Split (2)

train · 585k rows

text stringlengths 1 39.7k	original_task stringclasses 8 values	original_label stringclasses 35 values
BERLIN This city's Jewish Museum prides itself on stirring things up. In recent exhibitions exploring Jewish stereotypes and attitudes to circumcision, the museum pushed visitors to question what it means to be Jewish in Germany, and the world. Its latest show, "Welcome to Jerusalem," also got people talking. And it appeared to draw criticism from an unlikely source: the highest levels of the Israeli government. The exhibition, which presents Jerusalem's role as a crossroads of the world's three monotheistic religions, is singled out in a letter that surfaced this month, with the title, "German Funding of Organizations Intervening in Israeli Domestic Affairs or Promoting anti Israel Activity." The seven page paper, which was first reported by the daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung, is unsigned and gives no indication of who wrote it, or who was the intended recipient. But Israeli officials, while not owning up to having written it, say they agree with its message: that the German government should halt any financial support to organizations or institutions the Israeli government views as undermining the Jewish state and siding with the Palestinians. The Berlin Film Festival and Germany's federal board for film funding were also listed, along with several German organizations that provide financial support to partners in Israel, such as the magazine 972 and the Coalition of Women for Peace. The Jerusalem show, which opened a year ago and runs through April, explores the city's role as the center of religious and political tension between Christians, Jews and Muslims over the centuries. Historical objects, artworks, documents, video installations and models are presented in a series of rooms, each with a theme, such as "Mapping the City," "Both Sides of the City Wall" and "Artistic Responses." One room, "Conflict," features a 20 minute montage of film footage about disputes over the city from 1917 to the present. The movie strives for balance but ends with an acknowledgment that the footage came mostly from Israel. At the heart of the exhibition, a room called "The Holy City" features a large, detailed model of 19th century Jerusalem, made by the German born architect Conrad Schick, with the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock towering at its center. Flanking it on either side are models of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Western Wall. Although the holy sites of all three religions are represented, Schick's masterpiece dwarfs the other two models, and this was interpreted by some Jewish bloggers and critics as giving an impression of Muslim dominance. The wrangling over the Jewish Museum comes amid a broader campaign by the conservative government of Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to combat forces it deems hostile and accuses of defaming, delegitimizing or otherwise harming Israel. Mr. Netanyahu's office did not respond to questions about the paper, which The New York Times has obtained. According to German media, he handed it to Chancellor Angela Merkel when the two met in October. When asked at a news conference in Jerusalem this month about the paper's focus on the museum, he said he remembered speaking with Ms. Merkel about "the fact that Germany and the E.U. fund organizations that openly call for boycotting Israel." They also supported "Palestinian terrorist organizations, that masquerade as human rights organizations," he added. Battles over the right to boycott Israel have raged at college campuses and statehouses across the United States, where efforts to outlaw support for B.D.S. are being contested by civil rights advocates on free speech grounds. In Washington, Congress is weighing legislation that would keep American companies from participating in boycotts primarily against Israel. In Germany, where calling for a boycott against the Jewish state carries historical associations with the Nazis, the movement is widely viewed as anti Semitic. Issues involving Israel are especially fraught, given the country's commitment to atone for the Holocaust. Responsibility for Israel's right to exist is a cornerstone of German foreign policy and cultural institutions have become a proxy battlefield for the fight here over B.D.S. This summer, the Ruhrtriennale, an international arts festival in the former industrial Ruhr region, rescinded an invitation to a Scottish rap group after pressure mounted surrounding the artists' association with the B.D.S. movement. Germany's culture minister, Monika Grutters, whose department provides 14 million euros, or about 16 million, of the Jewish Museum's budget, acknowledged the concerns of the Israeli government regarding the museum and its Jerusalem exhibition. But she "does not share these concerns," a spokeswoman said. Israel maintains that, with the show in Berlin, and tours, lectures and events to accompany it, the museum has overstepped "the boundaries of the definition of its activities," Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, said. "The purpose and the reason of existence of the Jewish Museum is to preserve and show Jewish life in Germany throughout the centuries, and not to deal with the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and certainly not to take sides." Peter Schafer, the museum's director, said he realized that with such a fiercely debated topic, the show would not be able to please everyone. "Our exhibition does not aim to offer solutions. Instead, we hope it will generate an understanding of Jerusalem's special situation and help visitors to form their own opinions," Mr. Schafer said when "Welcome to Jerusalem" opened. In an interview on Thursday, he rejected the charge that the museum was offering anyone aligned with the pro Palestinian sanctions movement a platform. "We do not offer a forum for activists of any political orientation, which goes in particular for supporters or activists of the B.D.S. campaign," Mr. Schafer said. But one speaker who drew attention in 2012 was Judith Butler, one of the most influential feminist scholars and an early supporter of the B.D.S. movement, who took part in a panel discussion at the museum. Mr. Schafer was not the director of the museum at the time. Mr. Schafer refused to comment on reports in the German media that the museum's decision in July to relocate a lecture by Sa'ed Atshan, a professor of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore, had been in response to pressure from Israel's embassy in Berlin, which says Mr. Atshan supports a boycott. Mr. Atshan declined to be interviewed. The paper also singled out the Berlin Film Festival, known as the Berlinale, as an organization that "frequently hosts B.D.S. activities," but did not provide any examples. Dieter Kosslick, the festival's director, said that his office had not received the letter. Nor had the German government ever put conditions on the EUR8.2 million, or about 9.2 million, in annual support that it provides for the festival, he said. "The founding idea of the Berlin Film Festival was to contribute to international understanding by presenting the different perspectives of artists from around the world," Mr. Kosslick said. "These viewpoints may be controversial, but our role is to support freedom of the arts within the bounds of the democratic principles as enshrined in the German constitution." There has been some pushback in Israel, too. Tamar Zandberg, leader of the left wing Meretz party, which sits in the opposition, decried what she called Mr. Netanyahu's "obsession" with pursuing and censoring ideological opponents all the way to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. "Israel was founded, among other things, to protect the Jews against persecution," she said. "Now the Israeli government is coming out against a place and an exhibit most identified with the history of that persecution." She added, "The Israeli government not the B.D.S. supporters and not the neo Nazi organizations is the one calling for a boycott of an important Jewish institution."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Years before Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took over as the prime spots for oversharing, people had to go to websites like Open Diary, Blogger and LiveJournal to publish their thoughts for the world to read. But over time, social media became the way that people shared articles that reflected their politics, posted images of loved ones and sent out messages of frustration or exultation. Medium, the online open platform and publisher, is one bloglike platform that has persisted and innovated in the social media era. With 90 million unique monthly visitors, it has maintained relevance as a destination for open letters, petitions and personal essays. But it scarcely sparks such frenetic reactions as it did Thursday night. That was when Jeff Bezos, Amazon's billionaire chief executive, took to the website to accuse American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer, of "extortion and blackmail." The headline of the post was "No thank you, Mr. Pecker," a reference to David J. Pecker, the chairman of American Media.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
An expose of Silk Road, the underground drug market. Journalists and readers have feared that gems like these could disappear from the internet if the wealthy owners of Gawker and L.A. Weekly wanted to eliminate what they deem to be unfavorable coverage elsewhere on the sites. Hoping to neutralize the potential threat, the Freedom of the Press Foundation said on Wednesday that it would archive online content it deems at risk of being deleted or manipulated, starting with the two publications. The organization, which protects and defends adversarial journalism, said it aimed to protect publications from what it calls the "billionaire problem," or the ability of news figures to buy publications with the intent of taking them offline.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Sonny Mehta, the Indian born, Cambridge educated editor who for more than 30 years presided over Alfred A. Knopf and the New York publishing scene with seemingly effortless grace and erudition, died on Monday at 77. Mehta published Nobelists and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as first time authors, and here he is remembered by some of the writers whose careers he shaped. I loved Sonny for his grace, his insouciance and his sly, quiet humor. When he first told me of the mysterious, debilitating illness that attacked him some years ago, he described how one day he found himself fallen onto the pavement on Central Park South and unable, for the moment, to get up again. Naturally, people just stepped over him Manhattanites always have somewhere very important to go to but then a pretty young woman stopped, as pretty young women will, and knelt beside him and asked what she could do to help. Sonny, relating this to me, did one of his wistful smiles, and said, "You know, she really was very pretty." Of course, soon his wife, Gita, urgently summoned, arrived to rescue him. He loved the world and his loved ones, and was a great champion of good books in particular and of humane culture in general. The death of every noble man makes a slight, ignoble adjustment to the world. He would have wished us better times ahead. I shall miss him to the end. They used to warn you, before you first met Sonny Mehta, not to be intimidated by the silence. Don't let it throw you off, my agent told me, he just doesn't say much. Truth is, he didn't have to. The best writing advice I've ever received came delivered from him in single sentences simple yet deeply nuanced advice I would think about for months, each time arriving at the realization that what he suggested was exactly what the work needed. His gift, I think, was to read every manuscript twice at the same time once for exactly what it was and once for everything it could be. 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. I'm not sure my friends outside the writing world believed me when I told them I had the finest editor in the world. But I did. More than anything I have achieved or ever will achieve, those rare afternoons spent in Sonny's office listening to him dissect the inner workings of a novel will always be the fondest memories of my career. He came to literature from a place of love, and that love is evident in every book he ever touched. I often felt intimidated by him. I first met him in 1986, when I was 21 and had been flown to England and was being introduced to the U.K. publishing world; Sonny had just published my first novel, "Less Than Zero." The second night I was in London, I was at Sonny and Gita's home. Sonny was very solicitous, to the point of asking the young American writer where he'd like to have dinner that night we were with a group and I suggested "sushi?" not really grasping the culinary limitations of London in the mid 1980s, expecting that Japanese restaurants and sushi bars were as popular there as they were in Los Angeles. I remember a distinct hesitation fell over the living room as we finished our drinks, and then Sonny waved it off and spent the next 45 minutes not only locating a Japanese restaurant that served sushi but one that was open and could accommodate a party of six. An hour later, we were seated in a somewhat deserted Japanese restaurant far from Sonny's house. I was mortified that I had caused this complication, and I remember telling Sonny: "Really, you did not need to do this." "Please," he said as he lit a cigarette, "you're the writer. The writer always comes first." When I somewhat surprisingly won the National Book Award in 1997, Sonny and his lovely wife, Gita, were seated at my table. He leapt up, tried to stand on the chair while cheering, then gave me a push to go up to the stage and accept the award. No one was more visibly happy for me than Sonny. Sonny was my editor for the last 29 years, and a dear friend. He was always the most interesting person in the room and yet the quietest. The first time I went to meet him, I was completely intimidated. I got to his office at 10 in the morning, and there was a bottle of Scotch already open on his desk. I thought, "This is going to work out fine." I remember when I was finishing one of my novels he announced he was coming to South Beach to do the final edit face to face, which wasn't our typical routine. I was worried that he didn't like the final draft and wanted to tell me in person. When I arrived at his hotel, I found the manuscript in neat little stacks all over Sonny's room. We spent less than an hour going over his notes, and the rest of the night we hung out on Ocean Drive, eating and drinking. It was winter, and basically Sonny just wanted a fun trip to Florida. Looking back, I wish we'd done it that way on every novel. I first met Sonny in London in 1982 when he was at Picador, in Britain, and about to publish the paperback of "Midnight's Children." I arrived at his office, and after he said hello, he handed me a copy of Ryszard Kapuscinski's book about Haile Selassie, "The Emperor." "You have to read this," he said. "It's the best book I'm publishing this year." Humility was the first lesson he taught me. In 1986 I visited Nicaragua and wrote a first draft of a reportage book about the Sandinistas and the Contra war, which Sonny, in Britain, and Elisabeth Sifton (another sad loss this year), in the United States, would publish as "The Jaguar Smile." This was when I learned how great Sonny's editorial skills were. We went through the draft line by line, and he asked questions, wanted clarifications, demanded more depth and improved the text beyond all measure. The book in its published form owes everything to him. In 1990 we had a profound disagreement over my novel "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," which strained our friendship for some time; but five years later he was the passionate publisher of "The Moor's Last Sigh" and insisted on accompanying me everywhere on my United States book tour, and then everything was all right again. He was on the phone a lot during that book tour, because he was also publishing a novel by Dean R. Koontz at the time. "It's doing very well," he told me. "We just printed 400,000 hardcover copies." Once again, his great support for my work was accompanied by a lesson in humility. When he was honored at the Center for Fiction gala last year, Sonny abandoned the taciturn habits of a lifetime and spoke at great length, and with deep emotion, about his life in books. All of us who heard him that day were greatly moved, partly because it was such a shock to hear him speak so openly and so much! and partly, I think, because we feared it was a sort of farewell. It's so sad, today, to know that it was. Many years ago, when I was in London to promote one of my early novels, Sonny Mehta somehow found out that I was in town and invited me for a drink at his flat in Knightsbridge. He also invited an Iranian novelist he wanted me to meet. The invitation was especially generous given that, if memory serves, I was then published in hardcover by Random House, though Vintage, Sonny's imprint, published me in trade paperback. He and I had met maybe once or twice before in New York. But of course he'd read my early books and no doubt surmised from these that I was a small town boy who would be feeling a bit out of his depth in London (I was), and that with this invitation he would make me feel both welcome and important. Anyway, at the end of a very pleasant evening we decided to go out for a bite to eat. It was raining, though, and the restaurant was a bit too far to walk to, so a taxi was in order. Outside Sonny's flat, the Iranian novelist said, "We'll probably have more luck if we let Richard hail it." My first reaction was puzzlement. Why would someone like me, who hadn't a wealth of experience hailing big city taxis, be more likely to succeed than my two urbanite companions? But before I'd even fully articulated the question, I understood. I had light skin. I remember glancing at Sonny, whose sad expression seemed to say, "He's right, you know." Even now I can feel the profound embarrassment of acknowledging this shared truth about the world we lived in, and the look on Sonny's face suggested that he, no doubt a regular victim of that same world, was also deeply embarrassed. In fact, I think that's what I'll remember most about Sonny, the impression he so often managed to convey: not just that the world needed to be a kinder, fairer, better place than it was, but also that he might somehow be partly to blame, that he'd been aware of the world's imperfections for some time now and meaning to do something about them, but it had somehow slipped his mind and so, as a result, here we were with no choice but to genuflect before its ugliness. In a world where far too many people refuse to take responsibility even for what is clearly their fault, here was a man who felt responsible when he wasn't. A man, in other words, whose moral imagination could be counted on. The kind of man you'd be pleased to give your book to when you yourself couldn't make it any better. Sonny was always smart and kind and friendly. Maybe what I am most grateful for is that he let me do what I wanted to do. He championed "The Greenlanders," which, I think, everyone thought was truly odd and maybe not sellable. I talked him into a few other things, too. But I think I my best memory was just going to an Indian restaurant with him somewhere in Manhattan, and then strolling back down the street, chatting about this and that. I was very fond of him, and will miss him so! Sonny published me first in Britain in the 1980s, then in the United States. The reality was he gave me a personal bridge between London and New York. My very sense of New York, at least of Manhattan, is bound up with being in it with Sonny, with literally walking round it with him, block after block, sometimes for hours, slipping into this or that bar. He loved to walk. This made cruel the frailty in his legs (handled with impeccable dignity) in recent years. But right up until a few months ago he'd also wing into London and we'd meet. I felt he continued to watch over my British publications as much as the American ones, and I must be far from alone in feeling that the quality of watching over you was something he uniquely gave. To be watched over by Sonny and have his personal friendship what a deal! No publisher was ever more closely at my side or ever made me more welcome in his own home the London or New York one as if it might be mine. He was a peerless champion at what he did and yet his great gift and mission was to champion you, to champion writers, To be championed by a champion for almost 40 years: that is something beyond price, an honor for which I can't be too grateful. What an immense loss. After my novel "A Boy's Own Story" was turned down by my previous London publisher, Sonny bought it, surrendered his own office for interviews with every small gay bar publication, arranged for a sellout public event at a trendy theater, gave a chic party at his house, where his jet set wife arrived after jumping out of a plane with Viscount Linley, the queen's nephew, and where the beautiful whippet wore an expensive pearl necklace and half the guests were sniffing cocaine. He sold 100,000 copies, and the publicist, Jacqui Graham, won a prize. A heady moment for a simple guy like me from the Midwest. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Audi said that its 2015 A3 E tron which was introduced in North America last year at the Los Angeles auto show would be rolled out in Europe this month. The sportback model is Audi's first plug in hybrid, and the automaker said the car would be offered in China at the beginning of next year and in North America a few months later. Rupert Stadler, Audi's chief executive, said the company planned to introduce other plug in hybrid models as well. (Automotive News, subscription required) Curt Clawson, Republican of Florida, was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives this week. Mr. Clawson who ran in a special election after his predecessor was convicted of possession of cocaine and later resigned was until 2012 the chief executive of Hayes Lemmerz, a steel and aluminum wheels supplier that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009. He was also director of Lear Corporation, and, according to a report from Roll Call, he is worth about 13 million. (Roll Call) The Washington Traffic Safety Commission says that state patrol officers will be on the lookout for people driving while high on marijuana this summer after the state legalized recreational marijuana. To get the message out, the agency released a series of public service announcement videos on YouTube featuring people unable to perform basic tasks while under the drug's influence. The videos advised that the police would ticket people who are caught driving high. (The Seattle Post Intelligencer) According to a report from Bloomberg, the armor plated Mercedes Benz S Class Pullman will be priced at about 1 million when it goes on sale in 2015. The car will feature four rear seats that face one another and a partition between the driver and passengers. (Bloomberg)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
From left: Laura Ballance, Jon Wurster, Mac McCaughan and Jim Wilbur of Superchunk. After nearly 30 years, the group has made its first political album, "What a Time to Be Alive." In the waning days of 2016, during a news conference at a music festival in Australia, the singer songwriter Amanda Palmer made a prediction: "Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again," she said. "We're all going to crawl down staircases into basements and speakeasies and make amazing satirically political art." Around the same time, Mac McCaughan, the singer, guitarist and songwriter for the North Carolina based indie rock band Superchunk, was spending a lot of time in his Durham basement, writing songs. He'd heard predictions like Ms. Palmer's. In fact, this idea that conservative governance spurs outbursts of artistic protest from progressive minded musicians is almost conventional wisdom. It dates back at least as far as the political and musical convulsions of the 1960s, and was renewed in the late '70s and early '80s, when pioneering punk bands like the Clash, the Jam and the Minutemen were viewed as an antidote to the conservative politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But Mr. McCaughan wasn't buying it. "In the aftermath of the election, I was definitely not someone saying, 'Well, at least there will be all this great protest music,'" he said in a telephone interview. "I'd happily never make another record if it meant this administration wasn't in power. Most protest music is terrible. It's pedantic, it's usually preaching to the choir." And yet the album that grew from Mr. McCaughan's sojourns to his cellar seems to fulfill Ms. Palmer's prophecy. "What a Time to Be Alive," Superchunk's 11th studio album, is filled with the same sort of noisy, tuneful, hyperkinetic guitar rock the band has been bashing out for nearly 30 years, with one key difference: Despite almost never showcasing his political beliefs in Superchunk's music previously, Mr. McCaughan has focused pretty much all 11 songs on the new album on the challenge of living and surviving in Trump's America. "It'd be weird to live in the world now and make a record that ignored what was going on," Mr. McCaughan said. The group, which includes the bassist Laura Ballance, the guitarist Jim Wilbur and the drummer Jon Wurster, formed in 1989 but has become more of a part time concern in recent years. This is only its third album since 2001 and its first in five years. "It was about time," said Ms. Ballance, who along with Mr. McCaughan also runs the respected independent record label Merge. "It's all very Mac driven. He's always got ideas, and after a while, he resurfaces with stuff written." It helps when he's angry, she added. The album's primary emotion at times is a blinding, sputtering fury. On the squalling "I Got Cut," Mr. McCaughan spews bile from the start: "All these old men won't die too soon." But there's a recognition that anger alone isn't productive. The anthemic chorus of "All for You" (where Mr. McCaughan sings, "Fight me!") is a joke. "I've never been in a fight," he said. "But in the aftermath of the election, I'd leave the house thinking, if I see someone in a Make America Great Again hat, I will not be able to restrain myself. Which is an unusual way for me to go through the world. It's not tenable." Mr. McCaughan's misgivings about protest music also bubble to the surface. "Reagan Youth" is both an ode to the '80s anarchist punk band of the same name and a frustrated acknowledgment that the "other Reagan Youth," those inspired by the former president who are now in positions of power in the Conservative movement, have had a more durable legacy. "That song is questioning what good did all that punk rock do?" Mr. McCaughan said. That query inevitably leads to others. "As an artist, what good am I doing? What am I going to do? Write a song? What's that going to do?'" According to Billy Bragg, an English singer songwriter and a purveyor of protest music since the 1970s, what makes writing political music these days different than in previous eras is that what was once considered outrageous behavior is now shrugged at. "When the people who elected Trump aren't even offended when you call him a liar, it makes him a very slippery customer," he said by phone. The music industry and the overall media landscape have been remade, too. The fading influence of radio, MTV and music magazines coupled with the rise of streaming services and social media has virtually erased the idea of a musical monoculture. "The centrality of music to youth culture, that's changed," Mr. Bragg said. "In the 20th century, music, for young people, was our only social medium. It was the way we talked to each other, to our parents' generation, the way we identified ourselves. Music doesn't have that vanguard role anymore." Despite disdain for Trump from across the popular music universe (save, perhaps, country), musicians have mostly played minor roles in leading, organizing or even soundtracking the so called resistance to his administration. Even superstars are unable to capture the attention of the masses, let alone rally them to action, in the same way it might have been possible 10 or 20 years ago. When Eminem, Kendrick Lamar or Beyonce, who have far bigger audiences than Superchunk, inject their politics into their music, the best they can usually hope for is to generate social media hashtags or appreciative nods. But Mr. Bragg doesn't believe it's mass popularity that necessarily spurs real change. "Less than 5,000 people bought Woody Guthrie's 'Dust Bowl Ballads.' It's how culture picks up on those ideas and runs with them," he said. "Woody's guitar didn't actually kill fascists. It was an idea he painted on his guitar and that idea inspired people. That's what music does." Ted Leo, a veteran indie rocker who was a fierce critic of the Bush administration, and whose 2017 album, "The Hanged Man," opens with lines about waking up after Trump's election, "into a world of foes," said that while "it'd be great if something I wrote opened someone's eyes to something, it's more for people seeking solace, inspiration or a fiery call to action." He has no illusions that his music will "land on somebody's desk who disagrees with me and blow their mind." In fact, he's pretty sure most of his fans already share his views. "The idea of preaching to the choir gets a bad rap," he said. "One could just look at it as community building." Politically charged songwriting isn't always, or even usually, driven by the aim of affecting politics. Often, it works the same cathartic release valve as writing any other kind of song. "Through music, you can express your anger without it being a violent act," said Rick Valentin of the Illinois based indie rock band the Poster Children, whose ferocious new single, "Grand Bargain!," is indicative of the strident, political tone of a full album that will follow in May. "It's an aggressive act but it's not like going onto a street corner, asking people who they voted for, then screaming at them, 'Why did you do that?'" The musical results of all this catharsis can certainly feel like screaming into a void, but the goal for many of these artists is accomplished by these songs' mere existence: to keep pessimism, cynicism and nihilism at bay. "Music isn't necessarily going to change what's happening in the world, but it does make a difference in people's lives," Mr. McCaughan said. "It gives me a sense of purpose and somewhere to put stuff that's happening in my head."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Credit...Andy Haslam for The New York Times Go ahead, say their names: Avalon and Tintagel. Believe deeply enough, and they might emerge from the mouth as through an enchantment induced vapor, as though borne on the breath of a dragon. (Especially after at least four people have corrected your pronunciation of Tintagel: Be gentle with that "g," it's tin TAJ l.) And, indeed, these two sites in the southwest of England are epic and romantic, the stuff of myth and mystery. For the sort of person who watched "Excalibur" countless times as a child, and carried a tattered copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's "The Mists of Avalon" tucked under her arm as an adolescent, these places are also familiar enough that a first visit may feel like a homecoming. After our breakfast, I checked into the Covenstead, a witchcraft theme bed and breakfast. I braced myself for a kitschy spectacle. I found instead a comfortable and painstakingly designed house with a witchcraft and magic library containing more books about corn dollies than ordinary lodgings offer. My room was replete with a four poster bed, a fainting couch and red velvet drapery. Over the top? Right at the brink and perfect. I tore myself away from the Covenstead's cabinet of curiosities and crossed the street to Glastonbury Abbey. During the reign of Henry VIII, the abbey was a casualty of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Its ruins and grounds are strikingly serene. I walked among fragments of walls, ancient trees and a recreated abbot's kitchen, and felt the strongest tug of Glastonbury magic since I'd arrived. I ended my visit in a small chapel, where I lit a candle and sat quietly as though waiting for a sign. At breakfast at the Covenstead, I mentioned that my next stop was Totnes. "Oh, you'll like Totnes," someone at the table said. "It's like Glastonbury, but for grown ups." I wondered if he meant much the same thing Ms. Pilkington had, when she said, "Glastonbury is shamanic; Totnes is therapeutic." Mr. Cox's new book, "21st Century Yokel" comes out this fall, and he said it's about "being a walker and a lifelong country person, but it goes off into many other areas: folklore, family, little comedies of everyday life." He moved to Devon in 2014, and feels "very spiritually at one with the landscape here" a landscape he described as "rugged and rainy," a "psychedelic countryside" and "the greenest place I've ever lived." I apparently had come at the best possible time: "The explosion of colors is such a huge orgasm here in spring," he told me. Our bellies full, Mr. Cox drove us to the Dartington estate. Dating to the 14th century, Dartington was bought in the 1920s by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst (she, an American heiress; he, a landowning Yorkshireman) who aimed to establish a new model of rural life, community and education. Today, the Dartington Hall Trust is an independent charity and social enterprise with a focus on arts and ecology, supported by a range of businesses (shops, a restaurant, a pub) whose profits are reinvested in the community. Mr. Cox recommended that I spend some time walking its lush grounds and gardens and urged me to seek out one of Dartington's newer enterprises, a dairy managed by a philosophical farmer named Jon Perkin. Three Jack Russell terriers greeted me at the farm, barking like mad as they circled my feet. I bought a cup of goats' milk ice cream (an extra zingy mint chocolate chip) made at the dairy, then sat down with Mr. Perkin within view of a good number of the dairy's 180 goats. He spoke candidly of his challenges with depression and anxiety, and about how working with animals helps him cope. "Animals are the most mindful creatures on the planet," he said, the dogs clambering all over him. The area's therapeutic tendency extends to its farms: He hasn't fully formulated it yet, but Mr. Perkin is developing his own kind of mindfulness practice goats included. I pressed him about how goats might help ease anxiety and depression. "Sit down in a pen of goats," he said, "and you can't help but smile." That evening, I drank strong local cider, a Devon specialty, in the back garden of a Totnes pub and listened to locals talk about Dartington and art, therapy and community. As the sun descended over the River Dart, I rested by its banks and thought about what I'd seen, whom I'd met, what I'd tasted and drunk and felt so far in the southwest: its beauty, sure, but also the openness of its spirit, the potent pull to which so many had succumbed. Still, nothing prepared me for what I'd see the next day at the Timehouse Muzeum: The Time Travellers Museum and Narnia Totnes Shop. The unwieldy name put me off (and why that "z" in Muzeum?). But I'm glad I went. Housed in an 18th century building on Fore Street the lower half of Totnes's steep main drag, which slopes sharply toward the river the museum is entered through the Narnia shop, which has little to do with the books by C. S. Lewis, and sells cool records, gifts, T shirts and postcards. (A sign at the edge of town announces that Totnes is "twinned" with Narnia. The connection abides, and the creator of the Timehouse, Julie Lafferty, an artist and designer, recognizes that it is a draw.) Exit the shop, and the museum begins. It is the most hallucinatory experience I've had since I gave up actual hallucinogens a long time ago. You start below ground and work up to the top floor, through a series of rooms designed to evoke major eras in recent history; many also include Ms. Lafferty's hypnotic films. I didn't feel so much that I was going back in time, but rather that time was suspended. Period furniture and artifacts and original paintings, also by Ms. Lafferty, combine to tell a complex story about life and society, war and peace, art and music. Some sections like the Moroccan tearoom, awash in rainbow light beaming through multicolored windowpanes are achingly beautiful. Others, like a chamber next to the tearoom, loaded with imagery and memorabilia from World War II, are unsettling. The museum is essentially an art installation forged by a single creative spirit who might just be a genius. A little dazed, I stepped out of the museum into blazing sunlight. Still, I walked up the long stone stairway that coils around the mound on top of which the ruins of Totnes Castle sit, and surveyed the Devon countryside from its heights, breathing it in, steadying myself after the dizzying effects of the museum and the sunshine. The action had kicked off the night before, in the low ceilinged Golden Lion pub, whose stable houses the older of the two hobby horses. The pub was packed, steaming and sweaty and pulsating with anticipation. At midnight, the music struck up: a rough, ready opus on accordions and drums, and we all sang the occasion's traditional song, whose words I knew, more or less, from the Lomax film. It begins: Unite and unite and let us all unite, For summer is acome unto day, And whither we are going we will all unite, In the merry morning of May. We kept at it as we poured into the narrow street outside the pub in a crush of collective effervescence, in which both a strong sense of community spirit and a faintly electric undercurrent of criminality came through, as though anything could happen. When a stranger's elbows pressed into my kidneys, I briefly regretted my presence there. But soon, we were moving through the town, waking those who didn't make it to the pub, but who turned on their lights and waved from their windows. In the morning, the two osses are released from their stables, and process with their respective parties through the town, over and over. The weather was poor; I was told that normally the turnout is much higher. By the time I'd followed the old oss on its first circuit, I was soaked and chilled. But rain can't stop the old oss, the blue oss and their people from making their rounds. At lunch the day before, at the Seafood Restaurant, I asked a waiter about what I might expect come May Day. He gave one piece of advice: "Don't wear white." I was puzzled, but by the end of the festival I understood. The locals wear white, with blue or red scarves and other accessories, depending on one's team. For a tourist to follow suit would be to playact as a Padstonian. "It's very focused on the people who live in Padstow, and have family in Padstow," Kate Neale, an ethnomusicologist who concentrates on Cornish music, and who grew up about 10 minutes from the town, told me. Although it attracts many tourists, "It's for the locals, by the locals." On the last night of my journey, back at the hotel in Tintagel, there was a farewell party for a staff member. There was karaoke. There was dancing. There was toasting and hugging. I was made to feel at home, completely included. It was one of the best nights I've had in a pub and I've had a few. English eccentricity is a cliche, and I say what follows aware of the perils of stereotypes. I also say it with affection, even awe: There are no weirdos like English weirdos. No hippie can possibly outdo an English hippie for hippieness. I should know I've been trying for 30 years. I didn't want to leave the southwest, but I knew I would return. To Glastonbury for a weekend of goddess education. To Totnes to tour Timehouse again, to linger longer at Dartington and see how it's going with Jon Perkin and his goats. I'd be back to Boscastle's Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. And to Tintagel, for the restorative view of the sea, another shot at seeing those orbs in the glen, another warm, sweet night in a friendly pub. Believe in ley lines or not. Practice mindfulness (or witchcraft) or don't. Commune with goats and hug trees as your heart guides you. This, I think, is the region's most potent magic: You can come as you are, and it will take you in, exactly like that, or as you wish to be. If You Go Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, the Harbour, Boscastle, Cornwall; museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk. The Covenstead, Naish House, Magdalene Street, Glastonbury, Somerset. Rooms start at 50 pounds per night; covenstead.co.uk	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The passionate clarity with which she asserts her views is persuasive, and her complicated charisma makes her an irresistible, unforgettable screen presence. Barrese shoots her at home and outdoors, in front of a classroom and in conference with students. She smokes, vapes, makes coffee and dances. At London Fashion Week, she appears on the catwalk, holding her own with much younger models. Her old friend Lauren Hutton stops by for a visit. (Barrese is banished for most of it.) In some scenes, Barzini seems heartbreakingly fragile, in others indomitable. Growing to like her and also, maybe, to be a little afraid of her the viewer is trapped in a further contradiction. To embrace this movie fully means to accept the case for its nonexistence. At the very least, it's impossible to watch "The Disappearance of My Mother" without a measure of ambivalence. Gratitude for the chance to make Barzini's acquaintance, and for Barrese's sensitivity in making the introduction, is accompanied by ethical queasiness. That is very much the point. Barzini's critique of the culture of glamour and consumption is not easily refuted, but it is nonetheless partly undermined by her own magnetism. Footage and photographs from her earlier life cast an inevitable spell, as does Barrese's decision to "cast" young models as versions of his mother. The film opens with screen tests during which these women apply makeup to replicate the grain de beaute that is one of Barzini's distinguishing rates. Later, they read passages from a memoir in which she recalls her unhappy, wealthy childhood and her subsequent career. This is not "the biography of my mother." Those unfamiliar with Barzini's life might consult an interview conducted by one of her nieces and published earlier this decade in Document Magazine. It provides information about her family and her political views that is missing from Barrese's film, which is more about his mother's human presence than her history and accomplishments.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Chances are, you've seen Demi Moore on a screen a big one at the multiplex or a little one in your best friend's basement. If you're a moviegoer of a certain age, you might trace your journey from adolescence to adulthood by the release dates of Moore's greatest hits, from "St. Elmo's Fire" to "G.I. Jane." Now fans have a chance to see Demi Moore somewhere new: on the cover of "Inside Out," her memoir, which debuts at No. 1 on the nonfiction list. Here, the star who famously bared all on the cover of Vanity Fair reveals sides we haven't seen before some heartbreaking, some galvanizing. There she is as a kid, fishing pills out of her mother's mouth after an attempted overdose, and as a teenager, raped by one of her mother's friends. And later, there she is falling in love with Bruce Willis, having three daughters, asking to be paid a fair price for her work, getting divorced, marrying Ashton Kutcher. By the time Moore pops open a beer with Kutcher in Mexico, ending almost two decades of sobriety, the reader wants to climb through the page and body block their hotel minibar. Moore was already under contract with HarperCollins to write a book about mothers and daughters when she hit rock bottom in 2012. She was hospitalized following a seizure after smoking synthetic cannabis and inhaling nitrous oxide. After that, she says, "My life exploded. There was no way I could wrap my mind around the idea of writing. All parties involved from my agent to the publishers and my editor could not have been more compassionate or gracious in giving me space to heal. Then they came back to me a couple of years ago to say, 'We either need to let this go, or we need to do it.' It wasn't a pressure it was a release if that was what I saw was in my best interest. But I knew this was an opportunity I shouldn't miss. One question kept jumping into my head, almost like it was yelling at me: 'How did I get here? Coming from the life I came from?'" She was later introduced to Ariel Levy, the author of "The Rules Do Not Apply" and "Female Chauvinist Pigs," who proved to be a co writer on par excellence with J.R. Moehringer (collaborator with Andre Agassi on "Open") and Buzz Bissinger (who worked with Caitlyn Jenner on "The Secrets of My Life"). Moore says, "I knew she had just released her memoir, and I didn't want to read it because I didn't want to be intimidated or censor myself to what I thought she might want. But I knew we shared a very similar loss. Instinctively, intuitively, I felt we could connect."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Long term exposure to air pollution is associated with lower scores on tests of mental acuity, researchers have found. And one reason may be that air pollution causes changes in brain structure that resemble those of Alzheimer's disease. The scientists studied 998 women ages 73 to 87 and free of dementia, periodically giving them tests of learning and memory. They used magnetic resonance imaging to detect brain atrophy, or wasting, and then scored the deterioration on its degree of similarity to the brain atrophy characteristic of Alzheimer's disease. They matched Environmental Protection Agency data on air pollution to the women's residential addresses. Over 11 years of follow up, they found that the greater the women's exposure to PM 2.5, the tiny particulate matter that easily penetrates the lungs and bloodstream, the lower their scores on the cognitive tests. After excluding cases of dementia and stroke, they also found a possible reason for the declining scores: The M.R.I. results showed that increased exposure to PM 2.5 was associated with increased brain atrophy, even before clinical symptoms of dementia had appeared. The study is in the journal Brain.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The baby wearing a "CNN Sucks!" pin pretty much summed it up. In the back of a fairground auditorium in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday night, as President Trump presided over a rally dedicated to denigrating his enemies, the journalists dispatched to cover the proceedings attracted their own raucous crowd. "Stop lying!" shouted a man in an American flag T shirt, one of dozens of Trump supporters who hurled invective at the assembled press corps. Facing the reporters' work space and away from the stage where Mr. Trump was set to speak they flashed middle fingers and chanted "CNN Sucks!" as Jim Acosta, a CNN White House correspondent, attempted to speak on air. In Tampa, though, several journalists described an atmosphere of hostility that felt particularly hard edge. And far from condemning these attacks on the press, the president and his team have endorsed them. That night, Mr. Trump tweeted out a video of his supporters jeering Mr. Acosta, along with an approving comment from his son Eric: " truth." When the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was invited at Wednesday's press briefing to condemn the menacing behavior, she declined. "While we certainly support freedom of the press," Ms. Sanders said, "we also support freedom of speech. And we think that those things go hand in hand." Now, news organizations are anticipating an unnerving autumn, as their reporters prepare to fan out across the country for a fresh round of Trump rallies before the midterm elections. "I'll go six or seven days a week when we're 60 days out," Mr. Trump said last week. The president has recently revived his "enemy of the people" line about the mainstream news media, sprinkling the phrase into his public remarks. The new White House communications chief, Bill Shine, a former president of Fox News, signaled a tougher approach to press relations when he barred a CNN reporter from a public event last week in the Rose Garden. The reason? She asked questions of Mr. Trump in what the White House deemed an inappropriate manner for an event in the Oval Office. A montage titled "CNN's Jim Acosta Lowlights" followed, with footage of Mr. Acosta pressing Ms. Sanders at briefings and criticizing the administration's attitude toward the news media. "That's called opinion," Mr. Hannity said, when the camera came back to him. "And you're extremely rude. Oh, and a liberal partisan hack. That's why Americans don't trust you and fake news CNN." Press freedom groups have long warned that Mr. Trump's rhetoric and the accompanying criticism from his supporters is endangering journalists domestically and abroad, particularly under autocratic regimes that have adopted his language in cracking down on independent journalism. Those concerns came up during a meeting last month between Mr. Trump and the publisher of The New York Times, A. G. Sulzberger, who asked the president to reconsider his use of the term "enemy of the people." Ms. Sanders picked up on that theme at her briefing on Wednesday, the press secretary's first question and answer session with reporters in nine days. (Ms. Sanders held only three formal news briefings in July, compared with nearly once a day in the early part of her tenure.) "The media routinely reports on classified information and government secrets that put lives in danger and risk valuable national security tools," Ms. Sanders told reporters, going on to cite a debunked story that a report about Osama bin Laden in the 1990s had harmed national intelligence efforts. (President George W. Bush has made the same claim, that a report about Bin Laden's use of a satellite phone had tipped him off to surveillance; the information had been released by the Taliban two years earlier.) "It's now standard to abandon common sense ethical practices," Ms. Sanders continued. "This is a two way street. We certainly support a free press, we certainly condemn violence against anybody, but we also ask that people act responsibly and report accurately and fairly."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
CBS has been on the defensive this week as it deals with a simmering controversy surrounding the departures of two Asian American actors from its police procedural show "Hawaii Five 0." The two stars, Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, decided to leave the show after they were unable to agree to terms on new contracts prompting speculation that they left because they would not be earning as much as their white co stars. On Thursday, for the second time in less than 24 hours, CBS and producers of the show were saying that they did everything they could to keep them. Peter M. Lenkov, an executive producer of "Hawaii Five 0," said that CBS "was extremely generous and proactive in their renegotiation talks." "So much so, the actors were getting unprecedented raises, but in the end they chose to move on," he said in a statement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Before each performance of "Social Dance 1 8: Index," the choreographer Moriah Evans personally escorts audience members to seats of her choosing. It's the action of a hostess, though Ms. Evans isn't cordial. As a cold abstraction of a social gesture, and as an indication of Ms. Evans's close control over every part of her work, this is an apt introduction to what follows. The setting, at Issue Project Room in Downtown Brooklyn, is also coldly formal: a ballroom made for an Elks Lodge, with a high, vaulted ceiling and lots of marble. At first, the choreography is precise, minimalist and repetitive. The five dancers work out patterns and permutations, shifting among orientations and speeds, coming and going like changings of the guard. Yet they also hold hands, as in folk dance, and move together in circles and lines. Occasionally, they include a seated viewer in their circle, connecting by hand clasp; the gesture is at once sweet and cultishly creepy. The costumes, by Alan Calpe and Christopher Crawford, are austerely black, yet also sparkling with sequins and fringed for twirling. The minimalist vocabulary admits shimmying shoulders, rippling torsos, rolling hips. These are moves associated with getting down on a different kind of dance floor. At Issue Project Room, accompanied by David Watson's score of low drones and long violin lines that have been partly erased, the moves are abstracted. The performers maintain eye contact with one another and even smile Maggie Cloud appears to be having a ball but much of "Social Dance" can feel like social dance drained of pleasure, of life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
When faced with a loss in the market versus a lapse in his faith, Nabeel Hamoui, 37, a radiologist in Chicago, will invariably opt for the loss. This is because Dr. Hamoui manages his retirement portfolio in accordance with halal, or religiously sanctioned, Islamic guidelines. "I chose halal investing based on my religious beliefs, and try to remain in compliance with those beliefs," Dr. Hamoui said. A return on his investment, he said, is beside the point. For Dr. Hamoui and many other Muslims, both in the United States and abroad, saving for retirement means steering clear of investments in companies and funds that trade in a host of forbidden goods and services, which are known as haram. The lengthy list includes alcohol, tobacco, pork products and media or entertainment considered immoral, such as pornography. The rules can be tricky to navigate. Investments are banned in companies with too much debt as a percentage of their assets. Interest on loans (known as riba) is also haram, which rules out investing in conventional banking and insurance sectors. Investing in companies earning a minimal amount of interest, typically 5 percent or less, may be allowed, so long as the dividend income derived from that interest is donated to charity. Equally problematic are many customary market gambits such as annuities and short selling, which can be viewed as gambling, and thus are prohibited under Islamic law, or Shariah. "The Islamic principles look to what you are doing with your capital, what types of businesses, assets and operations are you furthering," said Umar Moghul, a New York based lawyer specializing in Islamic finance. Other important criteria, he said, are the terms and conditions of someone's holdings, "since Shariah also speaks to procedure as well as to the substance of investment." In spite of these challenges, the global Islamic financial sector is healthy and growing. While the bulk of the Islamic financial sector's assets lie in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, financial services managers in the United States are addressing the retirement savings needs and dollars of a steadily growing number of observant Muslim Americans, now about 1 percent of the United States population. Their economic profiles show them to be slightly more likely than non Muslim workers to be engaged in professional careers, according to a 2009 Gallup Poll, and as likely as other Americans to earn annual incomes in excess of 100,000, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study. Islamic finance in the United States is "a nascent industry, but people are very optimistic about where it is going," said Bashar Qasem, the chief executive of Azzad Asset Management, a money management firm in Falls Church, Va., that he founded in 1997. The philosophy behind Islamic saving and investing can be traced to the Quran and other early Islamic texts. The story of the prophet Yusuf (Joseph, the same one as in the Bible) conserving grain from rich harvests in Egypt, related in Sura (chapter) 12 of the Quran, is often cited as an admonition to save against hard times. Other verses advise against squandering wealth, while the Prophet Muhammad warned in a hadith (a collection of his sayings) that one "who is prudent in spending will not be dependent on others" later in life. Both the Quran and hadith inform Shariah, which guides Muslims through practical life decisions, including how they should make and save money while remaining true to their religious principles. "Because Islam tends not to distinguish between the temporal and the religious, there is a perennial desire among Muslims to live all aspects of their lives, including the financial, in a manner consistent with their faith," observed Usman Hayat and Adeel Malik, the authors of a 2014 study of Islamic finance by the CFA Institute. The Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions, Malaysia's Islamic Financial Services Board and Bahrain's International Islamic Financial Market are among the major independent organizations that help Muslims achieve these goals. Advised by boards of Islamic financial experts and religious scholars, these organizations continually and systematically review companies, bonds and mutual funds to ensure they are Shariah compliant. The vetted products are listed on various Islamic indexes that have concurrently emerged. "As Islamic funds were being developed, there was a need for benchmarks, and so we were responding to the needs of the assets management industry," said Michael Orzano, the head of equity indices at S P's Dow Jones Indices. The original Dow Jones Islamic Market Index was introduced in 1999 as the world's first Shariah compliant index. Today, the company's portfolio of more than 15,000 indexes is among many offered by major financial firms. Like Shariah itself, which varies in interpretation (known as ijtihad), the indexes differ on what is compliant and what is not. Most regard the trade and manufacture of weapons as noncompliant, for example, yet S P's board of Islamic scholars takes a nuanced approach. The use of weapons can be permissible (self defense) or nonpermissible (unprovoked violence), but the weapons themselves are neutral, so investing in their manufacture is sanctioned, as Mr. Orzano noted in a 2013 report. A vast range of customized, equally nuanced Islamic financial products structured like standard investments but operating within Shariah has likewise gained traction in the market. Sukuks are among the most prevalent. These are essentially Shariah compliant bonds. Yet whereas standard bonds pay investors a set rate of interest over a period of time, sukuks offer a fixed rate of profit instead, thus avoiding forbidden riba. Another important distinction is that sukuks must be backed by some tangible asset, such as properties or a Shariah compliant business. Ownership is transferred to the investors who then lease the asset to the issuer for a set period, essentially charging rent for its use, an arrangement known in Islamic finance as ijarah. "So with a sukuk, the investor owns a piece of the asset," said M. Yaqub Mirza, chief executive officer of Sterling Management Group in Herndon, Va. "With a bond, it is a debt, and you earn interest on it, which is noncompliant with Shariah." In 1986, Dr. Mirza introduced the Amana Income Fund, the first Shariah compliant mutual fund in the United States. Shariah compliant exchange traded funds (E.T.F.s) are another attractive product for Muslim investors. Whereas a standard E.T.F. is a security that tracks an index, commodity, bonds or an index fund, an Islamic E.T.F. exclusively tracks a benchmark index composed of Shariah compliant companies. They are also usually overseen by a Shariah committee to ensure compliance. Saving for retirement the Muslim way involves "very intentional investing that is consistent with values," said Josh Zinner, the chief executive of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, in a telephone interview from his office in New York. Yet whether driven by conscience or a keen sense of the market, Muslim and non Muslim investors alike have historically done well by parking retirement savings in the Islamic financial sector, particularly during volatile times. Both WorldCom and Enron were removed from the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index when their debt levels hit 33 percent, the Shariah cutoff. Shares of both companies later lost their value after they collapsed in 2001 2. More recently, halal investors similarly weathered the financial crisis of 2008 in relative safety, Mr. Orzano observed. "During that specific time frame, when the financial sector was devastated, being in a Shariah compliant investment was beneficial," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The Mariinsky program, though, opened with "Sacre" and moved backward in time, with the company dancing the 20th century pieces as if the performers were quaint curios. The "Paquita" Grand Pas, by contrast, is the epitome of what the Russian ballet modernists opposed. And the Mariinsky performers, dancing it last, suggested that here, finally, they had come home. Stylistic sophistication and virtuosity are topmost in "Paquita." Its music is charmingly trivial; tutus, tunics and other ballet regalia are worn; there are more than 10 breaks for bows by individual dancers. Performers are presented hierarchically. In one adagio section, the corps de ballet becomes the orchestra to the ballerina's solo voice; the corps members perform, on one flat foot, prolonged versions of steps and positions that the ballerina soloist, supported by her male partner, executes on point. For no logical reason, a pas de trois for one man and two women and then a series of solos for five ballerinas prolong the proceedings or, rather, waft its celebration of high style up into the ether. The crisscross patterns in the coda of the pas de trois are the wittiest sequence in all Marius Petipa's output, and the ballerina variations perfectly demonstrate his gift for coloratura brilliance. All four works were originally choreographed for Mariinsky dancers, though not all in Russia. "Spectre" and "Sacre" were given their premieres by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the West, and all four of these current productions really count as reconstructions. The "Sacre" was recreated in 1987 by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. The "Spectre" is attributed to the reconstruction of Isabelle Fokine, the choreographer's granddaughter; the company's "Swan" has also been designated as her responsibility in recent seasons. And the "Paquita" Grand Pas is a 1978 production, credited with "Revised Choreography by Pyotr Gusev, Lidia Tiuntina, Georgy Konishchev." I've seen the Hodson Archer "Sacre" danced by three companies: the Joffrey Ballet (which performed its premiere), the Paris Opera Ballet and the Mariinsky. Though I find it musically frustrating Ms. Hodson's dances alternate, bizarrely, between step for note fidelity and anti musical rhythms its details look markedly different in each revival. The Mariinsky dancers made much of it look tentative and inauthentic, but there were occasional passages when the complex daring of Nijinsky's imagination struck me powerfully. And Daria Pavlenko brought force and fervor in a solo as the Chosen Maiden. Ms. Hodson's staging clearly suggests two important things. First: Though some have claimed that the famous audience first night furor of the 1913 "Sacre" was a reaction to Nijinsky's choreography rather than to Stravinsky's music, this cannot have been so, since there are two extended passages with curtains lowered and no dancing. Second: that both Stravinsky and Nijinsky told the "Sacre" story poorly. Why is this Maiden chosen and not another? There's simply too little music for the tribe to react to her death and for us to understand its implications; the ending is a merely melodramatic flourish.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Then they realized that they hadn't been paying attention to whether the grasshopper was head up or head down in the container that held it. Grasshoppers, like other insects, get oxygen through tubes, or trachea that are open to the outside air and branch into smaller and smaller tubes in the insect's body. All insects have these, and some have air sacs, to store and pump air, as grasshoppers do. It turned out that the tubes were more compressed at the bottom of the animal, because gravity was causing the grasshopper equivalent of blood to sink to the bottom half of the animal. This is similar to what happens when humans stand up quickly and become lightheaded, or the way blood goes to the head during a headstand. Humans have valves in the circulatory system to combat this problem, and your heart rate can increase, to pump blood faster. But insects don't have the same system. A grasshopper has a heart, but most of its body had been thought to be like one big bag of blood. Nonetheless, the researchers found that the grasshoppers could substantially counter the effect of gravity when they were conscious. When they were anesthetized with nitrogen, they could not. The researchers found that the grasshoppers could change the pressure in different parts of their body. And the animals were able to keep different pressure in different parts of the body. How they do it is the next question. But they must have some way of blocking off the abdomen from the thorax, say, to create different pressures. The discovery reveals something brand new about the intersection of physics and biology. For now, it seems to be true in grasshoppers, at the least, and probably beetles, based on another study of Dr. Socha's. But all insects are going to be subject to the same physical forces, which few scientists have ever paid attention to before. And it seems unlikely, said Dr. Socha, that grasshoppers are the only ones to evolve coping mechanisms. Still, it may be that smaller insects, like fruit flies, don't need to regulate their bodies in the same way. Dr. Hu said that ants maintain the same metabolism whether they are walking horizontally or straight up a wall. Future studies will show at what size insects have these adaptations, and what exactly they are.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Now that The New York Times has put together a stomach turning chronicle of alleged sexual harassment by the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein complete with brave, on the record statements from, among others, the actress Ashley Judd we're hearing a lot about how the story of his misconduct was "the worst kept secret" in Hollywood and New York. But until now, no journalistic outfit had been able, or perhaps willing, to nail the details and hit publish. For decades, stars of Oscar winning movies produced by Mr. Weinstein appeared on the covers of glossy magazines, chitchatted with late night hosts and provided fodder for gossip columns and broadsheet features while the uncouth executive partly responsible for their success maintained his special status in Beverly Hills and TriBeCa. Somehow the whispers concerning his alleged hotel room and workplace abuses never threatened his next big deal, industry award or accolades, which included an honorary Commander of the British Empire appointment. The real story didn't surface until now because too many people in the intertwined news and entertainment industries had too much to gain from Mr. Weinstein for too long. Across a run of more than 30 years, he had the power to mint stars, to launch careers, to feed the ever famished content beast. And he did so with quality films that won statuettes and made a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people. "The unfortunate reality of Hollywood is that if someone has money, then they can generally find some kind of audience of people who are interested in working with them," said Kim Masters, the editor at large at The Hollywood Reporter. This was particularly true of Mr. Weinstein, who, she said, was known for having "the golden touch" that produced "Pulp Fiction" and "Good Will Hunting," "The King's Speech" and "Shakespeare in Love." Ms. Masters had been chasing the Weinstein story for years. She said she had gotten near "the end zone" once, only to bump up against the ultimate silencer: fear. "At the last minute, the source withdrew," she told me. She said she wanted to believe that times were changing, given the number of women who have put their names to the words that derailed the careers of Bill Cosby, who faced criminal charges that resulted in a mistrial this year, and Bill O'Reilly. But she also wondered aloud whether trouble had finally found Mr. Weinstein because he was no longer the rainmaker and hitmaker he had once been. "This industry is passionate about causes," Ms. Masters said, "but when it comes down to doing business, they're definitely capable of holding their noses." With the knowledge that the Times article was heading toward publication, and with word of a similar piece in the works at The New Yorker, Mr. Weinstein assembled an all star team of crisis management experts and lawyers that included Lisa Bloom. Ms. Bloom, who said earlier this week that she was working only as an "adviser" to Mr. Weinstein, said she resigned from her role Saturday. She is known for her work representing alleged (and often confirmed) victims of sexual harassment, including those who took on Mr. O'Reilly. Ms. Bloom shared one reason she may have been sympathetic to Mr. Weinstein on Twitter in April, when she wrote, "My book SUSPICION NATION is being made into a mini series, produced by Harvey Weinstein and Jay Z!" Mr. Weinstein has admitted to some inappropriate behavior, and Ms. Bloom has attributed his missteps to his status as a "dinosaur" who is now "learning new ways." Certainly, shamefully, there is a long tradition of disgusting harassment of women who try to make it in the movie business. (Jack L. Warner, a founder of Warner Bros. studios, was no saint.) 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 image that Mr. Weinstein had concocted for himself that of a classic Hollywood type, the hot tempered but charming mogul took a serious hit in 2015 when an aspiring actress, Ambra Battilana, accused him of groping her at his TriBeCa offices. The New York Police Department's Special Victims Division investigated the matter, resulting in a lot of bad press and some hard questions from his board. As the Times investigation revealed, however, no charges materialized after Mr. Weinstein paid off his latest accuser in a confidential settlement. Hollywood isn't the only industry still abiding behavior that never had a rightful place in civilized society. Not at all. But it stands out because the industry often holds itself up as a force for moral good, its awards ceremonies filled with beribboned attendees. As my colleagues who wrote the investigative article about Mr. Weinstein, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, noted, he was allegedly harassing women in five star hotel rooms across the globe even as his company was distributing films like "The Hunting Ground," a 2015 documentary about sexual assault on college campuses. He also helped endow a "Gloria Steinem" faculty chair at Rutgers; joined a national women's march in Park City, Utah, in January; and was a big fund raiser for and supporter of Hillary Clinton. The same day that The Times broke the story about Mr. Weinstein, Bloomberg News reported that State Street, the bank behind the famous "fearless girl" statue staring down the Wall Street bull, paid 5 million to some 300 female executives after a federal audit determined it had paid them less than their white male counterparts. State Street disagreed with the audit. But as in the case of Mr. Weinstein, the face it presented to the world was woefully contradicted by the charges about its out of view behavior. The allegations against Mr. Weinstein have come to light several years after similar stories concerning Mr. Cosby. The charges against the once beloved comedian and sitcom star had been floating around for years. But they generally stayed hidden and did not figure in the biography of Mr. Cosby by the former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker, published shortly before his public image unraveled because of what my predecessor, David Carr, described as Mr. Cosby's "stalwart enablers" and "ferocious lawyers." Mr. Weinstein had his own enablers. He built his empire on a pile of positive press clippings that, before the internet era, could have reached the moon. Mr. Carr wrote in a 2001 New York magazine profile of Mr. Weinstein, of whom he was an astute observer: "As the keeper of star making machinery, Weinstein has re engineered the media process so that he lives beyond its downsides." Every now and then, glimpses of his nasty side spilled out, like when he placed the reporter Andrew Goldman in a headlock and dragged him out of a party in 2000. Someone who was involved in that altercation, Rebecca Traister, wrote in New York's The Cut on Thursday that it didn't get the media attention it deserved because "there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine." Let's hope that those in the know did not include members of the Los Angeles Press Club, which this year gave Mr. Weinstein its "Truthteller Award," calling him an example of "integrity and social responsibility," along with Jay Z. (The mogul received the honor because of his producing "Time: The Kalief Browder Story," a Spike TV documentary series about a 16 year old who spent three years in Rikers Island awaiting a trial that never took place.) The Press Club might want to rethink the award given that Mr. Weinstein has hired the emerging leader of anti press jurisprudence, Charles Harder, who brought the case that put Gawker out of business last year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
It's a medical fact: Spending time outdoors, especially in green spaces, is good for you. A wealth of research indicates that escaping to a neighborhood park, hiking through the woods, or spending a weekend by the lake can lower a person's stress levels, decrease blood pressure and reduce the risk asthma, allergies, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, while boosting mental health and increasing life expectancy. Doctors around the world have begun prescribing time in nature as a way of improving their patients' health. One question has remained: How long, or how frequently, should you experience the great outdoors in order to reap its great benefits? Is there a recommended dose? Just how much nature is enough? According to a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, the answer is about 120 minutes each week. The study examined data from nearly 20,000 people in England who took part in the Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment Survey from 2014 to 2016, which asked them to record their activities within the past week. It found that people who spent two hours a week or more outdoors reported being in better health and having a greater sense of well being than people who didn't get out at all. Spending just 60 or 90 minutes in nature did not have as significant an effect. And five hours a week in nature offered no additional health benefits. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. "What really amazed us was that this was true for all groups of people," said Mathew P. White, an environmental psychologist at the University of Exeter Medical School, who led the study. "Two hours a week was the threshold for both men and women, older and younger adults, different ethnic groups, people living in richer or poorer areas, and even for those living with long term illnesses." It did not matter how close people lived to recreational spaces or how often they frequented them, as long as they accumulated two hours of outdoor time by the end of the week. "Nature is not like a pill you get prescribed by your doctor that you have to take in small doses every day," Dr. White said. "What matters most is that you're able to fit it into your lifestyle." Not everyone has the benefit of living near natural landscapes or parks that they can visit every day. But they can still get the same benefits by taking a long walk on one day, or making a trip to a recreational area on a weekend. Dr. Nooshin Razani, a pediatrician at U.C.S.F. Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland, Calif., has taken to prescribing time outdoors to her patients, who come from low income settings. She often leads group outings to nearby recreational areas in the East Bay Regional Park District. "When you go to a park with your family, there are so many good things that happen," Dr. Razani said. "Children get to play and be physically active. They get to socialize, and they get some stress relief." Adults experience the same benefits, she added. Teasing out the exact cause of these health benefits is difficult. Does being outdoors encourage physical activity? Would anything that gets you off the couch and away from screens improve your health? Or are healthier, happier people simply more likely to spend time outdoors? "Most studies like this are cross sectional, so they only look at one point in time," said Carla Nooijen, a researcher at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, in Stockholm, whose research has examined the effects of natural environments. Tracking habits and responses over a period of time may help shed light on the possible mechanisms, she said. Still, nature prescriptions are growing in popularity. In Sweden, friluftsliv, the term for living close to nature, is so ingrained in everyday life from commuting by bike to relaxing in lakeside saunas that there are tax breaks offered as incentives for the lifestyle. In South Korea, the government is establishing dozens of "healing forests" for its stressed out citizens. And last year, NHS Shetland, a national hospital system in Scotland, began allowing doctors at some medical practices to write scripts for outdoor activities as a routine part of patient care. The latest study is a major first step toward developing concrete guidelines for nature prescriptions, akin to the guidelines for weekly exercise. (The current weekly recommendation for American adults is at least 150 minutes of moderate activity, 75 minutes of vigorous activity, or some combination of the two.) "This study will help clinicians like me better advise patients," Dr. Razani said. And, she added, it provides a realistic target that most people can achieve. Low cost and low risk, it's just what the doctor ordered.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A good rule of thumb for the 21st century music business: Never count Taylor Swift out. This week, Swift returns to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart with "Folklore," her surprise quarantine LP, claiming its seventh nonconsecutive week at the top. No other title has collected this many No. 1 weeks since Drake's "Views," which had a total of 13 four years ago. In her career, Swift has held the chart's perch 47 times beating out Whitney Houston's 46 for a new record among female artists, according to Billboard. Now in its ninth week out, "Folklore" had the equivalent of 87,000 sales in the United States, nearly double its haul from the week before, according to Nielsen Music. The album's 40 million streams were down slightly from its 41 million the previous week, when Swift landed at No. 4. What propelled "Folklore" back to the top was its sales as a complete package 56,000 units, compared to 13,000 last week helped by merchandise bundles on her website and yet more autographed CDs. Also this week, Pop Smoke's "Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon" holds at No. 2, while last week's chart topper, YoungBoy Never Broke Again's "Top," fell two spots to No. 3. Alicia Keys's latest, "Alicia," opens at No. 4 with the equivalent of 62,000 sales, and Juice WRLD's "Legends Never Die" is No. 5.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, will likely need to walk a narrow line as he tries to explain how the Fed will proceed. WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve is wrapping up what might be the most activist year in its history with a final scheduled policy meeting this week, one at which it is expected to leave interest rates at rock bottom and to signal continued willingness to help the economy through the challenging pandemic era. The Fed left rates unchanged and committed to ongoing bond purchases. Any policy changes out of this week's gathering are expected to concentrate on the Fed's large scale bond buying program, which it began in March. For a time, it pledged to buy as much government backed debt as needed to help keep markets functioning before it settled into a steady pace of purchases. But the fate of that program is just one of several momentous questions that lie ahead. In the coming months, the policy setting Federal Open Market Committee a mix of governors in Washington and regional Fed presidents will have to decide whether to ramp up or dial back bond purchases from the current pace of 120 billion per month, what specifically to buy, and how to communicate when they will stop. Fed governors, who oversee bank regulation, will have to consider in 2021 whether to extend tweaks put in place because of the pandemic. And Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, and his new, Democratic counterpart at the Treasury Department will have to decide whether to restart emergency loan programs that outgoing Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is ending on his way out the door. Democrats have urged their renewal, and Republicans have warned against it. All of those decisions will be set against a fragmented economic backdrop: The recovery is sputtering in the near term as the coronavirus spreads and keeps holiday travelers and shoppers at home, but the economy is expected to rebound sharply as a vaccine becomes widely available. The Fed's monetary policies work with a lag, and the stark divide across time will make calibrating next steps all the more challenging. Mr. Powell will give his assessment of the economic outlook and answer reporter questions at a news conference following the 2 p.m. release of the Fed's December policy statement. Officials will also release their quarterly economic estimates, which will offer a sense of what path they expect the unemployment rate, inflation and interest rates to follow over the coming years. Mr. Powell will likely need to walk a narrow line as he tries to explain how the Fed will proceed. Many investors are looking for more economic help in the near term, and anything perceived as complacency could rattle them. Yet his colleagues, in recent speeches, have been divided over how much more the Fed needs to do now, which could make it difficult for the chair who speaks, in part, as a representative for the Federal Open Market Committee to present a conclusive message. The Fed has enacted a sweeping series of responses to cushion American workers and businesses against the pandemic's economic fallout. It slashed interest rates to near zero in March, rolled out its bond buying campaign to soothe troubled markets, and unveiled a spate of programs to keep credit flowing to states and cities, small and medium sized businesses and corporations. Those measures have largely achieved their goals. The central bank averted a financial system meltdown, borrowing costs have held at low levels across many credit markets, and interest rate sensitive sectors like housing roared back after lockdowns. Yet the next stage could be harder: Millions of people remain out of work nine months into the crisis, many businesses are teetering on the brink, and while a vaccine is in sight, widespread immunity might still be months away. The Fed is also low on new tricks, but not entirely out of them. Officials could, as early as this week's meeting, change the way they are buying bonds in order to have more of an economic impact. Policymakers are mulling whether to shift toward longer term debt and away from short term notes. That wonky maneuver may seem technical, but it could have the effect of holding down borrowing costs on things like mortgages and business loans and, in doing so, set the stage for stronger growth. 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 economy is far more sensitive to longer term rates," said Priya Misra, global head of rates strategy at TD Securities. She pointed out that without Fed action, longer term rates will rise as a deluge of Treasury securities enter the market to fund the government's pandemic spending. But it is not a slam dunk that such a change will happen at this meeting. Regional Fed presidents have expressed lukewarm appetite for changing the so called quantitative easing, or Q.E., programs now. "If we need to offer more support or we need to prop up the support that we've offered, we can use Q.E. for that, including changing the duration," Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said in a recent question and answer session. "But if you look at financial markets right now, I see no indication that they are misunderstanding where we're headed and that we need to somehow do something different to get financial markets where we need them to be." Conditions are evolving quickly. Since the Fed entered its premeeting quiet period, during which officials do not give speeches, virus cases have continued to climb, several real time data points have pointed to economic weakening, and rates on the closely watched 10 year Treasury bond have crept higher, making many types of credit a bit more expensive. At the same time, vaccines have been approved and early disbursement has begun. Even if the Fed leaves the contours of its bond purchase program unchanged for now, economists think the central bank might update the way it talks about its plans for the future. The central bank has indicated that it might offer guidance on how long it plans to buy assets to keep markets performing smoothly and bolster the economy "fairly soon." That is likely to entail tying its bond buying plans to qualitative rather than numbers based economic goals. J.P. Morgan analysts think officials might link the buying to the course of the virus by saying that they will "continue purchases for as long as the public health crisis weighs on economic activity," Michael Feroli, the bank's chief U.S. economist, wrote in a research note. Economists at Goldman Sachs expect the Fed to pledge that purchases will continue "until the labor market is on track to reach maximum employment and inflation is on track to reach 2 percent." That wide gap in expectations, even among top Fed watching firms, underlines why this could be a fraught meeting for Mr. Powell. Disappointing investor expectations could roil markets, but it is not entirely clear what market participants expect. The Fed's November meeting minutes also raised the possibility that the Fed might take a look at the types of bonds it is buying. The Fed is currently buying about 80 billion worth of Treasury debt and 40 billion in mortgage backed securities or M.B.S. per month. But the minutes show that a few officials worried that "maintaining the current pace of agency M.B.S. purchases could contribute to potential valuation pressures in housing markets." Whatever tweaks do come are likely to cut in the direction of more overall support for the economy. There are still about 10 million fewer jobs than in February, real time indicators of consumer spending are coming in soft as virus cases surge, and jobless claims are rocketing higher once again, dimming the near term outlook. "As economic momentum slows and Covid cases surge, we look for monetary policymakers to fortify the bridge that supports the economy until vaccinations become widely available," Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note previewing the meeting. The Fed will release a new set of quarterly economic projections at this meeting, and they are expected to reflect a more dire outlook in the near term but also a stronger bounceback later on. But even with the vaccines coming, wild cards remain including how much congressional support the economy will get in the near term.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Gary Steigman, an astronomer whose pioneering studies of the Big Bang helped show that most of the matter in the universe was not made of atoms a finding that led to the modern conception of a universe awash in dark matter being pushed into an infinite night by dark energy died on April 9 in Columbus, Ohio. He was 76. Ohio State University, where he was an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy, said the cause was injuries he had suffered in a fall. Dr. Steigman, a street kid in a big city turned astrophysicist, was a tall, curly haired, gregarious straight talker who was not one to shy away from intellectual combat. "He's the only person I know who would use the word 'bogus' in a referee report," said Robert Scherrer, of Vanderbilt University, referring to the peer reviews that papers go through before being published. Dr. Steigman was one of the ringleaders of cosmology in an era in which astronomy and particle physics were merging. It was a time when scientists were asking giant questions about the cosmos like why there are matter and galaxies and seeking answers in the relationships between quantum particles, formed when the universe was a split second old and ablaze with energies beyond the dreams of earthly particle accelerators. The universe, Dr. Steigman and his colleagues liked to say, was the poor man's particle accelerator. The 1980s saw an explosion of ambitious new ideas about the universe, and Dr. Steigman's work put him at the center of it though with something of a calming effect. As Michael Turner, of the University of Chicago, put it, "During the halcyon days of a new theory a week, when young scientists were having too much fun, Gary often provided the adult supervision and wise guiding hand." Gary Steigman was born in New York City on Feb. 23, 1941, to Charles and Pearl Steigman and grew up in the Bronx, a fan of the New York Giants baseball team across the Harlem River. He passed up taking the entrance exam for the selective Bronx High School of Science because he wanted to be "normal," he once said. Nevertheless, science and the universe beckoned. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from the City College of New York in 1961 and then obtained a Ph.D. from New York University in 1968. It was there, in his thesis, working under Malvin A. Ruderman, that Dr. Steigman made his first contribution to cosmology. According to all the laws of physics, when the universe was born in the Big Bang, elementary particles and their antimatter evil twin opposites with opposite charges and spins should be produced in equal, counterbalancing amounts. But all that astronomers could see in the present day universe was matter. Where did the antimatter go? Were there antimatter stars and galaxies hiding out there? In his thesis, Dr. Steigman showed that a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would not work. The universe, he concluded, must have become unbalanced in favor of matter in its earliest moments. Cosmologists are still struggling to understand how that happened. After research stints at Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Steigman taught at Yale and at the Bartol Research Foundation, part of the University of Delaware, before joining the faculty at Ohio State. He and his Great Pyrenees, Holly, spent many summers at the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado, where scientists talk through problems over picnic tables under the trees and on hikes in the Rockies. Dr. Steigman was a longtime trustee of the center and a member of its advisory board. Dr. Steigman became an expert in the study of the nuclear reactions that took place in the first three minutes of creation. "This is a way you can enjoy a high lifestyle without a high salary," Dr. Steigman told an interviewer one day over canapes at the home of a center benefactor. He was recruited to Ohio State in 1986 to found a cosmology center, which would include both astronomers and physicists. Around the same time, he began a romantic, interhemispheric relationship with a Brazilian astronomer, Sueli Viegas, from the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Sao Paulo, whom he had met at a conference in Rio de Janeiro. They married in 2004, after Dr. Viegas had retired from Sao Paulo. Besides Dr. Viegas, Dr. Steigman is survived by a stepdaughter, Cibele Aldrovandi; a stepson, Leonardo Aldrovandi; and two nieces. A previous marriage had ended in divorce. Dr. Steigman became an expert in the study of the nuclear reactions that took place in the first three minutes of creation. In those moments, the universe converted primordial hydrogen, the simplest element, into heavier elements like helium and lithium, which made up the first stars. (The rest of the elements needed to make planets and people would be manufactured in stars.) It was in Aspen one day that he and a former office mate, David N. Schramm, of the University of Chicago, discovered that they had both made the same breakthrough: According to the Big Bang equations, the amount of primordial helium produced was crucially dependent on how many kinds of ghostly, nearly massless elementary particles there were in the universe. At the time, particle physicists had suspected that there were three kinds, or generations, of neutrinos, each representing a different family of the elementary particles that make up nature. But as their particle accelerators had gone to higher and higher energies, they had discovered more and more generations. Dr. Steigman and Dr. Schramm combined forces with James Gunn, now at Princeton, to write a paper declaring that based on helium abundances, there could be no more than seven families of elementary particles. "The trend was for more numbers of neutrinos as accelerators went to higher energies," Dr. Schramm recalled in an interview before his death in 1997. "We said the trend wasn't going to continue. There was no statement from particle physics on the number of generations. It could be a thousand. For the first time cosmology was giving something back to physics." The physicists were at first amused at the astronomers' invasion of their realm. But as the measurements of primordial helium got better and better, their prediction on the number of neutrino families shrank to about three, the number known today a result confirmed by experiments at particle accelerators. In collaboration with Dr. Schramm and others, Dr. Steigman continued to refine the Big Bang calculations and investigate their potential consequences for the universe. One important result of their calculations was a determination that the amount of atomic matter in the universe fell far short of the amount needed to reverse its expansion and cause it to fall back together some day in a Big Crunch. This contradicted reigning theories that the universe was right on the border between eternal expansion and eventual collapse a so called flat universe. In 1980, Dr. Steigman wrote a paper suggesting that massive neutrinos left over from the Big Bang might comprise the missing mass needed to flatten the cosmos. It was one of the first proposals for what became known as dark matter. He, Dr. Turner and Lawrence Krauss, now at Arizona State, went on to write a prophetic paper in 1984 suggesting that all problems in cosmology could be solved by adopting an old idea invented by Einstein in 1917 and later abandoned by him known as the cosmological constant, a long range cosmic repulsion force. In 1999, two teams of astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding faster and faster with time, not slowing down, under the influence of some "dark energy" that appeared to behave exactly like Einstein's cosmological constant. In 2011, they won the Nobel Prize in Physics.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Hector Bellerin of Arsenal was among the club captains who told the Premier League that players intended to show their support for protesters who took to the streets after the death of George Floyd. LEEDS, England The captains of England's leading soccer clubs have informed the Premier League that players intend to demonstrate their support for the Black Lives Matter movement when the competition resumes play next week. The issue was raised on Tuesday during a regular conference call with the captains of all 20 Premier League clubs, part of an effort by the league to maintain a direct dialogue with its players over the course of the coronavirus lockdown and a way for the captains to convey their squads' views to the authorities. The league is scheduled to return to action in a week, with the first two games played on Wednesday, before a full round of matches the following weekend. The latest meeting focused on which causes the players believed should be emphasized, either as part of the pregame pageantry or in messages rolling along advertising hoardings or emblazoned on banners. At the meeting, the players said that they also wanted to show their support for the protests that have swept the globe after the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer placed his knee on his neck for several minutes. The Premier League has traditionally shied away from any gesture that might be considered political in 2018, the Manchester City coach, Pep Guardiola, who is from Catalonia, was fined 20,000 pounds, or about 25,000, for wearing a yellow ribbon on his lapel in support of the region's independence from Spain but the organization is not expected to stand in the way of the players' wishes. National authorities have already been advised by FIFA, soccer's global governing body, that players showing support for the Black Lives Matter movement or sending an anti racism message should not be punished. In Germany, where the Bundesliga returned to competitive play last month, players and teams have already shown solidarity with the protests: A number of Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich players have warmed up in jerseys bearing slogans from the protests including "No Justice, No Peace" while Marcus Thuram, a Borussia Monchengladbach forward, took a knee after scoring against Union Berlin. Weston McKennie, an American midfielder who plays for Schalke, wore an armband demanding justice for Floyd. In Britain, where tens of thousands have attended Black Lives Matter protests across the country in recent days, players from Chelsea, Liverpool and Newcastle have all taken a knee before training sessions. The Manchester City forward Raheem Sterling who had emerged as a powerful advocate on the issue of discrimination both within soccer and in society as a whole long before the latest round of protests expressed the need to "implement change" in an interview with Newsnight, the BBC's flagship news review program. The protesters, Sterling said, "are trying to find a solution and a way to stop the injustice they are seeing, and they are fighting for their cause." The captains of the Premier League's teams have made clear that they want to be able to express the same sentiment when they return to the field over the next 10 days. Though it is not yet known what form that message will take the Premier League is likely to offer the players a number of options Bellerin, Coleman and Deeney were all particularly vocal during the meeting, stating their belief that soccer had a duty to make its voice heard on a social issue that matters so much not just to its fans, but also to its players.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Deborah Raji, a college student, helped Joy Buolamwini of the M.I.T. Media Lab test facial technologies from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Face and Kairos.Credit...Jaime Hogge for The New York Times Over the last two years, Amazon has aggressively marketed its facial recognition technology to police departments and federal agencies as a service to help law enforcement identify suspects more quickly. It has done so as another tech giant, Microsoft, has called on Congress to regulate the technology, arguing that it is too risky for companies to oversee on their own. Now a new study from researchers at the M.I.T. Media Lab has found that Amazon's system, Rekognition, had much more difficulty in telling the gender of female faces and of darker skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. The results raise questions about potential bias that could hamper Amazon's drive to popularize the technology. In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft's technology mistook darker skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time. A study published a year ago found similar problems in the programs built by IBM, Microsoft and Megvii, an artificial intelligence company in China known as Face . Those results set off an outcry that was amplified when a co author of the study, Joy Buolamwini, posted YouTube videos showing the technology misclassifying famous African American women, like Michelle Obama, as men. The companies in last year's report all reacted by quickly releasing more accurate technology. For the latest study, Ms. Buolamwini said, she sent a letter with some preliminary results to Amazon seven months ago. But she said that she hadn't heard back from Amazon, and that when she and a co author retested the company's product a couple of months later, it had not improved. Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services, said the researchers had examined facial analysis a technology that can spot features such as mustaches or expressions such as smiles and not facial recognition, a technology that can match faces in photos or video stills to identify individuals. Amazon markets both services. "It's not possible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use case including law enforcement based on results obtained using facial analysis," Dr. Wood said in a statement. He added that the researchers had not tested the latest version of Rekognition, which was updated in November. Amazon said that in recent internal tests using an updated version of its service, the company found no difference in accuracy in classifying gender across all ethnicities. The new study, scheduled to be presented Monday at an artificial intelligence and ethics conference in Honolulu, is sure to inflame that argument. Proponents see facial recognition as an important advance in helping law enforcement agencies catch criminals and find missing children. Some police departments, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have tested Amazon's product. But civil liberties experts warn that it can also be used to secretly identify people potentially chilling Americans' ability to speak freely or simply go about their business anonymously in public. Over the last year, Amazon has come under intense scrutiny by federal lawmakers, the American Civil Liberties Union, shareholders, employees and academic researchers for marketing Rekognition to law enforcement agencies. That is partly because, unlike Microsoft, IBM and other tech giants, Amazon has been less willing to publicly discuss concerns. Amazon, citing customer confidentiality, has also declined to answer questions from federal lawmakers about which government agencies are using Rekognition or how they are using it. The company's responses have further troubled some federal lawmakers. "Not only do I want to see them address our concerns with the sense of urgency it deserves," said Representative Jimmy Gomez, a California Democrat who has been investigating Amazon's facial recognition practices. "But I also want to know if law enforcement is using it in ways that violate civil liberties, and what if any protections Amazon has built into the technology to protect the rights of our constituents." In a letter last month to Mr. Gomez, Amazon said Rekognition customers must abide by Amazon's policies, which require them to comply with civil rights and other laws. But the company said that for privacy reasons it did not audit customers, giving it little insight into how its product is being used. The study published last year reported that Microsoft had a perfect score in identifying the gender of lighter skinned men in a photo database, but that it misclassified darker skinned women as men about one in five times. IBM and Face had an even higher error rate, each misclassifying the gender of darker skinned women about one in three times. Ms. Buolamwini said she had developed her methodology with the idea of harnessing public pressure, and market competition, to push companies to fix biases in their software that could pose serious risks to people. "One of the things we were trying to explore with the paper was how to galvanize action," Ms. Buolamwini said. Immediately after the study came out last year, IBM published a blog post, "Mitigating Bias in A.I. Models," citing Ms. Buolamwini's study. In the post, Ruchir Puri, chief architect at IBM Watson, said IBM had been working for months to reduce bias in its facial recognition system. The company post included test results showing improvements, particularly in classifying the gender of darker skinned women. Soon after, IBM released a new system that the company said had a tenfold decrease in error rates. A few months later, Microsoft published its own post, titled "Microsoft improves facial recognition technology to perform well across all skin tones, genders." In particular, the company said, it had significantly reduced the error rates for female and darker skinned faces. Ms. Buolamwini wanted to learn whether the study had changed overall industry practices. So she and a colleague, Deborah Raji, a college student who did an internship at the M.I.T. Media Lab last summer, conducted a new study. In it, they retested the facial systems of IBM, Microsoft and Face . They also tested the facial systems of two companies that were not included in the first study: Amazon and Kairos, a start up in Florida. The new study found that IBM, Microsoft and Face all improved their accuracy in identifying gender. By contrast, the study reported, Amazon misclassified the gender of darker skinned females 31 percent of the time, while Kairos had an error rate of 22.5 percent. Melissa Doval, the chief executive of Kairos, said the company, inspired by Ms. Buolamwini's work, released a more accurate algorithm in October. Ms. Buolamwini said the results of her studies raised fundamental questions for society about whether facial technology should not be used in certain situations, such as job interviews, or in products, like drones or police body cameras. "Technology like Amazon's Rekognition should be used if and only if it is imbued with American values like the right to privacy and equal protection," said Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has been investigating Amazon's facial recognition practices. "I do not think that standard is currently being met."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A bed at Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn. Most of New York's 331 cases of C. auris infection have been concentrated in Brooklyn and Queens. New York State health officials are considering rigorous new requirements for hospitals and nursing homes to prevent the spread of a deadly drug resistant fungus called Candida auris. The requirements could include mandatory pre admission screening of patients believed to be at risk and placing in isolation those patients who are infected, or even those just carrying the fungus on their skin. Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, and a fungal expert from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met last Friday in Manhattan with nearly 60 hospital officials from across the state to discuss the proposed guidelines. State health officials said they were seeking hospital input before issuing the guidelines, which they acknowledged would likely be a hardship for some institutions. Screening can be costly and time consuming, but the officials said they are determined to stop the spread of C. auris, a fungus of mysterious origin that has been quietly spreading around the world since it was first identified in 2009. Most of the state's 331 cases of the disease, which is often resistant to antifungal medication, were in Brooklyn and Queens. While C. auris is not the first drug resistant germ to take hold, it is so dangerous and easily spread that it is putting new kinds of pressures on the health care system. One hallmark of C. auris is that it can be very difficult to clean from equipment or clothing, and it may spread through the air. Officials suspect that the spores can be shaken loose from bedding and they have been known to cling to walls and ceiling tiles. "One of our guiding objectives is to stop the geographic spread," said Brad Hutton, the state's deputy commissioner of public health. He said the state's efforts to contain the spread have required significant resources including sending individual infection specialists to investigate more than 150 cases and that New York now needs help from individual institutions. "We're at a point where our response strategy needs to change," he said. He added that he hoped the guidelines would be finalized by the end of the year, but said the state is still determining whether to apply them statewide or just to New York City and surrounding areas. It has yet to be decided whether the guidelines would be recommendations or regulatory requirements, he said. Zeynep Sumer King, a vice president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group that represents hospitals in the metropolitan region, described the meeting as "very productive and very collaborative." But she said hospitals raised concerns about such matters as whether hospitals have lab capacity and expertise to handle on site testing. For the moment, she said, hospitals are pre screening many patients who appear to be at risk. But it can take a week to get skin swab results back from the state laboratory, posing challenges for housing patients in isolation during the interim. Further, she said, regular testing is likely to turn up patients who are carriers but not infected, increasing the number of patients who require isolation, appropriately or not. "The more we screen the more we find colonized cases," she said, "That takes up space and more beds." The steps proposed by New York, while "draconian," are probably right to do, said Matthew Fischer, a professor of fungal epidemiology at Imperial College London, and co author of a recent scientific review on the rise of resistant fungi. "We're dealing with something very unusual here," he said. "I think it seems wise, seeing as we don't really know what we're dealing with, to at least attempt control." The thoughts were echoed by Dr. Tom Chiller, head of the fungal division of the C.D.C., who said New York is "at the forefront and has not shied away" from tackling an issue for which it has been "ground zero." "Going for it now makes sense," he said, adding of auris: "We have to see if we can stamp it out or keep it in check." The germ has also spread in New Jersey and Illinois, particularly the Chicago area. The spread of the germ in some hospitals and nursing homes has been cloaked in secrecy even as it can lead to devastating outcomes for individual patients and their families. According to the C.D.C., 90 percent of C. auris infections are resistant to at least one drug and 30 percent resistant to at least two drugs. New York State has seen three cases that are resistant to all known treatments. The C.D.C. reports that nearly half the patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days. Most people infected by the germ are already are very ill or have compromised immune systems. It is patients like these that New York state health officials would like to see "prescreened" when they arrive at a hospital including people who have recently stayed at a hospital intensive care unit or nursing home in Brooklyn or Queens; and those who are on ventilators, catheters or other invasive equipment that allow the infection to enter the body. Ms. King, from the hospital association, said that hospitals are already screening patients from nursing homes in the affected areas. The germ is so virulent that the C.D.C. recommends those infected or even just colonized with the fungus meaning they carry the disease without being infected should be isolated in individual rooms. For now, much of the burden for surveillance has fallen to the state. The effort has involved the development of a fast screening test that can analyze a skin swab in a matter of hours. But all hospitals, for the moment, have to send those tests to a state laboratory in Albany and wait several days before receiving the results, though hospitals say the backlog means tests can take a week. Officials say they are hoping to eventually deploy the tests so they can be done on site. An additional challenge is dealing with an unusual aspect of C. auris: It doesn't seem to go away once it's on the skin, said Dr. Eleanor Adams, a state public health physician who has led the surveillance efforts of C. auris in New York City. Dr. Adams and her team have made 173 visits to follow up on suspected and confirmed cases at hospitals and nursing homes, and also to test people who came in contact with infected patients. Initially, she said, the team was testing people infected and colonized every few weeks, but she realized that people who are colonized typically remain that way, sometimes indefinitely. "The question remains if anyone is truly cleared. That is an academic point we don't know," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Dixie Chicks are now the Chicks. The platinum selling country trio, which in 2003 became pariahs in Nashville for criticizing President George W. Bush on the eve of the American led invasion of Iraq, has changed its name, apparently in tacit acknowledgment of criticism over its use of the word "Dixie," a nostalgic nickname for the Civil War era South. The group made the change stealthily on Thursday, releasing a new video as the Chicks and adjusting its social media presence. Representatives for the band confirmed the new name. But the three women of the group Natalie Maines, Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire, who have been among the most outspoken figures in the conservative world of country music made little immediate comment. The group's decision comes as nationwide protests over police violence against black people have put a renewed spotlight on racial inequalities of all kinds from corporate brands with problematic logos to media organizations with a lack of diversity in their top ranks. For the Dixie Chicks, the pressure had come over its use of the word Dixie, with commentary in the news media pushing the group to change its name just as the country debates issues like removing Confederate monuments. The name change comes ahead of the release of the group's first album in 14 years, "Gaslighter," due out on July 17. It is perhaps the highest profile example of a musical act rechristening itself over questions of historical and social resonance. This month, the country group Lady Antebellum which has won five Grammy Awards announced it would become Lady A, saying, "Our hearts have been stirred with conviction, our eyes opened wide to the injustices, inequality and biases black women and men have always faced and continue to face everyday." But the Dixie Chicks occupy an even greater level of fame. Once a darling of country radio, the group has crossed over to become a banner mainstream act and magazine cover subject, even today. The Dixie Chicks have sold at least 33 million albums in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, and won 13 Grammys, including album of the year for its 2006 release "Taking the Long Way." That album was the Dixie Chicks' defiant response to its abrupt ejection from the Nashville establishment, after Maines, the group's lead singer, told a London audience in March 2003: "We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." The fallout from that statement was immediate and fierce, with fans protesting the group on tour and country radio stations dropping once ubiquitous hits like "Wide Open Spaces" and "Without You" from playlists. Ever since, such brutal rejection as a consequence of political speech has been so feared that it has become a verb "Dixie Chicked." Taylor Swift's recent documentary, "Miss Americana," showed that the fear loomed over even her. (Swift also had the Dixie Chicks as guests on her latest album, "Lover.") Quick rebrandings can be complicated. Soon after Lady Antebellum announced its new name, it emerged that at least one other act a black blues singer from Seattle had already been releasing music under the name Lady A for years, leading to awkward settlement talks. The Dixie Chicks faced a similar situation, with a 1960s pop group from New Zealand, but apparently resolved it in advance. "A sincere and heartfelt thank you goes out to 'The Chicks' of NZ for their gracious gesture in allowing us to share their name," Maines, Strayer and Maguire said in a statement circulated by a spokeswoman. "We are honored to co exist together in the world with these exceptionally talented sisters. Chicks Rock!" Exactly how the Chicks will handle the sudden change was unclear. Its social media accounts were quickly swapped on Thursday morning, but some merchandise, like advance vinyl copies of "Gaslighter," has already been put on sale under the old name. The Dixie Chicks, founded as a bluegrass group in Dallas in 1989, took its name in reference to "Dixie Chicken," a 1973 album by the country rock group Little Feat. The lyrics to that album's title track "If you'll be my Dixie chicken/I'll be your Tennessee lamb" contain the kind of casual references to "Dixie" that have turned up repeatedly in country songs, with little mainstream controversy. But as criticism of a romanticized slavery era South has grown, they have drawn new scrutiny. The Dixie Chicks became major country hitmakers in the years after Maines joined in 1995, and were hailed by critics for blending sharp bluegrass skills with pop sensibilities. Maines has also become known for being outspoken on progressive causes like the release of the West Memphis Three, a group of teenage boys who were convicted of a murder in 1994 but later released after widespread doubts about their case. Maines's Twitter account currently states simply: "Black Lives Matter." But as protests over police brutality and the killing of George Floyd continued, and Americans re examined institutions and brands with ties to racist stereotypes, the Dixie Chicks were quickly targeted with demands to make a change. In a recent opinion article in Variety, the entertainment trade publication, the journalist Jeremy Helligar said that the term Dixie "conjures a time and a place of bondage."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Change is coming for Givenchy. The French brand is going to emerge from coronavirus confinement with not just new social distancing rules, but a whole new look. Two months after Clare Waight Keller stepped down as creative director, the house announced that it had named a new designer, and he comes not from the school of couture, but rather the school of Kanye. Matthew M. Williams, the founder of the haute streetwear line 1017 Alyx 9SM, will be the new creative director. He will be the third Givenchy designer in three years, heralding yet another aesthetic about face for the brand and an apparent renunciation of its Audrey Hepburn past. Mr. Williams will be responsible for all creative aspects of the brand, including both women's and men's wear, and will start June 16. "I am looking forward to working together with its ateliers and teams, to move it into a new era, based on modernity and inclusivity," Mr. Williams said in a statement. "In these unprecedented times for the world, I want to send a message of hope, together with my community and colleagues, and intend to contribute toward positive change." The 34 year old from Pismo Beach, Calif., who founded Alyx in 2015, has no formal design training, but he does have a resume that includes being creative director for Lady Gaga, art director for Mr. West, and a founder (along with Virgil Abloh and Heron Preston, among others) of Been Trill, a short lived collective of coolness.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The Obama administration issued guidelines on Wednesday that recommended public school officials use law enforcement only as a last resort for disciplining students, a response to a rise in zero tolerance policies that have disproportionately increased the number of arrests, suspensions and expulsions of minority students for even minor, nonviolent offenses. The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., released a 35 page document that outlined approaches including counseling for students, coaching for teachers and disciplinary officers, and sessions to teach social and emotional skills that could reduce the time students spend out of school as punishment. "The widespread use of suspensions and expulsions has tremendous costs," Mr. Duncan wrote in a letter to school officials. "Students who are suspended or expelled from school may be unsupervised during daytime hours and cannot benefit from great teaching, positive peer interactions and adult mentorship offered in class and in school." Data collected by the Education Department shows that minorities particularly black boys and students with disabilities face the harshest discipline in schools. According to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, black students without disabilities are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled. And an analysis of the federal data by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that in 10 states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware and Illinois, more than a quarter of black students with disabilities were suspended in the 2009 10 school year. In addition, students who are eligible for special education services generally those with disabilities make up nearly a quarter of those who have been arrested at school, despite representing only 12 percent of the nation's students. As school districts have placed more police officers on campuses, criminal charges against children have drastically increased, a trend that has alarmed civil rights groups and others concerned about the safety and educational welfare of public school students. The Obama administration's document also set guidelines for reducing arrests and keeping discipline within schools. "A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal's office, not in a police precinct," Mr. Holder said in a statement. The administration advised schools to focus on creating positive environments, setting clear expectations and consequences for students, and ensuring fairness and equity in disciplinary measures. It also called for districts to collect data on school based arrests, citations and searches, as well as suspensions and expulsions, and reminded schools of civil rights laws protecting students. Civil rights groups broadly welcomed the federal guidance. Citing "misuse and overuse of exclusionary school discipline" that fuels a "school to prison pipeline," Deborah J. Vagins, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, called the guidelines "timely and important." The education secretary, Mr. Duncan, and the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., released a document suggesting other approaches. Some school districts, including in Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and Broward County, Fla., have already begun to alter their policies and focus more on preventing problem behavior in the first place. Of the federal guidance, Leticia Smith Evans, interim director of education practice at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said, "We can only hope that districts will look at this and embrace it and try to make sure that they can move forward in a positive direction to make sure that all students in their schools are being educated." School officials generally welcomed the guidance but said that putting all of the recommendations in place could be a long, expensive process. "Resistance can make implementing alternatives a difficult course to chart for school leaders," said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, which represents district superintendents. "Meanwhile, funds to improve school climate and train school personnel in alternative school discipline can be scarce in today's economic climate." Some experts saw the guidance as a good first step but warned that changing entrenched school cultures would be difficult. "We often talk about solving this problem as if it's an easy problem to solve," said James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School. "Actually creating a positive school climate, particularly in schools that are in communities that are themselves not calm and orderly, is hard work." Professor Forman added that because school accountability systems focus on student test scores and other academic measures, rather than on reducing suspensions, schools might not have much incentive to keep troubled students in class. "Sometimes getting rid of these kids can help you do better on the metrics that you are evaluated on," he said. "If a kid is causing trouble, that's probably not a kid who is testing well, and it may be a kid who is making it hard for teachers to teach other kids."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
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. On Friday, after 86 years as a museum, the great Hagia Sophia in Istanbul will once again echo with Muslim prayers. To Turkish Islamists, the conversion marks the fulfillment of a long held dream of restoring a symbol of Ottoman grandeur. For many others around the world, the change is a dismaying setback for one of the world's greatest architectural and cultural landmarks. Grandly arrayed on a hilltop over the Bosporus where it divides Europe and Asia, the Hagia Sophia's 15 century history is suffused with events, myths and symbols important to both East and West. Built in the sixth century by a Byzantine emperor, Justinian I, as the premier cathedral of the Roman Empire and dedicated to "Holy Wisdom," it was for almost 1,000 years the largest church in the world, a temple so majestic that upon its dedication the emperor is said to have proclaimed, "Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" Its influence on history and architecture and religion, Christian and Islamic, is profound. When Constantinople fell to Ottoman forces in 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror converted it to a mosque, the Great Mosque of Ayasofya, and with time the Byzantine mosaics were covered over or destroyed and four great minarets were raised around the structure. It remained a mosque until 1934, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular, modern republic of Turkey, transformed the Hagia Sophia into a museum, exposing long concealed mosaics and marble floor decorations, in what was seen as a bid to free the monument, and the nation, from myths of sacred conquest. Why President Recep Tayyip Erdogan chose to reverse Ataturk's decision is a matter of some conjecture. A product of an Islamist political tradition, he said he was unable to sleep on the night he issued the presidential decree making the change. Only a year earlier he had argued against the conversion. What is clear is that despite the great powers Mr. Erdogan has seized over 17 years in power as prime minister and president, his current political standing is shaky, and he needs to feed his nationalist base. In his address to the nation on July 10 announcing the conversion, Mr. Erdogan made no mention of Ataturk. There was no need his speech was preceded by a ruling of the Council of State, the highest administrative court of the country, nullifying Ataturk's decree. And in his speech, Mr. Erdogan extensively quoted Sultan Mehmed's will, calling down frightful curses on anyone who would change the Hagia Sophia's status. The reaction from Christian leaders has been relatively muted, perhaps for fear of fomenting sectarian strife. Pope Francis said only that he was "pained," while the Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, who as a resident of Turkey needs to be cautious in his pronouncements, expressed regret that the Hagia Sophia would cease being "a place and symbol of encounter, dialogue and peaceful coexistence of peoples and cultures." UNESCO was more direct. A statement from the organization said it "deeply regrets" that the decision was made without any prior discussion, adding: "Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece and a unique testimony to interactions between Europe and Asia over the centuries. Its status as a museum reflects the universal nature of its heritage, and makes it a powerful symbol for dialogue." The statement also warned that alterations to physical structures or changes to accessibility of the site could violate the 1972 World Heritage Convention, to which Turkey was a signatory. Mr. Erdogan, for his part, has sought to reassure the world that when not being used for prayer, the Hagia Sophia would remain open to the public, and that Christian frescoes would remain on display, though covered with curtains during Muslim prayers. It is critical that at least on these matters, he be held to his word. It is a sad reflection on the state of Turkey's democracy that a monument of such global importance and value should become an authoritarian leader's political tool. But what's done is done; there is no chance that Mr. Erdogan would reverse his decree, even if he could, without firing the fury of his base. But the Hagia Sophia remains a World Heritage Site in the most profound sense of the designation, a structure of surpassing beauty with a deep overlay of the histories of East and West, Christianity and Islam. That need not preclude prayer; nor should it preclude Turks from feeling a powerful connection to a monument that has been the pride of their nation for centuries. But like the damaged Notre Dame in Paris, or the Acropolis in Athens, that must not undermine its calling as a place of exceptional significance to all humanity. In converting the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, Mr. Erdogan has assumed the weighty responsibility of a custodian of one of the world's cultural landmarks. He ought not be allowed to forget that.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Claudia Rankine has won the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for her acclaimed book "Citizen: An American Lyric." The award is presented by the Library of Congress and comes with a prize of 10,000. "Citizen" was published in 2014 and explored race and violence in modern America. It made the New York Times best seller list and received numerous awards and a stage adaptation. Ms. Rankine was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant last year, and said that she planned to use part of that prize money to explore whiteness. Nathaniel Mackey won the Bobbitt lifetime achievement prize. The pair will receive their awards and read selections from their work on April 20 at the Library of Congress.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Carlos Cordeiro, the president of the United States Soccer Federation, resigned Thursday night, three days after the federation argued in legal filings that "indisputable science" proved that the players on its World Cup winning women's national team were inferior to men. Facing on field protests by members of the women's team, withering criticism from major U.S. Soccer sponsors and public condemnation by members of the organization's board of directors, Cordeiro found his position untenable. "My one and only mission has always been to do what is best for our Federation, and it has become clear to me that what is best right now is a new direction," he wrote in a statement announcing his resignation. The arguments, made as the team and U.S. Soccer face an increasingly unbridgeable gap as they brace for a federal trial in May, infuriated the players, as well as at least three powerful U.S. Soccer board members. "To see that blatant misogyny and sexism as the argument used against us is really disappointing," midfielder Megan Rapinoe said after her team's 3 1 win over Japan in the U.S. Soccer organized SheBelieves Cup on Wednesday night. "I know that we're in a contentious fight," she added in comments to reporters in Frisco, Texas, "but that crossed a line completely." Chris Ahrens, a former Paralympian, said he was "deeply troubled, saddened and angry by the comments" and had requested a meeting with U.S. Soccer's leadership and the members of the legal team. Don Garber, the commissioner of Major League Soccer and a longtime U.S. Soccer board member, said in a statement that he expressed to Cordeiro "how unacceptable and offensive I found the statements in that filing to be." Cindy Parlow Cone, the vice president of U.S. Soccer and a former women's national team player, said on Thursday that she was "hurt and saddened by the brief U.S.S.F. filed." She added: "I disavow the troubling statements." Cone, 41, who was elected vice president last year, will take over for Cordeiro. She is the first woman to serve as U.S. Soccer's president. Rapinoe said the legal filings, made by some of the same lawyers who will face the players across the table in collective bargaining negotiations next year, had caused "irreparable damage" to the relationship between the team and U.S. Soccer. But they also appeared to damage important relationships between the federation and its sponsors. Coca Cola, Volkswagen, Budweiser, Visa and Deloitte the presenting sponsor of the SheBelieves Cup all condemned U.S. Soccer for condoning the legal arguments. Volkswagen on Thursday declared itself "disgusted" by the positions taken. "They are simply unacceptable," the company said in a statement, adding that "we stand by the USWNT and the ideals they represent for the world." Notably, Nike, which paid the federation 22 million last year and is its biggest sponsor, did not comment on the filing. It was not the first time the equal pay fight had seen sponsors side with the team against the federation they pay. Last summer, Procter Gamble urged the federation to be "on the right side of history" in the dispute, and donated more than 500,000 to the women's team's players association. Nike and Visa also said they supported the players at the time. The players made their own statement on Wednesday. Before the game against Japan, they came onto the field for pregame drills with their training tops turned inside out hiding the U.S. Soccer crest and leaving visible only the four stars representing the team's four World Cup triumphs. "I think it was a powerful message, without having to really send a message," striker Carli Lloyd said after the victory, answering questions in front of a backdrop that featured the logos of Coca Cola, Visa, Budweiser, Nike and other sponsors. She added: "We don't want to be in this position, but we are here and it's just got to be better." Before the night ended, the blank crest with the four stars was showing up in fans' social media avatars and on shirts that were licensed by the players' union. The filing, made late Monday night, opposed the women's team's motion for partial summary judgment in the equal pay lawsuit. In it, U.S. Soccer argued "the job of MNT player carries more responsibility within U.S. Soccer than the job of WNT player," using the abbreviations for the men's and women's national teams, in regards to a claim under the equal pay act. They also argued the job of a men's team player "requires a higher level of skill based on speed and strength."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuations and love poems. Sometimes I wonder if the yearning I've felt for others was more of a yearning for yearning itself. I've pined insatiably and repeatedly: for strangers, new lovers, unrequited flames. While the subjects changed, that feeling always remained. Perhaps, then, I have not been so infatuated with the people themselves, but with the act of longing. Even when the longing was excruciating, it fulfilled a purpose for me: namely, the purpose of making meaning in this life. Crushes are like little treadmills of hope in the abyss. We may actually be going nowhere, but there is the sensation of forward motion something to anticipate, a reason for being, a distraction from death and larger existential questions like "What is everything?" and "What am I doing here?" Even my attempts at self love, a concept that still eludes me, have been marked by acquisition, stabs at forward motion, the illusion that we ever arrive at completion. In my 20s I really bought into it, reading copious self help books, consulting with psychics, attending new age workshops. I sought to "become a whole person," as though that were some kind of finite destination one could arrive at and then remain there, static; as though the fractured nature of existence itself isn't already some kind of overarching complete picture, our holes and missing pieces a sort of broken perfection. What would I have done if I had actually landed on some final, immutable me whom I embraced with all my heart? For the sake of my own hunger for pursuit, I would have likely thrown her back in the water and kept looking. I would have been sad to give up the quest. Likewise, I've sought to fulfill my longing for something bigger than myself something, for the sake of simplicity, I will call a higher power through a particular feeling. I've wanted a higher power to provide that same narcotic delight one feels in the early stages of a relationship. In those rare white light moments when I have felt a holy bliss, I've quickly purchased a candle or crystal, hoping to pocket the feeling. Unfortunately, that feeling cannot be contained in an object any more than it can be pinned down to one human being. It is so easy to confuse spiritual longing with a craving for romantic love. Beautiful people are everywhere, whereas the desire for some kind of eternal beauty or ineffable truth is more nebulous, always just out of reach. Recently, on a solo holiday trip to Paris, I saw tangible beauty all over the city: in twinkling silver lights, the blackness of my coffee, the florid cemeteries hinting at a more immortal mortality. The beauty conjured feelings of deep rapture, but also a simultaneous ache of longing. I couldn't figure out why the beauty made me so sad. I felt envious of the students' youth and what appeared to be a new, blossoming love affair maybe their first of early adulthood. They couldn't freeze that moment any more than I could return to the past, but they were in it now. This is what I am sad about, I thought. There are no more romantic firsts for me, at least not as a young person. I thought about a former lover who had grown up in Paris: the youthful exploits he described, the wild romantic and sexual explorations he'd had in Pigalle. I decided to go to the area and retrace his steps down the Boulevard de Clichy. I thought that perhaps if I could see what he had seen, recreate the journey, then maybe I could siphon some of that feeling of newness for myself. But in walking down the boulevard, I was surprised to discover that it was mostly sex shops, a sex club or two, nothing I hadn't seen before. I didn't feel transformed into a rapturous state of newness. Was I missing something? Afterward, I decided to walk up Montmartre and meditate at Sacre Coeur. It was freezing on the way up as I turned the corners of dark, cobblestone streets, then scaled the many stairs of the last hill. Suddenly, I saw the immense, glowing white stone domes of the church jutting up into the night sky. Then I heard a voice say, I've been waiting for you. I recognized this as the voice of my higher power. It's a still, quiet voice, and it comes to me when I am very quiet and very alone. I don't think I needed to go to a church to hear the voice. I don't think a church is any holier than a sex shop. But I feel that my higher power likes it when I seek. Perhaps the longing itself is holy. Look what I do for you, I said to my higher power, shivering in the wind. Look how far I am willing to go for you. Meditating in the church, its colossal, swooping arches lit by the fires of hundreds of red glass prayer candles so many wishes and desires here on Earth I realized that my sadness had not been romantic in essence, but concerned the ephemeral nature of all beauty. It's sad that there's nothing we as human beings can do to freeze a beautiful moment. It's sad how many beautiful moments have come and gone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
That's fascinating. I am probably amongst the more moderate members of the board. I am generally just personally more conservative. I was raised by Republicans and I come from the Midwest where, in general, some of the messages have not necessarily been resonating. That's a way oversimplification. But yes, I'm probably amongst the only members of the board who go to church regularly. And one of the questions that I asked almost every candidate was how they place themselves in terms of where spirituality comes into their leadership style and how they talk about that. Because I do know that I was in Iowa in November, and I remember one of the things I heard from a lot of voters was a lot of disappointment in the lack of discussion of faith and spirituality amongst some of the Democratic candidates. I also, I guess because I was raised by two people from a battleground state, I really worry that some of the ways that I feel this more with Warren than Sanders but some of the ways that they are talking to voters and around their ideas might be off putting. You know, I think that one of the things that came up over and over again in both of our conversations with the candidates, but also our deliberations, was this question of electability. The reality is is that 2016 has taught us that trying to figure out who is going to be the most electable candidate versus Donald Trump in November is probably a fool's errand. So we started looking closer at the policy prescriptions. We started talking a little bit more about the actual messages of the candidates. And what we realized is that the party needs to have that conversation amongst itself. It's really not the role of the editorial board to determine the future of the Democratic Party. And that the only vehicle that we really have is people going out and voting, to get a sense of what the Democratic voters want the future of the party to look like. Right after we had the outbreak of conflict with Iran, I sat down and I wrote an entire endorsement of Joe Biden. And I think that came from a desire on my part for the comfort of having someone who, during his interview, spoke so fluently about foreign policy, who's been in the room in some of those more difficult decision making, who was a really vocal opponent to the war in Afghanistan and sending more troops there. And I wrote that out. I wrote a full draft I mean, literally, 2,000 word draft talking about why I thought Joe Biden is the best Democrat to be president. And it felt so it didn't match the moment in any way. And by which I mean, as a board that has you know, all of its values are undergirded by institutions and norms in a lot of ways. I think one of the things that's come through in the last three years is how weak a lot of those institutions are, and how they really need to be reconsidered, and how our economic and political systems should at least be examined as to whether or not they need to be overhauled. And that's not Joe Biden's message at all. Joe Biden's message simply is, let's go back to normal, whatever normal is, right? I mean, for a lot of Americans, normal wasn't working. And I think that there needs to be some recognition that, at least for some portion of the American public, the government and the economic systems were failing them. And I think that is why, at least in part, Donald Trump was elected president. And returning to what Biden is offering, it just felt like tinkering around the edges when the house is on fire. And we need to have a really close examination of what needs to change in this country. And it doesn't come through when you talk to the former vice president that he understands that urgency, that he gets that people need something different. Katie Kingsbury, thank you so much for joining us. MUSIC PLAYING Now it's time for our weekly recommendation, when we make a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. This week is my turn. And Ross, I'm going to borrow the technique you used a couple of weeks ago in which I'm going to start off with a story. So I am, as you both know, a fan of Boston sports teams. I lived in Boston from when I was 2 to 8, the formative years for sports fans. I'm a Red Sox fan. I'm a Patriots fan. My wife grew up in Houston in a family of baseball fans. In fact, she grew up with season tickets to the Houston Astros and is a lifelong Astros fan. And as some listeners may know, there is a thread that runs through the three teams that I have just mentioned the Houston Astros, the Boston Red Sox, and the New England Patriots which is they have all credibly been accused recently of cheating. The Astros and Red Sox of using video to steal the opposing team signs, so they know what pitch is coming in. And for the Patriots, it's a long list of cheating accusations: That they deflate footballs, and videotape other teams, and do all sorts of things. And as I have been coping with these revelations in recent weeks and deciding what I think about them, I've basically come up with a kind of an excuse and a defense for all of them, which is, yes, the Astros were cheating, but so do all teams. And the Astros were just better at it. And the excuse for the Patriots is sort of similar.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
You don't have to be Jewish to live inside a synagogue in the East Village. You only need to buy one of the three condominium apartments that have been carved out of the historic synagogue at 415 East Sixth Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A. The congregation that has occupied the building since 1910 will still be there, on the ground floor and the basement level. In fact, the condominium deal has allowed the synagogue and its building to survive. Two of the apartments include the synagogue's original, newly restored stained glass windows, and one also has an original door, now with glass cutouts to let in light, as part of a living room wall. The developer, East River Partners, subdivided the original multilevel sanctuary to create units on newly formed second, third and fourth floors, and it excavated part of the basement to add more space for the synagogue. The synagogue will design a new sanctuary on the first floor. East River Partners "were the saviors of this shul," said Charles Knapp, a lawyer who is the pro bono counsel for Adas Yisroel Anshe Mezritch, the congregation that moved into the narrow space on East Sixth Street in 1910. In recent years, Mr. Knapp said, the synagogue had fallen on hard times, with a dwindling membership and few resources to maintain the building. If East River Partners hadn't stepped in, he said, "by now the building would have been condemned by the New York City Department of Buildings." An earlier, controversial plan by another developer would have involved demolishing the building and replacing it with a new six story structure with a synagogue on the first two floors. After it fell through in 2008, Mr. Knapp said, no other company was interested in pursuing a project that would allow the synagogue to stay. As part of the current agreement, the developers are providing at least 20,000 annually to the congregation for the next 198 years, in addition to a 600,000 payment up front. East River is also giving the synagogue a 180,000 "fit out allowance" for the synagogue to design and rebuild the sanctuary and other spaces, like offices or meeting spaces in the basement. "It's been a privilege to be able to work with the synagogue and to do something special for a historical site," said Joseph Cohen, one of the founders of the development firm, which specializes in small scale, often historical renovations. Jody L. Kriss, the other East River founder, said he thought the new apartments would have broad appeal. "The buyers will be living in a space that is part of the fabric of this country's history," he said. The stained glass windows, some with Stars of David, have been carefully brought back to their original colors through the use of chromatography and other scientific means. The building is within a historic district designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2012, a year after East River Partners signed on, and is considered the last operating "tenement synagogue" in the East Village and one of the last in Manhattan, according to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. The elaborate front door, made of red oak and faced with copper on its outside, is being returned to its original state, though some wooden panels are being replaced by glass. The central entrance, up some stairs that were in disrepair, will no longer be used, and the gate at the bottom of the steps will be locked as well. The synagogue will use the street level entrance on the right. The condo owners will use the entrance on the left, which has an elevator going to the three apartments. "We're very glad the building is being restored, and that the congregation will have a presence there," said Andrew Berman, the preservation society's executive director, adding that he wished it could have remained entirely as a house of worship. The first apartment, on the second floor, is a two bedroom, with two and a half baths, priced at 2.95 million. The third floor apartment, also with two bedrooms and two and a half baths, has a balcony and costs 3.25 million. The duplex penthouse, on the fourth and fifth floors, is priced at 4.39 million. It has no stained glass or other synagogue iconography but does have three bedrooms, two and a half baths and two terraces. The developers received permission to bump up part of the roof a little to create the second level of the penthouse, though the change is not visible from the sidewalk.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
As President Trump outlined a stricter policy toward Cuba on Friday, travel industry representatives scrambled to decode new prohibitions and reassure clients that the island was not off limits. Hotel owners, tour operators and online booking agencies who have been at the heart of much expanded contact between the two countries over the last few years, culminating in early 2016, when President Barack Obama eased restrictions took what they saw as confusing signals from the White House as a sign that the policy would be refined over the coming weeks. "It appears to me that they are making this up as they go," said Collin Laverty, president of Cuba Educational Travel, which has been organizing trips to that country for several years. Mr. Laverty said he fielded "endless" calls during the past two days from travel operators and travelers trying to figure out how they would be affected by the new policy. On Friday, he wrote in an email to clients that the organization was "very confident" the policy "will not impact the fall trips to Cuba." Under the new regulations, individual Americans travelers will no longer be able to visit the island on what are known as people to people trips, a popular mode of travel introduced as part of Mr. Obama's historic thaw. People to people trips will now be permitted only for groups and must be organized by a licensed tour operator. Americans will also be barred from transactions with companies run by the Cuban military a potentially significant restriction, given that many of Cuba's branded hotels are managed by a military owned conglomerate. The Treasury Department went some way to clarify the new rules on Friday, writing in a statement that the changes would not apply to people who had already booked trips or to existing business deals with the military. But the new restrictions would put new properties like the Gran Hotel Manzana, managed by Kempinski Hotels but owned by Gaviota, a Cuban military run company, off limits to American travelers. Travel representatives said they would redirect American travelers to hotels run by civilian tour organizations, including Gran Caribe and Cubanacan both of which own several properties in Havana. Exactly how far those restrictions go, however, is unclear. Could a tour organizer rent a bus from a military run company? What about purchases from a military run retail store? Prohibitions of that scope would make organizing group trips to Cuba "impossible," said Michael Sykes, president of Cuba Cultural Travel. Tour operators and Cuba experts predicted that the Cuban government would find loopholes. John Caulfield, who was chief of the United States diplomatic mission to Havana from 2011 to 2014, said the government could move tourism assets into the control of civilian ministries. "In an economy like Cuba's, they can rename things and change things around," he said. Still, even if the new rules were workable, travel representatives said, tighter regulation would put off Americans from traveling to a country still struggling with its tourism infrastructure. "We were finally getting to a point where there was a sense of normalcy; people felt it was legal to come to Cuba," Mr. Laverty said. "Now this is pushing us back to a point where Americans don't know if it's legal. That will dissuade a lot of Americans." Two sectors that were left apparently unscathed by the new policy were cruises and flights: Fees paid by cruise lines and airlines will be exempt from restrictions on doing business with the military. Marriott International, whose subsidiary Starwood runs the Four Points by Sheraton hotel in the Havana suburb of Miramar, may also have escaped the crackdown, which the Treasury Department said did not affect existing business deals. The Havana Sheraton announced on its website on Friday that it would require each guest to complete an affidavit at check in certifying authorization to travel in Cuba. Marriott said in a statement on Thursday that it was "still analyzing" the policy directive, and its "full effect on our current and planned operations in Cuba." The consensus is that those who will suffer most are smaller scale businesses that rely on individual travel private bed and breakfasts, cafes, restaurants, tour guides and taxis. And fewer individual travelers would also affect commercial airlines, who last year began operating dozens of daily flights to Cuba. Cuba is Airbnb's fastest growing market, with 22,000 rooms registered to its booking site and 70,000 arrivals every month on the island, according to figures published by the company. About 35 percent of Airbnb's guests in Cuba are American; 12 percent of American travelers to Cuba stay in an Airbnb listed property. The company said in a statement on Friday that it was "reviewing what this policy could mean for this type of travel" but was pleased that it would be able to continue to "support Airbnb hosts in Cuba." But those hosts are likely to see a decline in demand, travel representatives said. "Much of the growth has been from people booking from Airbnb and private casas," said Eddie Lubbers, president of Cuba Travel Network, using the Spanish term for homes. "It's not just casas it's restaurants, it's private tour guides." He added, "It's going to have an effect."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Urban air pollution is associa ted with an increased risk for psychotic experiences in teenagers, researchers report. A study published in JAMA Psychiatry included 2,063 British teenagers whose health had been followed from birth through age 18. Almost a third of them said they had at least one psychotic experience, ranging from a mild feeling of paranoia to a severe psychotic symptom, since age 12. Researchers linked air pollution data to locations where they spent most of their time at home, school or work. Compared with teenagers who lived where pollution was lowest, those in the most polluted areas were 27 percent to 72 percent more likely to have psychotic experiences, depending on the type of pollutant; exposure to two pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxides, accounted for 60 percent of the association.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Mary Wiseman never worried that the parents of her boyfriend, Noah Averbach Katz, wouldn't like her. When the couple started dating in 2013, she already knew them pretty well she and Mr. Averbach Katz were acting students at Juilliard, the Manhattan performing arts college. His parents, Rachelle Averbach and Steve Katz, frequently flew to New York from their home in California to see their son in school shows. They were always friendly and encouraging. "Noah's parents were like fixtures in our class," said Ms. Wiseman, 33. "They're enthusiastic, supportive people. They would even get our drama group little gifts and things." It wasn't until 2017, though, that she knew unequivocally she had also become his parents' favorite classmate. This was the year the flame haired Ms. Wiseman landed the role of Ensign Sylvia Tilly in the CBS TV series "Star Trek: Discovery." "My mom is a huge Trekkie," said Mr. Averbach Katz, 30, who lives with Ms. Wiseman in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. "When Mary got the job, we FaceTimed her with the news. She wept." "In that scene he says, 'I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love,'" Ms. Wiseman said. "Normally our teacher would do a scene like that over and over again. It was very rare to only do a scene once. But she was like, 'Oh, wow that shouldn't have worked but it worked.'" Not long after, their onstage chemistry spilled into a production of "Three Sisters" Soon they were ducking into private spaces around campus to kiss. "We tried to be sneaky about it, because you're in this small group, and there's a delicate group dynamic: When people start dating, everyone has to adjust," Ms. Wiseman said. "So we'd run down the hall and find a spot and make out really fast and then pretend it wasn't happening, even though Noah would have lipstick all over his face." By their fourth year, "we were a big time, hard core couple, and everyone knew it," Mr. Averbach Katz said. But then, in 2015, came graduation, and with it a host of challenges to keeping up their romance. Mr. Averbach Katz, lanky and sad eyed, found his first roles as a professional actor in regional theater, in cities like Washington and Portland, Me., and shows including "My Name is Asher Lev." Ms. Wiseman, meanwhile, stayed in New York, landing a role in her classmate Branden Jacobs Jenkins' Obie winning, Off Broadway play, "An Octoroon." Separations for work, though, seemed necessary. "We've always had this implicit understanding that, because we're both actors, when an opportunity comes up we have to say yes, even if it separates us for a long time," Ms. Wiseman said. Mr. Averbach Katz continued acting in shows like "The Lion in Winter" at Two River Theater in New Jersey in 2016. Ms. Wiseman started veering in an on camera direction, securing a recurring part as Trinity in the Zach Galifianakis show "Baskets." Then the "Star Trek" audition came along. She's not sure she would have gotten the part without Mr. Averbach Katz's input. "I had sort of grown up on 'Star Trek,'" Mr. Averbach Katz said, in what may be an understatement. "As a kid I would go to 'Star Trek' conventions with my mom, and there's some extremely embarrassing pictures of me as a 13 year old, at the height of my sex appeal, in 'Star Trek' gear," Mr. Averbach Katz said. He was an only child who grew up in Fairfax, Calif., amid "Star Trek" Christmas ornaments, saltshakers and action figures. Steven Katz, the publisher of Mother Jones, is less a Trekkie than his wife, Rachelle Averbach, a psychotherapist. She started watching the sci fi phenomenon after the original series debuted in 1966. She later integrated the show into her life in an unexpected way, using it to teach her son life lessons. "There are these wonderful moments in 'Star Trek' about equality and the environment and racism and sexism," Ms. Averbach said. "Noah and I would watch the show and we'd talk about it." When Mr. Averbach Katz expressed reservations about being bar mitzvahed, for example, she cued an episode of "Star Trek: Next Generation" in which the character Alexander wasn't sure he wanted to become a Klingon. "It was a rite of passage for Alexander, and it became this fun parallel for our own cultural dilemma. That's' sort of how 'Star Trek' became an important philosophical point of discussion in our family." It is also how its aesthetic eventually became an important piece of Ms. Wiseman's audition video. Mr. Averbach Katz helped her read for the part. "He told me, 'You have to nail the techno babble,'" Ms. Wiseman said. When she went to send her photo to the show's producers, Mr. Averbach Katz, who never comments on Ms. Wiseman's wardrobe, told her to change. "I was wearing this crazy hippie peasant dress with holes in it," she said. "Noah was like, 'Mary, you have to wear something more structured.'" Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Averbach Katz moved into their Prospect Heights apartment just after she signed contracts to became Ensign Tilley. Both were starting to think marriage was in their future. And both were ready to put lessons they had learned about long distance love to use as Ms. Wiseman prepared to commit to nine months a year shooting "Star Trek" in Toronto. "It was a watershed moment in my life. It was everything I'd hoped for, like I'd won the lottery," she said of the part. When she told her parents, "I saw my dad's shoulders relax in a way I don't think I've ever seen in my life. He actually cut a different silhouette." They were as relieved as she was at the idea of a steady paycheck, and the financial security that came with it. "But in other ways I was really sad at having to be apart from Noah," Ms. Wiseman said. Mr. Averbach Katz's regional theater work had prepared them for separation in smaller doses. And they were armed with advice from theater veterans: "There's a general rule of thumb that older actors have told me, which is that you should really aim to see each other every two weeks. You can push it to three, but after that it gets really hard." They put that rule into practice as Ms. Wiseman left for her first season, in March 2017. Still, "the experience of missing Noah was like someone had taken an organ out of me. It just felt like, I need this person." Mr. Averbach Katz felt the same. But he sensed that Ms. Wiseman's role in "Star Trek" opened a new chapter for them as a couple. "When Mary got the job I was like, hell yeah, I'm going to propose," he said. He already had a ring in mind. On a Thanksgiving trip home to California in 2017, while Ms. Wiseman was deep into her first season, he asked his mother if she still had his Grandma Sweetheart's Edwardian diamond ring. She did. The ring, a diamond surrounded by platinum filigree, dates to between 1890 and 1910. "It was given to my mother by her mother during the Depression, at a time when people didn't have things. So it became this symbol of hope and better times," Ms. Averbach said. "I was happy Noah wanted it for Mary." A month later, over Christmas at the Wisemans' house in Silver Spring, Md., Mr. Averbach Katz asked Kevin and Dorothy Wiseman for their blessing to propose. Once he got it, he asked for advice about timing. "They told me I should do it in April, before she left to go back to Toronto," Mr. Averbach Katz said. April 1, 2018, has since become legendary in both families. That morning, Mr. Averbach Katz orchestrated a scavenger hunt that led Ms. Wiseman from their apartment in Brooklyn to his old apartment in Harlem, then on to Malachy's Donegal Inn, the bar in Manhattan where they first exchanged "I love yous," then to Juilliard and finally to two favorite local cafes. At each stop, Ms. Wiseman was ambushed by loved ones. Her brothers flew in from multiple cities to surprise her at Juilliard; Ms. Averbach and Mr. Katz secretly awaited her arrival at the first cafe, Cheryl's Global Soul; her parents were camped out at the final cafe, Lincoln Station. By the time the scavenger hunt instructions told her to go home, more than a dozen friends and family members had congregated at the apartment. Mr. Averbach Katz dropped to one knee, presented his grandmother's ring, and asked if she would marry him. Ms. Wiseman, overwhelmed by her day of surprises and in tears, said yes. Since then, Mr. Averbach Katz has been immersed in a copy of "Wedding Planning for Dummies." "Mary didn't wrap in Toronto until the holidays, so I've done a lot of the wedding planning," he said. "I had a lot to learn." Their Feb. 16 wedding at the Full Moon Resort in Big Indian, N.Y., betrayed no signs of amateurism. A crowd of 160, including several of Ms. Wiseman's "Star Trek" castmates, was kept cozy in a barn outfitted with hanging globe lanterns and a huppah. Ms. Wiseman, in a silk ivory wrap dress by the Spanish designer Cortana and with her long hair flowing, walked down an aisle with both parents; her eight member bridal party included her three brothers and just one woman, her cousin Delia Regan. Mr. Averbach Katz, in a black satin J.Crew tuxedo, was flanked by eight friends, three from New York and five from California. Mr. Jacobs Jenkins, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated. After calling on Boo Killebrew, an actor friend of the couple's, to read the Masha Vershinin scene from "Three Sisters," he reflected on the nature of love. "Love is a force that finds you," he said. "Love turns you into the truest version of you." Then Mr. Averbach Katz, reading from handwritten vows, told Ms. Wiseman, "Before you, so much of myself was a mystery. You reached me. You unlocked me. You showed me how to be myself." When it was her turn, Ms. Wiseman, dabbing tears, said, "I promise when we're apart I'll still be tethered to you. Your name is written on my heart." After two blessings from Mr. Averbach Katz's cousin, Rabbi Gary Katz, Mr. Jacobs Jenkins pronounced them married. The room erupted in cheers, though Vulcan salutes may have been appropriate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Already drawing comparisons to Sally Rooney's work, "Exciting Times," by Naoise Dolan, has many of the familiar tropes of the "millennial novel" covered: Jealousy and obsession, love and late capitalism, sex and the internet all come whirling together in a wry and bracing tale of class and privilege. The protagonist, Ava, is an intelligent, 22 year old loner who moves from her native Dublin to Hong Kong to teach English, with no discernible qualifications other than being white. Not long after her arrival, she finds herself on a lunch date with Julian, an Oxford educated British banker in his late 20s. She hopes he'll be as impressed by her youth and attractiveness as she is by his salary, which she has Googled, thoroughly. "I wasn't good at most things but I was good at men," Ava confides in the reader, "and Julian was the richest man I'd ever been good at." Soon they are sleeping together, and Ava moves into Julian's flat. She is highly attuned both to the power dynamics at play ("do you want me to depend on you?" she asks him) and to her moral predicament, as she adds up how much money she is saving on rent, as well as on the clothes and meals Julian pays for with the funds he doesn't know what to do with. Ava admires how Julian handles his advantages, how "he could calmly note where he benefited from unfairness not self indulgently like I often did, but factually." As their undefined relationship goes on, she begins to develop her own brand of romantic longing, which begins with a desire for his life of privilege. "I loved him potentially," she thinks. "That, or I wanted to be him."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The huge, headline grabbing news out of Uber this week was the resignation of its chief executive, Travis Kalanick, under pressure from the company's board, a stunning move that capped a monthslong crisis involving sexual harassment, executive misbehavior and Uber's hard nosed culture. But amid the drama leading up to Mr. Kalanick's forced departure, Uber made a quieter change that could represent another momentous shift for the company. On Tuesday, the company announced that passengers would soon be able to tip their drivers through the Uber app. The change, which Uber plans to roll out nationwide next month, is a sudden reversal of longstanding company policy, and a move Uber fiercely resisted for years. Under Mr. Kalanick, the company argued that giving riders the ability to tip drivers would create "friction" in an otherwise seamless transaction and lead to awkward interactions between riders and drivers. The company even cited a 2008 Cornell University study that found that consumers tipped black employees less generously than white employees, and suggested that adding in app tipping would lead to racial discrimination. The relationship between Mr. Kalanick and Uber's global network of more than two million drivers has always been strained, to put it mildly. Drivers, who are not technically Uber employees but whose income depends largely on Uber's policies and pricing structures, balked at Mr. Kalanick's seeming indifference to their needs. At times, Mr. Kalanick sounded openly hostile to his company's labor pool, musing in onstage interviews about how long it would take to replace them with self driving cars. "There are a lot of things about Uber that tip the balance to the passenger side," said Harry Campbell, a Los Angeles based Uber driver and founder of TheRideshareGuy, a resource site for drivers. "A lot of that seemed, rightly or wrongly, to stem from Travis, and a lot of drivers blamed him for that." Tipping was among the hottest flash points. Uber drivers argued that they were missing out on thousands of dollars in potential earnings by not being able to receive tips inside the app. (Riders could give Uber drivers tips in cash, but few did.) Earlier this year, the Independent Drivers Guild, a group representing Uber drivers in New York City, collected more than 11,000 signatures on a petition calling for an in app tip jar. Then there was the video. In February, a dashboard clip of Mr. Kalanick arguing with an Uber driver was seen widely on the internet. In the video, Mr. Kalanick's driver accused him of dropping prices on Uber rides and told the chief executive that "I'm bankrupt because of you." Mr. Kalanick disputed the driver's accusations and told him curtly that some people "blame everything in their life on somebody else." Mr. Kalanick later apologized for his conduct in a staff memo, saying that it was proof that "I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up." Lyft, Uber's biggest rival in the United States, has taken full advantage of the acrimony between Uber and its drivers. The company makes a point of emphasizing that in app tipping has been available to Lyft drivers since 2012, and the company has made aggressive attempts to paint itself as the more driver friendly alternative to Uber, while trying to lure Uber's drivers to its own platform. In recent weeks, Uber has taken steps to repair its relationship with drivers. The company started an initiative called "180 Days of Change," which included changes that drivers had been requesting for years, such as a per minute waiting fee and the ability to accept rides heading only in a certain direction. It also seeded a 3 million legal defense fund to assist immigrant drivers who were affected by President Trump's announced travel restrictions. Aaron Schildkrout, Uber's head of driver product, characterized these changes as part of a genuine effort to mend fences with drivers. "Drivers are by far our most important partners," Mr. Schildkrout said. "Historically, as we've been racing to keep pace with our tremendous growth, we haven't done the best job of honoring that partnership. That's about to change." These benefits struck some drivers as too little, too late, but others may be willing to give the company a second chance. Jim Conigliaro Jr., the founder of the Independent Drivers Guild, said that he was happy with the changes the company had announced and that Mr. Kalanick's departure would give Uber a chance to "refocus attention on the people who actually make the company money: drivers." Ultimately, conflict between Uber and its drivers may be unavoidable. No matter who runs it, Uber is still marching toward a driverless future, and the company still needs to balance driver wishes against rider demands for cheap fares and instant availability. The company is also reportedly preparing for an initial public offering and faces pressure to show investors that it can turn a profit and keep its costs under control. Mr. Kalanick's successor at Uber will have many messes to clean up, including bruised staff morale, a toxic company culture and a short staffed executive team. But high on the new chief executive's list of priorities should be improving the company's relationship with the people who take its passengers from Point A to Point B. Without happy drivers, Uber 2.0 will be just as flawed as the original.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When mandatory evacuation orders are issued for natural disasters like hurricanes, it poses a special challenge for those who are frail and in poor health. People who have significant health issues or are in hospice care may be too ill to sit in cars inching along evacuation routes for hours, and their families must face the wrenching decision of whether it is better to stay or go. For people with dementia, evacuations can be especially disorienting and overwhelming. Denise Grimm, a registered nurse who is area vice president of operations for Amedisys, a home health and hospice care provider with 8,425 patients in North and South Carolina, said many elderly and chronically ill people refuse to evacuate. "If they choose not to evacuate, it's their right. They will say, 'Honey, I've been here all my life, only God's going to get me out of this house," Ms. Grimm said. "We encourage them and make sure they understand what this means by having them repeat it back to us: that if they have a medical emergency while this storm is hitting, there's nobody who can come and help them. If the house floods, if they have damage to the home, they're by themselves or with an elderly caregiver or another family member who can be severely injured or it could result in death. That they may be without power for multiple days, surrounded by flooding so they're stranded." She added: "You can have a patient with oxygen, and the electricity goes out, they have a portable tank, but they can't have an unlimited supply." Those who decide to shelter in place should also be aware that it is possible that emergency services may not be able to reach them if flooding is severe and demand is exceptionally high, as happened in Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Following is advice from the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross for those who cannot or will not evacuate. Prepare a disaster emergency kit with enough food, water and medical supplies to last three days, and check the supplies periodically to make sure prescription drugs, food and batteries have not expired; replenish if necessary. Count on needing at least a gallon of water a day per person for drinking and basic sanitation. Food should be nonperishable and ready to eat. Medical supplies should include a first aid kit, any prescription drugs or medical devices you need as well as extra eyeglasses and hearing aid batteries. If you take prescription medicine, have at least a week's worth on hand. Your kit should also contain blankets and extra clothes, your medical insurance or Medicare or Medicaid cards, a flashlight with extra batteries or chargers, a battery powered radio and extra cash. Keep a list of emergency contact numbers, including those of health providers, caregivers, family, friends and neighbors, as well as a list of prescription drugs and medical and assistive devices (including style and serial numbers), in a watertight container. The C.D.C.'s care plan may be a useful guide. If you depend on Social Security or other benefits, switch to electronic payments or direct deposit to will keep payments going when regular mail is disrupted. Create a support network of family, friends and neighbors who can help with communication, transportation and critical care when other support services or home care are not available. Those in your network should have an extra key to your home and know how to administer your medicines and where you keep emergency supplies. Talk to your health care provider about what to do in case of a natural disaster. Develop a plan and share it with your support network and practice it. Work with local public or private services and plan ahead for accessible transportation if evacuation is required, and call your local emergency management agency to make sure you're on a list of people with disabilities who will be helped if crisis strikes. Make sure those in your network know where you will go if you do end up leaving. Sometimes cellphone service is not available in a disaster and it can be difficult to locate people. If you rely on medical devices that require electric power, identify an alternative power source for devices. If you receive regular care like dialysis at a clinic or hospital, find out what the facility's emergency plans are and find backup providers if needed. For more information, contact your state and local health departments, your local emergency management agency or your local Red Cross chapter. There are also helpful resources for seniors in general, as well as for certain groups such as people with dementia, with disabilities and with diabetes. For those with special needs If you have a communication disability, make a plan for communicating with your network. If you are deaf or hard of hearing, make sure you have a weather radio with text display and a flashing alert, and pen and paper to communicate. If you use assistive technology devices keep information about model numbers and where your purchased the equipment with you. Plan on how to communicate with others if equipment is not working, including laminated cards with phrase or pictures and Braille/text communication cards. If you use a power wheelchair, make sure you have a lightweight manual chair as backup. If you have other mobility impairments, keep extra canes or a walker available. Know what disasters can affect your region and which call for evacuation or sheltering in place, and keep a weather radio tuned to your local emergency station.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
For most of my life, I have had a minor but chronic condition: My face, when it is at ease, looks not just serious but mean. There are women who will recognize this problem, particularly those who around this time of the year, as the sun comes out and more of us are outside have grown accustomed to being asked "Why don't you smile?" by anonymous people, usually men, on the street (that, or breathlessly practicing how we can put more people "at ease" by softening our facial expressions in the mirror). These smile critics are not only on the street, of course. Sometimes they are on television, offering advice to female politicians or female athletes, or politicians, suggesting that the speaker of the house might try smiling more, or President Trump, who appeared to say it to his wife during a recent photo op. They have inspired at least one art exhibit, "Stop telling women to smile," by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh. But if there were one tiny, very tiny, silver lining to the reality that masks are a necessary component of our daily lives now, it is this: smiling on our own terms. "For the first time ever, the weather getting nicer is not correlating with more men demanding that I smile, so that's something. Thanks face mask!" Steph Herold, an activist and researcher in Queens, tweeted recently. "Not having to fake smile or apologize for coming off a certain way has been such a weight off my shoulders," said Talia Cuddeback, a recruiter in Austin, Texas. "Wearing a mask is so liberating I might hang on to it, even if they do find a Covid 19 cure," said Clare Mackintosh, an author who lives in Wales. "I walked past a building site the other day, and despite my resting bitch face, no one yelled at me to 'smile, love.' No random men in the supermarket have suggested I 'cheer up, it might never happen,' and not a single person has suggested I'd look prettier with a grin on my face." In the midst of a pandemic that has brought to light so many of the festering inequities brewing just underneath the surface and as racial injustice takes rightful center stage in American activism feminine facial freedom is a minor victory. But it is also not nothing. Fifty years ago, the writer Shulamith Firestone called for "a smile boycott," in which, she wrote in "The Dialectic of Sex," "all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles henceforth smiling only when something pleased them." In more recent years, Safeway workers have said that the company's "smile and make eye contact" rule was often mistaken for flirting, while flight attendants for Cathay Airlines used the threat of not smiling as part of a negotiation tactic for higher pay. In 2016, after complaints from employees at T Mobile, the U.S. National Relations Board ruled that companies were no longer allowed to require employees to be cheerful. But perhaps the face mask obviates all of that. In parts of Asia, masks have long been used for things other than simply blocking the passage of germs. As Voice of America has reported, masks have been used to protect against heavy pollution and exhaust. Chinese youth have worn masks to build a "social firewall" against being approached by other people, while Japanese women mask their faces on days when they don't have time to put on makeup. Anna Piela, a visiting scholar in religious studies and gender at Northwestern University, has noted that Muslim women she has interviewed said they find it easier to wear masks because it has softened the stigma of face coverings. "Suddenly, these women who are often received in the West with open hostility for covering their faces look a lot more like everyone else," she wrote in an article in May. Of course, there is purpose to the polite smile. "The thing about facial expression is that it is so much a part of our lives it keeps so much flowing, it keeps so much lubricated," Dr. LaFrance said. Indeed, suddenly I was at a loss for how to express my gratitude to my mail carrier and gave him an awkward thumbs up. I couldn't smile at dogs, or children, or the protesters marching down my street (a raised fist felt more fitting anyway). I stared way too long at a woman jogging in a sports bra, trying to figure out through her mask if she was somebody I knew only to realize I looked like I was leering. "It creates this kind of weird anonymity," said Kwolanne Felix, a junior at Columbia University who recently wrote about how street harassers had missed the memo about Covid 19. "When I'm at the store or the supermarket, I still try to reaffirm those working with a smile, but it ends up kind of me staring at them awkwardly." Ms. Felix noted that as a black woman, she is often put in the position of putting white people around her at ease with a "warm smile." Dr. Lynn Jeffers, the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, noted that there is still a lot that can be conveyed through the eyes, voice and brows. "I am definitely aware that I am way more expressive with my voice when I'm wearing a mask," said Amy Zhang, a producer in Brooklyn who grew in Hong Kong during the SARS era, when masks were commonplace. "But it is a weird thing, at a time where we're all going through such trauma and grief, to not be able to express a smile."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A Photography Prize That Shows the World as It Is, and Hopes to Change It ARLES, France On a huge cinema screen that has been erected in the Roman amphitheater here, the photographs slid past. The vast Yangtze River in China, looking toxic in the morning mist, a factory chimney on the bank sending a curl of smoke into the sky. The broken asphalt surface of an Iraqi highway, shattered by a roadside bomb. The dead body of a baby albatross, its stomach cut open to reveal the diet of plastic waste that killed it. Nearly all depicted some appalling crisis; nearly all were arrestingly beautiful. As the slide show finished, there was appreciative applause. The event on Thursday was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Prix Pictet award, a highlight of the annual Rencontre d'Arles photography festival. The prize is a curious combination of incongruities: It is one of photography's richest, awarding 100,000 Swiss francs (about 101,000), provided by Pictet, a private Swiss bank; and it puts a spotlight on environmental sustainability, an issue not always associated with wealthy financiers. As photographers have become increasingly fascinated by conceptualism, the award champions the unfashionable notion that photography's primary duty is to show the world as it is and, if possible, to change it. Did he see the award's purpose as art or activism? "Both," he said. "Or perhaps neither." Run on a roughly 18 month cycle (there have been seven winners in ten years), the prize's inner workings are famously labyrinthine. First, the organizers announce a theme connected to sustainability previous themes have included "Water," "Earth," "Consumption," "Disorder" and "Space" after which a pool of over 300 nominators including curators, gallerists, journalists and other experts recommends a longlist that often numbers over 600 photographers. This is whittled down to a shortlist of around 10. After a year or so, the winner is finally announced, and selected work goes on a worldwide tour. In the last 10 years, work from the Prix Pictet has been exhibited in 40 cities and seen by 400 million people, the organizers estimate, including a sizable audience online. In Mexico City this year, 86,000 people visited the exhibition of the latest installment, they said. Although some of the grandest names in photography have been shortlisted, among them Edward Burtynsky, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, the judges have generally surprised critics by choosing more left field winners. The first was the little known Canadian photographer Benoit Aquin, who triumphed with a series of surreal, unearthly images of dust storms in China. Four years later, it was Luc Delahaye, a photojournalist who has renounced documentary work to make images that explore the boundary between war reporting and landscape art. Mr. Aquin acknowledged that when he found out he was on the Prix Pictet shortlist, he was unsure what to make of it. "I thought at first it was some kind of fraud you know, one where they ask for your bank details," he said in an interview on the forecourt of a former auto repair shop where the anniversary exhibition has been installed. "And I was even more surprised to win. But it was a tremendous honor. And the pictures I made have gone everywhere. People still want to use and show them, even 10 years on: They have taken on a life of their own." Mr. Aquin said he had become fascinated by dust storms after being stranded in one in Mongolia in 2002. Researching the phenomenon, he learned that more than a quarter of China's landmass is now desert, a figure that is increasing because of over farming. His photographs, which were made in 2007, are imposingly large, portraying vast landscapes cloaked in choking orange dust. They look like warning messages from another planet or perhaps a post apocalyptic future. Did he feel that he had helped make viewers more aware of desertification, which many environmentalists fear is on the increase globally? "If one person is inspired, I'm satisfied," he said. Though the prize aims to tackle headline issues 2017's winner was the Irish photographer Richard Mosse, who won with images of migrant trails and refugee camps taken with a military grade heat map camera not all the work it has showcased is epic. The victor two years earlier was the artist Valerie Belin, who illustrated the overuse of plastic with a droll series of still lives that reference 17th century Dutch painting. These hectic, junk store jumbles of plastic objects a mannequin's head, twists of wire, artificial flowers, children's toys find delight in artifacts that most throw in the trash without a second thought. In an interview, Ms. Belin said she hoped that what she had created had made a difference, highlighting the dangers of plastic pollution. "I hope that people feel they have the incentive to change," she said. "Otherwise, why would you look? We need art to help with this." The Prix Pictet is not without its critics, who argue that its themes are so broad, and the photographs so diverse, that it is hard to see its genuine purpose. "It's true that all the work is very different," Ms. Belin said. "But, looking at the exhibition again today, I thought, they're not so different, finally. We are interested in the same things." Sam Stourdze, the director of the Arles festival, said that whatever the debate about the Prix Pictet's form or ambitions, the thing that mattered was the quality and depth of the photographs. "There is a lot of photographic work looking at the world; the Prix Pictet celebrates that," he said. "You don't have to be a photojournalist to care about what is happening." A few minutes after the slide show on Thursday finished, the lights in the amphitheater dimmed and the prize's latest theme was announced: "Hope." A change in direction from previous editions, more calculatedly optimistic, it seemed like a response to the anxiety that has gripped the environmental movement, as global temperatures continue to increase, plastics pour into the world's oceans and nations struggle to agree on a way to combat climate change. Work responding to the theme will be sought over the next 12 months, and will go on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in fall 2019. "Perhaps it's unexpected," Mr. Barber said of the theme. "But we felt like we could do with a little hope right now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Researchers around the world are working on the next generation of coronavirus tests that give answers in less than an hour, without onerous equipment or highly trained personnel. The latest so called point of care tests, which could be done in a doctor's office or even at home, would be a welcome upgrade from today's status quo: uncomfortable swabs that snake up the nose and can take several days to produce results. The handful of point of care devices now on the market are frequently inaccurate. The up and coming tests could yield more reliable results, researchers say, potentially leading to on the spot testing nationwide. But most of the new contenders are still in early stages, and won't be available in clinics for months. Some of the tests in development swap brain tickling swabs for plastic tubes that collect spit. Others dunk patient samples into chemical cocktails that light up when they detect coronavirus genes. Another type of test identifies coronavirus proteins in minutes, using a cheap device that's easy to produce in bulk and deploy in low resource settings. "To combat this virus, we need to test widely and frequently, and get the results back quickly," said Dr. Zev Williams at Columbia University, who is developing a coronavirus spit test that can run in about 30 minutes. "That requires a genuine paradigm shift in the way we go about testing for it." Once scaled up and distributed, faster tests could be used in hospitals to quickly screen emergency room patients. Schools and workplaces could buy them to monitor the health of children and employees. With additional tinkering, some tests could even be developed to work as simply as a pregnancy test, yielding a clean cut positive or negative result in the comfort of a person's home. "The quicker and easier tests can be done," the more ubiquitous they can be, said Dr. Amesh Adalja at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. "That's going to help people get back to some semblance of normalcy." The gold standard method involves funneling a long, absorbent swab a few inches into the nose until it hits the nasopharynx, the part of the airway where the nasal passage meets the throat and a common target of the coronavirus. "The moment you see the swab, you're like, 'Oh no, my face isn't that deep,'" said Fernanda Ferreira, a virologist at Harvard University who took a nasopharyngeal swab test in April. "Turns out it is." The virus's genes must be extracted from the sample with a specific suite of chemicals. The material is then processed through a laboratory technique called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, in which a machine cycles through several temperature changes to amplify genetic material. This step is key to these tests' success: Copying genetic material over and over means that even tiny amounts of the virus can be spotted. But the process can bog down at multiple points. Swabs and chemicals necessary for processing are often in short supply, and invasive sampling requires trained health care workers who quickly drain precious supplies of gowns, gloves and masks. Additionally, many community testing centers lack PCR machines and must outsource their samples to large laboratories, leading to delays of days or even weeks. Rachel Coker, the director of research advancement at Binghamton University one of many institutions nationwide that have begun to reopen had to wait 10 days for her results after being sampled at a drive through testing site. Still, the quick tests available now are frequently inaccurate. Although they "ensure we can get an answer faster," said Dr. Ibukun Akinboyo, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Duke University's School of Medicine, "you lose some sensitivity," she said. "It's hard to win at both." In May, a swab based point of care test called Abbott ID Now made headlines when an analysis found that it might miss infections up to 48 percent of the time, despite being promoted by President Trump as "highly accurate." Sensitivity issues also plague antigen tests, which detect pieces of proteins made by the virus, rather than its genes. Antigen tests have been used to detect other airway infections, such as the flu, in less than an hour, and are easy to manufacture en masse. But the convenience comes at a cost: Unlike genetic material, antigens can't be amplified easily. Some antigen tests, including a few that search for influenza viruses, fail to pick up on active infections around 50 percent of the time. "If a Covid antigen test performs like an influenza antigen test, I don't think they will have much utility," said Dr. David Alland, the director of the Center for Emerging Pathogens at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Still, he noted, "if improved, they could be very promising." Even imprecise tests have their place in this pandemic, as long as they're easy to use and distributed widely enough. Should a test "miss someone on Monday, maybe you'll get them a day or two later," Dr. Wyllie said. So far, only two companies have received emergency authorization from the F.D.A. for coronavirus antigen tests. One is Quidel, which is, according to a representative, producing millions of tests each month, many of which have been distributed to urgent care centers and medical clinics in the United States. On Monday, a second firm, Becton Dickinson Company, also entered the fray with a point of care antigen test that can reportedly produce results in 15 minutes. While speedy, both Quidel's and BD's tests may produce false negatives between 15 and 20 percent of the time. Other antigen tests have made headway overseas, and experts estimated that several more will likely seek clearance in the United States in coming months. One will likely come from medical device manufacturer OraSure, which has made antigen tests for H.I.V. and Ebola. Stephen Tang, OraSure's president and chief executive officer, said his team is brewing up a "secret sauce" that will make their coronavirus test highly accurate, while still producing results within half an hour, but declined to specify details. Until these experimental tests are widely available, many people will still need the nasty nasal swab. "For any kind of normal life to resume, I think all of us need to get this idea that we're going to have to get tested all the time," Binghamton's Ms. Coker said. A faster, less invasive test would be nice. But even an unpleasant test is better than no test at all, she said. "If it's this painful one, so be it." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
This time of year, the temperature routinely reaches 104 degrees in northern Botswana. The grasses recede, forcing herds of wildebeest to walk farther and farther from their only water source to graze. Humidity falls to about 10 to 15 percent. "It's not quite Death Valley, but it's not quite far off it," said Alan Wilson, a biologist whose research examined how the wildebeest cope with such an inhospitable environment. "They're on a physiological knife edge in terms of: How do they continue to survive?" His research showed that these cow like animals, also called gnus, have remarkable adaptations, enabling them to walk up to 50 miles over five days without drinking water. They can do this because their muscles work incredibly efficiently far more than their body size would suggest. "I don't think we'd get to 50 miles," Dr. Wilson said, referring to humans. His study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, showed that this efficiency means wildebeest don't have to sweat or pant as much to release heat, even when they're running in heat higher than their body temperature.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Credit...Bryan Schutmaat for The New York Times Lara Prescott fascinated by the way Boris Pasternak's novel was used as a propaganda tool conjured a world of secretaries, spies and mint green typewriters in her debut, "The Secrets We Kept." AUSTIN, Tex. In 2018, two weeks before Lara Prescott's agents sent publishers the manuscript of her first novel about the C.I.A. plot to influence Cold War Russia with the banned love story "Doctor Zhivago" a famous male writer warned her, "You're not going to get anything for this. You need to edit it like Hemingway. We can talk about it over beers." "The Secrets We Kept," a gorgeous and romantic feast of a novel anchored by a cast of indelible secretaries some groomed to be secret agents, and all clacking away at covert C.I.A. documents on mint green typewriters promptly sold to Knopf at auction for 2 million. "I'd say that was the most man splainy thing that's happened to me in the writing world!" says Prescott, 37, with a laugh over coffee at the Austin cafe where she finished her first draft in 2016. Such a display of masculine bombast reminded her of her former career in politics, where she worked as a consultant on K Street for progressive Democratic campaigns. Her experience in a world fueled by propaganda and lorded over by big personalities "What would make a 60 year old man think it O.K. to ask a young woman why I didn't wear heels more?" informed her book. "The Secrets We Kept" is one of our most anticipated September titles. The years of embedding in campaigns, writing candidates' social media and stump speeches, left Prescott drained and disillusioned. She'd forever wanted to write fiction, dating back to a child when she submitted a 10 page story to Highlights magazine, the pediatrician office staple. ("My first literary rejection!") You could say she was born to write this historical novel: Prescott's mother named her after the doomed heroine from her favorite movie, the 1 965 adaptation of Boris Pasternak's epic. Prescott was turned down the first year she applied to graduate schools. "I just thought, I don't have it," she says. But the following year she was accepted at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas . There, early in her tenure, the fellows were treated to a day of mini pitch sessions with literary agents. After reading a short story version of what Prescott would eventually expand into her novel, a high profile agent warned her, "No one is interested in Russia anymore." Prescott left the room flattened, wondering, "Do I keep going?" 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. She dug in for four private drafts, done with sharing work until she was sure of its sturdiness. In early 2017, she finally presented the novel to her Michener thesis adviser, the author Elizabeth McCracken, who remembers thinking, "Oh my God, this book is going to do amazing things in the world." A year of revisions later, Prescott's agent, Jeff Kleinman at Folio , sent the manuscript out to publishers packaged with advance praise from McCracken, Bret Anthony Johnsto n and Ben Fountain . Kleinman asked Prescott what would be a satisfying deal. She told him 100,000, figuring that would give her three years to write full time at the roughly 27,000 a year she'd been granted while at Michener. By the end of the week she'd spoken with 20 editors, her novel had gone to auction and she went with Knopf, which wasn't even the highest bidder. She walked away from a two book option, unwilling to work in the future with a gun to her head. Lara Prescott's debut novel, "The Secrets We Kept," comes out Sept. 3. A deal that sweet can set a young writer up to fail. The money and expectations, the paranoia of peer envy or eye rolling. "I've had students that I thought were great writers before where I would go, 'Is this success going to destroy this person's life?'" says McCracken. "I'm not worried about Lara." She praises Prescott's work ethic and devotion to the craft. "But also, frankly, I think she's going to earn out her advance. She's not going to be somebody who sold her book for a ton of money and then is going to be a commercial failure and wreck the rest of her career." Rights to the novel have sold in 30 countries, and it was optioned in a major movie sale by Marc Platt Productions and The Ink Factory. Prescott has the slightly worried personality of a woman who went to 12 years of Catholic school and was raised by Pennsylvania parents who cautioned against taking oneself too seriously. She's game to indulge in casting ideas with a reporter what about Saoirse Ronan for the unlikely spy Irina or Michelle Williams for Pasternak's long suffering muse, Olga without sounding invested in Hollywood machinations. She pokes fun at her self serious expression in her author photo, explaining that when she fake smiles for pictures she looks insane. She tears up a few times, like when she describes calling her parents with news of the Knopf deal. "I had this great career in politics and then I took this huge pay cut to go back to school," she says. "And my poor dad said, 'I'm just happy you're going to be O.K.'" With the sale of the book, Prescott seems to have built sensibly upon an already cheerful life. She and her husband Matt who works for the Humane Society of the United States and recently published his own book, "Food Is the Solution" bought their first home, a three bedroom midcentury ranch with a pink and turquoise tiled bathroom and a writing shed in the backyard. They have two cats and a rescue puppy named Mo, and their close friends live down the block with a new baby they like to snuggle. Prescott is in a book club (they last discussed Toni Morrison's "Sula"). There is comfort in living far from the publishing industry. "I'm not going out to cocktail parties every night," she says of her somewhat anonymous Texas existence. "There's no sense of competition." Prescott is eager to pick the right rabbit hole to fall into for her next project. She's already started researching the Federal Writers' Project, the Depression era program that paid literary greats like Zora Neale Hurston and John Cheever to go out looking for American tales. She's fascinated by the world of fake news who writes it, and why and how it spreads. She'd love to chronicle her dream candidate Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail if she were to get the nomination. There's also the reality that she's now being sent advance copies of books hopeful for a blurb from a famous writer. Her! It'd be easy to let this flush of a time go to one's head. But there's a difference between ego and self possession. When asked what she's proudest of in all this, Prescott says, "I wrote a book that I would love to read. And that my sister and mom would want to read. What more can you do?" Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
For the Universal Music Group, months of uncertainty came to an end on Friday when it received regulatory clearance in Europe and the United States for its 1.9 billion takeover of EMI Music. Next week the deal is set to close, and Lucian Grainge, Universal's chairman, plans to address the EMI staff in Los Angeles as its new leader. But serious questions about the deal remain to be answered, for Universal as well as for artists and consumers around the world. On Friday, after negotiations that lasted through the summer, the European Commission approved the deal under the condition that Universal sell a third of EMI's assets. Those include Parlophone and various other labels in Europe, as well as the rights to release music around the world by some of EMI's most famous acts, including Coldplay, David Guetta and Pink Floyd. The Federal Trade Commission also gave its clearance on Friday, with no added demands. "It's a historic day for UMG, and a historic day for EMI," Mr. Grainge said in an interview. "Inevitably I'm disappointed that we were not able to retain Parlophone. However, I can only remain focused on the opportunity and the achievement." Where EMI's castoffs end up may not be known for months. According to a memo to EMI employees sent on Friday by Roger Faxon, its chief executive, once Universal completes its takeover of most of EMI, artists on labels to be sold will fall under the authority of a "hold separate manager" that will report to a trustee for the commission. (In that memo, Mr. Faxon also announced that he would resign next week.) The sale process can take six to nine months, and potential buyers must have "a proven track record in the music industry," which would exclude private equity and other bidders. Joaquin Almunia, the European competition commissioner, also stressed at a news conference in Brussels that Universal must sell at least two thirds of the EMI assets it must dispose of to a company that can serve as a credible competitor. The decision by the European Commission and the F.T.C. was criticized by many of the consumer and independent music groups that have been speaking out against the deal for months. Among their concerns are that Universal, already the largest music company, would gain so much control over the music market that it could dictate terms to new digital services. 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. "It's good to see that the commission has seen this deal as such a threat to the market that it has demanded and received truly swinging commitments on divestments," said Martin Mills, chairman of the independent Beggars Group. "However, that should not conceal that fact that Universal's arrogance has paid off for them, that they have destroyed a significant competitor, and that even with these divestments their ability to dominate and control the market has reached even more unacceptable levels." Jodie Griffin, staff attorney at Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group, said that by failing to block the merger, "the F.T.C. is allowing UMG to acquire unprecedented market power and amass a dominant collection of copyright holdings. UMG can now use those holdings not just to raise prices for consumers, but also to create a new tax on innovation among digital music services." For Universal, which agreed to pay Citigroup the full price of EMI regardless of regulatory approval, the value of the deal will be decided by how much the disposed assets will fetch at auction. The value of the assets to be disposed is not clear. The labels in Europe are said to generate about 450 million in annual revenue there, but global rights could add considerably more. "We've had enormous interest from the usual suspects," Mr. Grainge said. "Bertelsmann has been a very aggressive entrant, and there are other trade buyers experienced, well known music professionals. We're in discussions with all of them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times PATERSON, N.J. Brenda Pitts sat stiffly in an emergency room cubicle, her face contorted by pain. An old shoulder injury was radiating fresh agony down to her elbow and up through her neck. She couldn't turn her head. Her right arm had fallen slack. Fast relief was a pill away Percocet, an opioid painkiller but Dr. Alexis LaPietra did not want to prescribe it. The drug, she explained to Mrs. Pitts, 75, might make her constipated and foggy, and could be addictive. Would Mrs. Pitts be willing to try something different? Then the doctor massaged Mrs. Pitts's neck, seeking the locus of a muscle spasm, apologizing as the patient groaned with raw, guttural ache and fear. "Quick prick," said Dr. LaPietra, giving Mrs. Pitts a trigger point injection of Marcaine, used as a numbing, non opioid analgesic. Since Jan. 4, St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center's emergency department, one of the country's busiest, has been using opioids only as a last resort. For patients with common types of acute pain migraines, kidney stones, sciatica, fractures doctors first try alternative regimens that include nonnarcotic infusions and injections, ultrasound guided nerve blocks, laughing gas, even "energy healing" and a wandering harpist. Scattered E.R.s around the country have been working to reduce opioids as a first line treatment, but St. Joe's, as it is known locally, has taken the efforts to a new level. "St. Joe's is on the leading edge," said Dr. Lewis S. Nelson, a professor of emergency medicine at New York University School of Medicine, who sat on a panel that recommended recent opioid guidelines for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "But that involved a commitment to changing their entire culture." Such pain can be quickly subdued with opioids Percocet and Vicodin pills; intravenous morphine and Dilaudid. Most doctors say those drugs can't be altogether replaced. In extreme emergencies a broken bone jutting through skin; a bad burn; an acute sickle cell crisis opioids provide effective, immediate relief. But it is what happens after patients leave the E.R. that public health experts believe has contributed to a crisis of addiction in the United States. At discharge, patients are often given opioid prescriptions. Since the medication has kept their pain at bay, they seek refills from their primary doctors. Though many never become dependent, others do. And so although emergency physicians write not quite 5 percent of opioid prescriptions, E.R.s have been identified as a starting point on a patient's path to opioid and even heroin addiction. "Because we are often the first doctors to provide the patient with opioids for acute pain, we have set in their minds that it's the right treatment," said Dr. Nelson. Paterson, a densely packed, hard bitten city of 146,000, is a heroin hub for a swarm of suburbs. On a recent weekday in the E.R., John Schiraldi, 25, a recovering heroin addict, was grateful that his merciless kidney stone pain was ebbing not because of intravenous morphine a conventional E.R. protocol but because of a regimen that included intravenous lidocaine, a non opioid analgesic. Mr. Schiraldi is a former emergency medical technician who got a Percocet prescription two years ago, after he strained his back lifting a patient. When he lost his job, he lost health insurance and couldn't get refills. So he turned to another, cheaper opioid heroin. On the streets in Paterson, 30 milligrams of Percocet sell for about 25; a bag of heroin can be had for about 2. Two cubicles away from Mr. Schiraldi, doctors were trying to revive a man who had collapsed from a heroin overdose. According to a 2013 federal study, nearly 1,150 people a day around the country went to emergency departments for treatment related to prescription opioids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated that in 2014 there were 10,574 heroin overdose deaths and 14,838 for prescription opioids. Mindful of the exponential rise in opioid addiction at his hospital's doorstep, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, St. Joe's chairman of emergency medicine, began asking two years ago whether it was possible to treat many patients who arrive in the E.R. without opioids. He sent Dr. LaPietra on a fellowship year to study pain management at specialty departments at St. Joe's and other hospitals. She trained the St. Joe's staff. The ER's pharmacy stocked the alternative medications. Dr. Rosenberg alerted departments throughout the hospital to sustain the opioid avoidant philosophy when seeing E.R. patients for follow up visits. The other 25 percent eventually needed opioids to curb pain, most of them patients with sciatica, kidney stones or migraines so devastating that they resisted a non opioid headache protocol developed by the Cleveland Clinic. Upon discharge, some of them were given a limited prescription for opioids. E.R. staff not only warns these patients about the medications' risks, but, to help prevent acute pain from becoming chronic, connects them with hospital physical therapists, pain management specialists, psychiatrists and primary care physicians who have committed to sticking to the program's goals. The E.R. staff is beginning to embrace the non opioid options. "I'm thrilled," said Allison Walker, a nurse. "I'd hate to be the first to give Percocet to a teenager who dislocated his knee at hockey practice. And then he comes back a year later, addicted to opioids? I don't want that on my conscience." One patient in the pediatric E.R. recently was a 17 year old high school varsity baseball player, who had been treated with intravenous opioids at another E.R. for a lower back compression fracture. Physicians sent him home with tapentadol, a strong opioid. Throughout the week, the teenager was roiled by side effects, including constipation and panic attacks. His pain did not abate. An orthopedist sent him to St. Joe's, where he arrived sleep deprived, thrashing and incoherent. St. Joe's pediatricians used a non opioid protocol including a nasal spray of ketamine, a powerful drug which, in low doses, has analgesic and sedative properties. Within 30 minutes the patient was smiling, quiet and, without flinching, able to be transferred to a gurney for scans. While changing medical culture has been difficult, changing patient attitudes about opioids may be more so. "One patient might come in with short lived pain like an ankle sprain and say, 'I think I need some Percocet,'" said Dr. LaPietra. "And others who are dependent on opioids come in demanding and abusive. And meanwhile, you've got someone in the next room having a stroke! It can seem easier just to give them their prescription. They get through your armor and affect morale." Dr. Sergey M. Motov, an emergency medicine physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and a leading proponent of opioid reduction, said that for new approaches to succeed, "we need to talk with patients, acknowledge their pain, their suffering, but ask them: 'What if we can manage it without opioids?'" St. Joe's doctors and nurses are learning to reframe discussions, to educate patients that complete eradication of pain may be either not realistic, or achieved at too high a price. One treatment that gets swift patient buy in is nitrous oxide, which the E.R. staff introduces with its better known name: laughing gas. It is short acting, mildly sedating, noninvasive and has countless applications in the ER Children hold masks to their faces, grinning while having a major abscess drained; teens, while having a dislocated joint popped back into place; older patients while being "disimpacted" treated for severe constipation. St. Joe's is even cautiously trying therapies not typically taught in medical school. A nurse practitioner is studying acupuncture for pain. And another nurse, Lauren Khalifeh, the hospital's holistic coordinator, does a treatment called "pranic healing." One afternoon, Mrs. Khalifeh visited a brittle thin older patient whose sciatica was so inflamed she could not rise from her chair. On a scale of one to 10, the woman, doubled over, said her pain was a 10. Mrs. Khalifeh pulled up a chair. "I am going to sweep the energy," she told the patient. She opened a bottle of saline water. "The salt will destroy the negative energy." The patient closed her eyes, placing hands on lap, palms up. Mrs. Khalifeh leaned intently toward her, sculpting the air in figure eights. She stirred and swirled the space, and then passed her hands over each other. Then she hovered a palm near the patient's heart. The patient slowly stood. She walked over to Dr. LaPietra, who watched, open mouthed. Mrs. Khalifeh continued for two more minutes. "It's a three," said the patient wonderingly, doing deep knee bends in her leather pants. The entire process took about six minutes. Afterward, in the hallway, the doctor struggled to understand what she had witnessed. "I saw a patient with anxiety and stress who couldn't control her pain," she said, carefully. "And then someone spoke soothingly, and led her into deep breathing. "So much of pain is tied up with fear," Dr. LaPietra continued. "We can do more than we think, if we can just take the time to sit with patients and let them know we're present for them." Then she smiled and shrugged. "And when we can get it right, why not, especially if we don't have to use opioids?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Justin Peterson , a 37 year old graphic designer who lives in Orlando, Fla., owns nearly 100 baseball caps, including several featuring the familiar "C" logo of the Cincinnati Reds. But when he and his wife visited her family in Cincinnati over the recent Independence Day holiday weekend, Mr. Peterson didn't bring his red Reds cap. Instead, he opted for the team's alternate black hat. "Unfortunately, I don't feel comfortable wearing red baseball hats anymore," Mr. Peterson said. "I don't want someone assuming I'm something that I'm not, or that I represent something that I think has become pretty ugly." There are plenty of people who are proud to wear President Trump's signature "Make America Great Again" caps, of course, as evinced at recent rallies. When Mr. Trump's campaign introduced them in 2015, he was dubbed a "marketing genius." Hats flew off the shelves in the store at the Trump Tower in Midtown as Republican supporters and Democrats alike vied to obtain the accessory of the summer. Put more simply, they fear being mistaken for MAGA. Since teams throughout the sports world produce baseball style caps for sale, the potential for MAGA confusion extends beyond baseball teams like the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals, and includes fans of the Kansas City Chiefs (a football team), the New Jersey Devils (hockey), Liverpool F.C. (soccer) and many other red themed teams. It appears to be the latest example of how Mr. Trump's presence tends to have a polarizing effect on almost anything it touches, even something as seemingly innocuous as the humble ball cap. Promotional caps have also been affected. People responding to a reporter's inquiry said they had stopped wearing red caps advertising things like Maker's Mark bourbon and Sriracha hot sauce. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. 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. On a recent episode of the humorist John Hodgman's podcast, "Judge John Hodgman," a woman asked if her husband should stop wearing his red promotional caps from a software company. Mr. Hodgman's response: "If you're not a Trump voter, stay away from it. Stay away from anything that might resemble a MAGA hat." Louis Orangeo, 27, a procurement analyst in Bloomfield N.J., did vote for Trump in 2016 and is prepared to vote for him again in 2020, although he isn't 100 percent sure. Mr. Orangeo said he bought a MAGA hat after the election, "mainly to troll people," but stopped wearing it because of negative responses. "I hate having to explain it and defend it," he said. "It always gets a look and a sneer." He does wear a minor league baseball team's red cap plenty and nobody has ever said anything. But Mr. Peterson, the Orlando graphic designer, decided to mothball his red caps after his wife pointed out the potential for confusion or confrontation. And others have made similar decisions after noticing the responses to their red hats. "One of my favorite hats is a red University of Wisconsin Badgers hat," said Corey Looby, 31, a database manager from Madison, Wis. "But when I traveled, I would regularly notice glares from people I passed on the street. I don't want to be associated with MAGA, even mistakenly, so I stopped wearing it." The phenomenon is by no means universal; some red capped fans said the potential MAGA connection had never occurred to them until a reporter brought it up. "I don't like engaging in political conversations. I just want to be friends and talk about other topics, not politics," said Jason Stygar, 34, an audio engineer in St. Louis. "But as a lifelong Cardinals fan, I love my red hat I'll wear it anywhere and everywhere. It had never even occurred to me, that someone would mistake it for a MAGA hat, and nobody's ever bothered me about it." And some are wearing red caps in defiance, regardless of politics. "I am not pro Trump or anti Trump, but I do have a Detroit Red Wings hat and get weird looks when I wear it," said Nick Landry, 28, project manager for a carpenter subcontractor in Milford, Mich. "I continue to wear it as a social experiment, hoping people will feel like idiots when they realize that it's not a MAGA hat and that they're feeling vitriol over something so stupid." Fans and teams alike, though, have long been wary about inadvertent political messaging. In 1954, for example, the Cincinnati Reds changed their official team name to Redlegs, to avoid being associated with the communist scare. (They changed the name back to Reds in 1959.) And during George W. Bush's presidency, left leaning Washington Nationals fans often wore caps with the team's secondary "DC" logo, rather than the primary "W" mark, lest they be viewed as Dubya supporters. But those examples were team specific and localized, while the potential for being mistaken for MAGA appears to have no regional or even international boundaries. That's what Daniel Proulx discovered earlier this year when he wore a red Molson beer cap while pitching in his softball league in the Canadian town of Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. "The other teams would comment and ask if I was a Trump supporter," said Mr. Proulx, 34, an athletic director at a junior high school. "I had no idea what they meant, but it was a consistent question. After a while, my own teammates started suggesting that I get a different hat. Maybe something blue instead of red." Whatever one's opinion of Mr. Trump, these stories are a testament to the MAGA hat's success, both as a popular piece of apparel and as a cultural signifier. Because there are plenty of knockoffs, it's hard to calculate how many of the hats have been sold or distributed since they debuted in 2015 (the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment), but they have become sufficiently ubiquitous, at least in some circles, to overshadow all other red ball caps. Aside from wanting to avoid controversy or the potential for mistaken tribal identity, some people who say they have taken their red headgear out of circulation see this choice as a matter of courtesy or even empathy toward immigrants, minorities and other groups that they consider targets of the president's policies. "It breaks my heart to think I can make someone be on guard and uncomfortable just by wearing a red hat," said Jeremiah McBrayer, 42, an information technology worker from Missouri who shelved his red headwear after seeing some negative responses to it at his local Home Depot. "It is just sad and unfortunate that this is where we are in our country now." Has all of this led to a decline in non MAGA red cap sales? Two leading cap brands New Era Cap Company and '47 did not respond to requests for comment; neither did Lids, a chain of cap retailers. Another retailer, Dick's Sporting Goods Inc., declined to comment, citing a company policy of not discussing sales figures. But managers at several sportswear shops said red caps have been harder to obtain from distributors lately, and some of them said the scarlet scarcity was directly related to the MAGA connection. "Three of our vendors specifically mentioned this trend," said Benji Boyter, who runs the retail operation at a South Carolina golf and tennis resort. "One of them mentioned it in the sense of staying away from too many red hats, while the other two casually mentioned something along the lines of 'You've got to be careful with red hats these days.'" Many of the people eschewing their red caps said they feel conflicted. On the one hand, they are engaged in a form of protest and resistance. But in doing so, they're granting Mr. Trump power over their apparel choices and how they express their support for their favorite teams. "It's like, he can't take red hats from us, too," said Lendsey Thomson , 33, a sports lawyer in Kansas City who has stopped wearing his favorite red "KC" cap. "But, alas, he kind of has." At least one fan has decided to reclaim that power. Dave Tarr, a 64 year old retiree and Arsenal soccer fan in Charleston, S.C., put aside his beloved red Arsenal cap during the 2016 election campaign. "And then a few months ago," he said, "I just decided that I wouldn't give Trump or his minions the satisfaction of not doing something that I wanted to do." So Mr. Tarr brought his Arsenal cap out of retirement and began wearing it again. So far, he said, nobody has said anything about it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
E.R. Costs for Mentally Ill Soar, and Hospitals Seek Better Way RALEIGH, N.C. As darkness fell on a Friday evening over downtown Raleigh, N.C., Michael Lyons, a paramedic supervisor for Wake County Emergency Medical Services, slowly approached the tall, lanky man who was swaying back and forth in a gentle rhythm. In answer to Mr. Lyons's questions, the man, wearing a red shirt that dwarfed his thin frame, said he was bipolar, schizophrenic and homeless. He was looking for help because he did not think his prescribed medication was working. In the past, paramedics would have taken the man to the closest hospital emergency room most likely the nearby WakeMed Health and Hospitals, one of the largest centers in the region. But instead, under a pilot program, paramedics ushered him through the doors of Holly Hill Hospital, a commercial psychiatric facility. "He doesn't have a medical complaint, he's just a mental health patient living on the street who is looking for some help," said Mr. Lyons, pulling his van back into traffic. "The good news is that he's not going to an E.R. That's saving the hospital money and getting the patient to the most appropriate place for him," he added. The experiment in Raleigh is being closely watched by other cities desperate to find a way to help mentally ill patients without admitting them to emergency rooms, where the cost of treatment is high and unnecessary. While there is evidence that other types of health care costs might be declining slightly, the cost of emergency room care for the mentally ill shows no sign of ebbing. Nationally, more than 6.4 million visits to emergency rooms in 2010, or about 5 percent of total visits, involved patients whose primary diagnosis was a mental health condition or substance abuse. That is up 28 percent from just four years earlier, according to the latest figures available from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Md. By one federal estimate, spending by general hospitals to care for these patients is expected to nearly double to 38.5 billion in 2014, from 20.3 billion in 2003. The problem has been building for decades as mental health systems have been largely decentralized, pushing oversight and responsibility for psychiatric care into overwhelmed communities and, often, to hospitals, like WakeMed. More than 10 years after overhauling its own state mental health system, North Carolina is grappling with the consequences of a lost number of beds and a reduction in funding amid a growing outcry that the state's mentally ill need more help. In Raleigh, where the Dorothea Dix Hospital a state psychiatric institution that served the area for more than 150 years was closed in 2012, mentally ill patients began trickling into hospital emergency rooms. Hospitals, which cannot legally turn away any patient seeking care, say the influx of psychiatric patients is straining already busy E.R.'s and creating dangerous conditions. This spring, University Medical Center of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas declared an "internal disaster," shutting its doors to arriving ambulances for 12 hours, after mental patients filled up more than half of its emergency room beds. A suicidal patient took out a gun and shot herself in the head while in a hospital emergency room in New Mexico in January. With a crisis facing states, communities and hospitals across the country, experts say no clear solution has emerged. St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse created a separate psychiatric emergency department. Interim LSU Hospital in New Orleans opened a 10 bed mental health emergency room extension six years ago that is typically full. But in Raleigh, the goal is slightly different: keep the psychiatric patients out of the hospital emergency room altogether. The problem facing North Carolina and other states is a legacy of the 1960s, when warehousing of the mentally ill in large psychiatric hospitals was seen as inhumane. The first wave of so called deinstitutionalization was driven by new psychiatric drugs and by a 1963 law championed by President John F. Kennedy that provided federal funding for community based mental health centers. States began reducing the number of psychiatric beds. From a peak of more than 300 beds per 100,000 people in 1955, states had cut the number of beds to an average of 14 by 2010, according to research from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes improved psychiatric care through better laws, policies and practices. For decades, North Carolina resisted the broad mental health reforms. But in 2000, state lawmakers moved to overhaul the state's mental health system, closing state facilities and pushing counseling and outpatient programs to local communities. When the economy plummeted in 2008, North Carolina, like other states, reduced funding to community programs. In all, the state spends 20 percent less on community mental health services than it did a decade ago. Uninsured patients rarely receive individual therapy, only group sessions. And it can take up to three months to see a psychiatrist. "Now, we are seeing some of the most acute, the most aggressive and the most chronic mental health patients, and we're holding them longer," said Janice Frohman, the director of WakeMed's emergency department. The effects of the upheaval in care of the mentally ill are playing out vividly at WakeMed. A private, nonprofit organization with 884 beds, WakeMed is struggling to find a way to meet the needs of increasing numbers of mentally ill patients while also controlling costs. Hospital officials, along with their counterparts at the county and state level, support the pilot program but say it is one small step toward meeting a much bigger challenge. WakeMed has treated an average of 314 patients a month whose primary diagnosis is some form of psychosis. That is up a third from two years ago. On any given day, 25 to 50 mentally ill patients can be found throughout its halls. Some linger in the busy emergency room bays, surrounded by the bright lights and the soft beeps of machines. Others are mixed into the hospital's inpatient rooms. The nurses on the ward wear small panic buttons on the lapels of their hospital coats. When asked when she last pressed her panic button, which immediately floods the ward with help to subdue a violent patient, Francine Moseley, a petite nurse smiles ruefully: It was just last night. WakeMed, like Holly Hill, receives some money from a variety of sources to care for the patients, but it must pay for many other costs. Last year, the hospital spent 2 million on so called sitters, who monitor the most aggressive patients 24 hours a day. When the county sheriff's office became overwhelmed transporting patients to facilities up to three hours away, WakeMed hired a private transportation company. The hospital now employs 14 behavioral health specialists and four patient service assistants who spend hours contacting care facilities in the hopes of finding an empty bed. There is the elderly man suffering from chronic pain who has been transported by ambulance to Raleigh emergency rooms 120 times in the last two years. A female patient with a history of mental illness called 911 nine times in June alone. A little more than three years ago, Brent Myers, an emergency room physician, noticed that increasingly at the start of his shift more than half the beds were already full of patients needing mental health care, rather than physical care. The head of Wake County Emergency Medical Services, Dr. Myers was also among a handful of paramedics in the county who are trying to expand the role of first responders. Seeing an opportunity to both accomplish that goal and help reduce the number of patients flowing into the hospital emergency room, he persuaded county and state officials to agree to an experiment. Shortly thereafter, a group of Wake County paramedics began to be trained to perform mental health exams on patients in the field who are judged not to be in need of emergency medical care. By asking a series of questions, the paramedics are then able to evaluate a patient's mental condition. While giving a patient the option of going to a local emergency room if they prefer, they also offer the choice of being taken to another facility that might be better suited to provide the kind of care they need. Last year, more than half of the 450 patients identified with mental illness asked to go somewhere other than the emergency room. Dr. Myers sees it as the start for connecting other types of patients with alternatives to hospital emergency rooms. Emergency officials in many other areas are looking to replicate aspects of the Wake County program. But many states have laws and protocols that essentially dictate that patients may be transported by ambulance to only hospital emergency rooms. Moreover, Medicare and state Medicaid programs are largely unable to reimburse for transports to nonhospital facilities.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Barneys Is Gone. Where Should You Shop Next? Like many, I have been absorbing the slow death by strangling of Barneys New York online, in articles about failed Hail Mary investments and LOL worthy Instagram photos of 5 percent off price tags and clearance posters in the windows that look as if they were last used at a Hobby Lobby. It has been dispiriting, and also farcical the butterfingers dismantling of a great New York institution. Anytime I noticed that a friend had gone for a visit, I sent a message asking for a graveside report; most came back bleak. Recently I went to see for myself in Beverly Hills, forgive me and found the air inside stagnant. The clerks were bored, verging on resentful or resigned. There was an in house collection of T shirts with graphics drawn from Kurt Cobain's journals. A leather Gucci jacket bearing the logo of the Chateau Marmont was about 6,000, down from 6,700. I dry heaved just a touch. But Barneys truly became replaceable because it no longer had a monopoly on point of view. Artful luxury became broader as a category, and more diffuse. Barneys, which at its peak operated like an idiosyncratic boutique on a grand scale, found it difficult to remain the ne plus ultra of sly style. And now it's gone, or receding. Let's all meet up at the Barneys pop up inside Saks Fifth Avenue five years hence, likely to be a tiny but glitzy corner featuring cheap logo tees and mugs and a vintage installation of old Barneys house line clothing curated by Procell. IN THE MEANTIME, WHERE TO GO? Over the last few weeks, I visited the heirs apparent, the stores that have taken on the mantle of early Barneys, each homing in on a particular segment of the high end marketplace, or a particular angle of view: Dover Street Market New York, Totokaelo, Forty Five Ten, the Webster and Kith. What I was craving was a combination of fantasy and authority, a place that could nudge me toward a new self, or a refreshed one. I'm older than I was when Barneys first hypnotized me, but no less susceptible to magic. And wizardry is what I feel at Dover Street Market, each and every time I go, which is why I don't go more often. To do so would be hopelessly destabilizing to my bank account and my personal silhouette. The selection is limited and ambitious, and spaced out enough to encourage serious consideration of Marine Serre face masks, or Margiela Tabi shoes, or a patchwork argyle Molly Goddard sweater. The EKG is slightly less frantic at Totokaelo, but just slightly. Where Dover Street is an avant garde theme park, Totokaelo exudes a natural calm, as if all the various strands of elegant design were always reconcilable. Stay here long enough and you'll begin to see what Bode has to say to Issey Miyake, or the ways in which Craig Green and Sacai are in quiet, unlikely conversation. The default aesthetic is vertical and slim, and the tones are mostly neutral. Overall, the suggestion is that you can be bleeding edge and also modest, an innovator who can easily blend in. That said, on one of the days I visited recently, Totokaelo also had by far my favorite clientele, and easily the most vibrant: someone who looked like a rogue K pop star on the lam, a young stylist for rappers, three men (shopping separately) wearing heels. Even though it has been in New York for four years (and in three locations), Totokaelo still feels as if it's only for people who have the password. AS OPPOSED TO FORTY FIVE TEN, which is often so empty as to suggest Prada Marfa. Occupying much of the fifth floor of Hudson Yards, the 16,000 square foot store is broken into four parts. And yet still, everything feels crammed together. No store in New York does so little with so much. The spaces are beautiful, the clothes largely chic. And yet each section is a battle of its own. The intense mirroring of the vintage section distracts from the crucial details of the often astonishing clothes, including a pastel layered chiffon Giorgio Sant'Angelo dress. In the emerging designer and ceramic tchotchke section, the clothes are huddled together so tightly that it's hard to disentangle the Sandy Liang tech tulle from the Saks Potts patchwork mink. Most ostentatious is the women's designer section, which is thick with fanciful and often astonishingly expensive clothes, from Marni to Monse. It is far more thoughtful than the men's section, which tends to the anonymously wealthy and only moderately imaginative, apart from a few electric pieces from Jil Sander and By Walid. Spend too much time in the store and you're struck by just how ill a fit it is for this development, which tends toward luxury as commodity, not canvas. When you fall for one of the pieces, you look around and feel vulnerable, alone, exposed. Which is maybe what would happen at the Webster, were it not so narrow. The New York location, which has less flamboyant offerings than the one in Miami, occupies a slender building in SoHo; it's hard to admire the clothes without being mindful of a wall at your back or side. And besides, it trademarks its own sort of clout: Kith collaborates widely, the new hallmark of prestige. When I went, there was a mini exhibition of its recent Disney collaboration, both audacious and inexplicable, and also a Kith/Vogue varsity jacket, which may well lead Anna Wintour to fire whoever convinced her of its merit. (The sweatpants are good, though.) As a shopping experience, it's never not grim. The store is claustrophobia inducing, and as rowdy as the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. There are intriguing pieces from Mastermind and Ader Error, but it's a challenge to embrace them more than cursorily. The women's floor essentially sells only apres spin items that would pair well with black leggings and Air Force 1s. One inconvenient fact about Barneys is that it attempted, in its last years, to court this market ever so slightly. There was a grudging understanding that luxury was increasingly trickling up, not down. But the market pivoted faster than Barneys could. What was once a pastoral affair is now a scrum.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Sebastian Gorka's voice rippled with contempt as he announced, on behalf of Donald J. Trump, that the old Washington establishment was obsolete. Declaring it was time for "new ideas," Mr. Gorka, then a White House aide, packed disdain into a cryptic phrase that could have been borrowed from science fiction a space age update on the Bolsheviks' "dustbin of history." "We're not going to stay in the Washington bubble," Mr. Gorka proclaimed on television, "or the Acela corridor of wonkery." With its Asimovian name, wielded these days as a vaguely derisive epithet, the Acela might sound to an untrained ear like something exotic, even menacing. The reality is far more pedestrian: The Acela is a train. In the most literal sense, it is Amtrak's version of luxury rail, traversing a line between Boston and Washington. The Amtrak website boasts of "speeds up to 150 mph," a figure worth boasting about in a region plagued by dysfunctional railways, though sluggish compared with its European and Asian cousins. At the moment, the train is famous less for moving passengers than for sorting them into a cultural set. Not since the Concorde's last flight in 2003 has a means of transportation given the language such an evocative code word for a way of life the flitting between cities of Northeastern elites, whose values and habits are said to have been repudiated in the last election. Sinister cabal or not, the Acela people are an orderly bunch: They march on board in single file, a loose column of pressed shirts and tightly packed totes, rolling luggage and newspapers folded under their arms. When they disembark, they are slightly rumpled, perhaps more than slightly late, agitated by splenetic tweeting and an excess of Dunkin' Donuts coffee that sells for 3.50 in the cafe car. Lizzie O'Leary, the New York based host of the public radio show "Marketplace Weekend" and a frequent Acela rider, shrugs off all the recent train shaming. Ms. O'Leary, who relies on the Acela to visit her family in Washington, has become an Emily Post like figure in the Amtrak community. She has a voluble Twitter account that deals extensively with the etiquette of the quiet car, a supposedly placid zone adjacent to the first class compartment, where cellphone conversations are banned. "I love the Acela," she said. "I live for the three hours of peace where I can just read or do work." Ms. O'Leary noted the difference between the seasoned riders who navigate the train by instinct they have a favorite car and snack, often the 6 cheese plate and the wide eyed new arrivals. Scattered throughout the cars, she said, are the "performatively important," ostentatiously high powered riders who treat the Acela's two by two seats as personal boardrooms. "You're going to have a lot of jerks, and you're going to have a lot of people who think their time is extremely valuable," Ms. O'Leary said. "That's why I sit in the quiet car." The physical experience of traveling by Acela is nothing special: The train lurches and sways, making the walk to the cafe car or restroom an acrobatic exercise. It is not necessarily markedly cheaper than air travel a ticket from New York to Washington ranges from 165 to 289, one way (first class costs up to 421) but the Acela offers more generous legroom, and the Wi Fi, at least, comes free. Adherents insist the trip, which lasts just under three hours, is competitive with air travel, factoring in delays on the Van Wyck Expressway and on the tarmac. The relative conveniences are such that when President Trump's health secretary, Tom Price, was found by Politico to have taken an exceptionally costly private flight from Washington to Philadelphia, a puzzled cry went up: Why not take the Acela? "This is why people argue about the quiet car!" John Berman, a CNN anchor, said on air last week. "It's because that train exists. You don't need to take a private jet." (Mr. Price resigned on Friday, after his penchant for chartered air travel became public.) For some imaginative passengers, the halting motion of a train evokes a certain time and lifestyle, when Eastern aristocrats shuttled between cities without a hint of bashfulness or self deprecation, simply because it was the finest way to travel. "When I'm on it, I think of all the political intrigue that's transpired, all the corporate deals that have been brokered and even the occasional cultural masterpiece that's been conceived over the same lines," said Keith MacLeod, a lawyer in Boston who often rides the Acela. Mr. MacLeod invoked Teddy Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy riding between Boston and New York, "and, my favorite of all, George Gershwin writing 'Rhapsody in Blue' on his way to a premiere in Boston, and being inspired by the rhythm of the train." What passes for railway intrigue now is less romantic: In 2013, a liberal activist caused a stir by live tweeting an indiscreet telephone conversation between Michael Hayden, the former C.I.A. director, and a reporter. In 2007 Arianna Huffington wrote of having eavesdropped on Bill Kristol, the conservative columnist, as he enthused about the White House's messaging on the Iraq war. Mr. Kristol, no friend of the current White House, remains an Acela loyalist, and he has embraced the "Acela corridor" designation along with unfashionable labels like "establishment" and "globalist."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
An autocratic leader has won the vote. He has charm, yes, and smarts of a kind, but also a cruel streak. Beatings are frequent, and assassination foreign and domestic has become commonplace. His cultural pronouncements have had a chilling effect on the arts, theater in particular. Take your seat for "Evening at the Talk House," an ultra dark comedy by the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn ("The Designated Mourner," "Aunt Dan and Lemon") for the New Group that begins performances at the Signature Center on Tuesday, Jan. 31. Though written years before Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy, and first produced in London in the fall of 2015, the play may strike some as oddly prescient. Set in the course of one night, it eavesdrops on several people who worked together on "Midnight in a Clearing With Moon and Stars," a fictitious flop from a decade ago. They have gathered for a reunion at a rundown club. As they snack and sip and reminisce, they reveal the brutality of the world outside and the ways that artists can abet it, resist it and ignore it. The London production stoked controversy, with The Independent approvingly describing a "disturbing, balefully hilarious new play," while many other critics attacked its tone, pace and politics. More than a year later, in the wake of Brexit and the presidential election, that controversy is likely to resonate anew. On the morning of President Trump's inauguration, Mr. Shawn, who also appears in the play, the director Scott Elliott and the other members of the cast Matthew Broderick, Jill Eikenberry, John Epperson, Larry Pine, Claudia Shear, Annapurna Sriram and Michael Tucker gathered at a rehearsal space to discuss drama as protest and whether or not to invite the president. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. MICHAEL TUCKER Yes. It's other things, too. But it's most certainly political. JILL EIKENBERRY I felt when I first read it that it was extremely relevant to our situation in this world, in this country. After the election, it felt way more relevant, chillingly relevant. SCOTT ELLIOTT I decided to do it way before the election. Many people say Wally's a prescient artist, and I've seen it. And then all of a sudden on election night, it was this feeling of, oh my God, this play crossed over from fiction to LARRY PINE If the election had gone the other way, this play would still be very relevant. WALLACE SHAWN Plays began as political. The Greek plays were about communities and cities and kings and queens and how a country was run. We went through a brief period in the United States of somehow being so prosperous and secure that we forgot that we lived in the world, and plays were about what was happening in somebody's kitchen. Have you ever been a part of a play that failed unjustly? PINE Oh God, yes. Every play. SHAWN Most of my projects have been unsuccessful, so I'm a kind of expert on it. Most actors are very courageous people, and my experience is their commitment increases when it becomes clear that the show is not going to get universal approval. It's an honorable role to be committing yourself to the unpopular play. Is there anything wrong with apolitical plays, entertainment that simply comforts? CLAUDIA SHEAR I think there's a place for "Guys and Dolls" until the last splinter of light dies out on the planet. JOHN EPPERSON I never liked that show. But I like "The Unsinkable Molly Brown." SHAWN Speaking as someone who has devoted a lot of his life to doing some things that would certainly fit into the category of pure entertainment, that's how I have lived. I've been paid for that. But complacency is a very serious problem. Too much soothing entertainment isn't good for a person. If you admit that a play or a TV show or a movie can wake somebody up, you have to at least admit that possibly some plays or TV shows or movies might put people to sleep and help them in their quest for total oblivion. Personally, I would rather go to bed and have someone bring me a cup of tea. I don't have a desire to go out and get arrested or something like that. But it may be necessary. MATTHEW BRODERICK It's a play; it's not an essay. It's not like we're all sitting around saying, "Let's change the world and its politics while we're doing it." We're creating a human world. EIKENBERRY And there's a lot of irony, a lot of funny stuff. That's another great way to tell a political story. In the play, theater has died out. Is this likely? ANNAPURNA SRIRAM A lot of friends my age don't go to theater. I have one friend who will probably come, and this will be his second play. His first was another play I did. I definitely wonder what the next generation of theatergoers will look like. SHEAR They're all outside of "Hamilton." BRODERICK When I first did a play, I was absolutely sure that Broadway was dead. And now every time I'm in a play, you can't get a theater. Your young friends are going to start watching plays at some point. If it did die, would that be so bad? BRODERICK I would be fine with that. We would get paid more. TUCKER It would be a great loss. When it works, there's nothing like it. If there were no theaters, no one could ever say, "I saw that, I was there, that moment." EIKENBERRY It's been around for an awful long time; it's hard to imagine that even this administration could do away with it. People don't go to church that much anymore. They need collective experience. EPPERSON I thought the election in 2000 would spur people to make more interesting work, but it didn't seem like it did. And then after 9/11, it seemed like audiences wanted feel good stuff. Maybe this election will make more interesting work. Scott, you said you already have things on your desk. In the world of the play, assassination has become the norm. Do you feel we're moving toward a more violent world? TUCKER There's been slaughter, genocide since history began. But this is different. SRIRAM It's been going on for a long time, but it hasn't been as public. SHAWN Under Bush, torture became normal and most Americans accepted it. First they were shocked, and then they accepted it. And sadly, under the very likable Obama, these assassinations have become normal, and people have accepted that. In the case of killing Bin Laden, it was boasted about by apparently nice people. I'm not sure we understand the implications of that yet, the normalization of killing individuals. What does it mean if apparently nice people just go on eating snacks and drinking cocktails and making art while these things are happening? EIKENBERRY That's the question of the play. SRIRAM I feel grateful in real life just for the privilege of getting to be an actor, that I have the kind of sometimes insane work of putting on costumes and playing pretend, for a living! But what is my responsibility other than just trying to achieve and have ambition and success? SHAWN Our complacency is dangerous to other people. Have you always made it a point to do work that has political dimensions? TUCKER Most of us don't have that much of a choice. There are only a few actors who can choose what they want to do. There are actors who are very political who will join or form a company that only does political work. But I'm not much of a joiner. It's really something that we have to think about individually. EPPERSON I have a list of selfish reasons for doing it, too. My career has been a kind of trap: Performing in female clothing is one trap, and lip syncing is another trap. It's always good for me to do a job where people can realize, oh, he can do something else. BRODERICK But I think we're going to record all of your dialogue. The reaction to this play in London a year ago was mixed to negative. Will it be received differently now? TUCKER There will be negative responses, too, I imagine. People don't like to be confronted. EIKENBERRY Wally, do you have a fantasy I think it happened to Sean O'Casey that everyone gets up in the entire audience and starts throwing things at the stage? Would that make you happy? SHAWN I don't actually enjoy that. Nobody ever says, "I hated your play, because I happen to be very conservative, and I disagree with all of your ideas." They say: "You're a bad writer. We were bored. It's not a good play." What about the "Waiting for Lefty" model, where the audience joins the resistance? SHAWN I'm available. If the audience is inspired to activism, I'm thrilled and I'll join in, but things don't really happen quite that way. Our president has a lot of strong opinions on art. How would you feel if he liked this play? EPPERSON I saw him at a fashion show once. SHEAR I saw him at a party. ELLIOTT He was in one of my plays in the '90s. This play called "The Monogamist." I videotaped prominent New York figures for the scenic transitions. ELLIOTT Why not? Let him see it. SHAWN I don't know if it could influence Trump. It's only 90 minutes long, but he's one of those people who's interested in himself, and when the topic goes off of him he becomes bored. We don't mention him in the play. Maybe we should change that.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Over the last decade, Long Island City, Queens, has become a refuge for Manhattan professionals who want a short commute and an apartment in an amenity laden high rise, but don't want to split a Murray Hill two bedroom three ways to get it. But as rents have climbed studios in the neighborhood now average 2,405 a month, according to a March market report from the brokerage MNS more people have turned to informal shares. The problem is that larger apartments are designed with families in mind, making for awkward shares when divided among friends. Or worse, strangers. Chris Bledsoe, a founder and chief executive of the co living operator Ollie, is hoping that a new development at 29 26 Northern Boulevard will change that. "It marries the concept of micro living with a shared suite," said Mr. Bledsoe, whose company also operates the city sponsored micro unit building at Carmel Place, in the Kips Bay neighborhood in Manhattan. At the Northern Boulevard project, being built by Simon Baron Development and Quadrum Global, 13 of the 42 floors will be dedicated to co living. Composed of two and three bedroom shared suites with a total of 426 beds, Ollie asserts that its Long Island City project will be the largest ground up co living development in North America. The other floors will include traditional rentals, with the fourth mostly given over to amenities, including an indoor pool, to be shared by the building. Unlike a standard three bedroom unit, where a large chunk of the square footage has been devoted to shared living space, and small bedrooms are used primarily as places to sleep, these co living suites have been specifically designed to accommodate roommates who may not know one another well. The bedrooms will be larger from 90 to 187 square feet than those in most new developments, Mr. Bledsoe said, and include convertible furniture that borrows from micro living, like a bed that converts to a sofa (mattresses will be flippable, with harder and softer sides), a wall mounted smart television and a built in armoire. Rooms will also have individual temperature controls and, perhaps most important of all, soundproofing. "We put the insulation between bedrooms that we'd normally put between units," he said. Each unit will also have a kitchen and at least one bathroom (many will have two, and some bedrooms will have private baths), but no dedicated living room. The assumption is that tenants will spend most of their time holed up in their bedrooms, or else out in the communal amenity spaces. A number of start ups have entered the co living market in the last few years, among them WeWork's residential arm, WeLive, and Common, but most projects have focused on smaller scale renovations, creating what are essentially luxury iterations of group house living, rather than large scale, ground up construction. Though it is clear that most players see this as the future of the market: Common recently opened a ground up development in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, with space for 140 residents. Mr. Bledsoe said that while multifamily investors could be wary of new models, he hoped that the Northern Boulevard project, which was able to secure a 150 million construction loan from the American International Group, would show institutional grade developers that co living is not a narrow niche. To that end, Mr. Bledsoe said that Ollie, which like the others expects to draw most of its tenants from the young professional pool, has tried to make its marketing materials less aggressively hipster ish. "We realized we have a long tail of non millennials, which is important when you're scaling," he said. "You're not going to fill up 426 beds with freelancers and tech workers." Rents at the project, which have yet to be made final, are expected to start around 1,450 a month per room, and will include all furnishings, Wi Fi, premium cable, social activities and weekly housekeeping with fresh linens and towels. Even the shampoo and conditioner bottles will be topped off regularly. To address the fact that many potential tenants may not know people in the city with whom they might share an apartment, Ollie has developed an app, called Bedvetter, to help people select and match up with roommates. Rooms in the building will not be rented out individually. The start is planned to coincide with preleasing, in October. Completion is expected in January 2018.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Early morning is the best time to be awake in Costa Rica. In the soft, bluish light and amid calm, cool breezes, the previous day's heat and humidity are just a memory. This particular morning, though, there was a problem. I walked over to the Land Cruiser owned by my host, Edu, and joined him in considering a flat rear tire. I was scheduled to go on a tour of Corcovado National Park in 30 minutes, and Edu was supposed to take me to the pickup point. "It's no problem," he said, and he pulled out a cellphone to make a call. "Pura vida." Pura vida, an unofficial motto that means "pure life," is rarely used in a literal sense in Costa Rica. Instead, it's an all purpose saying that can be applied to any number of situations: greetings, farewells or, in this case, "don't worry about it." Ten minutes later, a distant buzzing could be heard from down the dirt path that leads up to Rio Drake Farm, a small hotel that Edu oversees with his wife, Sabrina. It was a small motorbike coughing gray smoke. He slipped the rider a few bills and told me to hop on the back. Then we were off, dipping and diving through the forest on the sputtering bike as the sun rose higher in the sky, rushing to make the boat to Corcovado. Costa Rica has no standing military, choosing to focus on other issues like environmental conservation. Its efforts (about 25 percent of the country is protected) have paid off: While Costa Rica occupies a mere 0.03 percent of the earth's surface, it has almost 6 percent of the world's biodiversity. It's the ideal place for an ecologically conscious vacation. Documents in order (you may not be allowed on the plane to Costa Rica unless you've had the yellow fever vaccination and are carrying proof), I chose the Osa over the more developed Nicoya Peninsula in the northwest precisely because it was more remote and difficult to reach and therefore more likely, I reasoned, to have an experience dominated more by nature than by other visiting tourists. Your best bets to reach Drake Bay are Nature Air and Sansa Airlines; I flew Sansa. Expect to pay around 80 to 120 each way. (American dollars are widely accepted, though I recommend getting some colones, the local currency.) A few essential tips: Sansa doesn't leave from the main airline terminal in San Jose. It's in a separate building nearby, so make sure to double check where you're going. Your boarding pass is simply a reusable laminated card with the name of your destination airport on it it doesn't have your name or any other personal information on it, so don't misplace it. And while most airports usually have a decent selection of small stores to buy food, supplies, and various other sundries, it's sorely lacking in San Jose's. Searching for sunscreen, I found a store in the terminal selling a small tube of 50 SPF lotion for 9,500 colones, or a little under 17. A similarly sized container of SPF 70 was going for 13,000 colones. When I inquired as to the difference in price, the man at the counter shrugged and pointed at the number 70. "Bigger number," he said. I recommend bringing your own sunscreen and bug spray (though the restrictions on liquids for carry ons can make this onerous). After a 45 minute flight on a small Cessna propeller plane, I was in Drake Bay. Edu, wearing cargo shorts and a lime green ball cap, found me immediately among the dozen passengers and we climbed into his Land Cruiser, then made one of the briefest airport transfers I've ever experienced. The drive to Rio Drake Farm took about a minute. In the heat and humidity of the afternoon, Edu walked me past a hand painted sign that read "Bienvenidos a Rio Drake Farm," papaya and maranon (cashew fruit) trees, and showed me my modest room. For 54 a night, I had my own room with a private bathroom. You can pay less, at nearby Cabinas Manolo, for example ( 40 per night, but you'll have to pay for transportation from the airport) and also much, much more: At high end eco tourism spots like the Luna Lodge, also on the Osa Peninsula, you can pay over 200 a night for a private bungalow. Still, my accommodations were satisfactory. The bed was basic but serviceable, and the room came with a weak fan that provided some relief on sweltering nights (and helped keep mosquitoes at bay). A slow Wi Fi connection is available to guests for a couple of hours every night. But any lack of creature comforts was compensated by other amenities: breathtaking sunsets from the open dining area, the ability to ride a kayak in the Rio Drake and proximity to a nearly deserted beach and nature trails. One day I trekked across a rope bridge to reach the gorgeous beach, which I had almost completely to myself. Another morning I went hiking along the monkey trail on Rio Drake's property and saw a couple of capuchins moving through the branches above me. Other activities, like a fishing trip ( 125) or seeing poisonous dart frogs ( 50), can be arranged. I chose snorkeling ( 89) and a tour of Corcovado National Park ( 99). With these, Edu simply arranges the tour and acts as a middleman. If you want to save a few dollars, you can book directly with the tour operator (Manolo Tours, in this case), but you may just find it easier to book it all through Edu. We arrived, donned our provided flippers and snorkeling gear and plunged into the water. The colors were spectacular. Despite the previous night's rain, the fish and coral were bright and clear. Immediately Gustavo said, "There's a shark." I froze. Gustavo was unperturbed. He took his Go Pro and went to move closer to the whitetip reef shark floating not far below the surface. He did that frequently during our outing, demonstrating superhuman lung capacity and disappearing minutes at a time to get a better look. And there was plenty to see. No sooner had we moved past the shark than a black sea turtle swam by, plunging deep into the dark blue ocean below. After that, it was a symphony of crackling coral and a parade of bright yellows, metallic greens and deep, shiny blacks. Parrotfish swam alongside us, followed by a few clown fish. We encountered a school of horse eyed jacks, hundreds of small, silvery fish swirling and flashing brightly like lures in the water. The tour of Corcovado National Park the next day provides just as much excitement for those who wish to remain on solid ground. For the most part, anyway. We had something of an amphibious landing upon arriving near Sirena Beach (pack flip flops or water shoes, as well as water and sunblock). After my exhilarating motorbike ride from Rio Drake, I boarded the boat to Corcovado with just minutes to spare. It's a lengthy ride down the peninsula to the park nearly 90 minutes each way. Our guide, Julian, was no nonsense. "Be careful," he told the group of us. "We have some of the most poisonous snakes in the world." I pulled my socks up slightly. "This is the land of the jaguar, the puma and the tapir," he said. There were also 22,000 butterfly species in this forest alone, he said. With sharp eyes, he pointed out a cute little coati mundi poking around in the dirt, then a crested caracara bird. "We must be quiet," he said, leading us to a small clearing where a huge tapir at least six feet long was lying with her baby. We walked past majestic ceibas and thick, ropy ficus trees, all while gazing up at playful spider monkeys, a couple of dozing howlers and the odd black mandible toucan (Julian helpfully brought a small telescope so we could get a closer look).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
It's taken a long time for "Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch," Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's 1990 end of days fantasy novel, to reach the screen. Long enough for Gaiman, then a promising comics writer and Duran Duran biographer, to become an industry: The Amazon Prime Video mini series "Good Omens," which debuted Friday, is the third current television show based on his work, with Netflix's "Lucifer" and Starz's "American Gods." And there have been other auspicious changes. When Gaiman and Pratchett made a Queen greatest hits CD a leitmotif in their book it's the preferred driving music of one of the heroes, a demon named Crowley it was a joke about the bombastic songs' late 1980s inescapability. Now it gives the mini series a soundtrack of pop classics. But what makes the diverting and mostly pleasurable "Good Omens" especially timely is something that hasn't much changed: Armageddon seems as real a possibility now as it did three decades ago. The story's hopeful universalism and ecological consciousness, which played well against the backdrop of the late Cold War and the ozone hole, feel just as necessary. A line like "your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category" can go right from book to screenplay, and it has. Gaiman wrote the series's six episodes himself (Pratchett died in 2015), and in streamlining the book which was a digressive, more is more exercise in the tradition of "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" he's made the wisest possible choice. The story is now focused even more closely on the central relationship between Crowley, the high living devil who kicks the plot into gear by misplacing the baby Antichrist, and the prudish angel Aziraphale, who works with Crowley in a desperate, covert, comical campaign to keep the world from ending. It's a good move because the book's sharpest and funniest writing was mostly in the Crowley Aziraphale scenes, and for the series Gaiman has reduced the time given to some of the duller material, like the appearances of the horsemen of the Apocalypse (here motorcycle riders) and the group of friends who beneficially influence the unsuspecting 11 year old Antichrist, Adam Young. (There's a visual shout out to Richmal Crompton's echt English "William" children's book series, a primary inspiration for "Good Omens.") And it's a great move because demon and angel are played, by David Tennant and Michael Sheen. It's hard to imagine better casting than Tennant as the cynical but softhearted Crowley, piloting his vintage Bentley at speed through central London, or Sheen as the timorous, dandified Aziraphale, maintaining his cover as an antiquarian book dealer while thrilling to the thought of lunch at the Ritz. Gaiman has added to the cast of Crowley's and Aziraphale's hellish and heavenly superiors, to reinforce the idea of their working to subvert divine plans, and this creates small, droll parts for performers like Jon Hamm (Gabriel) and Anna Maxwell Martin (Beelzebub). He's also added an amusing sequence showing the co conspirators' meetings through the ages, where we learn why the unicorn no longer exists and see a worried William Shakespeare (Reece Shearsmith) during rehearsals for "Hamlet." (It's a nice in joke when Tennant, a notable contemporary Hamlet, offers advice to Richard Burbage, the actor who created the role, played by Adam Colborne.) The BBC Studios production is studded with piquant performances by veteran actors, mostly British. The great Bill Paterson is at his bemused best as Adam's exasperated neighbor, and Michael McKean and Miranda Richardson are fun to watch as the aging witchfinder, Shadwell, and his accommodating landlady, Madame Tracy. Sanjeev Bhaskar of "Unforgotten" is pleasingly oily as the libidinous lawyer, Baddicombe, and Derek Jacobi, no less, has a cameo as God's spokesman, Metatron. Gaiman's tweaks to the plot, along with explanatory animations and an unfortunately obtrusive narration by Frances McDormand as God, make the story more straightforward and take this as a description, not a judgment more cartoony, less writerly. Many fans of the book may be disappointed by what's been de emphasized, particularly the sentimental Anglophilia of the children's friendships and the notion that Adam is disinclined to wipe out humanity because he's too attached to his village of Lower Tadfield. It's easy to imagine a big budget feature version of "Good Omens" that would lean into the sentimentality while also giving more striking visual treatment to Adam's accidental reorderings of the world, like the sudden emergence of Atlantis and the appearance of tunneling Tibetans in Lower Tadfield. But it most likely wouldn't be as entertaining as this casual, somewhat shambling series, which catches the spirit of Gaiman and Pratchett's attempt, at the start of their careers, to keep topping each other with gags and comic set pieces. And among its copious jokes, "Good Omens" has the wit and good taste to mock "The Sound of Music" on multiple occasions. For that alone it deserves an Emmy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
An eon or two ago, Eastman Kodak was a bleeding edge technology company. It hired the smartest engineers and put them to work racking up patents, pioneering new chemical processes and building a globe spanning camera and film business that, at its peak, employed 145,000 people. But the digital photo age passed Kodak by, and today, the Rochester, N.Y., company exists mostly in the past tense. Many of the patents have been sold, buildings have been rented out or demolished, and the company has continued to shrink since it filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Now, the 130 year old company is trying an unlikely sort of comeback one built by betting on cryptocurrency. It's a bold gamble that has excited some investors, perplexed others and raised questions about how closely Kodak vetted its cryptocurrency business partners, who now include a paparazzi photo agency, a penny stock promoter and a company offering what has been called a "magic money making machine." Kodak's stock rose more than 200 percent following the announcements, and has not fallen much since. That's partly because the blockchain the mathematical ledger system that forms the basis of digital currencies has a kind of talismanic effect in today's stock market. As investors seek to capitalize on the popularity of currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, a number of struggling companies have reversed their fortunes, at least temporarily, simply by adding "blockchain" to their names or announcing a new cryptocurrency venture unrelated to their previous line of work. (The most notorious example is Long Island Iced Tea Corp., a beverage company that tripled its value overnight after it rebranded itself "Long Blockchain Corp.") These sudden, brazen moves have also attracted the attention of regulators. In a recent speech, Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the agency was "looking closely at the disclosures of public companies that shift their business models to capitalize on the perceived promise of distributed ledger technology." Kodak is the most prominent old line company to enter the cryptocurrency game so far, and maybe the most controversial. Almost immediately, critics pounced on the company's plans, characterizing them as a desperate money grab. "It feels like a publicly traded company issuing a token to raise its stock price from the grave," said Kyle Samani, a partner at the cryptocurrency trading firm Multicoin Capital. "I would not be sleeping very well if I was involved in this," said Jill Carlson, a blockchain consultant. In an interview, Jeff Clarke, Kodak's chief executive, said that the company's blockchain ambitions were genuine. He began looking into blockchain technology last summer, he said, and realized that it could solve a perennial problem for photographers proving ownership of their images, tracking down copyright violators, and getting paid. "This is not a dog food company that's creating a currency," Mr. Clarke said. "This is a real solution around digital rights management that Kodak has been involved in for many years." In theory, photographers will be able to upload their images to a platform called KodakOne, create a blockchain based license for each image, and use web crawling software to scour the internet looking for copyright violations. Instead of using dollars, photographers can have clients pay them in KodakCoins. KodakCoin's initial offering, scheduled for Wednesday, is expected to raise as much as 20 million. (On Tuesday night, KodakCoin's website said that it would delay the offering by "several weeks" to verify the credentials of potential investors.) But there are few details about what that money will be used for, or why a similar system could not be built without the blockchain. There is also a more obvious question: Why would photographers want to be paid in digital tokens, rather than cash? Make no mistake: Digital rights management is a real issue for photographers, and the blockchain does, in theory, offer a compelling solution. But the specific attributes of KodakCoin present some red flags. First, despite the name, KodakCoin is not actually a Kodak project. The company behind the offering, WENN Digital, is a California based affiliate of a British photo agency that specializes in paparazzi photo licensing. Under their licensing agreement, Kodak will not receive any direct revenue from the public offering. It will receive a minority stake in WENN Digital, 3 percent of all KodakCoins issued and a royalty on future revenue. Cameron Chell, a lead adviser to the KodakCoin project, told me that the initial offering represented a "seminal moment" for Kodak, and that the company's interest in blockchain technology was a savvy long term investment. "The real story is that it's about to be a renaissance," he said. But Mr. Chell, a Canadian entrepreneur and motivational speaker who once opened for Tony Robbins, has a troubled track record. In 1998, Mr. Chell agreed to a five year ban from the Alberta Stock Exchange in Canada and paid a 25,000 fine in connection with a violation of the exchange's rules. A previous company of his ended in ignominy after its chairman was charged with fraud. Asked about these incidents, Mr. Chell said that he was "young, inexperienced and was irresponsible in my actions," and that he had "learned a lot since 1998 and work hard to conduct myself in a manner that does not reflect that poor judgment." A Kodak spokesman did not return a request for comment about Mr. Chell and whether it knew about the ban. Mr. Chell has refashioned himself as a blockchain expert in recent years, and KodakCoin is his biggest project so far. He is the chairman of Appcoin Innovations, which was registered as a literary agency Redstone Literary Agents until last year, when it became a consulting firm that provides "a turnkey set of services for companies to develop and integrate blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies," according to securities filings. The company, which trades over the counter as a penny stock, earned no revenue in 2015 or 2016, according to S.E.C. filings. Appcoin Innovations is slated to receive 20 percent of all KodakCoins issued and a portion of the offering proceeds, a stake that could amount to millions if the offering is successful. "Once formally launched," Mr. Chell wrote to me in an email, "the company will hopefully provide shareholders a traditional and transparent place to participate in the crypto space with projects that are regulatory compliant." Now, about those coins. You might think that a digital currency that is trying to "democratize photography and make licensing fair to artists," in Mr. Clarke's words, would be easily accessible. But because of regulatory requirements, KodakCoins will be available only to so called accredited investors in the United States. An accredited investor is defined as a person with a net worth of 1 million or more, or an annual income above 200,000. How many cryptocurrency obsessed millionaire photographers do you know? Even if photographers do meet the requirements to participate, they could have a hard time spending their KodakCoins, or redeeming them for cash. The S.E.C. has warned that securities sold in private offerings, such as KodakCoins, may be difficult to resell and that investors may be required to hold on to them "indefinitely." A KodakCoin representative told me that the company believes its tokens will eventually be freely traded, and that it may issue other types of tokens in the future that will not be subject to the same restrictions. KodakCoin's white paper says that token holders may receive other benefits, such as a share of KodakOne's revenue and access to a "marketplace" that will allow them to spend their KodakCoins on camera equipment, studios for photo shoots, and travel expenses. But these benefits could fail to materialize. Cryptocurrency experts also do not seem impressed with the Kodak KashMiner, a Bitcoin mining machine advertised at this year's CES electronics trade show. According to the advertisement, users will pay 3,400 to rent the machine, a Kodak branded computer that solves complex math equations to unlock new Bitcoin, for two years. Half the Bitcoins successfully mined with the Kashminer will go back to Spotlite, the company licensing Kodak's name, and the user will keep the other half.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
To the scabrous pile of breakdowns, shutdowns and scandals that will memorialize 2018, a humble submission: Paul Dano, acclaimed 34 year old actor, did not appear in a single movie. Granted, this might seem a minor point in the grand scheme. But consider this: To find another 12 month span in which discerning moviegoers were deprived of even one Paul Dano performance in more generous times, there were as many as four you have to go all the way back to 2003, a year when (coincidentally!) Bennifer, Saddam Hussein and the Chingy song "Right Thurr" were on top of the world. To be fair, Mr. Dano didn't plan things to work out this way. Far from it! He loves movies and they love him right back. For the past decade and a half, he's been a constant, animating (if not always showy) presence in a run of good and strange films, many involving a winning bingo card of the great contemporary directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Steve McQueen, Ang Lee, Spike Jonze, Denis Villeneuve. That it's not Mr. Dano's face a cherubic, inverted teardrop that first comes to mind when you think of these movies ("There Will Be Blood," "12 Years a Slave," "Prisoners") is a testament to his most durable gift. Filmmakers and audience members alike believe he is one of them. And now he really is a filmmaker, with the release last fall of "Wildlife," Mr. Dano's meticulous and evocative directorial debut, adapted from the 1990 Richard Ford novel and starring his old friends Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. That's why the actor failed to visit you at the multiplex last year he was busy realizing a lifelong dream. But that's not all. Hunkering in the editing bay of "Wildlife," he missed the physicality of performance. So he accepted an offer and put on 20 lbs. of muscle to play a tenacious, convicted murderer who tunnels his way out of prison in the seven episode Showtime limited series "Escape at Dannemora" with Benicio Del Toro. And there's more! Really, Mr. Dano has never been so busy. "Dannemora" shot for a grueling six months in upstate New York. During that time, another old friend and neighbor, Ethan Hawke, sent him an effusive text about collaborating on a revival of the venerated Sam Shepard play "True West." Mr. Dano just couldn't resist his cup ranneth over. And so he closed out the year in yet a third medium, starring opposite Mr. Hawke in the Roundabout Theater Company's Broadway production, which began previews Dec. 27 and opens Jan. 24. Twelve months, no movies and an embarrassment of riches. And none of his professional accomplishments compare to his most personal one, the one that inspired Mr. Hawke to observe in a phone interview that his friend was "truly becoming himself": Paul Dano became a dad. He was getting over a cold and had a four month old at home he and Ms. Kazan, with whom he co wrote "Wildlife," welcomed Alma in August. But he was warm and genial, brightening as he began to report on his fledgling days of fatherhood. "I didn't think I would like it so much; I mean, I thought I would like it, but it's really quite astonishing," he said. In a crisp, black and blue flannel, a nest of light brown hair and olive librarian glasses he could have passed as an adjunct at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "There's just a sort of ... I don't know, a hope or something. Seeing something so innocent and pure and unsullied by the world." Mr. Dano, who has self diagnosed "dorky impulses" and relishes researching a role, spent that last movie less year, in 2003, as a New School freshman studying English and Russian literature. To portray the Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson in 2015's "Love Mercy" he learned to play piano. But now he's found the ultimate research project. "There's something about being there for the first moments, the fragility, which really begins at conception," he continued. "And the heart has this chemical reaction on the first breath the chambers change, because you've switched from breathing amniotic fluid to oxygen. And then that breath just keeps going, and going, and it doesn't stop until we ... It's just mind blowing stuff." He was born in Manhattan to a father who was a financial adviser and a mother who raised him and his younger sister (a half brother is 16 years older). Mr. Dano was acting in school plays and community theater as far back as he can remember, "a summer activity that ended up gathering steam," and by the time he was 12 he was performing on Broadway, with George C. Scott, in the 1996 production of "Inherit the Wind." At 16, he starred in his first feature film (and won an Independent Spirit Award) as a reckless, libidinous teenager coping with his mother's death in the Long Island based indie "L.I.E." Mr. Dano's family wasn't especially arts oriented. ("They don't even like good music," he confessed). But his parents did everything they could to support his dream. With Alma, whose primary talents to date include smiling and using her hands, he can pay it forward. "We were talking last night about how everything the baby does even if it pukes everywhere you say, 'Good job!'" Mr. Dano gushed. He was already nostalgic. "One day that's going to stop, you know? One day not everything is going to be good." Out of nowhere, two tables down from us, a man with a puppy dog grin and a riot of straw colored hair turned toward Mr. Dano and asked about Ms. Kazan and the baby. It was the comedian and writer Mike Birbiglia, another neighbor of the actor's, who was in the midst of his own Broadway run. Mr. Dano asked Mr. Birbiglia how his show was going. "It's fun," he answered, unconvincingly. A moment later, he amended: "It's so, so exhausting." On the 10th floor of a Times Square office building, two weeks before previews for "True West" were to begin, Mr. Dano and Mr. Hawke were running lines in a makeshift, fluorescent lit rehearsal space. Mr. Dano appears in every minute of the two hour play, and was already feeling it: "It's the greatest challenge I've ever had as an adult actor on stage," he said. The story follows two distant brothers with dreams of making a fortune in Hollywood who forge a tempestuous screenwriting partnership. Its solitary setting, their mother's tchotchke filled Southern California bungalow, deteriorates along with the brothers' psychological mooring, and the rehearsal set looked as if it had been turned upside down and shaken for loose change. The older brother in the play, Lee, played by Mr. Hawke, is a feral and felonious hustler, the antithesis of Mr. Dano's younger, starch collared Austin. The actors were well matched to their parts. In rehearsal, Mr. Hawke was a bee in a meadow, pacing excitedly, pogoing from one scene interpretation to the next. Mr. Dano, who seemed almost too tall to fit into the fake kitchen, was comparatively dispassionate, soft spoken. "One is more outward, the other is more inward, so you get this great, catalytic energy between them," said James Macdonald, the play's director. "They're great dance partners." "True West," first produced in 1980, has made memorable brotherhoods of Tommy Lee Jones and Peter Boyle, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, among others. (Kit Harington and Johnny Flynn are paired up in London right now, too.) It hinges on a comic reversal, and by the end of nine scenes, it's Austin's animal instincts that prove the most vicious. The character's turn from meek to maniacal is classic Dano. In his two most famous roles, as a conniving preacher in "There Will Be Blood," and as an electively mute goth in "Little Miss Sunshine," he plays diligent, abstemious men whose tight lids obscure bubbling waters. Mr. Hawke, who directed his current scene partner in a 2007 Off Broadway production of "Things We Want" (Mr. Dano and Ms. Kazan, then co stars on stage only, were reportedly "kissing in the broom closet"), observed someone who "can be both explosive and intellectual, which is a rare combination." Ben Stiller, the director and executive producer of "Escape at Dannemora," told me, unprompted, that the actor had been keen to play "a guy who is at odds with himself." Mr. Dano has heard these appraisals before. "It's not conscious," he insisted, back at the restaurant in Brooklyn, when I theorized that he had a type. "But I do enjoy layers digging around, asking why, figuring it out. If it's really clear what a character needs, I feel a little less intoxicated by it." When I asked Carey Mulligan, who has known Mr. Dano for 10 years, whether he is as inscrutable as his characters, she recalled the first time she met him, after performing in a play with Ms. Kazan. "I was quite intimidated by him at first," she said. "But then I discovered he's not a serious person at all, really. He's kind of goofy and really funny and he does everything he can to make people feel comfortable." Shooting "Wildlife," she said, was her "favorite filmmaking experience ever." "He has such a graceful touch and will encourage you with the most gentle push," she added. "I never felt like I could do anything wrong." Mr. Dano glanced at his phone, checking for baby updates. With "Wildlife," then "Dannemora," and now "True West," he had been running nonstop, the culmination of 14 unbroken years of momentum. But parenthood had permanently altered his priorities in ways that he couldn't yet explain.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. 'We Do Not Need You' Eric Schneiderman, New York's former attorney general, may have been a longtime champion of women's rights, but he now stands accused of beating and verbally abusing multiple women. After hearing the accusations against him, Samantha Bee said that she didn't feel at all conflicted about condemning the onetime liberal darling. "Now, Schneiderman was a guest on my show, so this is a little complicated for me to talk about, but just kidding, it's not complicated." SAMANTHA BEE Schneiderman's willingness to take on domestic abusers in the political sphere didn't make Bee any less ready to bid him good riddance. "Eric Schneiderman, you are trash and we do not need you. Tarana Burke started the MeToo movement 11 years ago on Myspace. It will keep moving forward without you just fine." SAMANTHA BEE "You know who's a better advocate for women? Women! Last night's primaries made that very clear. Women ran in 23 open Democratic House primaries in Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana and they won 18 of them. And remember Rachel Crooks, one of the women who accused Trump of sexual assault? Last night she won a nomination for the Ohio state legislature. The future is female, or at least it better be, because I am done with this expletive ." SAMANTHA BEE	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. Adrian Bonilla lived in a shared house in this Silicon Valley town with his wife and two grandchildren until earlier this year, when the rent for their bedroom jumped to 1,200 from 900 a month. Mr. Bonilla attributed that rise to Facebook, which is based nearby and was growing. So Mr. Bonilla, a 43 year old mechanic and Uber driver, bought a 1991 recreational vehicle and joined a family oriented R.V. community on a quiet cul de sac. They lived there until last week, when Mr. Bonilla received an eviction notice. This time, Mr. Bonilla said, the reason he had to move was because the city wanted to clear the way for "the Facebook school." That school is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company set up by Facebook's co founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to work on social change endeavors. Ms. Chan is a co founder of the school, a private institution for low income children called the Primary School. Despite the good will behind the school, it has been met with wariness. "The school is a Facebook school. It's not a city school," Mr. Bonilla said, adding that he knew he would have to move again when he heard about it. "When Facebook comes, everybody moves everywhere." Mr. Zuckerberg is already facing plenty of troubles across the globe, including questions about Russian interference on Facebook during the 2016 election. The skirmish between the couple's initiative and the R.V. community, which city officials said was becoming a flood hazard, is a reminder of how the billionaire also faces difficulties on his own doorstep. For many in East Palo Alto, which is just blocks from Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., no C.E.O. and company have come to embody the anxieties of the modern tech boom more than Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook. At a meeting last Wednesday at East Palo Alto's City Hall, about 100 residents and protesters gathered with city staff to discuss their housing and some invoked Mr. Zuckerberg's name. Wherever Mr. Zuckerberg goes in Silicon Valley, he seems to generate a housing problem. In 2014, after the tech mogul bought a house in San Francisco, neighbors complained about construction, his security detail, the parking and how his presence would inflate prices. Earlier this year, protesters marched in East Palo Alto to denounce the displacement of residents because of big tech companies like Facebook. The battles are likely to grow as Facebook continues its expansion in Menlo Park, with 1.75 million square feet of new office space expected to be built. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has also been growing, staffing up as it prepares to invest Mr. Zuckerberg's enormous fortune in efforts like his stated goal to "cure, prevent, and manage all disease." Community members expect more tension later this month at an East Palo Alto town hall hosted by Real Community Coalition, a local citizens group, and featuring Facebook. At the meeting, residents will have the opportunity to ask Facebook executives questions about the company's role in the community. "Connections are at the core of everything we do at Facebook and our relationship with residents of East Palo Alto is no different," Juan Salazar, a public policy manager for Facebook, said in a statement. The social network has been lobbying to build more housing in the region, which Silicon Valley cities, worried about traffic and preferring a commercial over residential tax base, have fought against. In East Palo Alto, Facebook has invested 18.5 million into the Catalyst Housing Fund, an affordable housing initiative; the company has set a goal to grow the fund to 75 million. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is also writing grants for affordable housing, said working side by side with local communities was "core to our work." In a statement, the Primary School said the episode with the R.V. residents was "frustrating and emblematic of larger housing issues in the Bay Area," but that it was not aware of East Palo Alto's action to evict those residents and had not engaged with city officials on the matter. "CZI's just walking into something with a lot of baggage," said Daniel Saver, a lawyer with the Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, which receives funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. "People here have been pushed around by very big interests and have been taken advantage of for decades. " Paul Bains, a pastor and president of Project WeHope, a local organization funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said that the initiative needed to figure out how to interact with wary residents. "They have to learn how to communicate with communities of color," Mr. Bains said. The recent evictions at the R.V. enclave were not requested by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said Donna Rutherford, an East Palo Alto City Council member and a former mayor of the town. Instead, city officials said the area had become a flood hazard as rains were coming and the vehicles had spilled wastewater into storm drains. Ms. Daher pointed out the future site of the school, an empty lot surrounded by a chain link fence. "This obviously is the Chan Zuckerberg location," she said. She added that the flood prone street would be rebuilt for the school, so the R.V.s would have had to move in any case. Sean Charpentier, East Palo Alto's assistant city manager, said the region had been squeezed by the wealth around it and that the homeless population had grown. "We're a receptacle for the externalities around us," he said. "It's felt more deeply here because this city was formed to provide safe and affordable housing." Patricia Lopez, 48, who owns a home on the street where the R.V.s were parked, said the trouble for the R.V. residents began after a community meeting that Facebook executives attended. "They didn't introduce themselves, but the organizer said, 'Facebook is in the house,' and they waved. And ever since then, it's been heavy harassment, heavy policing," she said, which ultimately led to the evictions. At last week's City Hall meeting, residents and protesters expressed support for the school but anxiety over the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. "The first step is to make sure quasi affiliated supposed philanthropic organizations don't set the policy," said Johannes Muenzel, 28, a software engineer who is the co chairman of Silicon Valley's Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Mr. Kirk, the Stanford student, stood in the back, organizing other students. He said he had never seen so much grass roots energy to protest among his cohort.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The Copenhagen cop Christian (Nikolaj Coster Waldau) is a pleasant fellow but not a terribly good police officer. Leaving his apartment to go on an early morning shift with his partner and pal Lars (Soren Malling), and distracted by the nude woman trying to get him to stay, Christian forgets to take his gun with him. Later, at a crime scene a grisly torture murder he borrows his partner's gun. This allows the fearsomely bearded suspect, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), to fatally assault that partner. During a rooftop chase that looks like the opening of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" reimagined as a vintage Doublemint gum ad, Christian manages to lose the borrowed weapon, too. Under other circumstances, the director, Brian De Palma, might have squeezed some mordant humor out of his protagonist's ineptitude. De Palma's career took off with the paranoid comedies "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom!" five decades back, and his filmography has encompassed horror, crime and other genres, all delivered with a sardonic edge. Even blockbuster exercises such as "Mission: Impossible" (1996) managed an acerbic undercurrent. But "Domino," arriving here after the director complained in at least one interview about the way the film's producers treated him, isn't all that unified with respect to the values it contains and excludes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Even puppets can inspire empathy: Katy Owen as Lily with her cat in "946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips." My eyes were on the sheep, and how could they not have been? With her black nose and creamy coat, this unflappable woolen creature was mellowness personified while a pack of dysfunctional humans railed around her. Her real name is Annie, and she's not quite four months old. Lounging in her spacious downstage pen, where she'd used a hoof to arrange her bedding just so, she was the lamb in Sam Shepard's "Curse of the Starving Class" at Signature Theater. It's a role so identified with the play that they sell windup sheep in the theater bookshop, and in her long scenes on the exploded kitchen set, she could hardly have seemed more at ease. And I knew as soon as he said it that he was a kindred spirit: a theater lover who worries, reflexively, whenever animals are in a play. Are they being treated well? Are they scared? These anxieties are partly for them, but also for our own gooey hearts. I say that, mind you, as someone who has always hated classic westerns because the horses fall down. As for circuses, I'll go to the kind that has only humans in it. Onstage, playwrights and directors know the power of putting animals in a show: They affect us viscerally, in ways that human actors can't. Their presence can be glorious. It can also be fraught. That's true whether the animals are live or puppets, seen onstage or (like the dog in "Yen," Off Broadway in 2017) just vividly talked about. Which sounds strange until you consider what an act of imagination theater is, how much we're projecting onto it. Still, I'd thought for years that I was the only one who braced herself against plays involving animals, particularly those in peril, or who regarded "War Horse" with dread, despite the magnificence of its puppetry. Then, a couple of seasons ago, into my inbox popped an email from a tough minded fellow critic. I'd just reviewed a show at St. Ann's Warehouse, one that it somehow hadn't occurred to me to worry about. Based, like "War Horse," on a children's book by Michael Morpurgo, "946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips" was also set in wartime, and also had a puppet animal at its center a feline named Tips, separated from the little girl who loves her. Not having seen it yet, Elisabeth Vincentelli had a bashful question: Does anything awful happen to the cat? "I have a hard time with lost animals," she added, "even offstage puppets!" We critics, some of us, are tenderer than you'd think. "I LOVE YOU FOR SAYING THAT," I wrote back. "Fear not: Tips is just fine." To be safe, though, I warned her about a mention of drowned kittens and the puppet chicken whose neck is wrung in front of us spoilers that would fit right in on a crowdsourced site Elisabeth later told me about, doesthedogdie.com. Live animals onstage inspire a species of awe. You can see it on Broadway in "The Ferryman," when the gentle Tom Kettle plucks a rabbit (real name Pierce) from his coat pocket a trick that may have grown old to his neighbors in the play but is electric for the audience: this tiny, darling, pulsing presence, all fur and vulnerability. But there's often a startle effect, too, as with that show's live goose: so large and unmistakably real that when she appears she brings an element of risk, a potential for unscripted action. What might this creature do? Because no matter how well trained she is, that bird (real name Peggy or Gertie, depending on the performance) has been drafted into a human enterprise. It matters deeply, then, how the animals in a show are being treated. (If the veteran animal trainer William Berloni's name is in the program, as it is for both "The Ferryman" and "Starving Class," I instantly relax.) One of my most uncomfortable theatergoing experiences, several seasons ago, was at an Off Off Broadway play with an increasingly distressed live chicken onstage. It was a political show, and the bird seemed to be intended as a tool of provocation, to shame any audience members who cared about its pain in a world filled with human suffering. Martin McDonagh took the opposite attitude in one of his plays, where the survival of a small fur creature in a landscape of man made carnage delivered a heart leapingly happy ending. On Broadway, the show went to some lengths to preserve the surprise, so I won't mention it by name. But it was an affecting, even ambushing, use of an animal cameo. Such grandeur is the territory where "War Horse" lives, though that show freed the imagination and sharpened it by using intricate, galloping, large scale puppets to play its animals. When we gaze on an inanimate object and imagine it sentient, we're agreeing to fill in all sorts of blanks about what it feels and thinks and wants. This is how puppet animals like Joey, the affectionate equine hero of "War Horse"; or Rose, the soulful canine romantic in Lee Breuer's "La Divina Caricatura"; or the smart and lonely ape at the center of Nick Lehane's play "Chimpanzee" climb into our hearts. The puppeteers supply movement, which is the spark of life, while we supply the sympathy. As investments go, that can have a rich payoff. Or not. I confess to having sympathized so acutely with the mammoth puppet star of "King Kong," on Broadway, that when one of his arms was badly bitten by a giant snake on Skull Island and Kong fell asleep on the wound, it demolished my suspension of disbelief. Um, wasn't that arm just hurting? Like, a lot? That's the kind of fanciful leap I tend not to be able to make with live animals onstage. I'm too aware that, in a realm of artifice, they are solidly themselves in all their catness or birdness or sheepness. My sympathy in a play like "War Horse" is with Joey, who no question about it will shred my heart before the show is done. My sympathy in a play like "Starving Class" lies not with the animal character but with the real animal in that role.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The nightshades have an ominous reputation, but this large plant family is more than just its most poisonous members, like belladonna. It contains more than 2,400 different species, including some of the most widely consumed fruits and vegetables in the world, such as potatoes, tomatoes and peppers. By analyzing the fossil record through molecular data, scientists had estimated that the nightshade family was about 30 million years old, making it a relatively young plant family. But paleontologists in the Patagonia region in Argentina have discovered 52 million year old fossilized tomatillos, which are also nightshades. The discovery could push the age of the entire plant family, perhaps, back to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Tomatillos are like the tomato's oddball cousin. They are small, green and covered in a papery husk, which makes them look like Chinese lanterns. The berry beneath the sheath is the key ingredient in a tangy, zesty salsa verde. Until now, researchers thought tomatillos first evolved about 10 million years ago. But the new findings suggest that the fruits are actually five times that old. Because tomatillos are thought to be an evolutionarily young member of the nightshade group, the recent finding suggests that the entire family may be much older than scientists had previously estimated. "The finding of the fossils extends the origins of these plants for at least 25 million more years," said Ruben Cuneo, the director of Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio in Argentina and an author of a paper on the discovery published Thursday in the journal Science. "Now we have a much better idea of the evolution of this incredible group of plants that are so important from an economic viewpoint in the modern world." Peter Wilf, a paleobotanist from Pennsylvania State University and the paper's lead author, collected the two fossils in 2002 and 2006 while exploring a site at Laguna del Hunco in Chubut Province, Argentina, with a team of researchers. Millions of years ago, the area was near a lake that had been formed in a volcano's caldera and was surrounded by rainforest and teeming with prehistoric life. Now the remnants of those prehistoric plants and animals are preserved in the endless dry and desolate hills. "There are white rocks that are jam packed full of fossils, so many fossils that people cry when they see them," Dr. Wilf said. "I've never seen so many beautiful fossils in one place." To determine what the fossil was, he and his team compared it with more than 100 living nightshade species as well as several plants outside of the family. It was through careful morphological analysis that the team determined that the fossils belonged to a newly discovered species of tomatillo, within the nightshade family. He said that when he first saw the fossils he was surprised that the plant's delicate husks had been preserved, that the veins on the husks were visible and that the berry, now black and turned to coal, was also present. He and his team named it Physalis infinemundi. No other fossilized fruit from the nightshade family had ever been found before, Dr. Wilf said. Only fossilized seeds had told the story of the family's evolutionary history. "The initial discovery was a very big O.M.G. moment," he said. "I was like, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Could it be? Could it be? Could it be? Really? Really? Really?' Then I just went nuts." He said the findings suggested that the nightshade family originated much earlier than previously thought, and that it was well diversified during a time when South America was attached to Antarctica and Australia as the supercontinent Gondwana. It also shows that tomatillos had husks millions of years ago, which he said could have helped shield the berries from rain and kept them afloat if they fell into the water. "This is an outstanding advancement in our understanding of the history of the tomato and potato family," Steven R. Manchester, a curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, said in an email. He said the fossils appear to share the same unique features of the tomatillo genus Physalis. "As it matches this living genus so perfectly, its position as a member of the nightshade/tomato family is quite secure." Tiina Sarkinen, a molecular biologist and plant taxonomist from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh said in an email that the fossils clearly showed that the nightshade family existed 52 million years ago. But she said it was still possible that the fossils were an earlier, diverging relative of the tomatillo genus, related to the group but not a member of it. "Whether the fossils truly are an extinct relative of the tomatillo is the big question," she said. "It is exciting to think this is a past relative of what we now eat in our salsas."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Q. How do you take a screenshot of just a single window on the Mac, and is there a way to get rid of that fake shadow around it? A. While the keyboard shortcut of the Command, Shift and 3 keys pressed together takes a picture of the Mac's entire screen, pressing the Command, Shift and 4 keys allows you to select a specific area of the screen to capture. If you press the Command, Shift and 4 keys and then press the space bar immediately, you can click the highlighted window to take a cropped screenshot of just that window.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II By Sonia Purnell "A Homeric tale" is how Sonia Purnell describes the life of , and that sounds about right. Certainly, hers was a story that must have been muttered about on hillsides, in the dark, by warriors, for Hall emerged from a middle class American background to become one of the greatest figures of World War II: "the Madonna of the Mountains," a hero who helped liberate France. There were early signs of independent mindedness the young Virginia "once wore a bracelet of live snakes" to school, Purnell writes in her captivating new biography of Hall, "A Woman of No Importance" but in early adulthood she submitted to her mother's ambitions to mold her into a society girl. Brief experiences at Radcliffe and Barnard proved enough, however, and soon Hall was in Europe, enduring a succession of disappointing jobs at embassies and losing her left leg in a hunting accident. And yet the prosthetic replacement she dubbed "Cuthbert" didn't prevent her from becoming an ambulance driver in France when the war broke out; nor slow her down when a chance encounter put her in touch with the man setting up a new British secret service. The Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., had a remit to "set Europe ablaze," and while Hall seemed an ideal candidate as a neutral American, she could travel around France quite openly many barriers remained, not least her sex. But outdated sensitivities came to her aid. "Traditionally," Purnell notes, "British secret services had drawn from a shallow gene of posh boys raised on imperial adventure stories" (much like the British acting profession today), and many new recruits backed away in horror on learning that they were essentially expected to become assassins. Having witnessed early gatherings of National Socialists in Vienna, Hall had fewer qualms, and found herself in Vichy controlled Lyon shortly before careless tradecraft led to local S.O.E. agents being rounded up by the Vichy police.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
BuzzFeed News has pulled a political correspondent from the White House press pool, citing concerns that the area has become a coronavirus hot zone after President Trump, many of his top aides including the press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and several journalists have tested positive for the virus. A BuzzFeed News spokesman, Matt Mittenthal, confirmed that the company on Tuesday had withdrawn the correspondent, Kadia Goba, from her Wednesday shift out of concern for her safety. The spokesman added that BuzzFeed News was awaiting further guidance from the White House Correspondents' Association. Reporters rotate into the White House press pool, a group of journalists that represents the wider corps to share coverage of the president and the day's events. The pool includes representatives of wire news services, newspapers and news sites, as well as television and radio outlets. "Anyone that knows me understands I'd rather be at the White House working today," Ms. Goba said, "but at the same time, there are obvious concerns about working indoors during an outbreak." She added, "I don't want to be knocked out for the rest of the election because I'm sick." After BuzzFeed News notified other news organizations on Tuesday that its reporter would not work her shift, an email circulated among members of the press pool asking for someone to fill in. "We are in uncharted territory," Todd J. Gillman, the Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News, who coordinates the print pool, wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times. "No one wants anyone to take unwarranted risk," he added. "Nor do we want the pool system to collapse." The Politico White House reporter Meridith McGraw volunteered for press pool duty and covered the White House in place of the BuzzFeed correspondent on Wednesday. "Politico has taken, and will continue to take, all necessary precautions to keep our journalists and staff as safe as possible," Politico said in a statement. "Witnessing events unfolding at the White House is valuable for us, the press corps, Americans, and the world at such a critical moment in our nation's history. We will continue to follow WHCA guidelines on safely reporting from the White House as the situation continues to develop." In addition to the president and Ms. McEnany, the coronavirus outbreak has ensnared nearly a dozen members of the Trump administration. Two other members of the White House press team, including a relative of Ms. McEnany's, are known to have tested positive. At least three journalists who have covered the White House reported that they were infected, including Michael D. Shear, a reporter at The Times. 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. In a statement on Wednesday, the White House Correspondents' Association said that dozens of tests had been conducted on members of its press corps since Friday, and that there had been no additional cases of the coronavirus. The association continued to encourage the wearing of masks and the use of regular testing on Wednesday, and said it had pushed the White House to give the press corps more information about known infections so that journalists could evaluate the risk. "Still, despite everything we've experienced in recent days, it would be foolish of us to assume that the situation at the White House or on the campaign trail will improve dramatically over the coming four weeks," the statement said. "That means that we as a press corps, and each of us individually, must be cleareyed about the potential risks of Covid exposure on the job, taking every precaution we can to fulfill our coverage obligations while being prepared for situations with which we may not be comfortable." The White House Correspondents' Association statement also said that reporters "have worked under challenging circumstances to sustain the pool" during the pandemic, while noting that the press pool is "vital to the American public." Still, the statement said, "we would also strongly encourage all journalists to avoid working from the White House grounds entirely if it can be avoided."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Wilson's work, never far off the radar, has been especially prominent in recent months, with "Jitney" playing on Broadway and the film version of "Fences," starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, earning four Oscar nominations. In an essay in Spin magazine in 1990, Wilson wrote about his insistence that the film version of "Fences" have a black director. (It was first optioned in 1987.) Wilson wrote that the job "requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans." Given that view, Ms. Hartigan, in a telephone interview, addressed the fact that she is white. "I interviewed him many times about this subject, and I know how strongly he felt about it," she said. "And I think my knowledge of his work and my experience with him over the years adds a depth to the biography that perhaps someone who isn't immersed in theater wouldn't bring to the project." She also highlighted the importance of the editorial team behind the book. "It takes a collaboration of editor and author to write a book, and I am honored to be working with Dawn Davis, who has championed multiculturalism in the book world," Ms. Hartigan said. Ms. Davis, the publisher of 37 INK, previously spent many years running Amistad, the imprint at HarperCollins focused on African American literature. Asked about Wilson's papers, which are in Seattle, Ms. Hartigan said that she was eager to see the breadth of material. "There's early poetry, which isn't well known at all," she said. "He took notes everywhere on paper plates, napkins and they have all of that. Early drafts of plays, plays he wrote but never got produced."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
MANCHESTER, England The first ball floated backward, spinning and arcing toward the net. For a second, it hung in the air, a foot or so above the white goal line. Manchester City, Liverpool, the Etihad Stadium crowd all held their breath. And then John Stones reached it, and sent it as far away from himself, from danger, as he could. Anthony Taylor, the referee, checked his watch for the goal line technology reading that would determine if the entire ball had crossed the line before Stones reached it. He waited. Everyone waited. He shook his head. The slightest sliver of orange and purple leather had remained above the line less than an inch. City could breathe again. That is how it felt when Taylor blew his whistle, confirming that Sane's goal had been enough to seal a 2 1 victory for Pep Guardiola's team, enough to end Liverpool's 19 game unbeaten run, enough to evaporate the faint aura of invincibility that had started to attach itself to Jurgen Klopp's team. Manchester City's players sank to their knees in ecstasy. The stands bounced and heaved. Guardiola just moments removed from berating Martin Atkinson, the fourth official, for some perceived error by Taylor embraced his coaching staff, and hugged his players. More from Rory Smith: David Silva, Manchester City's Key Piece, Is Now More Valuable Than Ever Later, Guardiola would be asked if his captain, Vincent Kompany, should have been sent off, instead of receiving just a yellow card, for a first half foul on Mohamed Salah: another fine line, another slender margin. Guardiola did not want to contemplate such a question "on a night like this," he said. This was the moment, manager and players and fans had decided, on which the whole season would turn, when the slightest differences could have seismic consequences. Guardiola had made clear, in the days beforehand, that this was a game Manchester City could not afford to lose. It would, he believed, be "impossible" to catch up to a team as good as Liverpool maybe the best in the world, he called Klopp's side, trying to kill his foe with kindness if it won and secured a 10 point lead with 17 games to play. The fans clearly felt the same way. As City cantered to the championship last season, the Etihad was a contented, mellow sort of place quietly confident in its own obvious superiority. There was little tension, no drama. Against Liverpool, under pressure, it was raucous and angry, possessed of the same manic energy that infused Guardiola's players. By the end, that energy had transformed into jubilation. Trailing Liverpool by four points, as City does now, is hardly ideal; a month ago, most people connected to City would have been hard pressed to even imagine such a situation. But when the damage could have been so much worse, it felt like a blessing. City can celebrate all that it has gained; it need not worry about the ground it had lost. Four points is a couple of bad afternoons over the course of five long months. Four points is a lapse of focus in the league because of the demands of the Champions League. Four points is an unfortunate injury, or a needless sending off. It is the bounce of a ball. It is a fine line, a slender margin. It is particularly precarious now, in what the Premier League has become: a two tier competition in which, every week, six elite teams demonstrate their superiority over what are in theory their peers, but their pawns in practice. The pace that Liverpool, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur in third, just six points off the lead have set this year has been historic. Last season City became the first ever side to pick up 100 points in a season. Both Guardiola's team and Klopp's side could reach that mark this year. Both win so remorselessly that what would qualify in ordinary circumstances as a perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, result say, drawing away from home against a team pushing for a European place may instead be a knockout blow. Logic seems to suggest that City is better placed to deal with those terms than Liverpool. Guardiola's team, after all, knows what it takes to get to 100 points. It has proved it can win, week after week, for months at a time. Despite Liverpool's smart (and expensive) recruitment, City's playing resources remain deeper; Guardiola has more options at his disposal for the long slog of spring. More important, perhaps, City is not encumbered with the weight of history. It is not trying to win a championship for the first time in 29 years, trying to lift a curse, to escape the ghosts that Liverpool is trying to escape. As the denouement comes closer, Liverpool's desperation will mount, mistakes will creep in, and points will slip away. City, the champion three times this decade, has no such reason to worry. It is not, though, quite so simple as that. The next few months are as much a test of City's nerve as Liverpool's. No team came close to keeping pace with Guardiola's team last year. It sauntered to the title, setting itself the vaguely artificial target of getting a century of points just to stay motivated. This season represents a different sort of challenge, one in which City's standards and its focus cannot slip, one in which it has a rival that has so far, at least been able to match its relentlessness. City has the head to head advantage, winning here and drawing in autumn at Liverpool's Anfield. Narrow or not, it can regard itself as the better of the two teams.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SAN ANTONIO Ask Phyllis Causey what time she goes to lunch, and the third grade teacher will give a very specific answer: 11:55 a.m. "I live on a timer," she said. Every minute is accounted for in her meticulously planned workdays. To some extent, that is true every school year. But last fall, for the first time in her 12 years of teaching, 23 students were enrolled in her San Antonio elementary school class making those minutes even more precious. "As a teacher, when you know you are planning the day out for 23 kids, every single minute counts," she said. "It's an art and a science to balance out everybody." Many Texas teachers have found themselves in a similar predicament. Texas Education Agency data for the 2011 12 school year show that the number of elementary classes exceeding the 22 1 student teacher ratio has soared to 8,479 from 2,238 last school year. Texas has had the 22 student cap for kindergarten through fourth grade classes since 1984, and districts can apply for exemptions for financial reasons. But during the 2011 legislative session, to ease the pain of a roughly 5.4 billion reduction in state financing that did not account for the estimated influx of 170,000 new students over the next two years and after an attempt to do away with the cap failed lawmakers made those exemptions easier to obtain. Texas schools, which have shed approximately 25,000 employees this school year, including more than 10,000 teachers, have jumped at the chance to trim costs. Research is mixed on the effect of class size on learning, but many educators agree that adding just two students to an already full classroom can intensify the challenge for teachers. Some worry that increasing class sizes hurts the neediest students most. Budget cuts have affected all of the state's 1,200 plus school districts and charters, but the 102 fastest growing districts, which have absorbed 92 percent of the growth in student population since 2007, have been hit the hardest by increasing class sizes. About 46 percent of these fast growth districts have campuses with waivers, compared with 28 percent of non fast growth districts, according to an analysis of T.E.A. data by the Fast Growth School Coalition. The coalition advocates for districts that have an enrollment of at least 2,500 and have grown by at least 10 percent or have added 3,500 students over the past five years. Those districts educate about 40 percent of the state's students. In the past, these schools have been able to add staff members and build facilities as the number of students increases. But now, even as the student body continues to grow, the schools have had to drop employees and delay building projects to cut costs, said David Vroonland, the chairman of the coalition and superintendent of the Frenship Independent School District, outside Lubbock. His district has avoided requesting class size exemptions for now, but he expects that to change next year. "We're anticipating we'll be at 24 or above," he said. "And there's very little we can do about it." Some fast growth districts may be better prepared to take on larger classes, because they have had to plan for ever increasing student populations, and they are already familiar with methods like dividing students into smaller groups for instruction. In Northside I.S.D., where Ms. Causey teaches, 64 campuses had requested class size waivers as of early February. Brian Woods, the district's deputy superintendent for administration, said the district is used to dealing with more students, who enroll throughout the year. What is different this year, he said, is that the budget has made it more difficult to hire a new teacher when a class hits 23 students. The district has an internal policy to keep class enrollment in kindergarten through second grade at 23 students or fewer, he said. Third and fourth grades, he said, allow for 24 students. If all of the classes at an elementary school have hit those numbers, he said, as a last resort the district transfers students to a different school, which is usually farther from their homes. "We just flat don't do that," Mr. Woods said of exceeding the 24 student limit. "Our classrooms aren't built to hold that number of students." His district, the state's fourth largest, eliminated 973 positions this school year. Mr. Woods said that many of those were support positions staff members who helped teachers reach children who need extra attention or who struggle with language. "Students struggling at 22 to 1 who are now sitting in a class of 23, that's not a dramatic difference," he said, "But the person that was there last year to help them with their math and help them with their reading who may not be there now, there is a dramatic impact for that child." About 90 minutes north on Interstate 35, Leander I.S.D. has designed classrooms in its newer buildings to handle larger classes in anticipation of rapid growth they are shaped like an L to create strategic pockets of space for small group work and to reduce potential distractions. Faubion Elementary was not built for such growth. Many of the rooms in the school, which was converted from an open classroom concept building, are small and windowless. Patti Mosser, who teaches at Faubion, has 24 students in her third grade class, 6 more than she had last school year. As her students filed in one Friday after recess, they pushed the desks which are carefully arranged in the one configuration Ms. Mosser has found that they all fit to clear space on the carpet in the center of the room. With Ms. Mosser and a student teacher, there was barely enough room for all to sit cross legged for their weekly class meeting. "It is what it is," she said. "We just have to do a lot of creative grouping." Things have improved since the beginning of the year, Ms. Mosser said, when she felt like she was "being pulled in all directions from nurse to counselor to referee." With almost 28 years of teaching experience, she knew to establish firm expectations about behavior and classroom procedures from the start, and her students have become more self sufficient. However, if she were a first year teacher, she said, her perspective would be different. Still, her students did not seem to notice the crowded classroom. In fact, when her class recently added its 24th student, she said, they were excited to have a new face. Ms. Causey also said she thought many of her students were doing fine with the extra bodies in the classroom. But she worried about the children for whom school is a "safe place" the only place where an adult listens to them, where they get warm meals and feel secure. "If you get a lot of children like that in the classroom, it's really going to hurt them because you can't spend as much time with them as they need," she said. "It will change the way instruction looks."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
A greatest hits compilation of the British Empire (Ms. Eason occasionally scolds its carefree colonialism), the book isn't actually much of a travelogue. Fogg doesn't go in for sightseeing and neither especially does Verne. But how exhilarating it must have been, in an era before discount cruises and air travel, when most readers would count themselves lucky to journey a town or two away. How thrilling is it now? Still pretty thrilling. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter. Ingeniously directed by Theresa Heskins and stylishly designed by Lis Evans (the set is a citadel of suitcases), the production borrows techniques from story theater and devised theater to create country after country with just music, lights and a few hand props. At its best, which is pretty often, it has a childlike sensibility, creating a delightful elephant out of a cloak, a credible shipboard scene with just a couple of tilting chairs and a life preserver. The four other actors whiz in and out of character so fast jet lag feels like a legitimate risk. Not all of the secondary figures are fully realized and the lone American character subscribes to the yeehaw agenda but it's still a neat trick, as is the deft stage magic. Ms. Eason's script, precise and purposeful, doesn't talk down to children. If it avoids any icky kissing, it includes a scene set in an opium den. (Parents will enjoy explaining the line about "a curious local tobacco.") The show sometimes takes the adventure plot so seriously that it forgets to allow for silliness, though the giddy moments, most of them courtesy of Mr. Hugo's darling Passepartout, seemed to delight the children most. Well, that and the elephant. Sure, a kid in front of me kept turning on his phone, but the show makes a brilliant case for imaginative play, for how you can create a world to circumnavigate with just a few blankets and pillows and a dress up bin. (O.K., a light plot and a decent sound system help a lot. But still.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Are we on our way to becoming a single sex species? In "Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome," the choreographer Michelle Ellsworth considers the possibility, building on her body of jubilantly absurd yet pragmatically minded work. (Her past projects include an online inventory of pseudospiritual paraphernalia and a video archive of motivational talks.) "Preparation," which draws inspiration from the folklorist Alan Lomax and recent genetic research, digests cultural lore through gestural choreography, a "male gaze simulator" and other witty devices. The production is one of 23 presented by American Realness, an 11 day festival of contemporary performance at Abrons Arts Center. Other highlights include Miguel Gutierrez's "Age Beauty Part 2," which confronts the plight of the midcareer artist, and Tere O'Connor's "Undersweet," a duet exploring the repression and expression of sexual desire. (Michelle Ellsworth and Tere O'Connor: Monday through Wednesday; Miguel Gutierrez: Monday through next Sunday; the festival runs through next Sunday, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side, 866 811 4111, americanrealness.com.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The average citizen of Nepal consumes about 100 kilowatt hours of electricity in a year. Cambodians make do with 160. Bangladeshis are better off, consuming, on average, 260. Then there is the fridge in your kitchen. A typical 20 cubic foot refrigerator Energy Star certified, to fit our environmentally conscious times runs through 300 to 600 kilowatt hours a year. American diplomats are upset that dozens of countries including Nepal, Cambodia and Bangladesh have flocked to join China's new infrastructure investment bank, a potential rival to the World Bank and other financial institutions backed by the United States. The reason for the defiance is not hard to find: The West's environmental priorities are blocking their access to energy. A typical American consumes, on average, about 13,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. The citizens of poor countries including Nepalis, Cambodians and Bangladeshis may not aspire to that level of use, which includes a great deal of waste. But they would appreciate assistance from developed nations, and the financial institutions they control, to build up the kind of energy infrastructure that could deliver the comfort and abundance that Americans and Europeans enjoy. Too often, the United States and its allies have said no. The United States relies on coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear power for about 95 percent of its electricity, said Todd Moss, from the Center for Global Development. "Yet we place major restrictions on financing all four of these sources of power overseas." This conflict is not merely playing out in the strategic maneuvering of the United States and China as they engage in a struggle for influence on the global stage. Of far greater consequence is the way the West's environmental agenda undermines the very goals it professes to achieve and threatens to advance devastating climate change rather than retard it. "It is about pragmatism, about trade offs," said Barry Brook, professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania in Australia. "Most societies will not follow low energy, low development paths, regardless of whether they work or not to protect the environment." "We shouldn't be talking about 10 villages that got power for a light bulb," said Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University in India who was among the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. "What we should be talking about," she said, "is how the village got a power connection for a cold storage facility or an industrial park." Changing the conversation will not be easy. Our world of seven billion people expected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century will require an entirely different environmental paradigm. On Tuesday, a group of scholars involved in the environmental debate, including Professor Roy and Professor Brook, Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., issued what they are calling the "Eco modernist Manifesto." Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The "eco modernists" propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of "sustainable development," supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity's footprint by using nature more intensively. "Natural systems will not, as a general rule, be protected or enhanced by the expansion of humankind's dependence upon them for sustenance and well being," they wrote. To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than "intensifying many human activities particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world." As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature "by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it." This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world's surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water. As the manifesto notes, as much as three quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity was supposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half. "If we want the developing world to reach even half our level of development we can't do it without strategies to intensify production," said Harvard's David Keith, a signer of the new manifesto. Development would allow people in the world's poorest countries to move into cities as they did decades ago in rich nations and get better educations and jobs. Urban living would accelerate demographic transitions, lowering infant mortality rates and allowing fertility rates to decline, taking further pressure off the planet. "By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re wild and re green the Earth even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends," the manifesto argues. This, whether we like it or not, would require lots of energy. Windmills or biofuels would put large swaths of the earth's surface in the service of energy production, so they have only limited usefulness. Solar panels and nuclear plants, by contrast, could eventually provide carbon free energy on a very large scale. The new strategy, of course, presents big challenges. Notably, it requires improving the safety of nuclear reactors and bringing down their price. Solar energy at scale requires new energy storage technologies. "Decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutions alongside those changes," says the manifesto. Until they are developed, poor countries will require access to other forms of energy including hydroelectric power from dams, natural gas, perhaps even coal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
American families shored up their savings substantially between 2016 and 2019, according to Federal Reserve data released on Monday, but wealth inequality remained stubbornly high and that was before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. Median net worth climbed by 18 percent in those three years, the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances showed, as median family income increased by 5 percent. The survey, which began in 1989, is released every three years and is the gold standard in data about the financial circumstances of households. It offers the most up to date and comprehensive snapshot of everything from savings to stock ownership across demographic groups. The figures tell a story of improving personal finances fueled by income gains and rising home prices, the legacy of the longest U.S. economic expansion on record, one that had pushed the unemployment rate to a half century low and bolstered wages for those earning the least. Yet many Americans had less in savings than they did before the last recession a decade ago and yawning gaps persisted the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent of households was still near a three decade high. Nearly all of the data in the 2019 survey were collected before the onset of the coronavirus. Economists worry that progress for disadvantaged workers has probably reversed in recent months as the pandemic related shutdowns threw millions of people out of work. The crisis has especially cost minority and less educated employees, who are more likely to work in high interaction jobs at restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues. Inequality appears to be poised to widen as lower earners fare the worst. Employment remains sharply depressed compared with before the pandemic, leaving many households in a more precarious position. Stock market indexes have rebounded, which should help to support household wealth, but the benefits will mostly accrue to the rich. Only about half of Americans hold stocks, the survey showed. "Without a doubt, it will worsen," Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a former Fed economist, said of inequality. "We know that the skew of the unemployment is toward lower income, more economically vulnerable people." Before the pandemic hit, Michelle Bernier was finally rebuilding after a lost decade. Ms. Bernier, 47, was injured shortly before the last recession and lost her job at a nursing home in Lewiston, Me. By the time she was well enough to work again, the economy had collapsed, and she and her husband had to rely on food stamps. By last year, however, things were looking up. She had a job she loved, as a home nurse, and was earning 20 an hour. "I was doing pretty good, not great, but pretty good," she said. "We had groceries, we had our car, we had our house. We had what we needed and we had extra money to play with." Coronavirus wiped it all away. Her clients no longer wanted outsiders coming to their homes, meaning Ms. Bernier was out of work. The extra 600 a week in unemployment benefits from the federal government kept her afloat for a while. But that supplement ended in July, and she isn't sure how she will get by without it. The bill collectors that she thought she had shaken are already hounding her again. "So here I am stuck without a job again and floundering, trying to figure out what my next career will be," she said. The newly released data suggest that families with lower pretax incomes, like Ms. Bernier's, were catching up to their richer counterparts between 2016 and 2019. The bottom 90 percent of the income distribution actually saw its share of overall earnings increase slightly in 2019 reversing a decade long decline. Even so, a Fed analysis noted that the rebound happened from record lows. And even at a moment when tighter labor markets were translating into more broadly shared prosperity, divides in wealth savings amassed over time, rather than the money a family earns in a given year remained high. 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. In 1989, the top 1 percent of wealth holders held about 30 percent of the nation's net worth. That had jumped to nearly 40 percent in 2016 and was little changed in the latest survey, Fed economists said. While wealth did climb slightly for those in the bottom half of the distribution, the poorer half of American families held just about 1 percent of the nation's savings in 2019, the Fed data and a related report showed. Only the richest 10 percent held more wealth in 2019 than on the eve of the 2007 to 2009 recession, based on the release, though broad based progress was beginning to take hold. "The late recovery from the Great Recession was finally starting to help people at the bottom a little bit," said Ernie Tedeschi, policy economist at Evercore ISI. The pandemic recession "is definitely a setback. I hope that it's a setback we can get through faster than we did after the Great Recession." Financial assets have long been particularly concentrated in the hands of the rich, and that trend persisted through 2019. The median family with stocks among the wealthiest 10 percent held about 780,000 in them, directly or indirectly, last year. The median family in the bottom quarter with stocks held a little more than 2,000, the data showed. The percentage of lower wealth households that held some stocks climbed, but remained far lower than for the rich. About 94 percent of the wealthiest families hold stocks, compared to one of every five households in the bottom 25 percent. That means that while lower wealth families may have been less touched by stock market declines in the spring, they also did not benefit nearly as much when prices surged this summer. President Trump often highlights the stock market's performance as a signal of success, but the data reinforce that it does not speak to how many Americans are doing financially.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Disney's live action take on "Mulan" has no need for songs or wisecracking dragons, but there is still one notable holdover from the 1998 animated version that inspired it: Ming Na Wen, the actress who originally voiced Mulan, appears at the end of the new film in a cameo role. After the villain's plot is foiled and the brave warrior Mulan (played by Yifei Liu) reveals her gender to the troops she fought alongside while dressed as a man, she is brought to the throne room of the emperor for a celebration. That's when Wen comes in, oh so briefly: Billed in the credits as "Esteemed Guest," she introduces Mulan to the emperor, bows and departs. Though it had been scheduled for a March 27 release in theaters before the pandemic, "Mulan" debuted on Disney over the weekend. Still, Wen delights in the reaction her surprise cameo got at the film's premiere back in March, before Hollywood went into shutdown. "I hope even though it's streaming, it can still have that impact," she said in a phone call last week. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. You heard through the grapevine that Disney is going to do a live action "Mulan." What happened next? It all started with the fans tweeting about it, saying, "You have to be a part of it!" I asked my manager and my agent if that would be a possibility because I thought that would be kind of fun. Then I met with the producer Jason Reed and he loved the idea, but at that time I was doing "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," so scheduling wise, it was kind of a logistical nightmare because "Mulan" was shooting in New Zealand. They had written a scene for me to be a part of, but the schedule just didn't work out. What was that going to be? I was going to be the potential mother in law for the matchmaker scene, but because of the weather, they needed me to be out there for a month just in case. The producers of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." just threw up their hands: "We can't lose you for a month!" I totally understood, and I'm always very Zen about this stuff. I said, "Look, if it was meant to me be, it was meant to be. We all tried, and it's too bad." So we sort of let it go, and then Jason and Niki Caro, the director came up with this great idea where instead of shooting an entire scene, I'd just make a cameo at the very end to announce Mulan to the emperor. I thought that was very appropriate and just wonderful, a little Easter egg where I could pass the baton. And this time, they only needed me there for a week. So it all worked out! And the dress they put you in was pretty breathtaking. Oh, the details of it were extraordinary. In the week I was there, we landed and immediately went into fittings and hair and makeup tests. We went through three different looks, and the first one was extremely elaborate, with a huge hairdo that had a ton of artifacts in the hair. Niki wanted it more like the image of the animated Mulan, so we kept trying to figure out how to transform that look into something that made sense. But yes, I felt delicious in that outfit! What did they tell you about your character? She was probably one of the relatives of the emperor, whether she married into that high status or not. I had a week to come up with something it was a whirlwind. I remember I was joking around with Donnie Yen and I said, "Hey Donnie, you've done a lot of these period pieces, right? What would be an appropriate way to bow?" And he was like, "I don't know!" So I had to summon all my memories of growing up watching these incredible, epic movies that my mom would take us to in Chinatown, when I lived in New York. There was a certain essence to the way these women walked that was quite different than, say, "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." I did let out a little yelp when I saw you. That's what happened at the premiere! I'm so happy you squealed. That's what it's about, right? I'm just sad that the fans don't get to see this on a large screen, because Niki Caro did this brilliant job creating this imagery. I really hope that in the future, they can do a limited rerelease in theaters. Was it a full circle moment to go to the "Mulan" premiere 22 years after the animated film debuted? I couldn't have foreseen any of it. At the time, I thought Disney was taking a huge risk by doing an animated film that was ethnically diverse and based on foreign folklore. The fact that it still speaks to the current generation of kids makes me think this movie is going to blow them away. You know, it's so sad that recently Chadwick Boseman passed away, and just seeing all the love for what he created as the king T'Challa in "Black Panther," it's very affecting, because that's what "Mulan" was like for our community and Asians in general. What was it like for you to win the role back in the day? I was excited because I'm a huge Disney geek. I remember reading the full script and thinking, "OK, she's 16 or 17 and I'm in my 20s, so I'd better make her sound younger." When I went in for the first recording session, I did this young voice, and the director and producer in the room were like, "Ming? Uh, what are you doing? We hired you for your voice." I'd never done voice over before, so I had no idea that you record by yourself before they even animate it, and that it would be a three year process. I know a lot of queer and trans fans saw themselves in Mulan, too. I was blown away when these beautiful young women and boys from the LGBTQ community would come up to me crying because Mulan was a representation for them, and they latched on to the images of her transforming herself into a boy. There was so much about the film that was an extra plus like that. I'm sure Yifei is going to get incredible accolades as the live action Mulan, but I hope everyone will still have a little place in their hearts for the animated Mulan. I mean, at least she cut her hair! Laughs A lot of moms would come up to me and say, "My daughter cut her hair because of you." I got a few of those complaints. What did you say to them? Do you think you'll keep voicing Mulan in future projects and spinoffs, or will Yifei take over those duties? Oh, gosh. Yifei and I will have to duke it out! I feel a little possessive in that way about wanting to keep Mulan consistent, wanting to have her be voiced by me. She's my baby. They'll ask, "Can we use your voice for a stuffed animal?" and I'll say, "Yeah, sure." I have such a loyalty to Mulan's fans that I will always say yes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Jewelry can send powerful signals. Dr. Sarah Burton, who teaches writing at Cambridge University, said that historically, when powerful men gave jewelry to women, it was a badge of ownership. But "when women give each other jewelry, they are reclaiming the beauty of the thing itself: It's an emblem not of patriarchy but of sisterhood." Sometimes the bonds of sisterhood go way back. "We were all at Wellesley together," said Cavan Mahony, a fashion, beauty and lifestyle consultant living in London. "There's a group of about 10 of us who see each other regularly." And they all have jewelry designed by their college mate, Catherine Prevost, one of London's small luxury jewelers. "There's no greater person to show her jewelry than Catherine," Ms. Mahony said of her friend. "She wears her rings and everybody goes crazy." Although her friends collect everything the jeweler makes, the bold rings with their strong sculptural shapes, are especially popular. "They're dramatic without being over the top. And you can wear them everywhere, with everything. When I travel, people always ask about them. They're fun to wear and trigger conversations. All of our friends have at least one of her rings." It's as if the rings provide entry to a private club. "When we go to lunch we compare our rings," Ms. Mahony continued. "'What's that one? I don't have it, I need to get one.' It feels like we share the same exciting secret insight into something special. We have a friend with such great talent, and we're women who recognize it." Wearing the same jewelry can be a cultural bond. Annie Yang Zhou may have met her friends in New York City when they were all working or studying there, but the natives of Shanghai, Huangshan, Guizhou and Beijing now all live in Beijing. And they all have pearls. Looking appropriate on the job is essential to her. Ms. Zhou, who holds graduate degrees from Oxford and Columbia and studied at Sciences Po in Paris, describes herself as an entrepreneur with her own "cross border investment consulting business." She also is a member of the National Committee on U.S. China Relations. Her friends are her support system; "we have our own Wechat group, GG xoxo" in honor of the "Gossip Girl" TV series. The group takes trips together, traveling to Seoul, Dubai and Shanghai, all wearing their pearls. "I'm serious about playfulness," Annemarie Steen said. The resident of Veldhoven, the Netherlands, started a business, Steentrain, and travels internationally to introduce businesses to the benefits of playfulness. So it should come as no surprise that her favorite piece of jewelry, and that of her like minded friends, is a leather wrist strap that has snaps on it allowing the wearer to add a personalized selection of charms to snap on or off. "You're buying individuality when you choose your own chunks," she said, which is what the company that makes the jewelry, Noosa Amsterdam, calls the charms. The connecting thread is the local boutique, Lot 7, that sells the bracelets. The owner is a friend, and Ms. Steen and other friends of the owner support her by shopping there for their clothing and accessories. "The style is feminine in a confident way, not too girly," she said. The leather straps are all over town. "If you go into a bar in Veldhoven and you see someone else with a Noosa bracelet you connect and compare, 'Which chunks did you choose?' 'Oh, you went to Lot 7, too.' You connect through the similar style reference." Hilary Adams Zwicky keeps her jewelry sisterhood all in the family. Well, her good friend, Michele Tortorelli Kearns, is almost family; she lives next door in the same Fifth Avenue co op building. Her daughter, Alexandra Adams Zwicky, belongs. And her husband, Henry, began the sisterhood when he bought his wife an Hermes enamel bangle seven years ago for Christmas. Now, all the women collect Hermes enamel bangles. "I loved it," Ms. Zwicky said of the bangle that started the ball rolling. "It's classic." And it's logo free: "It doesn't have someone's name all over it." The bangles come in a wide range of colors, widths and designs that practically beg to be collected. Mr. Zwicky realized he had scored a hit, and gave Mrs. Zwicky another Hermes enamel bangle for her next birthday. When the couple were wondering what to give their daughter for a present, the answer was staring them on Ms. Zwicky's wrist: an Hermes enamel bangle. Alexandra loved it. Her then boyfriend bought her another one for Christmas. Alexandra now has five ("Not too shabby," her mother said) and sometimes borrows her mother's two, or swaps with her to mix up the collection of colors on her wrist. Ms. Kearns owns six of the bangles. "She always liked mine and her husband Tom, not to be outdone, gave her one for her birthday. Then for Christmas. For anniversaries," Ms. Zwicky explained. But credit for creating the sisterhood goes to Ms. Zwicky's husband. "Henry started a trend," she said. "It's a bonding thing, and it feels great." "The design is elegant," she said. The motif, which the jeweler calls a "lucky charm," is scalloped, like a four leaf clover. It's expensive, too, but the Dubai resident maintained, "It's a good investment." Ms. Manji now has four pieces. Her first was a pair of stud earrings, which she bought because "you can wear them with everything." She also has a ring, and long necklaces that are perfect to "wear over an abaya." The Alhambra collection comes in a variety of gemstones and colors, but Ms. Manji favors the white mother of pearl; "it is easy to match with all my outfits and it looks polished and elegant without looking over the top. It's good for travel," she said. She travels a lot. She founded RR Co, a luxury management and consultancy firm for the Middle East. She has worked with fashion luminaries like Tom Ford and Tory Burch; Christian Louboutin named the "Rosemin heel" after her.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Schumann is among the most celebrated names in the classical music canon for most people conjuring the poetic and intense work of Robert Schumann, the Romantic master. But when the Schumann in question is his wife, Clara, the name should remind us most of the frustrating lack of recognition still accorded female composers. Not that she has gone ignored. Indeed, Clara Schumann whose 200th birthday arrives on Sept. 13 was a celebrity pianist in her own time; the music she wrote is a recognized part of the narrative of 19th century musical Romanticism. But to this day, references to Clara are routinely centered on considerations of Robert's life and music not to mention gossipy speculation about her relationship with Brahms, a close friend of the couple to the detriment of her own creative achievements. "When I was growing up, I first learned about Clara from reading about Robert Schumann," the pianist Lara Downes said in an interview. The experience immediately resonated, she added, because she had found a classical music figure who looked like her, and could be a role model. As a teenage virtuoso, Ms. Downes determined to track down Clara's music and played her Piano Concerto in A minor with a small regional orchestra in Alabama. That was considered unusual at the time , in the mid 1990s. "I was fortunate to have teachers when I was really young who let me explore repertoire off the beaten path," said Ms. Downes. On her new album, "For Love of You," which intertwines music by Clara and Robert Schumann, she again explores her early fascination. She's one of a growing number of performers who are finding inspiration in Clara Schumann's legacy and bringing it before a wider audience . Since Schumann more or less stopped composing after Robert's early death in 1856, when he was 46 and she was only 37, her oeuvre is relatively small just 23 published works and comprises almost exclusively solo piano pieces, chamber music and lieder. "Romance" offers an engaging overview of her style as an instrumental composer, starting with a warmly personal account of her Piano Concerto the one Ms. Downes played which Clara wrote as a teenager. That work also made a belated debut at the BBC Proms festival on Aug. 18, played by the young pianist Mariam Batsashvili. "I was inspired by Clara's music itself to read more about her as a woman and pianist. She was a great virtuoso and also a very passionate person," Ms. Kanneh Mason said, adding that she finds, even in Schumann's early pieces, "an underlying sense of sadness of grief from early on in her childhood that becomes harmonically more complex as she gets older." For her part, Ms. Downes is intrigued by the reciprocity of Clara and Robert's work. In her account of Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto (also in A minor), a staple of the concert hall, on "For Love of You," she said she wanted to elicit a sense of Clara's "presence as a pianist, as the embodiment of his work." Ms. Downes points out that in other pieces, Robert explicitly incorporated phrases of Clara's music as a private code they shared. A child prodigy trained and strictly supervised by her father, Friedrich Wieck, Clara had already debuted at the Gewandhaus in her native Leipzig, Germany, and toured to Paris before her teens. Born in 1819, she became one of the 19th century's foremost piano virtuosos in the same league as her contemporary Franz Liszt, and over a much longer stretch, remaining active for more than six decades. (She died, at 76, in 1896.) Clara also began composing early. In her youth, she "astonished audiences as much by her compositions as by her playing," Nancy B. Reich wrote in her milestone 1985 biography "Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman." While Robert Schumann was a virtually unknown and deeply insecure composer, Clara commanded an international reputation; her advocacy helped his work circulate. Robert had first entered her life when he became a student of her father who eventually waged a losing court battle to oppose their marriage, which went forward in 1840 and his initial compositions focused on music for solo piano, her instrument. It was Clara who encouraged her husband to write his Piano Concerto, which she premiered and played often. Roe Min Kok, a musicologist at McGill University in Montreal, has studied the Schumanns' relationship and its effects on their work, as well as Clara's careful management of her husband's legacy after his death, which followed a mental breakdown. "Overall, Clara Schumann was a highly intelligent Renaissance woman who could do many things," Ms. Kok said in an interview, pointing to her work not only as a composer and performer but also to her role in shaping generations of pianists as an influential teacher as well as her efforts in editing her late husband's works. At the same time, Ms. Kok added, Clara was a highly efficient "micromanager of the household," raising and financially supporting seven children; an eighth died as an infant. Unlike Gustav Mahler, who frowned on the composing ambitions of his wife, Alma , Robert Schumann encouraged Clara. Ms. Kok, who has scoured their letters, diaries and musical manuscripts, believes that Clara "composed only when she felt she had something to say. She didn't just churn things out. This was not her livelihood, so she did it because it was important to her." Thomas Synofzik, director of the Robert Schumann House in Zwickau, Germany, said the tendency to partition Clara's career into what she composed versus what she performed is misguided. "She was a pianist first and also a composer," he said. "Since of course she made no recordings, her documented legacy is her composition. But I always think one shouldn't see music history as merely the history of music which was composed but also the history of musicians who have performed it." Despite its name, the Robert Schumann House's mission is equally devoted to Clara Schumann. The museum holds the world's largest collection of materials documenting her career, including an immense array of playbills from her lifetime of concerts. The museum also has keyboards and artifacts relating to Clara; Mr. Synofzik recently delivered a paper illustrating the differences between the types of instruments she used and how they affected her own compositions. The harpsichordist and pianist Byron Schenkman, who has interpreted Clara Schumann from the perspective of the early music movement, has recorded a collection of her chamber music with colleagues. It includes the Piano Trio in G minor (Op. 17), from Clara's final period as a composer a piece which Nancy Reich, in her biography, deemed "probably her greatest achievement." Clara's decision to write a trio preceded her husband's sudden interest in the genre. "Clara studied and performed 18th century composers like Haydn, as well," Mr. Schenkman said. "She really was a Romantic Classicist, and wanted to continue that tradition. Hers is not the kind of Romanticism we associate with Wagner or even Mahler. We still have some of the lightness and sparkle and wit we find in Haydn in her music." Through her research, the cellist, gambist and musicologist Kate Bennett Wadsworth, who performs on the new album with Mr. Schenkman, has determined that the playing style practiced by Clara Schumann and her circle was, she said, "much freer with the score than written descriptions would lead us to believe." Time, she added, was "much more multifaceted and elastic. The tempo could vary the way your heartbeat varies." This emphasis on interpretive freedom leads to improvisation, which was a bridge between Clara's personalities as composer and pianist. The fortepianist and scholar Gili Loftus has been inspired by the work of the musicologist Valerie Woodring Goertzen to develop a "Clara Schumann Suite" that Ms. Loftus believes can bring us closer to how Clara's audiences might have experienced her live music making.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
For all the domestic dysfunction it chronicles, there's something reassuringly cozy about "Before You Know It." Especially if you're a longtime New Yorker. Directed by Hannah Pearl Utt, who shares screenwriting credits and starring roles with Jen Tullock, the film's main action is in an Off Off Broadway theater in Greenwich Village, represented by the real life Village landmark, the 13th Street Rep. In this movie, the theater and the living quarters above it are occupied by a dysfunctional bohemian family whose artistic and sociological antecedents go back to the 1936 Kaufman and Hart comedy "You Can't Take It With You," if not further.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Bryan Carmody, the Bay Area freelance journalist whose house was raided by the police this month, was to get back his property that was seized including his laptop and three decades' worth of archives following a hearing in San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday. Mr. Carmody became a target of the San Francisco Police Department in February, when his reporting was used in three local TV news reports on the death of Jeff Adachi, a longtime public defender. The materials Mr. Carmody sold to the TV stations included a police report that revealed Mr. Adachi had collapsed at an apartment in the presence of a woman who was not his wife. The police wanted to find out who had given the report to Mr. Carmody. After Mr. Carmody refused to tell them, the police obtained a search warrant, raided his apartment and detained him, in handcuffs, for six hours. In a Twitter statement on Tuesday, Mr. Carmody said: "I am pleased that everything that the San Francisco Police took from my office and home will be returned today. This includes the police report, video, records, notes, computers and personal electronics."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Judith Linhares's "Sphinx," 1990. The painter has a joint presentation with the sculptor Annabeth Rosen at P.P.O.W. and Anglim Gilbert Gallery. The best thing about the Art Show, the annual fair sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of America in the Park Avenue Armory, is that ticket sales benefit the Henry Street Settlement, which has been bringing art and culture to the Lower East Side since 1893. The second best thing is that all 72 exhibitors are in a single room, albeit a large and drafty one: You can take it all in with a leisurely stroll. What you'll find this year is a program dominated by uncompromising female artists. The very best of them are two joint presentations: the painter Judith Linhares with the sculptor Annabeth Rosen at P.P.O.W. and Anglim Gilbert, and Alice Neel's paintings with photographs by Diane Arbus, brought together by David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery. Be on the lookout as well for a survey of work by the turn of the century African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (Michael Rosenfeld, A16); the mysteriously magical paintings of Markus Lupertz (Michael Werner, C8); Gordon Parks's amazing color photograph of a tightly packed, jubilant crowd at the 1963 March on Washington (Howard Greenberg, A12); Rackstraw Downes's pocket size oil painting "Vent Tower and Salt Shed," in which two Department of Sanitation structures become found abstractions in a quiet city scene (Betty Cuningham, D18); and the disconcerting spot where Seth Price's large scale, lightbox images of human skin (Petzel, B4) face off against Roberto Cuoghi's bird corpses cast in agar agar and pork gelatin (Hauser Wirth, B3). Here are some especially notable booths. Judith Linhares, who uses thick, glowing lines to depict titanic female figures, brings out the color in Annabeth Rosen's work wire wrapped ceramic assemblages that evoke seashells, ballast or construction sites on the moon. In this presentation, both artists present a muscular and unapologetic femininity that feels not only welcome right now but necessary. San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery and New York's own David Zwirner, which co represent the estate of Diane Arbus, mount an extraordinary pairing of Arbus's portrait photographs with paintings by Alice Neel in these conjoined booths. Uncanny formal similarities, such as the way Neel's "David Sokola," from 1973, and Arbus's "Norman Mailer at home, Brooklyn, N.Y. 1963" both sprawl in their armchairs, make for a fascinating typology of posture and performance. One juxtaposition, of Neel's 1932 "Danny Lasser" with Arbus's "Boy in the subway, N.Y.C. 1956," goes even further: The two little boys with blank stares, one sadder, one more distant, suggest an infinite continuum of emotion. The fair's most stunning display is at Susan Inglett Gallery, where four large paper cuttings by William Villalongo, a Brooklyn based artist working in painting, printmaking and installation, neatly fill the booth's gray walls. Each features a storm of decorative slivers cut into black velour paper. Accented with collaged in photos of jewels and African sculptures, or painted arms and legs, these storms become ingenious summations of black American identity: They're bodies composed of innumerable traumas that somehow hold together and even look good. A full booth at the Washburn Gallery is dedicated to the painter Alice Trumbull Mason (1904 1971), with a focus on drawings and paintings from the 1940s, whose surfaces are broken into rhythmic showers of narrow shapes. In "Bearings Charted With Yellow," from 1946, the overlapping rhombuses have a dizzying effect, suggesting a teasing motion that doesn't actually get anywhere, while "Bearings in Transition," beside it, is as still as the grave. Six large oils by Jordan Casteel, painted from snapshots taken on the subway, manage to capture the M.T.A.'s loud colors and distinctive surfaces without overlooking its moments of hidden repose. Though her subjects' faces are cropped, hidden or turned away, the artist's sympathetic interest imbues them with life. The small gouaches by Maira Kalman that ring Julie Saul's booth are illustrations for a forthcoming reissue of "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein. Starting with a portrait of Toklas, her chin sharp and uneven, her nose hanging down like a bloated sardine, they continue through scenes of the couple's famous friends and glamorous life abroad to a portrait of Stein seated under Picasso's portrait of her. You can't help but be charmed by Ms. Kalman's detailed, slightly wonky drawing. Her palette of dark greens, pale blues and rosy pinks, meanwhile, is like German Expressionism made friendly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
BRUSSELS The European Union's halting effort to create a more unified banking system, which many experts consider necessary for avoiding future financial crises, received fresh impetus on Tuesday. Two top E.U. finance officials gave a push forward to efforts to overhaul governance of the region's banks, easing concerns that the bloc is failing to move swiftly enough to avoid future crises that could sink the euro. Speaking in Berlin, Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, signaled support for moving ahead with efforts to create a so called banking union. Germany, and Mr. Schauble in particular had been widely viewed as standing in the way of progress, demanding a potentially complicated treaty change to proceed. "Naturally, with the inertia that we have in Europe, we cannot wait for treaty changes to solve current problems," Mr. Schauble told an audience at the Free University in Berlin. "We have to make the best of it on the basis of the current treaties." German officials say there has no been a change in their stance, but proponents see a softening in tone that could signal a new openness. Meanwhile on Tuesday in Brussels, the president of the euro zone's group of finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said it would be "dangerous" to delay moving ahead with a banking union. He said some of the bloc's biggest banks could reveal new vulnerabilities as their accounts come under scrutiny in the next few months as part of a new round of so called stress test audits expected to be conducted by the European Central Bank. Last month at a finance minister's meeting in Dublin, Mr. Schauble conceded that a banking union could go forward under current E.U. law. But he still insisted then that treaty change would eventually be needed for a new single banking supervisor, under the aegis of the E.C.B., to work effectively. As the euro zone's paymaster, Germany has considerable clout in the banking union debate. On Tuesday, Mr. Schauble still said there was a need for "institutional changes" in the medium term, requiring changes to the treaty. But he indicated that near term problems required timely attention. German leaders, however, remain cautious about any moves that could lead to further euro zone demands for money from their country. Chancellor Angela Merkel, up for re election in September, has shown little inclination to test the patience of a bailout weary electorate. E.U. leaders agreed last year to create a banking union as a way of breaking the so called doom loop. This is a vicious circle in which states go so deeply into debt to support failing banks that they require bailouts or risk leaving the euro zone. But that agreement in principle has been hard to put into practice. The question of how to regulate banks under a banking union has been politically contentious as the European debt crisis rumbles on. Bailing out banks has been one of the biggest factors in Europe's financial crisis, and Mr. Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, said Tuesday that Europe continued to face "very dangerous" situation unless all its members started using the same rule book for restructuring or shutting down failing banks. A standard process for winding down troubled banks would be a key component of a banking union. The effect of huge bank debt on state finances almost forced Ireland and Cyprus to leave the euro zone before they received bailouts. And is now a major concern for Spain, which has received banking bailout money from the euro zone, and Slovenia, which is scrambling to avoid asking for a bailout. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. German officials had warned that adding the politically fraught business of bank supervision to the E.C.B.'s responsibility for monetary policy would risk the bank's independence. At the Dublin meeting last month, Mr. Schauble insisted that a treaty change, to keep those areas of responsibility distinct, would eventually be needed for the banking supervisor to work effectively. That threw up an unexpected and potentially formidable roadblock. He also said a treaty change would be needed to create institutions to share the burden of restructuring and closing banks. Many other countries resist trying to make any changes to the European Union's treaties at a time when Britain is already seeking modifications that many other member states oppose. And Europe's economic problems have made many citizens so disenchanted with the Union that they might very likely vote down any treaty changes. German officials continue to argue that it is more important to get the banking union right than to adopt it quickly. But supporters of a swifter pace regarded Mr. Schauble's go slow message as blocking one of the few paths they see out of Europe's debt trap. Mr. Dijsselbloem, speaking on Tuesday in Brussels at an economics conference, emphasized the need to establish a banking union to enable the restructuring of shaky banks, and the orderly shutdown of failing ones, because the coming bank stress tests which officials have dubbed an asset quality review could raise new questions about some of those lenders' viability. "The outcome of that asset quality review we don't know yet, but it might be worrying," Mr. Dijsselbloem said. "It might be worrying for some banks in some countries we don't exactly know." He added: "What I do know is that when we do have an outcome that is worrying, we need to have the instruments to deal with the problems. Because just exposing problems in banks and not having an answer how to recapitalize banks and how to strengthen them, that would be very dangerous." The comments by Mr. Dijsselbloem and Mr. Schauble come against the backdrop of a worsening economic picture in the euro area and the wider Union. The deteriorating economy in the European Union is expected to drive unemployment to new highs this year in countries including Spain and Portugal that already are feeling acute pain.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Visitors to the Petite Patrie neighborhood northwest of Montreal's city center previously had little reason to venture beyond the Marche Jean Talon, a popular food market stocked with local bounty: seasonal produce, Quebec cheeses, canned maple syrup. After all, the area's main commercial artery, Plaza St. Hubert, is a bizarre strip of formal wear shops touting bargain basement prices on '80s style prom and wedding gowns (and the requisite underpinnings). But lately, amid the sequins and satin, a growing roster of cool cafes, coffee shops, bakeries and bars, many on residential side streets, has unexpectedly bloomed in this transforming neighborhood, which now attracts Montrealers from across the city. Montreal's food world was skeptical when the renowned local chef Charles Antoine Crete announced that his first solo venture would be on Plaza St. Hubert. But this bustling brasserie has been reliably packed with diners devouring platters of oysters and creative dishes like baloney cannelloni.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
WASHINGTON Smoking, the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, continued to decline last year, federal health authorities reported Thursday, with the share of American adults who smoke dropping to 16.8 percent, down from 17.8 percent in 2013. Smoking has been one of the brightest public health successes of recent history. Nearly half of all Americans smoked in the 1960s, but a broad push against the habit, starting with the surgeon general's warning in 1964, helped bring rates down. The rate has dropped by about a fifth since 2005, when it was 21 percent. But the national numbers mask deep trouble spots within the American population. About 43 percent of less educated Americans smoked in 2014, compared with just 5 percent of those with a graduate degree. About a third of Americans insured by Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, smoked, compared with 13 percent of Americans with private insurance. The figures, reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, underscored the extent to which smoking in America has become a problem of the poor. Nearly six million Americans covered by Medicaid smoke, as well as almost nine million uninsured Americans, or about a third of the uninsured population.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"Trudeau came out to apologize for one blackface and ended up admitting to more. He's like: 'I did brownface for "Aladdin" and I did blackface when I sang the song "Day O." And now if you'll excuse me, daylight's coming and me wan' go home.'" TREVOR NOAH "With the Canadian election just one month away, many are wondering if this blackface scandal is going to hurt Trudeau's chances of being re elected. And to be honest, I'm just sad to see another black man being brought down." TREVOR NOAH "This is pretty bad and I just want to say: It's not us this time! Suck it, Canada!" STEPHEN COLBERT "I'm not going to show you the picture because it's really bad. It's so bad that Canadians traveling in Europe are going to start telling people they're American." SETH MEYERS "As a result, Trudeau has been dropped from the cast of 'Saturday Night Live.'" CONAN O'BRIEN "He didn't need the brown face to make the costume work he's in a full Aladdin outfit at an Arabian Nights themed party. Nobody was gonna see him and be like 'Huh, white skin are you the snowman from 'Frozen?'" TREVOR NOAH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Although I personally disagree with most of the recent conflicts that our country has been involved in, it infuriates me to hear any disparagement of the men and women who carry out those missions. The men and women who died, were captured or were wounded in any battle never asked for that fate. To try to denigrate them as "losers" and "suckers" demeans any service member who has ever served, including all my uncles and aunts and a great many of my friends, all of whom I regard as heroes. Whom do I consider Patriots? Those who accepted responsibility and served our country, whether voluntarily or conscripted. Who are the Losers? Those who would disparage military service. Who are the Suckers? Those who believe the Losers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Last year Erin Bligh, the proprietor of Dancing Goats Dairy in Newbury, Mass., planned to introduce a new cheese hard, with spicy peppers called Madam President, in what she assumed would be a fromage homage to a historic election. Then came the unexpected result: hard cheese indeed, in the Evelyn Waugh sense of the phrase. "I'm like, 'Oh damn, this is awful,'" said Ms. Bligh, 29, who has four full time employees overseeing a herd of 45 goats. She renamed the cheese General Leia Organa, after the Rebel Alliance leader in "Star Wars," and sent chunks to fortify friends attending the women's march in Boston. "This is my small piece of the resistance," a local customer told her, brandishing a wedge. Soon thereafter Ms. Bligh decided to name cheeses after Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Cheddary, enrobed in black) and Josephine Baker (Sardo style, with a natural rind and slightly sweet). "We've got a Misty Copeland, we've got a Marie Curie," she said. "We're just releasing our Jane Goodall, and we had an Amelia Earhart two wheels of it and it sold out in a second, because everyone's like, 'Yeah, that's my girl.'" "As it should be," said Seana Doughty, 46, of Bleating Heart Cheese in Tomales, Calif., who has created both Fat Bottom Girl, named for both a Queen song and its lovably variable shape, and Shepherdista, alluding to Ms. Doughty's proud fondness for fashion. "Last time I checked, you couldn't milk boys!" At a moment when assault and harassment revelations are creeping across male dominated industries like so much unwanted mold, independent American cheese making stands as an obvious if undersung exemplar of the ultimate matriarchal workplace. "We're all women here," said Rhonda Gothberg, 63, of Gothberg Farms in Bow, Wash., a former nurse who offers a cheese called Woman of La Mancha the sharpest in her catalog, naturally. "We do have one man who cleans our pens for us, but all my milkers, all my farmers' market people it's not a requirement that they be women, it's just worked out that way," Ms. Gothberg said. "We've tried a couple of guys, and they were not patient and kind and clean." Cheese was historically woman's "indoor" work while men were outside plowing the fields, as the New York City cheesemonger Anne Saxelby details in a useful "5 Minute History" last spring, in which she proclaimed that "The Future (And Past!) of Cheese Is Female." Then came the Kraft brothers and their convenient processed singles of midcentury; the slick bricks of Velveeta, Philadelphia and Cracker Barrel. Second wave pioneers taking back the land in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s included Judy Schad of Capriole Inc. in Greenville, Ind.; Laini Fondiller of Lazy Lady Farm in Westfield, Vt.; and Sue Conley and Peggy Smith of Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station, Calif. Last year Ms. Schad, 75, introduced Flora, named for her grandmother, who made cheese under less than ideal conditions on her back porch. It joined Piper's Pyramide, inspired by Ms. Schad's own first, redheaded granddaughter ("bright and spicy just like her namesake!"); Sofia, for a longtime friend ("a queen at any age!"); and Julianna, after a Hungarian intern. "Beneath her wrinkly exterior lies a complexity not often found in such a young cheese," reads Capriole's description of the Wabash Cannonball, a popular, prizewinning cheese named for the folk song about a fictional train sung by Johnny Cash. "I think these cheeses are women and sometimes they're ladies, sometimes they're not," Ms. Schad said. "But the flavor is subtle. They don't hit you over the head with a rolling pin." A commonly cited fantasy Plan B among urban paper pushing professionals, the artisanal cheese business has surged in recent years, with more than 900 specialty cheese makers in the United States, according to the American Cheese Society, a nonprofit trade organization in Denver. The A.C.S. does not keep data on gender, said its executive director, Nora Weiser, but compared with the bro centric field of craft beer, where female brewers have struggled to get respect and recognition despite significant contributions, cheese making is a relative haven. Membership has more than doubled since 2005 and now numbers 1,800. "There aren't many breakoff groups, because there don't need to be," Ms. Weiser said. The A.C.S. said there were over 2,000 entrants in the Annual Judging Competition last July, a kind of Golden Globes for the curds and whey crowd, up from 89 in 1985. Winning second place in the category of "Farmstead Cheeses Aged 60 Days With a 39 percent or Higher Moisture Content (Cow's Milk)" was Womanchego, a familiar sight near the She Wolf Bakery booth at the farmers' market in Union Square in Manhattan, where many high powered restaurateurs shop. "It's very quickly the one that people gravitate toward the most, and now they are extra delighted because of the sexual and political climate," said Mark Gillman, 48, a founder with his mother of Cato Corner Farm in Colchester, Conn., which has manufactured Womanchego since 2004. The farm later added spinoffs: Wise Womanchego, aged more than one year, and an elusive middle aged version, Mrs. Robinson (all christened by women, Mr. Gillman hastened to add). Down South is Kathryn Spann, who practiced international law in New York City for a dozen years, for a time alongside Eliot Spitzer when he was attorney general. She is now an owner of Prodigal Farm in Rougemont, N.C., and sells, among other cheeses, Bearded Lady, a reference to her goats. There is also Dirty Girl: a reclaiming of sorts of an often pornographic phrase used as recently as 2010 as the title of a movie about a sexualized high schooler distributed by the now disgraced Weinstein Company. To Ms. Spann, 49, Dirty Girl connotes something different. "To me, in my head, it's always a little farm girl in overalls," she said. "She's innocent, she's a working girl. She's not being foofy and image conscious, she's just herself." A new label in progress for the cheese shows an image of this girl: flanked by animals, smiling as she looks hopefully toward a boundless sky.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Taylor Swift dominates the Billboard album chart once again this week, while Cardi B lands perhaps the raunchiest No. 1 single in history. Swift's "Folklore," which was released last month with less than 24 hours' notice, remains the No. 1 album for a third time, with the equivalent of 136,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen, barely changed from last week. But the mix of data within that composite number shows how Swift's rollout plan helped her stay at the top. For its first two weeks, the array of collectible physical versions of the album that Swift offered fans were available only through her website. So when "Folklore" came out, a whopping 73 percent of its opening week total was attributed to copies sold as a full package. In Week 2, with streams still strong but CD and vinyl copies not yet in stores, complete albums made up just 23 percent of the total. In Week 3, with physical albums finally available from sellers like Target which offered exclusive versions, as it has in the past the sales ticked up again. According to Nielsen, 67,000 of its total this week, or nearly half, came from sales of the album, while the number of streams dropped by a third, to 90 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Faced with the prospect of sweeping flight cancellations during the busy holiday season, American Airlines said Friday that it had resolved a scheduling problem that had left thousands of flights without assigned pilots. "Customers can rest assured we will have the full schedule covered in December," Matt Miller, a spokesman for American Airlines, said in a phone interview on Friday evening. More than 10,000 flights were in danger of cancellation this week after a scheduling error allowed too many pilots to take time off during the high volume travel days of late December. But on Friday morning, the airline's president, Robert Isom, met with Daniel F. Carey, the president of the Allied Pilots Association, and they agreed on a plan, said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the union, which represents American Airlines pilots. "So in record time, the situation was handled," Mr. Tajer said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
David Hockney's "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011" is one of several paintings by the British artist featured in a new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. AMSTERDAM It's easy to miss the Vincent van Gogh paintings at "Hockney/Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature." In the Van Gogh Museum's blockbuster spring exhibition, which runs through May 26, Mr. Hockney's dazzlingly vibrant multi canvas paintings like "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011" are hung like murals across the gallery walls. Van Gogh's much smaller landscapes appear here and there on pillars, somewhat like punctuation marks to Hockney's effusive sentences. And if you imagine that the link between the contemporary British painter and the 19th century Post Impressionist is the use of bold, contrasting colors purples and blues set against mustard yellows you will quickly think again. The brilliant palette of Mr. Hockney's 2008 "More Felled Trees on Woldgate" looks psychedelic next to van Gogh's subdued cobalts and azures in "The Garden of St. Paul's Hospital ('Leaf Fall')" from 1889. Van Gogh was one of early modernism's most radical colorists, but Mr. Hockney has taken the ball and run with it, far, far down the field. "Midsummer, East Yorkshire" Mr. Hockney's 2004 series of 36 watercolors on paper is a direct homage to van Gogh's Provence landscapes, with their wheat fields, wheel like haystacks, stocky clouds and high horizon lines. Squint a little and one can easily mistake Mr. Hockney's 2005 oil painting "Woldgate Vista" with its layer cake structure of wild grass, farmland, hills and sky, for van Gogh's "The Harvest" of 1888. Mr. Hockney said he believes that the main link between him and van Gogh is not color, brushwork or subject matter though both men clearly have a fascination with nature: "It's clarity of space, I think," he said in an interview. "Van Gogh could see space very, very clearly." "Hockney/Van Gogh" is neither a side by side comparison nor a Hockney retrospective he had three of those in 2017, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Instead, it is a selection of about 60 works by Mr. Hockney, and eight paintings and three drawings by van Gogh. The bulk of the Hockney works are landscapes created from about 2004 to 2011, created in the Woldgate Woods in northern England. Edwin Becker, chief curator of exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum, said that van Gogh's influence on Mr. Hockney started after the artist visited a van Gogh exhibition in Manchester, England, in 1955. "It lingers on and on and on," Mr. Becker said. "Sometimes it's more direct, and sometimes it's more subconscious." About half of the exhibition is devoted to depictions of Woldgate Woods particularly of a path through tall, slender trees captured across the seasons in different media. Some are oil paintings made "en plein air" outdoors, as many 19th century painters did, including van Gogh over three or four days. Others are digital video compositions and drawings made with an iPad. For the video installation "The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods" from 2010 to 2011, Mr. Hockney mounted nine cameras on a moving Jeep to simultaneously film the path in the woods from multiple perspectives. Here, they are presented as clusters of nine monitors on four walls, each presenting the same view in different season: winter, spring, summer or fall. With each camera pointed in a slightly different direction, the viewer is forced to look at the scene as a composite of multiple perspectives. "I know it makes it more interesting because you have to look at each one, and to do that, you have to make space in your mind," Mr. Hockney said. In the spring of 2011, Mr. Hockney revisited the woods with his iPad, creating the series "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire" in the electric greens, pastel blues and hot pinks of the device's palette. Mr. Hockney, now 81, has actively embraced digital technology, especially in his recent work, and is one of the few artists of his generation to have done so. Mr. Becker, the curator, said he saw this as another important similarity between the two artists. "Van Gogh was constantly on the search for new ways of working, from naturalism, to Impressionism to Post Impressionism, to add to his own style," Mr. Becker said. "The same goes for Hockney, because he embraces new techniques, new developments be it the Polaroid, the Pentax camera, the video camera, the iPad." "The first things I did were lots of sunrises from a window," he said at a news conference on Wednesday. "And I didn't have to get up to get paint or water or a brush or pencils." He made 70 or 80 pictures this way, "always in this same window, but every day it was different: different colors, no two sunrises are the same." This approach (minus the iPad) resonates with van Gogh's practice of exploring the same view or subject from multiple perspectives, in changing light, in different seasons. Mr. Hockney, who continues to work from early morning until evening (with the help of a midday nap, according to Mr. Becker), said that van Gogh put all of his energy and love into his work. "He put some beans on his fire when he went out in the morning, and he painted all day eight hours, nine hours then he'd come home and eat the beans," Mr. Hockney said of van Gogh. "Then he'd converse with his brother for two hours by writing letters. The only time left for him was to sleep." This, he said, is perhaps why van Gogh's work has such enduring popular appeal as does Mr. Hockney's. "People have always been very attracted to van Gogh's paintings: Since they were first shown in 1906, people have flocked to them," he said. "He's a great artist, still. It's contemporary; if it's speaking to you now, it's contemporary."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In the months since Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States, theaters around the country have announced that they will be mounting productions of "An Enemy of the People," the play by Henrik Ibsen about a man who is ostracized by his community for daring to criticize a dangerous government initiative. Now, the play is coming to Broadway. The producer David Binder ("Hedwig and the Angry Inch") said Thursday that he would be bringing a contemporary adaptation of the 19th century play to Broadway during the 2017 18 season. He did not specify when during the season, or at which theater, but he is aiming for next spring. The new production of the oft adapted play was developed at a German theater, Schaubuhne, in Berlin, and has since had productions around the world, including at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013 and at the Barbican Center in London in 2014. The adaptation is by Florian Borchmeyer and Thomas Ostermeier, and will now be further adapted into English for Broadway by the playwright Branden Jacobs Jenkins ("Gloria"). Mr. Ostermeier, resident director of the Schaubuhne, will direct the production.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The No. 1 team lost. Then the No. 2 team lost. Then the No. 3 team lost. An unexpected week in women's college basketball ended with No. 4 South Carolina ascending to the top spot in the rankings on Monday. No. 1 Connecticut lost at home to No. 6 Baylor on Thursday. Unexpected? UConn had won 98 straight games at home, dating to 2013. The No. 2 team, Oregon, lost when it visited unranked Arizona State on Friday, 72 66. And when the No. 3 team, Oregon State, made the same road trip on Sunday, it too lost to Arizona State. That was the first time any team had back to back wins over top five teams in the regular season since 2010, and the first time that feat was performed by an unranked team. That left South Carolina (16 1), which beat No. 21 Arkansas and Vanderbilt last week, to take over the top spot in the Associated Press poll. South Carolina began the season at No. 8, and lost to Indiana in November, but also has several good wins, including a defeat of Baylor, then ranked No. 2, in the Virgin Islands. It is South Carolina's first time at the top of the poll since 2015.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SAN FRANCISCO At OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, machines are teaching themselves to behave like humans. But sometimes, this goes wrong. Sitting inside OpenAI's San Francisco offices on a recent afternoon, the researcher Dario Amodei showed off an autonomous system that taught itself to play Coast Runners, an old boat racing video game. The winner is the boat with the most points that also crosses the finish line. The result was surprising: The boat was far too interested in the little green widgets that popped up on the screen. Catching these widgets meant scoring points. Rather than trying to finish the race, the boat went point crazy. It drove in endless circles, colliding with other vessels, skidding into stone walls and repeatedly catching fire. Mr. Amodei's burning boat demonstrated the risks of the A.I. techniques that are rapidly remaking the tech world. Researchers are building machines that can learn tasks largely on their own. This is how Google's DeepMind lab created a system that could beat the world's best player at the ancient game of Go. But as these machines train themselves through hours of data analysis, they may also find their way to unexpected, unwanted and perhaps even harmful behavior. That's a concern as these techniques move into online services, security devices and robotics. Now, a small community of A.I. researchers, including Mr. Amodei, is beginning to explore mathematical techniques that aim to keep the worst from happening. At OpenAI, Mr. Amodei and his colleague Paul Christiano are developing algorithms that can not only learn tasks through hours of trial and error, but also receive regular guidance from human teachers along the way. With a few clicks here and there, the researchers now have a way of showing the autonomous system that it needs to win points in Coast Runners while also moving toward the finish line. They believe that these kinds of algorithms a blend of human and machine instruction can help keep automated systems safe. But researchers like Mr. Amodei are trying to get ahead of the risks. In some ways, what these scientists are doing is a bit like a parent teaching a child right from wrong. Many specialists in the A.I. field believe a technique called reinforcement learning a way for machines to learn specific tasks through extreme trial and error could be a primary path to artificial intelligence. Researchers specify a particular reward the machine should strive for, and as it navigates a task at random, the machine keeps close track of what brings the reward and what doesn't. When OpenAI trained its bot to play Coast Runners, the reward was more points. If a machine can learn to navigate a racing game like Grand Theft Auto, researchers believe, it can learn to drive a real car. If it can learn to use a web browser and other common software apps, it can learn to understand natural language and maybe even carry on a conversation. At places like Google and the University of California, Berkeley, robots have already used the technique to learn simple tasks like picking things up or opening a door. All this is why Mr. Amodei and Mr. Christiano are working to build reinforcement learning algorithms that accept human guidance along the way. This can ensure systems don't stray from the task at hand. Together with others at the London based DeepMind, a lab owned by Google, the two OpenAI researchers recently published some of their research in this area. Spanning two of the world's top A.I. labs and two that hadn't really worked together in the past these algorithms are considered a notable step forward in A.I. safety research. "This validates a lot of the previous thinking," said Dylan Hadfield Menell, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. "These types of algorithms hold a lot of promise over the next five to 10 years." In some cases, researchers are working to ensure that systems don't make mistakes on their own, as the Coast Runners boat did. They're also working to ensure that hackers and other bad actors can't exploit hidden holes in these systems. Researchers like Google's Ian Goodfellow, for example, are exploring ways that hackers could fool A.I. systems into seeing things that aren't there. Modern computer vision is based on what are called deep neural networks, which are pattern recognition systems that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of dog photos, a neural network can learn to recognize a dog. This is how Facebook identifies faces in snapshots, and it's how Google instantly searches for images inside its Photos app. But Mr. Goodfellow and others have shown that hackers can alter images so that a neural network will believe they include things that aren't really there. Just by changing a few pixels in the photo of elephant, for example, they could fool the neural network into thinking it depicts a car. That becomes problematic when neural networks are used in security cameras. Simply by making a few marks on your face, the researchers said, you could fool a camera into believing you're someone else. "If you train an object recognition system on a million images labeled by humans, you can still create new images where a human and the machine disagree 100 percent of the time," Mr. Goodfellow said. "We need to understand that phenomenon." Another big worry is that A.I. systems will learn to prevent humans from turning them off. If the machine is designed to chase a reward, the thinking goes, it may find that it can chase that reward only if it stays on. This oft described threat is much further off, but researchers are already working to address it. Mr. Hadfield Menell and others at U.C. Berkeley recently published a paper that takes a mathematical approach to the problem. A machine will seek to preserve its off switch, they showed, if it is specifically designed to be uncertain about its reward function. This gives it an incentive to accept or even seek out human oversight. Much of this work is still theoretical. But given the rapid progress of A.I. techniques and their growing importance across so many industries, researchers believe that starting early is the best policy. "There's a lot of uncertainty around exactly how rapid progress in A.I. is going to be," said Shane Legg, who oversees the A.I. safety work at DeepMind. "The responsible approach is to try to understand different ways in which these technologies can be misused, different ways they can fail and different ways of dealing with these issues."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
BEIJING Hollywood studios, facing steep challenges in the North American movie market, are taking more interest in China. The Walt Disney Company and Marvel Studios, a division of Disney's Marvel Entertainment subsidiary, are producing "Iron Man 3" in China. News Corporation recently bought a stake in the Bona Film Group in Beijing. And an agreement with Chinese authorities will allow more American companies to distribute more movies and reap a greater share of the box office in China, the world's fastest growing economy. But at least one billionaire businessman is betting that the American movie market is still the ticket to international success. And he is Chinese. Wang Jianlin, a rags to riches tycoon, is taking over AMC Entertainment, North America's second largest movie theater chain behind Regal Entertainment. And he is promising to integrate it into a new, made in China, global brand called the Wanda Group. Mr. Wang, 57, is regarded as one of the most successful Chinese real estate tycoons. His 17 billion empire includes huge commercial property developments, five star hotels, tourist resorts, a film and television production company and Asia's largest cinema network. Now, by paying 2.6 billion to acquire AMC, the Wanda Group is extending its reach globally. The deal, announced Sunday, is still subject to the approval of United States regulators, though there are no hints it will be blocked. The purchase signifies a new era for Mr. Wang and in China's development. Companies here are moving away from low cost manufacturing and going abroad in search of natural resources and global consumer brands, part of an effort to upgrade the nation's economy. In an interview at his spacious headquarters in Beijing, Mr. Wang, the Wanda chairman, said he was pondering his next international destination: Europe. "We're already negotiating," he said. Wanda is a private company in a nation dominated by state owned enterprises. But the AMC deal is closely aligned with the Chinese government's priorities, which include encouraging Chinese companies to "go global," pushing an overhaul of Chinese media and entertainment properties and placing greater emphasis on consumer spending. But whether Wanda, a 24 year old enterprise with little international experience, can make a success of such a big acquisition and create a global property and entertainment brand is debatable, analysts say. "China has great entrepreneurs," says Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, a Beijing based investment advisory firm. "But the question is: How will they take these companies international? Are they going to be willing to learn and adapt?" One of the biggest experiments in this area is being undertaken by Mr. Wang, a former army officer who has turned a tiny real estate venture into a national brand. Wanda, which started in Dalian, a northeastern city, and moved its headquarters to Wanda Plaza in Beijing, is a colossus with 183 million square feet of land under development or operation. 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. In 1988, Mr. Wang who entered the army at 15, after middle school says he left a job as a local government official in Dalian and borrowed 80,000 to start a business he now describes as a "sprinting elephant." Wang Yongping, founder of the China Commercial Real Estate Association, described the chairman of Wanda as usually a step ahead of other Chinese real estate barons. "He always has a vision," Mr. Wang, no relation, said. "When everybody was doing housing property, he jumped out to focus on commercial property. When everybody was chasing commercial property, he was eyeing culture and tourism the industries that the government is stressing and cultivating." That few Chinese companies have managed to establish global brands is of little concern to Wanda's chairman. And buying a stake in a company focused on a quintessentially American experience moviegoing seemed hardly daunting for a man who survived the Cultural Revolution, a period of social and political madness in China. "In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated," said Mr. Wang, the Wanda chairman. "We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off." Mr. Wang usually hits his targets, he says. The company has experienced 30 percent growth in the last year, even in a down market. And he promises that by 2015 the Wanda Group will have overall revenue of about 30 billion. Which raises the question: Why invest in the United States cinema market at a time of weakness, when box office receipts are sluggish and American film producers are looking to China? Some analysts have suggested that Mr. Wang's acquisition of AMC was political, an effort to curry favor with Chinese leaders, who are pushing their nation to enhance its influence by exporting cultural products. Others contend that Mr. Wang is eager to establish himself as China's first global corporate chief. "This is kind of a statement deal for him," said an executive familiar with the Wanda AMC talks, but not authorized to discuss them. "He's coming out of China, and this is an area he has great interest in. He kept emphasizing he just wants to learn how cinemas are operated in the U.S. It's not just about the money." But to pull off the deal, Wanda needed plenty of that: more than 3 billion in cash, including 500 million it has promised to invest in AMC in North America. Financing such a big deal in a tough credit environment, and with China's property market in a slump, was some feat. In the end, much of the cash came from China's big, state controlled banks. To ensure that the deal succeeds, Mr. Wang said he would keep AMC's management in place with long term pay incentives, and invest heavily in renovating older American theaters in an effort to bolster revenue. Asked whether AMC would show films that the Chinese government found offensive, such as one dealing with the contentious issue of rebellions in Tibet, Mr. Wang said he would not interfere with decisions by his management team in the United States. He also dismissed speculation in China that his ties to Bo Xilai, the fallen Politburo leader who also got his start in Dalian, could harm the Wanda Group. "We knew each other, and were very familiar with one another," he said. "But it was just a working relationship. There was no personal relationship." He said the government had not asked to investigate the group. Throughout the interview, Mr. Wang who spoke calmly and quietly, and occasionally twirled his thumbs said he was focusing on targets and executing strategies, fast. Buying a Hollywood movie studio was not planned, he said, but he would not rule it out. Hotels and American shopping malls are more likely targets, he said. "We don't have the strategy to go global in real estate," he said. "But for globalization and going out, we would like to buy hotels and hotel management companies. We also like department stores."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
President elect Joe Biden has pledged to "marshal the forces of science" in his administration. Undoubtedly he needs to start by bolstering the credibility of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But a third health agency, central to the lives of older Americans, low income families and the disabled, is sorely in need of his attention. Science has also been under assault at the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services, which provides federal health insurance to more than 130 million Americans at a cost of more than 1 trillion, nearly twice the Pentagon's budget. C.M.S. does more than just write checks for medical care. Its scientists and analysts determine which treatments should be offered I am the chairman of the committee that advises Medicare on those decisions and how best to care for the patients it serves. Unfortunately, the Trump White House has steadily eviscerated the agency's dispassionate approaches to making those determinations. Recently, for instance, the Trump administration set in motion a plan to strip C.M.S. of its ability to assess for itself whether new medical devices approved by the F.D.A. are appropriate for the older patients it covers. This is important because the benefits and risks of such devices and procedures, which range from implantable hips and cardiac stents to digital apps and laboratory tests, can vary widely based on patient age and disability. The proposed rule requires Medicare to pay for any new device so long as the F.D.A. labels it a "breakthrough." And that word does not mean what you think it does. The F.D.A. calls a device a "breakthrough" when it is expected though not yet proved to be helpful to patients with serious conditions. The designation has nothing to do with how the device works in older patients, or even if it was studied in that population at all. The proposed rule would also require Medicare to cover any new drug or device if at least one commercial insurer covers it for its members, even if its members are young and healthy. Already, companies seldom generate enough data on their products for C.M.S. to assess their value for its patients. In 2019, for instance, data was insufficient in just under half of new F.D.A. drug approvals to assess benefits or side effects in older patients. The proposed rule would drain the last remaining motivation that companies have to study their treatments in the patients who are likely to ultimately receive them. C.M.S. scientists and analysts do more than evaluate new treatments. They also test alternative ways to organize and pay for patient care. The agency has found, for example, that enrolling people at risk of diabetes in gym sessions reduced how often they were hospitalized. But some seemingly obvious ways to improve health care don't work: C.M.S. also found it could not reduce hospitalizations for cancer patients by paying their doctors to actively manage their patients' care. The fact that so many promising ideas don't work as expected is the reason C.M.S. needs to double down on evaluations of how medical care is delivered to its patients. This administration has gone in the other direction. Just before the election, the White House conjured up a plan to send older people a 200 prescription drug discount card in the mail. Research has already demonstrated that if you give people money to buy prescription drugs, they will buy more of them. The pharmaceutical industry knows this, too. That's why it hands out coupons worth billions of dollars. These same studies also show that when people are indiscriminately given cash for medicines instead of only those who need that money the most it costs much more overall than it saves. No wonder the discount card giveaway would have cost around 8 billion. Fortunately, the president has yet to follow through with it. In another troubling development, the administration announced on Nov. 20 that it would run an experiment in which reimbursements to physicians will be cut for dozens of high cost drugs they administer in the office, such as chemotherapies and treatments for inflammatory diseases. C.M.S. financial analysts warned that the cuts will lead many Medicare patients to lose access to these important treatments. Scientists should evaluate this prediction by including a comparison group of patients whose doctors would not receive a cut in payment. But the agency administrator made it clear that she didn't believe the warning. No comparison group is planned. That is no way to evaluate whether our nation's vulnerable would be helped or hurt by this significant policy change. Another example of a poorly designed experiment involved taking Medicaid coverage away from able bodied people who are not working or going to school, under an ill founded theory that doing so would inspire them to seek employment. Such a study is best done narrowly, so that any harms are minimized. Instead, the administration invited multiple states in 2018 to test the outcome. A Harvard study found that a work requirement in Arkansas led to a rise in the number of uninsured people and no significant changes in employment. Thousands of Medicaid beneficiaries in Michigan and New Hampshire were set to lose their coverage before work requirements in those states were ended. Given those results, the overall program should have been canceled. The administration broadened it. Through its reliance on scientific evaluation of what it should pay for, and how, C.M.S. has remained financially viable for more than half a century. As the new president plans to fix the damage done by the current president, this vital agency demands his attention. Peter B. Bach is a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He served as a senior adviser to the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2005 and 2006. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
FUTURISTS are talking about the effects of megacities often defined as cities of more than 10 million people and so, too, are designers devising new types of vehicles for the world's congested metropolitan areas. The United Nations estimates that the population of cities, now 3.2 billion, will rise to 5 billion by 2030. And by 2050, the U.N. projects, 70 percent of the world's population will live in cities. How will drivers (and those who co exist with drivers) cope? Automakers are looking at ways to reduce the automotive footprint. General Motors has shown its EN V, for Electric Networked Vehicle, a podlike two seater for the megacities of 2030. It is currently being demonstrated at the Expo 2010 world's fair in Shanghai. Ford showed its Start concept car at the Beijing auto show this year. The Start is built of composite panels on a metal frame, with a shape that recalls the New Beetle and Mini Cooper. Now BMW is offering a glimpse of its Mega City Vehicle, or MCV, an urban electric car that is to arrive in 2013. In briefings this week, BMW mostly discussed the car's materials and technology. But Adrian van Hooydonk, director of BMW Group Design, also talked about the MCV's design. In a telephone interview, he said the Mega City would be part of an entire new BMW subbrand. The challenge, he said, is whether BMW "can produce a car that is both sustainable and premium." BMW knows how to create premium products. "They are highly emotional, with refined materials and high level of attention to detail," Mr. van Hooydonk said. "But there was a belief that premium and sustainable could not go together." The company assembled a special group to speed the project to completion. "We put a team together of 15 exterior and interior designers, together with engineers, he said. "If you want to create something very new in a short time frame you have to have everybody sitting together." The team is led by Benoit Jacob, a French designer who worked on a successful small car, the Dacia Logan, before he left Renault for BMW. New technologies offered the possibility of a radically different look, but Mr. Jacob's team ultimately retained some of the traditional cues of a small sporty car. Still, the all electric propulsion system and the absence of a large internal combustion engine up front let the designers alter the car's proportions. And the use of very light carbon fiber reinforced plastic for the body required a new design sensibility: drawings that translate nicely into steel may appear less felicitous in plastic. "It is sometimes hard for designers to get their heads around the change," Mr. van Hooydonk said. He added, "The chance to work on such a new formula is a once in a lifetime opportunity." The Mega City Vehicle is imagined not simply as an in city errand hauler, but as a commuter car. "In the beginning of the program we asked, what does 'megacity' mean?'" he said. "What kind of people will drive this car? What will they do everyday?" He noted that while "many people are looking forward to zero emission cars," some worry about the vehicles' range and their safety. "Many are afraid they will have to give up coolness or sense of style," he said. "People fear that a responsible car might look ugly or weird." To find ways to reassure them, Mr. van Hooydonk said, the designers looked not so much at other cars as at other sustainable products, from food to furniture. Most sustainable products involved sacrifice; BMW's design team did not think people would be willing to sacrifice much with a car. The MCV looks sportier than most electrics. The front end is short, but the dynamic sweep of the roof and beltline (the line that runs below the side windows) keep it from being podlike.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
WHEN Honda showed the CR Z concept car at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2007, it appeared alongside some of the wacky Japanese design exercises that the biannual show is known for. One difference between the CR Z and the Nissan Pivo 2 (with a pivoting cabin), the Toyota Hi CT (with styling akin to a shrunken Zamboni) and other flights of fancy is that the CR Z actually goes on sale Aug. 24, looking pretty much as it did on stage. The CR Z doesn't resemble anything else in the Honda (or Acura) lineup. A sharp wedge, it has an expansive glass rear hatch that seems to extend half the length of the vehicle, almost as if someone chopped a car into thirds, pulled out the center section and fused the two ends together. A gaping grille makes the car look like a feeding goldfish. The CR Z may look even weirder on paper. A two door hybrid that seats two people, it resembles the original Honda Insight of 2000 but delivers noticeably lower fuel economy despite the wide ranging technology improvements of the last decade. That original wedge shaped Insight was rated at 65 miles per gallon in combined city highway driving (a figure adjusted to 53 m.p.g. after the calculation method was changed in 2008). The new CR Z gets 34 m.p.g. with a 6 speed manual transmission or 37 with a continuously variable automatic. By comparison, the combined economy rating for the current four door Insight is 41 m.p.g. The Ford Fusion Hybrid is rated at 39 and the Toyota Prius at 50. At 19,950, the CR Z is the least expensive of those models, but not by much. I tested an EX version with a navigation system, which had a sticker price of 23,310. The Insight starts at 20,550, the Prius at 23,560. It is curious that Honda decided to run with a two seater, given that a chief complaint about the first generation Insight was the space taken by its batteries, leaving room for only two people. The current, second generation Insight seats four. (CR Zs sold on other continents come with a tiny back seat.) Honda clearly intended the CR Z to evoke warm, fuzzy memories of its CRX, a vaguely similar two seat slice of hatchback that Honda sold in the 1980s and early '90s. The CRX was low set, peppy and so light that it seemed in danger of flying away to join a bundle of renegade party balloons. Eventually, young hot rodders discovered they could install bigger engines in the car (from an Acura Integra or a Honda Prelude), and the CRX became one of the best examples of a pocket rocket. With the CR Z, Honda is also targeting a young demographic with what it says is a first: a sporty, fun hybrid. At a press briefing in June, Honda said the low, short and wide CR Z was designed for the "responsibly indulgent" buyer aged 25 to 35 who might also be considering a Mini Cooper. By hybrid standards, the CR Z is a fairly zippy ride. Honda says the car can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 10.1 seconds or less. One has only to get inside to recognize that Honda didn't build it for my dad, who while technologically savvy might not be prepared for the visual assault of lights, buttons and digital displays. The seat is low. The dashboard display is concentrated on a circle that projects the speed with a 3 D effect. A ring of light behind the digital speedometer ranges from neon green (when the car is in its efficient Eco mode) to bright red (when it's in Sport mode). There are three modes in total: Eco, Normal and Sport. Essentially, they are presets for the hybrid system. With three buttons on the left flank of the steering wheel, the driver can toggle among the car's three personalities. The CR Z combines a 1.5 liter 4 cylinder 16 valve gas engine making 122 horsepower with the automaker's Integrated Motor Assist system Honda shorthand for the electric motor and computer control unit. This is essentially the same mild hybrid system used in the Insight; unlike the Prius, which has a more capable full hybrid powertrain, the CR Z cannot be propelled by its electric motor alone. In Eco mode, the CR Z conserves fuel by relying less on the gas engine. As with most hybrids, there is a display that shows your fuel economy level. There is also a guide to help you time your shifts for optimal fuel economy. There is a meter for the battery charge level and a display that shows when the battery is being charged and when it is providing an assist to the engine. On the road, Eco mode makes for a laborious driving experience. The CR Z barely registers a pulse, especially on the highway. It doesn't matter if the pedal is to the metal; the car feels as if something has gone wrong. Fortunately, Normal mode seems, well, more normal. Throttle response is more in line with what you'd expect out of a compact car. During my five days with the CR Z, I found myself toggling among the three modes, driving highways in Normal, selecting Eco for surface streets and strategically using the Sport mode as a sort of hyperspeed button. Hyperspeed is an overstatement, of course, but you sense a definite surge of power: with the throttle held steady, switching from Normal to Sport instantaneously increased the speed by 20 m.p.h. And it is in Sport mode that the CR Z really captures the thrill of the CRX of yore. With the 6 speed manual, the car accelerates rapidly and smoothly. The engine revs hard and high. At 2,670 pounds (2,720 pounds with the variable transmission), the CR Z is nimble and engaging. (Fuel economy meter? What fuel economy meter?) And yet, as you experience the mild thrills of Sport mode, guilt creeps in. Because the stated fuel economy numbers are for Normal mode the default one assumes (correctly) that Sport mode exacts a gas mileage penalty, especially when zooming past tractor trailers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
A translation: Like the woodsman's lore that you can't outrun a grizzly bear, there are plenty of cars that can't outrun this 7,384 pound behemoth. Mash the accelerator and a moment of turbocharger lag quickly gives way to a frenetic rush to the 3,000 r.p.m. horsepower peak, the tall rear tires clawing for traction. Perched as you are in the ether the step in height is 26 inches, which means you're riding around with your posterior at least three feet off the ground the sensation is of piloting a low flying plane in traffic. Sierra 2500, requesting permission to land. With the diesel's full measure of torque available by 1,600 r.p.m., towing isn't much of a challenge, either. I was towing or hauling something practically the entire time I had the Denali, so the mileage numbers are a little warped. (Because of its weight rating, this truck does not get E.P.A. mileage numbers on its window sticker.) But I did see that it would manage 12 m.p.g. while towing my boat. Which is pretty good, considering the boat and truck together are 10,000 pounds of messy aerodynamics. Tow ratings vary according to a particular truck's configuration, but the one I drove diesel, 4 wheel drive, crew cab with the 3.73 final drive ratio maxes out at 17,100 pounds using a fifth wheel trailer. That is, ballpark figure, the weight of a school bus. Configured for maximum towing capability, a Sierra HD with the same Duramax engine (but the 3500 model) can handle 23,200 pounds, which ought to be sufficient to tow the entire New England Patriots 90 man off season roster, provided you could find enough roller skates. What I'm saying is that it probably won't have a problem getting your Glastron to the lake. The Duramax V8 isn't unduly stressed, even at this power level. G.M. says that from the factory, the Duramax diesel is intended to suffer whatever rough duty abuse you can throw at it for at least 200,000 miles without a major overhaul. This engine's laudable combination of power and longevity bears consideration when you're scratching together an extra 8,395 to go diesel: 7,195 for the motor and 1,200 for the Allison transmission. And there we are with money again. As Dr. Plache pointed out, pickups have become far more capable than they were a decade ago. In the GMC camp, a half ton Sierra can tow as much as 10,200 pounds, which is probably enough for most drivers. But if you're making the leap up to the 3/4 ton league of the 2500 series, you may as well go all the way and get the diesel, which is not available in the half ton models. Then go ahead and throw mulch in the bed. Haul gravel. Tow an elephant or two. Reconcile the dichotomy between luxury price and workaday purpose, because trucks are no longer wheezy agricultural implements trimmed in cardboard. And anyway, if the last decade is any indication, 10 years from now we'll wax nostalgic for the humble days of 70,000 pickups.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
It's not considered perverse to desire a vehicle that can go twice the legal speed limit. Do buyers want cars with faster Internet connections as well? High speed 4G wireless connections have come to the car. Audi started offering LTE service (shorthand for long term evolution) in the 2015 A3 last spring. General Motors has included 4G LTE in the 2015 Chevrolet Malibu, and more than 30 other G.M. models are to follow by year end. How will 4G benefit a driver or passenger? One conspicuous improvement will be the ability, on G.M. vehicles, to "download directions while OnStar is talking to you," Chris Penrose, AT T's senior vice president for emerging devices, said in an interview. Also, cars can be roving Wi Fi hot spots for up to seven devices. Perhaps more important, faster wireless Internet connections are needed to improve sluggish in dash services. "Smartphones have changed the landscape of customer expectations," Anupam Malhotra, senior manager for connected vehicles at Audi, said in a phone interview. Customers are used to the "Google moment" of being able to search at will, he said, and they expect the same experience behind the wheel. "So we need LTE to give them access to information that's the same caliber as at home or off a phone," Mr. Malhotra said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
But was it? Not by a long shot; when it comes to misconduct, Congress has a long history. Congressmen have pulled guns on each other. They've shoved and punched each other, and smacked at foes with fireplace tongs. They've engaged in mass brawls, toppling desks, tossing spittoons and, in one case, yanking off a toupee. The most famous violence in congressional history is the caning of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the Senate floor in 1856, but it was not an anomaly. Nor is Ms. Pelosi alone in violating traditions for all to see; it was far from the first time that members of Congress met alleged lies with bold displays of open contempt. In 1790, Representative Aedanus Burke of South Carolina showed his feelings with a flourish after Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury secretary, slurred the Southern militia during an Independence Day speech. Hamilton had said that Southern troops were dispirited and in disarray before the arrival of Gen. Nathanael Greene. Burke outraged and hoping to impress folks back home used the theater of Congress to have his say. Turning toward the visitor gallery, he declared, "In the face of this assembly and in the presence of this gallery ... I give the lie to Colonel Hamilton." Onlookers were stunned. Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas did much the same when President Obama discussed his health care plan before the House in 2009, waving a handwritten sign that read, "What Plan?" "The things he was saying were certainly not true of the only bill we had at the time," Mr. Gohmert later said. On that same night, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted "You lie!" at the president for a similar reason. By far, the most skilled practitioners of this showy statecraft were Southern slaveholders in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Threatened by even the hint of opposition to slavery, they used bold public threats during debate to frighten their foes into compliance or silence, tossing off insults or dangling duel challenges to set an example. Faced with the choice of a fistfight or a duel or the humiliation of avoiding one most men backed down or held back. For Southerners, transgressing rules was part of the point; it was a show of power. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky used the same form of showmanship when he exposed the alleged whistle blower's name during impeachment proceedings last Tuesday. Days after Chief Justice John Roberts refused to read a question from Mr. Paul that revealed the name, Mr. Paul did the deed himself. During a period reserved for impeachment speeches, he read his question aloud while standing next to a large blue poster with the name in bold yellow, endangering the whistle blower and violating the spirit of whistle blower protection laws in the process; although those laws are meant to protect informants from retaliation, they don't explicitly stop members of Congress or the president from revealing names. Tradition and ethics alone keep them silent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Ian Austen, a correspondent who is based in Ottawa, discussed the tech he's using. How do Canadians differ from Americans in the ways they use tech, and what are the most popular homegrown apps there? Many of the apps on Canadians' phones would be familiar to any American they generally include Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. I'm leery of cross country comparisons because they often mix survey samples and methods. But they suggest that Canadians spend somewhat more time online, and on Facebook, than Americans. There are some hometown apps. Some are predictable: Canadian banks, large Canadian retail stores, Canadian news organizations (although The Times also has a large following here) and Canadian loyalty programs. But others are more surprising. Kijiji, not Craigslist, dominates online classifieds here. It's owned by eBay and bombed when it was also tried in the United States. What are your favorite tech tools for doing your job? My two main tools also seem to be with nearly every other reporter surrounding me in media rooms at events: a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 7. Whatever harms they've brought to society and general human interaction, few things have made my job easier than smartphones. Right now, I'm also experimenting with Trint, an app that shows promise at taking over the transcribing of interviews, the most dispiriting part of an otherwise great job. It's a bit expensive, and, right now at least, its accuracy swings wildly from being very impressive to producing something that resembles experimental prose poetry. But there aren't any obvious factors behind its hits or misses, like the quality of the recording or the subjects' accents. Mr. Austen wears a GPS watch when he goes cross country skiing. Also an avid cyclist, he got a GPS computer for his bikes. Dave Chan for The New York Times Like the three other Times reporters who cover Canada, I work throughout the country. So in my (untidy) office in Ottawa I keep a work backpack ready for leaving town. My one tip for anyone who travels frequently on short notice is to buy a second laptop charging brick and keep it in your travel pack. Yes, I came to that solution the hard way. Along with my laptop, a Leica M (Typ 262) camera and three or four lenses go into my backpack when I head out to the airport or the car. Photos supplement my notes and voice recordings. They also make their way into the weekly Canada Letter that I write (please subscribe), and they sometimes illustrate my articles. A lot of people use a smartphone for photography. Why bother carrying a dedicated camera? The adage that the best camera in the world is the one you have with you is completely true. Most smartphones can produce very nice images, and I certainly use my phone's camera. But squeezing a camera into a phone brings many compromises. Their incredibly small image sensors don't match up to those in dedicated cameras, especially when the light is low. The tiny sensors also mean that you can't really take advantage of the different perspectives that different focal lengths of lenses offer on dedicated cameras. Composing on a screen held away from your face is far from ideal, and if you learn about photography, controlling the exposure and focus of the camera become a big part of it. I've used Leicas on and off since I was in high school, and its rangefinder cameras, of which mine is a recent digital version, were once synonymous with photojournalism and documentary photographers like Robert Frank and Henri Cartier Bresson. Leicas are more compact than any comparable digital single lens reflex camera, and I prefer the clarity of their optical viewfinders over the magnified electronic ones of other mirrorless digital cameras. They're also much more discreet when taking photos during interviews. Film still has a few tricks that digital can't match, and I often also take an old Leica or another film camera along on trips. Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life? I drink far too much tea, so the Breville One Touch tea maker keeps me supplied and maintains productivity at the bureau, which is the fancy term for a space in the basement of my house in Ottawa. We also came into an Instant Pot, the surprisingly successful creation of Ottawa's tech industry. My colleague in Cooking Melissa Clark is best placed to tell you all about the wonders of the amped up pressure cooker. Cycling is a big part of my life. Last year, I became the last person in my branch of the cycling world to get a GPS computer for my bikes that also measures, among other things, my heart rate. It was joined by a similar watch I use while running and cross country skiing, the winter activity for cyclists around here. Google's sister company Sidewalk Labs intends to remake Toronto in a high tech image. What do you think about the plans? There isn't even a plan yet. Sidewalk is spending the next year doing consultations and coming up with a final design that will need government approval. But it has already put out an ambitious list of what it hopes to build. As now proposed, the plan involves a perhaps unprecedented level of data collection from people going about their daily lives. Dealing with the obvious privacy concerns that flow from that may prove to be its greatest challenge. What is Canada's high tech scene like now? BlackBerry has foundered, but Canada has a lot of well known artificial intelligence researchers, especially in Toronto. It's now bigger and expanding more quickly than it was at any point during BlackBerry's glory years. Except for Instant Pot, however, not a lot of what goes on in Canada is directly connected to consumer products. Several of those researchers at Canadian universities were A.I. pioneers, and that has directly played a role in turning Toronto and Montreal, particularly, into centers for that work. Canada's immigration rules, which make it quick and easy to bring in skilled workers, have also been a major factor and spurred growth in Ottawa; Kitchener Waterloo, Ontario; Calgary, Alberta; and Vancouver, British Columbia. As for BlackBerry, it's still around, even if it's much smaller and no longer makes phones.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The first episode of "Zoom Where It Happens" was a table read of a "Golden Girls" episode. Top row: Sanaa Lathan, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Regina King. Bottom row: Alfre Woodard and Lena Waithe. Tracee Ellis Ross fluffed her wig, did a little shoulder shimmy and became a Florida retiree from the 1980s. Just below her on the screen, Alfre Woodard, in a gray hairpiece of her own, threw shade and spun tales from the old country Sicily. Afterward, the two of them talked about the census. This was "The Golden Girls," reimagined for the Zoom era and aiming to galvanize the citizenry in an unparalleled political season. You don't even miss the laugh track. Created by a who's who of Black women in Hollywood, including Ava DuVernay, Kerry Washington, Issa Rae, Tessa Thompson, Rashida Jones, Regina King and Channing Dungey (the vice president of original content at Netflix), the series, called "Zoom Where It Happens," produces a weekly live event, usually a script read of a throwback sitcom, with an all Black cast, and hosts like Lena Waithe and Gabrielle Union Wade. At the end of the show, they stick around to talk about making a voting plan or filling out government paperwork. "Inside of escapism, I really love this idea this call to action," said Thompson, the "Creed" and Marvel star. It was about "finding a joyful way into really talking about and normalizing the idea of being civically engaged," she added in a recent Zoom interview alongside a co producer, the actress Ryan Michelle Bathe. "The performers are able to do that in a way that feels authentic you can finish an episode of 'Friends' and then you hear Sterling and Ryan talk about their voting plan with Kendrick." (Bathe and Sterling K. Brown, who are married, were Ross and Rachel on the "Friends" virtual watch party, and Kendrick Sampson played Joey.) The producers expect episodes to appear regularly until the election. The next show, on Tuesday night, is "227," the '80s series set in a Washington apartment building, with Wanda Sykes, Keke Palmer and one of the original stars, Jackee Harry, as the host. The idea came together this summer, as the nation convulsed in the wake of George Floyd's death. Black artists, filmmakers and executives were texting, sorting through emotions and debating what they could do. It was DuVernay, the director and producer, who hit upon the need for a communal experience amid the isolation of the pandemic, with SMS technology as a tool, "to walk people up the ladder to the ballot," as Thompson put it. Karen Richardson, a political strategist and alumna of the Obama White House, serves as a consultant for the project. "I think a lot of people feel there are barriers to engaging in this process of voting and civic engagement," she said. "How do we lift the veil to make it less mysterious?" Seeing the stars cop to dragging their heels on their census forms (as Sanaa Lathan did at the end of "The Golden Girls" episode), or contemplating voting by mail versus marching to the polls "having conversations that you're having at your home too," she said demystifies it. The first few episodes also showcased the alternate reality where there was an all Black "Golden Girls." (If only!) "What would have happened if, in 1982, or 1992, or 2002, they had given as much weight to actresses or actors of color, that they were giving to the quote unquote mainstream?" Bathe asked. "What if in the '70s, the idea of 'the mainstream' had been completely obliterated. What if, what if?" Nostalgic script reads have become a pandemic staple, and many raise money for liberal political causes or candidates. (Zoom Where It Happens is officially nonpartisan: "It is not about any two white men," Thompson said.) The "Golden Girls" table read, of a timely episode called "The Flu," found the ladies getting increasingly ornery about staying home: King, playing Dorothy, did some Oscar caliber sneezing; Lathan disappeared into a honeyed Southern drawl as Blanche; and Woodard was near mesmerizing as the snippy Sophia all she was missing was the handbag. They gave Dr. Fauci a shoutout, too. That episode launched the series on just a few days' notice in September, receiving over 100,000 RSVPs more than double Zoom's viewership capacity of 50,000. Viewers must register with their contact information and may then be connected to a variety of social justice and civic organizations like Michelle Obama's When We All Vote. For the creators, who are all donating their time and talent, it's been a lesson in organization and hustle and a deep dive into copyright law. Because of rights issues, each show only airs once (no restreams). Even with the occasional snafu of timing or mute buttons, it all feels pretty seamless, if D.I.Y. "It's become this lovely, sort of functional assembly line," said Allain, who produced the 2020 Oscars but found herself transcribing scripts for this project. "Ryan and Tessa are the programming architects," picking the shows and episodes for broad appeal, she said, tweaking scripts in tiny ways adding a Jordan Peele reference, say and choosing directors from among their networks (they started with Gina Prince Blythewood). Dungey, the Netflix executive, helps secure the intellectual property also donated while Allain works on music rights. They've been experimenting with the medium of Zoom, to make it seem more theatrical throwing an object from one person's frame into another, for example. Prep starts a week out, with young actors as stand ins for blocking. The performers get one run through, and a speed read. "Everybody was, with the exception of my husband, in the same state of nervousness," said Bathe, a self described Jennifer Aniston superfan. ("My husband never gets nervous," she added with an eyeroll.) The staging is minimal, but the actors take what they can get. "I was definitely prop acting my buns off," Bathe said. The next episodes are still being cleared, but fans of "A Different World" should be happy. The series is all sitcoms, though "we had ambitions," Thompson said. "We were going to do 'Game of Thrones' and 'The Sopranos.'" There was buy in from those showrunners, too. "So maybe in some other context you will get to see a Black woman play Tony Soprano, who knows?" Attracting a cross section of viewers was the point. Nobody involved expects their work to be finished as citizens and artists after Nov. 3. "We have been here, particularly as Black people, in the past, and we will be here again, in terms of having to show up in real ways to protect the value and dignity of our lives," Thompson said. The gravity of this moment is reminiscent of the Civil Rights era, she said, but the sense of common purpose could be too. "If you really sort of drill down, most of the Civil Rights movement was about gathering together in the name of hope," Bathe said. By reframing and re airing some cultural touchstones, "we wanted to remind people that you cannot get through the tough times without a sense of hope, a sense of joy, a sense that something better is coming."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
For years, Erin Boyle wrote about living in a tiny apartment on her blog, "Reading My Tea Leaves," detailing the creative, thrifty ways she made a roughly 500 square foot one bedroom in Brooklyn Heights work for her, her husband, James Casey, and their two children, Faye, 6, and Silas, 3. One post described making old wooden crates into under bed sliding drawers with rope pulls and felt pads. "We moved into that apartment when I was pregnant with Faye," said Ms. Boyle, 36, who had previously lived with Mr. Casey, 39, in a 240 square foot studio apartment (and that included the storage loft where they put their bed). "Even after Silas was born, it didn't feel crowded. It felt very doable." The arrival of a third child, Calder, in February, complicated matters, as the bedroom wasn't large enough to comfortably accommodate the older children's bunk bed and Calder's mini crib. But Ms. Boyle thinks they would likely still be in that apartment if not for the coronavirus, which forced them to upsize this fall. Mr. Casey, an associate laboratory director at Barnard College, was teaching remote biology classes from the apartment. Ms. Boyle was trying to work and breastfeed a newborn without accidentally appearing in a Zoom call. Faye was doing remote kindergarten, and Silas was being a normal, energetic 3 year old. The problem of living as a family of five in a small one bedroom wasn't the amount of stuff Ms. Boyle is avowedly anti clutter but the challenge of so many people trying to do so many things in two rooms, especially when one of those rooms was a 7 by 12 foot bedroom mostly taken up by a bunk bed. Mr. Casey and Ms. Boyle kept their bed in the main living area and worked at the dining table; in lieu of a sofa, they have a love seat size bench that Ms. Boyle upholstered. "The expectations of the kids were so high," Ms. Boyle said. "It was, like, 'Be calm and color quietly for two hours while Dad teaches this class.'" Summer and the reopening of playgrounds provided some relief, but Ms. Boyle and Mr. Casey knew that by the time fall rolled around, they would be desperate, if not for more space, then at least for a few more walls. "We didn't have a checklist, like we need a bigger bedroom or an office. It was just a gut thing we need more space for everything," she said. They found it on Craigslist after a brief, intense hunt: an 800 square foot two bedroom railroad style floor through in a Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, brownstone. They moved in on Sept. 1, after finding someone a woman who plans to live by herself to take over their old lease. Their children: Faye Casey, 6; Silas Boyle, 3; Calder Boyle, 9 months Occupation: Ms. Boyle is a writer with a lifestyle blog, "Reading My Tea Leaves"; Mr. Casey is an associate laboratory director in the biology department of Barnard College. Why they stay in New York: "People in New York are always getting asked that question! People in other places don't get asked why they stay," Ms. Boyle said. "It's for the same reasons anyone wants to stay anywhere to be close to family, friends, jobs." (Ms. Boyle's sister also lived in the city until recently.) Morning stoop hang: Their two older children like to sit on their new stoop in the mornings. "We're only one flight up," Ms. Boyle said. "It's lovely that we can see them from the window of our new place. It makes a big difference." Clutter: "I really do not like being in clutter, so I have no impulse to fill a larger space with things," Ms. Boyle said. "Kids are magpies, and they like collecting little things. But they're used to getting rid of things. I'm part of the local Buy Nothing group; when they're done with it, they're, like, 'You can post it on Buy Nothing.'" Although the family had been looking to increase their square footage as they upgraded from their one bedroom, the general assumption that a family of five should be moving into something larger than a two bedroom was part of what made their search difficult. "We saw a lot of apartments that we never heard back from," Ms. Boyle said. "I felt like showing up with three kids to look at a one or two bedroom apartment raised some eyebrows." The rent, at 3,200 a month, is an increase from the 2,775 they paid for their last place. It was enough of a bump that Ms. Boyle used her father as a guarantor, but it still feels like a better deal than would have been possible pre pandemic. "Before this spring and summer, moving to a bigger space never felt financially possible," Ms. Boyle said. "It seemed like a lot of places opened up and went on the market." The new apartment has some quirks. There was no dishwasher, and the stove, Ms. Boyle believes, is from the 1950s. "I'm still trying to figure out how to simmer on it. I've burned so much garlic," she said. "I think what's interesting about New York real estate is there's no waiting to find the perfect spot. You have to give notice a month before and then just go for it." But having almost double the space and, crucially, a few doors to close has been key. "Balancing work and child care and devoting what feels like enough attention to both feels pretty impossible right now, regardless of space," Mr. Casey said. "Still, being able to close a door between myself and the rest of the family and being able to trade off with Erin so she can do the same has made a huge difference." The children have the apartment's large "real" bedroom, which overlooks the street. Off the side of that room is a kind of antechamber, about seven by nine feet, that Mr. Casey and Ms. Boyle use as an office; they built a standing desk using pipes and a piece of wood. The children's bedroom connects to a pass through room that the couple use as their bedroom, with the main living area and kitchen at the back of the apartment. But for someone who wrote extensively about living in a tiny space, will living in a not so tiny space present some issues? Ms. Boyle doesn't think so. "It was just a space I lived in," she said, explaining that she saw her last apartment as part of the reality of living in New York, one that she embraced, but never as an identity. "New York real estate is expensive. You can be interested in sustainability and thrift and minimalism, and not be defined by living in a small space." Besides, while it feels enormous to them, she added, 800 square feet is, by many people's standards, still pretty small.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
On Monday, as twilight falls on Fifth Avenue, more than 500 Oscar winning actresses and actors, Wall Street titans, Silicon Valley wunderkinds, fashion designers and Hollywood players will walk up a 150 yard red carpet leading into the Metropolitan Museum of Art for what has become, over the last decade, the undisputed party of the year on the New York social schedule. Last year, the single evening generated almost 12 million, was a trending topic on Twitter and attracted over 25 million page views on vogue.com the following day. This year, it will be part of a documentary by the filmmaker Andrew Rossi, and recorded by 225 approved photographers, reporters and even tweeters and Snapchatters. It is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute benefit, known as the Met Gala. In addition to kicking off the museum's annual blockbuster fashion show, devoted this year to Chinese aesthetics' influence on Western fashion, the event has become a testament to the unmistakable power of its co host, the 65 year old editor of Vogue and artistic director of Conde Nast, Anna Wintour, continuing the mythmaking of films such as "The Devil Wears Prada" and in a retort of sorts to that thinly disguised portrayal the 2009 documentary "The September Issue." Since 1999, Ms. Wintour, an iron fist in an Oscar de la Renta (or Prada or Chanel) dress, has been the driving force behind the gala's transformation from a well attended dinner for museum donors and patrons into one of the biggest fund raising events staged by any of the city's cultural institutions, as well as an unprecedented global advertisement for her vision of the fashion industry. Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and artistic director of Conde Nast, on the red carpet before the Met Ball last year. How that happened is a story not only of changes in society, media and philanthropy, but also of one woman's understanding of how a single evening could solidify her role as a corporate power broker. Under Ms. Wintour's reign, the gala has raised more than 145 million for the Costume Institute (the party funds its operating budget in its entirety), with attendees willing to pay 25,000 for an individual ticket or commit to a minimum 175,000 for a table of 10. By contrast, the Museum of Modern Art's recent David Rockefeller lunch, the museum's biggest annual fund raiser, brought in 3.5 million, while the New York City Ballet's 2014 spring and fall galas raised a combined 5.45 million. That is partly why, at a ceremony last May that was attended by Michelle Obama and nearly every living American fashion designer of note to reveal the newly renovated Costume Institute, the space was christened the "Anna Wintour Costume Center." If the gala has been good for the Met, it has also been very good for Vogue, cementing Ms. Wintour's position as perhaps the most powerful person in fashion. She and her team exert significant control over the guest list, the seating plan, the coverage deciding which reporters are allowed to go where and, often, even what selected guests will wear. And, given the shadow economy of Hollywood fueled by beauty contracts and brand ambassadorships, celebrity guests have their own compelling business reasons to attend, according to Bryon Lourd, chairman and managing director of Creative Artists Agency. Though she declined to be formally interviewed for this article, Ms. Wintour agreed to answer three questions via email as long as they did not involve the guest list, the seating plan or financial information. Asked about her own motivation, she said "there was no grand plan." However, Mr. Filipowski said, "In my experience, she does not do anything she does not understand." What is clear is that before Ms. Wintour arrived, "It was a very different kind of party," Emily Rafferty, president emerita of the museum, said. "It was local society." Pat Buckley, the socialite wife of the conservative pundit William F. Buckley, had been largely overseeing the event since 1979 (it was started by the publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948). Tickets were generally bought by individuals, unlike today, when most are bought by companies such as Burberry, Chanel and Versace. The true flexion point came in 1995, when Ms. Wintour, who was hired as Vogue's editor in 1988, was asked to host for the first time. The following year, the invitation went to Elizabeth Tilberis, another British editorial import who had been brought over to run the Hearst owned magazine Harper's Bazaar in 1992. "They were keeping a pretty close watch on each other at the time," said Susan Magrino, chief executive of the Magrino public relations firm, who handled communications duties for Ms. Tilberis. "Liz saw the Met as a way to show she had arrived. In a way, the museum was the accidental beneficiary of their competition." (Ms. Tilberis died of cancer in 1999.) Diana, Princess of Wales, was a guest at the gala that Ms. Tilberis hosted, and Christian Dior served as a sponsor. Bernard Arnault, Dior's owner, had just named the radical British designer John Galliano as artistic director, and Mr. Galliano made his debut with the dress Diana wore that night. The pair caused a media sensation. By 1999, Ms. Wintour had become, as she remains, the gala's de facto co host, and her leadership coincided with the shift in Vogue covers from model based images to celebrities. In 1993, there were three celebrity Vogue covers; by 1998, there were seven, and in 2002, there were 10. Though Hildy Kuryk, Vogue's director of communications, is quick to point out that not every cover model is a host of the ball, it is also true that every female Hollywood star who has served as a host has been on the cover of Vogue. "A lot of actresses aspire to the cover of Vogue," Mr. Lourd said. "It's the gold standard. And Anna absolutely controls that." As a result, he added, "There are a lot of people who would like her to like them." And not just actresses. When the designer Stella McCartney was asked to be a host in 2011, the year of the museum's Alexander McQueen exhibit, she had just gotten pregnant. "I thought, 'Oh my god, if Anna finds out I will be at the top of those stairs just after giving birth....' " Ms. McCartney said with a laugh. Did she consider saying no? "It never occurred to me," she said, noting that she felt she owed it to Mr. McQueen's memory. Besides, she added, being a host confers "a real legitimacy." That year Ms. McCartney dressed 18 attendees, including Madonna and the model and entrepreneur Iman. Christopher Buckley, the writer and Pat Buckley's son, said of his late mother, "I have the feeling she's up there looking down and saying, 'Who are all these people?' " Rumors have gone around for years that Ms. Wintour turns away guests she does not know or who she feels do not fit the image she wants her event to project. Radar Online reported in 2013 that she had "banned" cast members from the "The Real Housewives of New York City" from buying a table. (Asked about whether such bans existed, Ms. Kuryk responded, "We do not comment on the guest list.") At the same time, Ms. Wintour ensures that many designers are present, including new faces who might not have the wherewithal to buy tables, implying Vogue's support and giving them credibility in the eyes of the retailers who attend. She also helps connect brands and celebrities: In 2012, a brand representative said at the time, Vogue "suggested" to Valentino that it might like to invite the starlets Lily Collins and Brit Marling, for example, when the house asked for guest ideas. Valentino did, and an online search for "Lily Collins Met ball 2012" today yields numerous results, many of them including pictures of Ms. Collins in her Valentino dress. The level of control that Ms. Wintour exerts can chafe, with guests complaining of feeling like pawns in her business. The actress Gwyneth Paltrow famously told USA Today in 2013 that she would never attend the gala again, because it was so "unfun." "It's been professionalized," Ms. Rafferty said. Working alongside members of the museum's development office, numerous Vogue staff members devote time to the event year round, juggling it with their magazine jobs. On the day of this year's gala, 85 Vogue employees will be stationed around the museum. The evening represents an enormous investment of time and manpower as well as money on the part of Conde Nast. "It positions them as the classiest publishing company in the world," David Patrick Columbia, editor of New York Social Diary, said. "You can't fault it as a business decision." The same may be true for the guests who have paid thousands of dollars to attend, for whom the evening has become not just a ticket, or a tax write off, but an investment. "When it comes to increasing name recognition and profile, nothing compares," Mr. Filipowski said. "The effect lasts far beyond one evening. A dress gets associated with a celebrity, and then becomes known as the dress XX wore to the ball, and becomes part of history."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

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