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Fifty years ago, the designer Betsey Johnson part rebel, part cheerleader got herself from proper Connecticut to New York City, as many a respectable female adventurer was wont to do. She arrived in Manhattan by way of a 1964 Mademoiselle magazine guest editorship. (She was in good company: Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath preceded her.) But that wasn't the New York she was searching for. She had been staying at the white gloved Barbizon Hotel for Women, and knew there was another New York. Soon she found it: the dark new bohemia that was just then supplanting the earnest folk singing scene of Macdougal Street. She was home. This world, dripping with dissoluteness and a belief in the redemptive value of danger, coincided with the debut of a revolutionary new clothing consortium called Paraphernalia. Ms. Johnson, hiding her normalcy under a stark Vidal Sassoon haircut and layers of fake eyelashes, became its star designer. Her dresses were fairy tale clothes for girls who skipped on the wild side.And as a soon to be regular wearer of those dresses, I would add that we wanted to walk wild for some emotional good, not tragic ill, we expected to get out of it all for some incandescence in our souls that would match the incandescent in those dresses. It's hard to describe just how Ms. Johnson's clothes defined us, but let me try. For one, they amped up the youthquake gimmick of the time, but they also shifted gears and went romantic, with voluminous sleeves and ribboned, shirred necklines apt, since coming to New York alone and female was all about romance. They toggled from skimpy silver minis (perfect for discotheques like the Electric Circus and the Scene) to ankle length skirts that acknowledged the new counterculture's fondness for medieval gowns. Edie Sedgwick was a fitting model; Julie Christie, an avid customer. A trip to London "flipped my whole thing," remembers Ms. Johnson, now 72, as we talk in her West 30s showroom. Racks of clothes are everywhere; dozens of tutus suspended on ceiling hooks; her eyes bright beneath her egg yolk yellow striped mop of glossy vanilla hair. She was dazzled by the "sexy and edgy and romantic" Biba boutique, run by the Polish designer Barbara Hulanicki. She waited in line the two hours it often took to get into Biba each day and marveled at "the Edwardian high hats and glamorous, feminine 'Elvira Madigan' gowns and the Art Nouveau prints and the tight Lurex turtlenecks." At Paraphernalia, Ms. Johnson's first hit was a set of three nylon microskirts: Day Glo pink, green and yellow, crunched up in a tennis ball can. Then came her silver motorcycle jacket. In the mid to late 1960s, her clothes punched your membership ticket in a chick elite: not for us, the coming to New York of that older generation, with "straight" jobs, roommates in high rises and a thirst for engagement rings. The clothes signaled a sea change. "When I wore my Betsey micro mini crossing 39th Street at First Avenue, the truck drivers coming out of the Midtown Tunnel would go crazy," the actress Ali MacGraw recalled. "We were so different from the depressing society ladies with their Diana Vreeland s curved posture in their Courregeses." The folk singing queen Judy Collins said: "I still have Betsey's crushed velvet jacket, in black and bright fuchsia. In fact, I'm wearing the black one at the moment." Ms. Johnson designed dresses for the girl who had fled Mayberry for the edgiest quarter of Manhattan to erase her former self. ("I didn't want anyone to know I didn't do drugs," she said.) I fled to New York a few years after Ms. Johnson did. One day after the semester was out at the University of California, Berkeley, I sat, all alone, in a plane filled with soldiers en route to Vietnam, singularly compelled to take a reverse migration I barely understood myself. Once I touched down, I picked as a long term boyfriend an older man who had swapped girlfriends with Norman Mailer and Timothy Leary. (He also took my money and bedded other women, but that seemed at the time like a part of the process of becoming darkly, resplendently world weary.) I got a job as a fashion assistant at a new glossy that Hearst was starting for the counterculture. It was called Eye, and it was a magical place, all the more so as few people remember it. Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and Nora Ephron wrote for us. The art department girls were cocky and beatific, as if cutting and pasting bits of swirling psychedelic typeface was a completely uninteresting part of their personal cosmic order. A regular photographer was Linda Eastman: leggy, busty, impatient. Midpoint between being the receptionist at Town Country magazine and wedding Paul McCartney, she was dating some of the rock stars she photographed, and they sometimes swaggered into the office, tie dyed scarves looped around their messy long hair dusted necks. The Eye offices were also next door to the loft where Ms. Johnson then lived with the Velvet Underground's John Cale. I visited and interviewed her there; we featured her clothes in our layouts almost every month. Ms. Johnson tells me it was love of ballet that first brought her, the daughter of an iron foundry owner and a homemaker in "sweet, WASP, white picket fence" Wethersfield, Conn., to the big city. Her childhood ballet teacher ferried her to the city on weekends for recitals, but when ballet became too competitive, she, who could sew almost as soon as she could walk, threw herself into dance costume making. After graduating from Syracuse, she won the highly competitive guest editorship at Mademoiselle. Edie Locke (whom Ms. Johnson has for decades called "my fashion mommy") was the magazine's fashion editor; she saw where Ms. Johnson was headed: "She was not a 'nice Connecticut girl'! She was born to be a hippie: bubbly, crazy and irrepressible." To supplement her 62 a week Mademoiselle paycheck, Ms. Johnson started designing a Biba inspired "great, tight, little silver lame T shirt," Ms. Locke recalls. So many assistants clamored to buy them, the magazine offered them in its shopping column. Ms. Johnson found herself making three or four T shirts every night and 10 on the weekend. Soon, the fashion businessman Paul Young told Ms. Locke about a Biba like store he was opening on Madison. He wanted the best young designers. "We had to lose Betsey," Ms. Locke says. "If we kept her, we'd be holding her back." Ms. Johnson spent her days at Paraphernalia and her nights at Max's Kansas City, the nucleus as she puts it, of "this sparkler of a world." (Young women quit publishing and advertising jobs in droves to be Max's waitresses.) "It was this capsule this tent of impassioned, driven, crazy great but crazy with an idea people," she said. "We all congregated there." Jerry Schatzberg came with his girlfriend, Faye Dunaway, then unknown. John Ford, a handsome fashion designer, came in daily with his two Irish wolfhounds. Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, brought Janis Joplin. Andy Warhol held court in the back room. Twiggy, Veruschka and Lauren Hutton were there alongside Paul Morrissey and Robert Rauschenberg and Brigitte Bardot. John Lennon and Yoko Ono slumped in a booth for privacy. The bar was the province of the brawling sculptor John Chamberlain; there were lots of amphetamine fueled Social Register exiles vamping about, and the rumpled junkie every girl wanted to save was that bard of exquisite two minute love songs, Tim Hardin. Ms. Johnson moved into the Chelsea Hotel, and its basement became her workroom. She fell hard for Mr. Cale, who was living there with the stunning Nico: "He was beautiful, brilliant, crazy and the funniest guy I'd ever been with." She designed for the Velvets Cale and his partner Lou Reed and because she'd never done men's wear before, she relished the compliment: "Lou said I cut a really good crotch." "We both recognized something going on between us: Our focus on work was a kind of loneliness," Mr. Cale says. When he visited her parents in Connecticut, "they were like, 'What?' But they were ready for me; she was doing things to shock them all her life." They married in 1968, "with everybody from the Factory" present, Mr. Cale says. In their LaGuardia Place loft, "we were two little pipe and slippers kids," Ms. Johnson says. "We loved each other, we each just wanted a friend." They tried to act suburban married. "I cooked pot roasts on Sunday!" But the scene was not a perfect fit. Within several years, they had separated. But they have remained friends all these subsequent decades. Ms. Johnson was looking ahead for new things to do as the decade was about to turn. As for me, in that muggy black summer of 1969, while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and Ted Kennedy left a girl dead in the water off Chappaquiddick, I moved to Ibiza, where you could pretend that living with no electricity or indoor plumbing among beautiful people and savvy drug dealers was a healing experience. I sent my quixotic dispatches to Jann Wenner, who published them in his Eye eclipsing Rolling Stone. I came back to New York 10 months later. It was 1970. If you've ever lived an earlier portion of your life in a manner that can't be explained without your sounding certifiable, you've probably collected examples of other women, real and fictional they've Velcro'd themselves to your psyche, out of defensiveness and comfort who exemplified the vaporous spirit of the age that governed the life you desired at the time. In my collection are: Sue Graham leaving the bland, white Dakotas for New York City ... and Charles Mingus; Susanna Moore's masochistic female writer in her downtown based novel "In the Cut"; the novelist Rachel Kushner's tough California "Alice" tumbled down the rabbit hole of the All Irony '70s New York art scene in her "The Flamethrowers"; the sneering, guiltless older musician on young girl demi molestation struggled with by the wounded, rapier witted West 10th Street teenage vixen in Dylan Landis's novel "Rainey Royal." And the songs in Laura Nyro's "Eli and the Thirteenth Confession." When I first heard its haunting opening track, "Timer," during my dazzling tumult, I almost fell on the floor in absolution. My nutty choice of boyfriend was sanctified into a spiritual journey. One of the first things I did when I got back to town was rush over to Paraphernalia to buy some new dresses, one of them a forest green velvet, collared and cap sleeved dance frock. The dress sent the message: You can make your own romance, and live it, and thrive. I asked Ms. Johnson, all these decades later, "That was yours, right?" "Yes!" she said. Ms. Johnson, ahead of the curve, had by then started her Alley Cat line, which lasted for four years, while also participating in the opening of Betsey Bunky Nini, long a trendy boutique on the Upper East Side. In 1978, Ms. Johnson and business partner Chantal Bacon started Betsey Johnson, the namesake brand that was built into 60 boutiques worldwide. She would push on and prevail, all the way through to this current decade. (How many people have had a steady design career for 50 years?) Breast cancer wouldn't stop her. Three divorces wouldn't stop her. Nor would single motherhood her daughter, Lulu, 39, is her best friend. Chapter 11 wouldn't stop her, in a business that "builds you up and spits you out and knocks you down," as Fern Mallis, the former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America describes the industry. "She just endures," Ms. Mallis said. "She keeps on ticking." Ms. Johnson branded herself long before others: She'd made the ballet skirt over a leotard her signature dress, and she made her spiky white blond hair and huge, red lipped smile her signature look. She performed a cartwheel at the end of her runway shows (she does to this day). She racked up accolades: the Coty Award, the Pratt Institute Award, the CFDA's Timeless Talent Award, several lifetime achievement prizes. With her new business partner, the shoe king Steve Madden, and as creative director of her namesake brand (whose name Mr. Madden purchased in 2010), she is licensing dresses, sleepwear, jewelry, bedding, handbags, footwear, fragrance. She just did a stint on "Dancing With the Stars." Ms. Johnson designed for good girls who wanted to seem wild but who could turn back at zero hour, girls who knew that no adventure was really dangerous as long as you kept your wits and your work ethic. We wanted to bury our ingenue selves, and she became one of the first New York women at a very convenient noir moment when the available means for such burial were copious as were, if you were smart and lucky, the means for self reclamation. She found them both. And then, like any good seamstress, she cut the pattern for the rest of us.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Frederick Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee" a tenderly sunny two act 1960 masterpiece that on Tuesday returned to the American Ballet Theater repertory for the first time in 10 years reaches zones of innocent joy beyond those attained by any other ballet. Its early stages take the audience by surprise, but the experience is also one of recognition and (again and again) of revelation. Surprise: There are dancing chickens and a cockerel but there's also a real pony. Widow Simone, the mother of the heroine, Lise, is played by a man (a tradition that goes back to 19th century Russia), and yet the relationship between mother and daughter is one of touchingly real conflict and affection. You see harvesters negotiating (in ballet mime) for more pay; you also see them dancing as they harvest, in steps that never feel false to the truth of farm life. Read Alastair Macaulay's primer on the poetic love in Ashton's choreography Recognition: The rural, comic world onstage is one we've known all our lives, an idyllic wonderland as real as the realms of Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame. Ashton, who had been reading the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, wrote: "There exists in my imagination a life in the country of eternally late spring, a leafy pastoral of perpetual sunshine and the humming of bees the suspended stillness of a Constable landscape of my beloved Suffolk." That world lives in this ballet. Revelation: Ashton called the ballet his "poor man's 'Pastoral' Symphony" "it was to Beethoven's symphony that I constantly returned during the period of preparation." In this "Fille," realism and naturalness exist with ceremony and classicism. In one incident, Lise holds a balance on one point and, grasping the ends of eight ribbons above her head, revolves, while her eight girlfriends, holding the ribbons' other ends, run around her. It's as miraculous as observing the harmony of the spheres in motion.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m.; through March 2). Herbert Blomstedt, that 91 year old miracle of spirit and smiles, mounts the podium to conduct Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 and Grieg's Suite No. 1 from "Peer Gynt," as well as his Piano Concerto. Jean Yves Thibaudet is the pianist. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. ORCHESTRA OF ST. LUKE'S at Carnegie Hall (Feb. 28, 8 p.m.). There's nothing more innovative in this program than Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, but sometimes there's nothing more satisfying than Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The orchestra's principal conductor, Bernard Labadie, leads Haydn's overture to "L'Isola Disabitata" and his Symphony No. 45, the "Farewell," as well as Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Mozart's concert aria "Non temer, amato bene." The soloists are luxury casting: Paul Lewis is at the keyboard; Ying Fang is the soprano. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org MATTHEW POLENZANI at Zankel Hall (Feb. 24, 3 p.m.). One of the Met's leading tenors appears with the pianist Julius Drake for a recital featuring Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms and, most intriguingly, Janacek, in the form of "The Diary of One Who Disappeared," for which Polenzani is joined by the mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano and a trio of offstage female voices. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org INBAL SEGEV at Roulette (Feb. 28, 8 p.m.). This recital, titled "21st Century Women," features Segev playing recent solo cello works by five of our more prominent female composers. Works by Anna Clyne, Missy Mazzoli and Kaija Saariaho are all on the bill, as are ones by Reena Maria Esmail and Gity Razaz, which are accompanied by films by Heather McCalden and Carmen Kordas, respectively. 917 267 0368, roulette.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Some decades ago I studied the impact of fraternities and sororities on the student cultures of colleges and universities. Historically, fraternities arose as a way of institutionalizing the resistance of collegians, more interested in play than in study, to the demands of faculty and administration. Fraternities gave rooms in which to gather, drink and rabble rouse; held files of previously assigned papers, opening the way to plagiarism, along with old exams that allowed unfair preparation and even the copying of previous successful answers. Fraternities sorted out groups by religion, class and race, creating hierarchies of prestige. Yearly rituals involving initiation of new members gave "brothers" opportunities to engage in group violence. What was not to like? Sororities may have been more circumspect, but they nonetheless offered "sisters" a structure of social hierarchy and imposed pressures toward conformity, bearing their own cruelties. Socializing with campus fraternities could also make college women vulnerable to sexual abuse.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
Because the fireplace is usually the focal point of a room and all the furniture is arranged around it the accessories that go with it matter. Especially the fireplace tools, which not only need to look good, but are also used to tend the fire and clean up after. "Nice fireplace tools are essential, but good ones are hard to find," said Steven Johanknecht, a founding partner of the Los Angeles based design firm Commune. A great set of tools, Mr. Johanknecht said, "just finishes off the room, but too often it's something that people don't really consider." At Commune, "almost every residential project we do has a fireplace," he said, and the firm's designers have used a wide variety of tools for homes ranging in style from Tudor to midcentury modern. Sometimes they struggle to find just the right ones, so they have even designed a steel set of their own, with square handles and a bronze patina.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
The jobless rate dropped to 4.4 percent in April, the lowest level in more than a decade, the government said on Friday, signaling the economy's resilience and showing a labor market closing in on full capacity. Employers added 211,000 workers, the Labor Department said, helping to quell doubts raised by sluggish growth in the first quarter and anemic hiring in March. The economic anxiety and uneven fortunes that figured so prominently in the presidential campaign have not disappeared, particularly outside of the country's flourishing urban centers. Wage growth was also modest, with the year over year increase staying just baby steps ahead of inflation. But some of the labor force's weakest corners improved, with declines in the ranks of discouraged workers and of those working part time who would prefer full time jobs. The average monthly gain in jobs since February reached 174,000. "Great news," Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta said Friday morning on Twitter, adding in a later statement that further work was needed "on bridging the skills gap and on expanding opportunity." Republicans were not alone in paying homage to the labor market's strength. "The momentum in the job market is really impressive," said Jason Furman, the chief economic adviser during the Obama administration. "I'm frankly surprised that this late into an expansion the economy is still adding jobs well above the steady state pace." The April figures renewed a conversation among economists about whether the economy was at "full employment," the point at which everyone who wants a job can get one at the current level of pay. There was less agreement on who deserved the credit. Republicans crowed about how many jobs had been created since President Trump took office in January, while Democrats pointed to the ongoing economic legacy of President Barack Obama. Three months is still a short span in the life of an administration, and Mr. Trump has not yet pushed through the main planks of his pro growth agenda like tax reform or a large investment in infrastructure. Even so, some economists gave the president credit for a jump in optimism. "Sharp increases in consumer and business confidence can have real consequences that show up in increased hiring and investment," said Douglas Holtz Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who advised Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, during his 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Holtz Eakin added that Mr. Trump's freezing of new regulations and elimination of others were having a measurable impact. "The observed pace of regulatory activity has come to a standstill," he said. In contrast, he argued, a persistent rollout of regulations by the Obama administration had added millions of dollars in costs for businesses each week. Another major factor in the economy's performance is, of course, the Federal Reserve Board, which put a confident stamp on the economy this week and plans to raise interest rates further this year. The jobs report on Friday strengthens that case, though another report is due before Fed policy makers meet again in June. And the wide swing between March's disappointing jobs growth figure, which was revised to 79,000, and April's vibrant one was a useful reminder that every monthly jobs report provides only a temporary and incomplete snapshot of the economy. Elizabeth Holmes has taken the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The C.E.O. of Afiniti, an A.I. start up, steps down after accusations of sexual assault. Whatever effect Mr. Trump's policies are having so far, economists agree that presidents always tend to be given much more responsibility for the economy's ups and downs than they deserve. "We have a big, big economy and the overall shape is made by millions and millions of individual decisions," said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "We tend to give too much emphasis to role of the president." "It's not an employer's market," said Patrick Bass, chief executive of Thyssenkrupp North America, which makes elevators, steel and other industrial products. Based in Germany, Thyssenkrupp employs more than 15,000 people in the United States, but "the labor market is very competitive at all levels," Mr. Bass said. "We have more positions open than we've been able to fill." Yet if shortages were as acute as advertised, then wages would be bid up at a faster rate. Average hourly earnings, though, rose by 0.3 percent in April, bringing the year over year growth to 2.5 percent. Last year at this time, increases were the same but inflation was lower, further shrinking the impact of any wage increases. Employers must decide whether to buy skills or to build them, said Michael Stull, a senior vice president at the staffing company Manpower North America. The small pressure on wages, he said, is evidence that they have been trying to buy them, but more businesses are expressing an interest in partnerships with educational institutions or in developing skills so that new hires "can earn while they learn." Workers with fewer skills or less experience can often be hired at a cut rate. Some may have come from the ranks of part time workers who want full time jobs and of those who had previously been too discouraged to look. There was a sharp drop last month in the broader measure of unemployment, which includes individuals in both categories, to 8.6 percent from 8.9 percent. That is close to the prerecession rate. Less encouraging was a dip in the proportion of adults who have a job or want one. That measure, known as the labor participation rate, edged down to 62.9 percent last month from 63 percent, a sign that workers who had been sidelined are not being drawn back into the labor market. "This gets to be the real issue," said Diane Swonk, founder of DS Economics in Chicago. "As good as this report is, it points to how hard it is to bring in those marginalized workers. With skills erosion, people in long term unemployment have gotten into a vicious cycle. An incoming tide does not lift all boats." And the divisions among Republicans in Washington that have left the future of the Affordable Care Act uncertain even after the House vote on Thursday to repeal it have put some employers in a wait and see mode. Ms. Swonk noted, for example, that while hiring in health care and social assistance jobs was up by 37,000, the monthly average in the sector was down from last year at the same time. "Health care employment since the beginning of the year is not the driver it once was," Ms. Swonk said, calling it a "residual of uncertainty regarding health care coverage." Owners of small and medium size businesses tell pollsters that they are optimistic about the economy, despite several weak economic indicators, said Catherine Barrera, an economics professor at Cornell University and the chief economic adviser for ZipRecruiter, an online jobs platform. But many employers have yet to act on their stated intentions to add workers. "The thing that stands out most," Ms. Barrera said, is the "gap between that optimism and the follow through on that optimism." Matthew Dolly, director of research at Transwestern, a national commercial real estate firm, said: "Businesses want to hire and planned on hiring. But until policies are ironed out, hiring will remain stagnant for a bit while that happens." Even after a policy is carried out, it can take time before the effect kicks in. When it comes to individual tax cuts, for example, consumers have historically started to spend only when the extra money is in hand, not when it is promised, said William Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
WARSAW Nearly a decade after it was first proposed, Poland's Museum of the Second World War, billed as the most comprehensive public exhibition in Europe about the greatest cataclysm of the 20th century, opened on March 23. Among those in attendance were former prisoners of German Nazi concentration camps and Soviet labor camps. The museum, in the seaside city of Gdansk, has attracted some 14,000 visitors in just its first two weeks. But Poland's president, prime minister and culture minister who might normally be expected to attend such a high profile event were absent from the opening. The museum has become an ideological and political flash point, and its director may be out of a job. A Polish court on Wednesday cleared the way for the right wing government in Poland, which took power in 2015, to seize control of the institution and merge it with a smaller, not yet built institution that would focus more narrowly on the German Nazi invasion of 1939. The merger would likely result in the dismissal of the museum's director, the historian Pawel Machcewicz.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
A CENTURY ago, when electric cars were popular especially in cities and among women drivers they looked discernibly different from gasoline powered automobiles. In the age of the horseless carriage, the transportation historian James Flink wrote, electric cars looked even more like carriages. Those early electric cars were upright and boxy, just the look that today's designers are trying to avoid. The electric cars on display this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit are adopting one of two overriding design philosophies: make it exciting, or make it familiar. Joel Piaskowski, Ford's director of exterior design for the Americas, says both approaches are valid. "Some people want to stand out and make that an expression," he said. "Others want to be discreet." While the electric design studies of the recent past were often futuristic pods, the designs of the latest production models are dictated largely by one mundane factor: where the batteries go. The most common solution, in the vehicles' floor, usually establishes what designers call the small tall format. Fitting the elements of electric drive into a conventional body can limit range or passenger space, and the small tall configuration isn't inherently stylish. The challenge, said Adrian van Hooydonk, head of design of BMW, is to present the small tall configuration in an attractive way. Many designers have resorted to visual tricks to keep electrics from looking gawky or humpy. In an effort to reduce the car's apparent height, the designers of the Chevrolet Volt, a General Motors team lead by Robert Boniface, worked to fool the viewer's eye. They artificially lowered the beltline essentially, the baseline of the car's windows by putting shiny black trim under the greenhouse. They added dark glass beneath the spoiler to make the rear seem less high set. Nissan designers kept the Leaf from looking goggle eyed by reducing the headlights to blisters that swell above the hood. The designers also rolled the tail of the car backward and downward in an effort, not wholly successful, to hide its awkwardness. But even within the small tall genre, the cars' shapes vary a great deal. The small electric car that Mitsubishi calls the "i" (adapted from the Japan market i MiEV) uses the same beanlike body as a gas model. Franz von Holzhausen, who had been a designer for Volkswagen, General Motors and Mazda and is now chief designer at Tesla Motors, says that designing electrics does not require sacrificing style. To judge from the latest prototypes of the company's Model S, he has achieved the sensuous lines of a traditional sports car, differentiated from an internal combustion vehicle mostly by its grille. Mr. Piaskowski of Ford says there are "two camps" on the design of hybrid and electric cars. "One is to have a dedicated architecture," he said. "The other is to use an existing architecture." An start up carmaker might expect a better reception if its models arrive in a familiar package. The Coda electric suggests a small, generic family sedan. Likewise, mysterious new technology might find greater acceptance if it is embedded in a traditional body style. Ford's electric Focus, for instance, is virtually indistinguishable from its gasoline powered siblings. Some analysts foresee a time when car buyers will pick from similar looking cars that offer various types of electric, hybrid and conventional powertrains much as shoppers now choose among 4 , 6 or 8 cylinder engines. While Ford has elected to add electric technology to familiar body designs, BMW is taking a different tack. The German automaker has created a new subbrand (also called "i") and a new design philosophy that emphasizes the substitution of carbon fiber for steel or aluminum. BMW says it thinks that pioneering electric car customers will want to advertise the new technology they have purchased. Benoit Jacob, head of design for the new "i" division, said: "We discussed whether we should make a normal looking car, or should we make a statement." Mr. Jacob noted that the "i" cars are not for everyone, "but some people want to show they are already part of the future, driving a car like this." The all electric i3 concept car, which will be displayed in Detroit, has a body of mostly carbon fiber, rather than metal. The substitution makes the car lighter and extends its travel range on a battery charge. The result is a radically different design, Mr. Jacob said. "This material gave us the chance to begin from a white sheet of paper. We designed a new kind of car." The i3 concept has large windows that plunge dramatically into the doors. This effectively removes the beltline as the visual center of the car's design. Black bands proudly display carbon fiber, and blue body segments show off the color that the industry often uses to signal electric drive. The key to the BMW design is layering and translucence, an interplay of surface and depth that is also a mix of materials: glass, carbon, plastic and metal. Mr. Jacob said the carbon elements and the large windows visually emphasized the lightness of the i3's structure. As in the case of the Volt, the disparate parts black, blue and transparent break up the shape of the vehicle and make it seem shorter. "This material allows us greater interior space than steel," he said. "We have also developed a new kind of door." The generous glass areas provide better visibility, but they also have stylistic and expressive importance. "We use the word transparency a lot with my team," Mr. Jacob said. "We want to make the vehicle optically light, but also optimistic and open minded about the future." At Audi, electric models are also sequestered into a subbrand called E tron. Stefan Sielaff, Audi's chief of design, said the company had created a set of common elements for its electric cars think of it as a dialect of the company's broader design language. The E tron electric models display carbon fiber panels and the wheels are what Mr. Sielaff called a mandala shape, using the Sanskrit word for wheel shapes in Asian art, though others might see the blades of jet turbines. These wheels are made up of vanes or panels of exposed carbon fiber. Mr. Sielaff said the company did not plan to simply to shift from aluminum, which Audi pioneered in cars like the A8, to carbon fiber. Rather, Audi's future electric designs will mix aluminum frames with carbon panels and elements of magnesium. Lighter materials also dictate the shape of a new electric car design by Gordon Murray, a noted designer of Formula One cars and the McLaren F1 supercar. Mr. Murray is promoting his T.27 as a new type of small car that he says can be made in a more efficient and less costly process. The cars would be built of panels of carbon reinforced polymer, a relative of carbon fiber and fiberglass, attached to a tubular metal frame. Mr. Murray says that the bodies would be 20 to 25 percent lighter than those built conventionally and that the system to build them would require 80 percent less investment and 60 percent less energy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
WASHINGTON Congressional leaders confirmed this week what seemed inevitable with the triumph of Donald J. Trump: The far reaching trade agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim nations that President Obama hoped to leave as a major legacy, but which Mr. Trump called "a terrible deal," is dead. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the incoming Democratic leader, told labor leaders on Thursday that the pending Trans Pacific Partnership, the largest regional trade agreement in history, would not be approved by Congress. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said flat out "no" when reporters on Wednesday asked whether the agreement would be considered in the lame duck Congress that convenes next week its last legislative chance, given the opposition from the president elect. Mr. Trump, whose invectives against trade agreements were central to his appeal to disaffected working class voters, will have the authority as president "to negotiate better deals, as I think he would put it," Mr. McConnell said. Yet there is little likelihood of Mr. Trump seeking a new agreement. That reflects not only his campaign statements, but also his yearslong hostility to past trade accords as well as the sheer difficulty of renegotiating a Pacific pact that was seven years in the making, entailing compromises among a dozen countries including Australia, Canada, Chile and Japan, but excluding China. Another broad trade deal still being negotiated, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between Europe and the United States, is a likely casualty of the Trump election and a global backlash against trade. The discussions "are dead, and I think everybody knows it," Matthias Fekl, the French secretary of state for trade, said Friday as trade ministers met in Brussels. "Globalization has created lots of losers, lots of difficulties." Mr. Obama faces the prospect of many of his signature achievements dying or being pared back dramatically during the Trump administration. The president elect and congressional leaders have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Trump has said he will pull the United States out of last year's Paris climate agreement and kill off Mr. Obama's global warming regulations. The Dodd Frank law regulating Wall Street could be carved up. But the Trans Pacific Partnership, painstakingly negotiated but little understood, will be buried with few in either party to mourn it. It was hailed by its negotiators as the most sophisticated such deal ever, establishing the rules of commerce that would rope both sides of the Pacific together into a 21st century economy, while cementing the United States' alliance with Asia. Which raises the question: What would be lost by abandoning it, for the nation and for specific industries from Hollywood to America's ranches and farmlands? "Popular understanding of the T.P.P. is very low," Kevin G. Nealer, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a postelection analysis on Thursday. With its abandonment, he added, "The risk to America's role as trade policy leader and therefore to the global economy is real and immediate." Mr. Obama and his team likewise emphasized the potential geopolitical blow, even as they promoted the economic benefits the trade agreement would offer American exporters by eliminating thousands of tariffs and other trade restrictions in the other countries. Forsaking the agreement, the president insisted, would undercut the United States' standing in the fast growing Asia Pacific region as a reliable counterweight to an expansionary China, economically and militarily, for America's allies there. The other countries have approved the pact or are in the process of doing so, but without the approval of the United States, it does not take effect. That tension could well be evident later this month, when Mr. Obama and his trade representative, Michael B. Froman, attend the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The Americans will have to explain their failure on the trade agreement to foreign leaders gathered in Lima, Peru, while China's leader, Xi Jinping, is there seeking progress toward an emerging alternative to the Trans Pacific Partnership the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, known as R.C.E.P., which includes China, Japan and 14 other Asian countries but excludes the United States. "In the absence of T.P.P., countries have already made it clear that they will move forward in negotiating their own trade agreements that exclude the United States," Mr. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers wrote days before the election. "These agreements would improve market access and trading opportunities for member countries while U.S. businesses would continue to face existing trade barriers." One example is a bilateral agreement between Australia and Japan, which gives Australian beef exporters a price advantage over American producers whose exports are subject to higher Japanese tariffs; those tariffs would ultimately have been removed under the Pacific agreement. "We are experiencing lost sales without T.P.P." of about 400,000 a day as a result, said Kevin Kester, a California cattle rancher and vice president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "Multiply that over several hundred more products and several dozen more free trade relationships," Mr. Froman said in an interview. The T.P.P. would have phased out some 18,000 tariffs that the other 11 countries have on imports from the United States, thus reducing their cost to foreign buyers. Beyond such typical trade actions, it also would have established a number of precedents for international trade rules dealing with digital commerce, intellectual property rights, human rights and environmental protection. For the first time in a trade agreement, state owned businesses like those in Vietnam and Malaysia would have had to comply with commercial trade rules and labor and environmental standards. The agreement would have committed all parties to the International Labor Organization's principles prohibiting child labor, forced labor and excessive hours, and requiring collective bargaining, a minimum wage and safe workplaces. While unions and human rights groups remained skeptical about enforcement, the United States reached separate agreements with Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam in which the three countries committed to specific labor changes, under penalty of the United States' restoring tariffs for noncompliance. Those side agreements will fall along with the overall trade pact. Election year antitrade politics aside, the biggest hurdle to Republicans' consideration of the Pacific pact was objections from some led by Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, chairman of the committee responsible for trade to intellectual property provisions that would have limited monopoly protections for brand name pharmaceutical companies' so called biologics. Those are advanced drugs used, for instance, in cancer treatments. The Obama administration pressed by nearly every other nation, the generic drug industry and nonprofit health groups like Doctors Without Borders, all of which wanted quicker access to affordable lifesaving drugs had agreed that drugmakers could keep production data secret for five to eight years, fewer than the 12 years in federal law. Mr. Hatch had demanded 12 years. But administration officials were hindered in how far they could go to appease Republicans given strong opposition in other countries to any change. Without the trade agreement, however, drug companies have no monopoly protections for biologics data in some countries. Democrats, organized labor and the Ford Motor Company were especially opposed to the trade agreement because it did not include what they considered enforceable protections against other countries' manipulation of their currency's value to gain price advantages for their products. The pact did have a side agreement that, in another first for trade accords, included the parties' "joint declaration" against currency manipulation, required them to report interventions in exchange markets and set annual meetings to discuss any disputes. Another innovation in the T.P.P. was provisions to help small businesses, which lack the resources of big corporations, to navigate export rules, trade barriers and red tape. Opponents on the left were especially critical of the agreement for opening the door to more foreign subsidiaries being able to go to special trade tribunals to sue to block local, state or federal policies environmental or consumer safety rules, say on grounds that the rules conflict with corporations' rights under the trade pact. The administration, however, countered that the trade agreement actually reformed the so called Investor State Dispute Settlement tribunals, which are a longstanding feature of trade policy. It called for changes responding to criticisms that the tribunals favor corporations and interfere with nations' efforts to protect public health and safety.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
Malbon Golf wants to sell a white collar, country club sport as a pursuit that's got street cred. An apparel brand with a streetwear sensibility wants to get teens and 20 somethings onto the gre en . PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. Last Tuesday, as men in penny loafers descended on this golfers' paradise, Stephen Malbon surveyed the backyard of a Spanish Colonial mansion and lit up a fat blunt. A hundred or so people had come to celebrate a collaboration between his apparel brand, Malbon Golf, and Beat s, the headphone maker. "There's still a lot of people coming," he said, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke as Kanye West boomed in the background. "Most golf parties, I don't want to go to," Mr. Malbon said. "It's all white dudes in blazers and khaki pants. It's like a bank party with a bunch of, like, bankers." He sauntered up to a makeshift putting green, where Schoolboy Q, a rapper, was demonstrating his swing for Tony Finau, the 16th ranked player in the Professional Golfers Association. "I try to golf every day," said Schoolboy Q, whose given name is Quincy Matthew Hanley. He started playing a year and a half ago, after a friend bet him 10,000 that he couldn't make a birdie (a score of one stroke under par) in two years. "The third time I ever played, I got a birdie," he said. "That was the only birdie for like four months. But this guy," he said, pounding Mr. Malbon on the shoulder, "plugged me with a lot of golfers, golf connections. I play with people like him and me, people that wanna change the game, people that don't care about wearing their hat backwards until somebody says, 'Hey, you gotta turn your hat around.'" "We say, 'No problem,' and turn it around for like, one hole," said Mr. Malbon. "And then turn it right back," said Schoolboy Q. "Don't try to make me be not who I am. I wear my teeth." He flashed his grill: chrome on top, blue on the bottom. Mr. Malbon and his crew were in town for the U.S. Open, the third of four annual major golf championships, with a lofty goal in mind: to make golf cool. Though the sport has long appealed to a certain set of white collar professionals, and the comeback of Tiger Woods enthralled even the most ESPN averse, the look of it hasn't changed all that much. Meanwhile, other professional sports like basketball, soccer, tennis and even gaming have become increasingly aligned with streetwear brands. "Kids that are into fashion, hip hop and music, they're not into golf," said Mr. Malbon. "It's in danger of going where baseball is. Or think about bowling bowling used to be lit." "Every event, activation, whatever, it was always, art, music, fashion, graffiti, skateboarding," said Mr. Malbon, who was raised in Virginia Beach and began golfing at age 12. "When I lived in New York, I was embarrassed, almost, to be a golfer," he said, kicked back on a linen covered armchair inside the mansion (which is owned by Mark Werts, the founder of the clothing company American Rag Cie). "Golf is the most non punk rock thing there is." Things changed when he moved to L.A., where Ms. Malbon grew up and golfed as a kid. "I was doing events at Fred Segal with youth brands, and I was like, 'I don't want to be here,'" Mr. Malbon said. "I had that feeling of, 'Gross.' My interests had changed." "You matured," Ms. Malbon said. She wore a white maxi dress and sanguinely sipped ice water. "It's not like you're going to be D.J.ing at an underground club anymore." "I don't go to clubs," Mr. Malbon said. "I don't want to go to 1Oak. I want to go to country clubs early, in the morning." In 2012, Mr. Malbon started a golf dedicated Instagram account, "because people in his daily life were like, 'Dude, stop posting photos of golf, none of us golf,'" Ms. Malbon said. It became "a complete obsession," Mr. Malbon said. "I had thoughts of doing what I know how to do" making brands relevant to young people "in the golf world." Cheeky logos a golf ball with lines under its eyes, presumably strung out from the night before adorn Malbon's sweatshirts, hats and polos, available online and at a store on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, up the street from Supreme. There's space in the back to putt and throw parties attended by casual celebrity golfers like Tyler the Creator. It's millennial catnip, but not everyone likes cats. "On Instagram, there's a huge discrepancy between people that are our fans and people who are not our fans," said Ms. Malbon. "The haters are like, 'This is not golf,' 'Don't wear Jordans golfing.'" Old and new ideas have informed his aesthetic sensibility. This fall, Malbon will introduce plush merino sweaters made with the Scottish heritage brand Lyle Scott. Earlier this year, the company partnered with Nike on a line of graffiti esque golf shoes that quickly sold out. And Beats, its co host for the party, recently formalized endorsement deals with Mr. Finau, 29, and Justin Thomas, 26, the PGA's seventh ranked player. "If you look at him, he's just straight up Southern California," Mr. Finau said of Mr. Malbon. "He's got swag. The game of golf needs more of those personalities." "There's a lot more guys like me on the tour that would like to come to a party like this," he added, "instead of a place where they have to wear a button up shirt." An unbuttoned philosophy governs the Malbon Golf Club, founded in May, a collective of L.A. area golfers who plan to compete, monthly, on a municipal course, "so you don't have to pay 300,000 to be able to play with a good group of people and have a good time," Ms. Malbon said. The first gathering is scheduled for late June. "There are a lot of people like me, who, just because I want to join my dad's country club, doesn't mean I want to act like he did," said Mr. Malbon. "Or wear his clothes," said Ms. Malbon. Still, she admitted, they're in the process of joining a traditional country club, "mainly because our younger son," they have two, ages 7 and 9, "is really obsessed with golf." "It's an investment in his future," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
LAST fall Kathleen and Donald Hogan of Plainview, who had fallen three months behind on their mortgage payments, sent the Bank of America a check for 2,020. It was all they could muster of the 3,256 they owed their mortgage servicer that month on the three bedroom two and a half bath split level they have owned since 2001. The bank returned the check, refusing a partial payment. Unable to sort out their problem and restart a loan modification process by phone, the Hogans recently attended a foreclosure help event sponsored by Bank of America at a Marriott in Uniondale. They hoped to roll the 9,700 in arrears into a new loan, or be given 18 months rather than 90 days to pay it back. The Hogans were among the 4,955 delinquent customers within a 100 mile radius invited to the outreach event with housing counselors and specialists that the Bank of America held July 12 to 14 at the Marriott. According to a Bank of America spokeswoman, 291 customers met with loan modification specialists, underwriters and other experts on site. "It's a thorough analysis of your financial situation," said Jessica M. Garcia, a vice president for national mortgage outreach. "The economic downturn has impacted people in different ways," among them divorce, job loss, underemployment or illness. The spokeswoman said that out of the 30 percent who arrived with full documentation, only about 10 were approved for a loan modification. Customers who did not receive a decision on site have the option of meeting later with a specialist; 50 attendees scheduled appointments. The Bank of America event was one of several on the Island in the wake of a 25 billion federal state settlement reached in February with the nation's five largest loan servicers for foreclosing without verifying documents. The settlement provides relief for: homeowners needing loan modification now; borrowers who are current but underwater, or owe more than their property is worth; and victims of wrongful foreclosure conduct. JPMorgan Chase, which since last fall has been meeting with struggling borrowers at a "homeownership center" in Hauppauge, held a loan modification event this month at a Hempstead branch. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, Wells Fargo assembled a team of more than 100 mortgage specialists and invited 40,000 customers from the area, including 6,300 within a 25 mile radius, to a "Home Preservation Workshop" at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Ally Financial held a similar event in Melville. Distressed CitiMortgage clients can attend a July 31 event at the Islandia Marriott. At the Bank of America event, qualifying customers had to be 60 days or more behind on their mortgages. A modification to make payments more manageable could include extending terms, reducing the rate, or suspending payments for 90 days. Reducing the mortgage amount is not the focus, said Ms. Garcia, who has been running such events in different parts of the country for four years. "Let's right size the payment based on what the customer can manage." "Our goal is foreclosure prevention," she added. The bank also operates a customer assistance center in West Hempstead six days a week. In June, according to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing firm, there were 391 new notifications of pending foreclosure in Nassau County and 178 in Suffolk County, down from June a year earlier, when there were 428 in Nassau and 292 in Suffolk. Foreclosures are affecting one in 1,162 homes in Nassau and one in 2,317 in Suffolk. Marie Day, a regional servicing director for Wells Fargo home mortgage division, which services 17 percent of Island mortgages, says that 7 percent of its customers are currently unable to pay their mortgages on time. "We will do all we can to get them to an affordable number," she said. "We do not want to be in the real estate business" rather to help "as many of our customers as possible to stay in their home." Before seeing specialists at the Bank of America event, borrowers discussed budgets with housing counselors from the nonprofit agencies Community Development Corporation of Long Island or the Long Island Housing Partnership, both certified by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Topics included "crisis budgets" for the immediate hurdles, as well as budgets maintainable in the long term. "It's a reality check, an awareness," said Joan LaFemina, the program manager for homeowners services for the Community Development Corporation. The budgeting form required itemization of gym memberships, cosmetics purchases, expenses like dry cleaning and manicures in short, minor expenses that add up and "prevent people from long term success." The counselors functioned as a nonjudgmental "support team" to help prioritize budget essentials and prepare for the bank process. "Everyone thinks a modification will save them," Ms. LaFemina said. "We can't promise that everyone can keep their home. It's about being honest and realistic." The events, she continued, "offer them for good or bad answers, resolutions." Carol Yopp, the foreclosure prevention program manager for the Long Island Housing Partnership, said many of the homeowners who attended had previously received a modification and were "now out of work and facing another crisis." Contributing factors have included exorbitant local property taxes and a high cost of living, she added. Homeowners who are unemployed shouldn't expect a loan modification, she said, but they can request that the bank "defer a portion of their payment while on unemployment without penalty." As for the Hogans, paying the mortgage became problematic in 2008 when Mr. Hogan lost his job. Then Ms. Hogan was disabled. Two years ago, when one of their children suddenly needed surgery, their medical expenses soared; that was when they first received a loan modification. Meanwhile, counting the arrears, the delinquency charges and other bank fees, their initial 300,000 mortgage swelled to 426,385, Ms. Hogan said. "Basically the last 10 years of paying the mortgage were lost," she added, expressing hopes that they could "hold on to what we have" and not lose the house. After several hours at the event, the bank deferred a decision on the Hogans' plight for 7 to 10 days.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
From left, Joshua Roberts/Reuters, Matt Edge for The New York Times, Mike Cohen for The New York Times. From left, Joshua Roberts/Reuters, Matt Edge for The New York Times, Mike Cohen for The New York Times. Credit... From left, Joshua Roberts/Reuters, Matt Edge for The New York Times, Mike Cohen for The New York Times. Billionaires Can Seem Like Saviors to Media Companies, but They Come With Risks Roughly a century ago, men like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and Henry Luce dominated the media landscape. These moguls built their publishing empires and used them to intimidate rivals, espouse favored causes and settle scores. Today, members of a new Gilded Age are again in control of many of the country's most venerable media outlets. Only now, it is tech entrepreneurs, casino magnates and hedge fund billionaires who are seizing control of the press, simply by writing a check. In the most recent transaction, Marc Benioff, the founder of the software company Salesforce, bought Time magazine on Sunday for 190 million in cash. With the deal, Mr. Benioff joined an elite club of relatively new press barons that includes the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post; Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of the Apple co founder Steve Jobs and the head of the Emerson Collective, who acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic; and Michael R. Bloomberg, who owns Businessweek and Bloomberg News. At a moment when many print publications are struggling to survive, the largess of a wealthy owner can seem like a godsend. But there are also fresh concerns, some based on recent experience, that these individuals are assuming an unhealthy amount of influence. "Even good billionaires need to have less of a role in our public life," said Anand Giridharadas, author of "Winners Take All," a new book about the global elite. "They are buying up the free press, which is meant to hold them accountable." Beyond the marquee names, local billionaires now own the daily newspapers in Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Boston. Smaller outlets including The Village Voice, The New Republic and Gothamist were also bought by wealthy individuals in recent years. And all of this is happening as the business model for print and online journalism remains precarious at best. "We have a new era, particularly in the last few years, of billionaire owners from the new economy who are intrigued by this old dilemma," said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, a journalism advocacy group. In some cases, these new owners succeed in revitalizing the publications they acquire, injecting them with new energy and freeing them from the pressures of short term profits, while preserving editorial independence. By all accounts, Mr. Bezos has refrained from meddling in the news or the editorial operations of The Washington Post, where the newsroom has grown significantly under his ownership. Ms. Jobs has earned similarly high marks for her work at The Atlantic over the last year. Businessweek was reinvigorated under Mr. Bloomberg's ownership. The new owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon Shiong, is investing in the paper, and has pledged to allow it to operate with editorial independence. And in Minnesota, a local businessman, Glen Taylor, has drawn praise for his ownership of The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which he bought for about 100 million in 2014. "Jobs and Bezos and presumably Benioff, these people are doing good work," said Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, who recently donated 20 million to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. "Anything that helps independent journalism is a good thing." But just as often, it seems, the new owners of newspapers and magazines can sap newsroom morale, or quickly discover that they have little tolerance for financial losses, or unions. For much of the 20th century, print publications were largely owned by private companies often helmed by families like the Scrippses and the Chandlers that had started a publication in one city and gradually expanded. By the 1970s, consolidation and ample profits from print advertising led many of these companies to go public. But in the late 1990s, advertising on the internet began to chip away at print profits. And in recent years, many once proud print empires have consolidated, others have been sold for parts, and some papers and magazines are simply going out of business. Amid this turmoil, the new generation of wealthy buyers has emerged. But while buying a high wattage publication can deliver an owner a certain amount of status and prestige, it can also invite controversy. President Trump, displeased with coverage of his administration in The Washington Post, has taken to attacking Amazon on Twitter, even though Mr. Bezos not Amazon owns the newspaper. And Mr. Benioff may find himself facing the ire of Mr. Trump should Time continue publishing tough covers that portray the president in a critical light. (Mr. Benioff has sparred with members of the administration in the past. In 2015, when Vice President Mike Pence was the governor of Indiana, Mr. Benioff threatened to reduce Salesforce's business there in protest of a state law that critics said discriminated against people who are gay or transgender.) Walter Isaacson, a former editor of Time, said that for most of his career, he had believed that the best owners for media companies were publicly traded corporations, where there was less of a chance for a wealthy owner to meddle. That changed, he said, during his tenure at Time. "Then I went through the disaster of Time Warner, a company that only cared about short term stock price and didn't have a feel for journalism," he said. Now, Mr. Isaacson said, "I have come to the belief that a sole proprietor, especially a benevolent and public spirited one, is a good thing in troubled times." Mr. Giridharadas, however, remains skeptical that ultrarich individuals, however public spirited, are the best owners for the free press. "I'm concerned about the powerful having an oligopoly of the media," he said. "The only amount of power that a billionaire should have over a paper they own is zero."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. What do you think of it? What else are you interested in? Let us know: thearts nytimes.com. Samantha Bee and Gretchen Carlson Agree on One Thing Samantha Bee continues to speak out against workplace harassment, and on Wednesday's "Full Frontal" she focused on so called forced arbitration clauses, which often serve to silence women when they accuse co workers of misconduct. Bee sat down with the former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, who sued Roger Ailes in 2016 for sexual harassment and is now pushing Congress to pass legislation limiting the use of forced arbitration. Bee admitted to making fun of Carlson "for 12 straight years at my previous gig" "The Daily Show" but she said fighting workplace harassment should be a bipartisan effort. The other late night shows focused on President Trump's State of the Union address, and each host seemed to have his own particular beef with it. "President Trump gave his first State of the Union address last night. And I have to say, he did all white." SETH MEYERS, showing a photograph of white Republican senators and members of the cabinet in the audience at Tuesday's address Some were skeptical of the president's appeals to bipartisanship. "He offered what he called an open hand to members of both parties, to work together in a bipartisan way. Donald Trump calling for bipartisanship is about as believable as Mike Pence calling for bisexuality." JIMMY KIMMEL "During his speech, Trump called for unity. He said, quote, 'Tonight I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground.' And when he finds that common ground, he plans to build a wall across it that goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean." JAMES CORDEN Bee took issue with the way the president addressed the debate over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that protects from deportation young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. "My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities and their right to the American dream," he said. "Because Americans are Dreamers, too." "Oh my God, what a beautiful, proud, thoughtful way to say that you will only help white people," Bee responded. "In a new interview, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi should, quote, 'smile a lot more often.' And that Senator Ted Cruz should smile never." SETH MEYERS "Today it was reported that President Trump's State of the Union address was the most tweeted in history. Yeah, when he was told this, Trump said, 'Suck it, Abraham Lincoln!'" CONAN O'BRIEN On "The Daily Show," Roy Wood Jr. offered a response to the State of the Union, specifically for the black community.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
For Those With O.C.D., a Threat That Is Both Heightened and Familiar The coronavirus outbreak has turned many of us into nervous germophobes, seeking to protect ourselves from infection by washing our hands methodically and frequently, avoiding unnecessary contact with so called high touch surfaces and methodically sanitizing packages, our homes and our bodies. For people diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., the worry created by the threat of coronavirus has the potential for more intense and longer lasting implications. According to the International OCD Foundation, there are about three million Americans who have been diagnosed with O.C.D. It's a condition characterized by unwanted thoughts or urges that generate high levels of anxiety and repetitive acts meant to neutralize the obsessional thought. The cleaning and sanitizing practices that help prevent coronavirus infection are bringing people with O.C.D. into closer orbit to behaviors that are a gateway to detrimental patterns that could interfere with their ability to engage meaningfully with the world outside their homes for years to come. Courtenay Patlin, a 28 year old in Los Angeles, is trying to find balance between appropriate caution and overreaction. Several weeks ago, before the California shelter in place order, Ms. Patlin decided to mostly stay indoors. She had read enough about how quickly coronavirus had spread in China, Italy and then Seattle, and how very sick it was making so many. She felt she could rely on only herself and her Clorox to stay healthy. "I keep a very clean apartment, and I feel safe at home," she said. Ms. Patlin, a graduate student studying clinical psychology, was diagnosed with O.C.D. about five years ago, she said, after years of being afraid of public toilets, refusing to eat off dishes that she hadn't scrubbed herself or witnessed being sufficiently cleaned by others and being fearful of being hugged by basically anyone. In recent years, she said, she had managed what is known as "contamination O.C.D." with medication and therapy. But these days, Ms. Patlin has felt her O.C.D. take reign again. When she heard a neighbor sneeze across the courtyard, she closed her windows to keep out any shared air. When a friend picked up Ms. Patlin's prescriptions from a pharmacy and left them for her at her doorstep, she wiped down the bottles with bleach, in the hope of killing any germs the pharmacist may have transmitted. The most complicated part is she doesn't even know anymore what's too much. "These are the moments when I am asking myself, 'Is that my O.C.D. or should I be doing that?'" Ms. Patlin said. "The lines are getting blurred." The lines between O.C.D. and avoiding dangerous germs today About one third of people with O.C.D. are afflicted by contamination O.C.D. The new reality of a pandemic that requires acute attention to the transmission of germs creates additional peril for these people. "The rules have changed," said Julia Hitch, a psychologist in Seattle whose practice is in part devoted to treating children and adults with O.C.D. "Friends and neighbors are now engaging in O.C.D. type behaviors, and it's making people in treatment with O.C.D. wonder: 'How do I not let this get out of hand, and what is out of hand anymore?'" Dr. Hitch said. Those who have successfully gone through treatment to overcome or manage a contamination obsession and sanitizing compulsion are working hard to cope. Bella Ronan, a 19 year old in Kirkland, Wash., was diagnosed with O.C.D. when she was 9. Her symptoms began, she said, after her younger sister, Frannie, was born. Ms. Ronan obsessively worried about germs coming into the house that could harm her sister, who has Down syndrome. To avoid transferring germs from one room to another, Ms. Ronan designated a different pair of slippers for each room of the house. She would change her slippers three times as she went from the kitchen to the living room to the laundry room. If her mother wiped down a table with a cleaner that had chemicals in it and Ms. Ronan's book was placed on the table, she would refuse to touch the book again for fear of being contaminated by the chemical. "I was washing my hands 40 times a day, scrubbing them so they were raw and bloody," said Ms. Ronan, who is living with her family while on a gap year between high school and college. Years of intensive therapy and finding the right combination of medications offered short term relief from the O.C.D., she said. But her life was changed after she turned 18 and was eligible for an adult residential treatment program. She stayed for eight weeks and the treatment consisted of intense exposure therapy during which Ms. Ronan tested her fears that germs and chemicals could make her sick by touching various surfaces and liquids (for example, the bottom of shoes, bathroom countertops and laundry detergent) and then gradually extending the amounts of time before she could wash her hands. The residential treatment was followed by a monthlong step down recovery program, during which she lived in an apartment with other O.C.D. patients. "The only way to overcome the O.C.D. is to learn to live with it, and that's by living an exposure lifestyle," Ms. Ronan said. Now, she is focused on staying healthy mentally and physically. "I've spent almost 11 years having something inside my head tell me things that would cause my mom, my dad, my friends and my therapist to say, 'That's a little extreme,'" she said. "But now those same people are telling me to wash my hands all the time so I don't get sick, and I'm trying to wrap my head around it all." Ms. Ronan has asthma, which makes contracting Covid 19 even scarier. She is taking her cues on sanitizing from her mother and father, who she trusts. "If they say I should wash my hand for 20 seconds under warm water, I know there are facts causing them to tell me to do that and I'm relying on facts," she said. She is also listening to advice from doctors and other experts she hears on TV or reads about in news articles. Becky Ronan, Bella's mother, is struggling with her own anxiety connected to her older daughter's condition. "As worried as I am about anyone getting Covid 19, I'm equally worried about her having a backslide and having to go back into a residential program," Becky said. "That is just as scary as Covid 19." Therapy and O.C.D. in the time of coronavirus Exposure and response prevention therapy is the most effective treatment, experts say. It systematically tests a patient's worries that something will harm them by exposing them in a prolonged, repetitive and intensifying system to things that they fear. When the exposure doesn't cause significant illness or harm, the patients can begin to learn how to better cope. But the unusual and urgent focus on sanitation to fight the spread of the virus is also creating concerns for health care professionals involved in the treatment of O.C.D., said Bradley Riemann, a psychologist and the chief clinical officer of Rogers Behavioral Health, which has mental health and addiction treatment centers around the country. (Dr. Riemann is also the clinical director of Rogers's O.C.D. Center, in Oconomowoc, Wis.) That's why providing treatment for O.C.D. right now is especially complicated. "This is clearly a time when we have had to change the way we interact with one another and the way we interact with our environment it's a matter of public safety for all of us," Dr. Riemann said. "But it really collides with the world of O.C.D., and in particular with patients with contamination O.C.D." Usually, Dr. Riemann and his staff work with patients by asking them to interact with germs, increasingly extending the amounts of time between washing their hands or otherwise sanitizing. In some situations, he said, patients are asked to touch toilet seats or bathroom floors, and then are given food to eat before washing their hands. "As you can see, the world we live in today, that collides head on with that kind of treatment intervention," he said. "It has been very challenging to try to achieve a balance where you are keeping your staff and patients as safe as we all can be, yet still providing effective treatment." Dr. Riemann said he and other professionals in this field have been conferring daily about ways to dilute exposure therapy so that it conforms to the public health coronavirus standards while still offering therapeutic value. So far this has meant having patients wash their hands before eating, because that is a coronavirus necessity, and then touching an item that creates trepidation in the patient but is unlikely to carry the virus, like a pillow from their own home, for example. Connor Kelly Eiding, 31, was diagnosed with O.C.D. earlier this year, and the coronavirus crisis has made the symptoms feel more acute. Ms. Kelly Eiding, an actress who also works for a women's rights advocacy organization by helping to connect survivors of sex abuse with law firms, has been leaving her apartment with her boyfriend only to go running, and even that is a challenge. "If we see other people, I become consumed with how we are going to maneuver around them and I begin to see a cloud of germs surrounding them that I will have to run through," said Ms. Kelly Eiding, who lives in Los Angeles. "I understand intellectually that some of my fears are not based in fact, but many of them are, actually." She reached out in February to a local O.C.D. association, and last week she began phone therapy to address her fear of germs. "I'm so grateful that there is help out there," she said. A silver lining for some people diagnosed with O.C.D. is that the pandemic is showing them how far they have come. Jeffrey Blitt uses humor to cope. As a child he dressed up as a Purell bottle for Halloween. Jeffrey Blitt, 21, a junior at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was studying abroad in Brisbane, Australia, when he and his fellow students were ordered to return home in March. The logistical complications of having to get from one side of the world back to his family home in New Providence, N.J., distracted him from focusing on any fears of germs. When he was 11 years old, such fears dominated his thoughts so completely that he was not able to go to school and was sent by his parents to Rogers for residential treatment. Since arriving home from Australia, however, even as the grip of the virus has grown more intense, he is taking note of how much progress he has made. "At a certain point in time this would have been some of my worst fears realized," Mr. Blitt said. "But my O.C.D. anxiety is almost completely under control. It's almost weird seeing everyone do the things I used to do, like people watching hand washing videos and my mom leaving packages outside," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
The soprano Erin Wall in 2016. She had a "wide compass, gleaming high extension and ability to float a ravishing, seamless line," one critic wrote. She was in treatment for cancer for much of 2018 but continued to perform. Erin Wall, whose silvery yet warm soprano voice infused works by Mozart, Strauss, Britten and Mahler with luminous elegance, died on Oct. 8 at a hospital in Mississauga, Ontario. She was 44. The cause was metastatic breast cancer, Lyric Opera of Chicago said. Lyric Opera was an artistic home base for Ms. Wall, who received her professional start as a member of the company's prestigious young artist program, now known as the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center. Chicago was the site of the dramatic season opening performance that jolted her nascent career in 2004, when she jumped in with just a few hours' notice to replace an ill colleague as Donna Anna in Mozart's "Don Giovanni." John von Rhein of The Chicago Tribune wrote in his review that "in classic showbiz style, she came, she sang and she conquered." He praised her voice's "wide compass, gleaming high extension and ability to float a ravishing, seamless line." "There's a marvelous soprano aria in that, 'The sun goeth down,'" Mr. Davis said in an interview. "And I've never heard anyone sing it more beautifully, with such ease and such poignancy. I think of her singing and I get goose bumps." Erin Marie Wall was born on Nov. 4, 1975, in Calgary, Alberta, to two American musicians, Michael Wall and Suzanne (Hill) Wall, and grew up in Vancouver. She started in music as a pianist, but she was concentrating on singing by the time she attended Western Washington University in Bellingham. She later transferred to Rice University in Houston. From Rice, she entered Lyric Opera's young artist program in 2001. She swiftly established herself as a rising talent: a lyric soprano with a full bodied yet agile voice and dazzling facility in her top register. It was an instrument ideal for youthful roles like Marguerite in Gounod's "Faust," which she sang in Chicago in 2003, as well as Mozart's Donna Anna, Pamina (in "The Magic Flute") and Konstanze (in "The Abduction From the Seraglio"). "The voice definitely evolved," Michael Benchetrit, Ms. Wall's manager, said in an interview. "The middle and lower parts became richer with time." This evolution came as she increasingly took on Strauss roles that benefited from more tonal opulence, like Arabella, Chrysothemis (in "Elektra") and Daphne. When she starred in "Daphne" at the Santa Fe Opera in 2007, Mr. Benchetrit said, the effect was overwhelming. "I couldn't speak to her at the end of the show," he said. "I had to write her a fan letter. It's the only time I did that with a client." Ms. Wall made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2009, as Donna Anna. She returned as Helena in Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 2013 and Arabella in 2014. Though acclaimed in staged opera, she concentrated more of her time on concert work, in pieces like Strauss's "Four Last Songs," Britten's "War Requiem," Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and, especially, Mahler's mighty choral Eighth Symphony, in which she was captured on several recordings. Found to have cancer in late 2017, Ms. Wall was in treatment for much of 2018, but she continued to perform amid surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation. She maintained her appearances until earlier this year, when her cancer returned and the coronavirus pandemic caused performances to be canceled worldwide. She discussed her condition candidly in blog posts and on social media; in her Twitter biography, she wrote, "Please don't use the word 'battle' to refer to my life or illness." She is survived by her parents; her husband, Roberto Mauro, the director of artistic planning at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto; their children, Michael and Julia; and her sister, Shannon.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Coming soon to Broadway: a new musical, adapted from an Oscar winning film, about a struggling actor who masquerades as a woman to get what he wants. No, not that one. This season, it's "Mrs. Doubtfire," based on the 1993 comedy starring Robin Williams, about an estranged husband posing as a Scottish nanny to spend time with his kids. The show will begin previews at the Stephen Sondheim Theater in March 2020 for an April 5 opening, after an out of town run in Seattle later this year. The producer, Kevin McCollum, is no stranger to bringing films to the stage. He signed a deal in 2013 with 20th Century Fox, the studio behind "Mrs. Doubtfire," to develop nine to a dozen new musicals based on the company's films. "The Devil Wears Prada" and several others are on his docket. (While Disney purchased 20th Century Fox earlier this year and holds the rights to the film, the company's theatrical branch is not a producer, a spokesperson for the musical said.) McCollum is also working on "The Notebook," from Warner Bros. But film inspired musicals are still tricky on Broadway, where the appeal of recognizable stories is at odds with audience members' lofty expectations for adaptations that live up to the originals. "Moulin Rouge! The Musical," "Beetlejuice" and "Mean Girls" not to mention Disney's catalog are still playing to packed houses this season, but other recent adaptations, like "Pretty Woman" and "Groundhog Day," have found less success.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
When Amanda Davidson, a 42 year old Los Angeles based artist and writer, welcomed her firstborn child in December a boy named Felix with her partner Isaac Schankler, 39, a composer, she chafed at the assumptions the medical staff members made about how the pair wanted to identify themselves as parents. "'Hi, Mommy! Where's Daddy? Mommy needs to know this, but so does Daddy,'" she said with a big laugh. The binary clashed so much with how the couple sees themselves and exists in the world she's queer identified, and her partner goes by pronouns they/their/them and uses the gender neutral title Mx. she refrained from calling herself anything vis a vis Felix for the first two weeks of his life. She eventually settled on Mama. "I was racking my brain for a mama alternate, but it feels right for the moment," she said, adding that in her universe, "identity wiggles around," and she's open to other possibilities. The topics parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week. Mx. Schankler remembers reading the queer writer Andrea Lawlor's essay on identifying as "Baba" (as opposed to some iteration of mother) in Mutha magazine and thinking that "dad" or "daddy" wouldn't work for them either, so they opted for "Abba." It means "dad" in Hebrew, providing a link to their Jewish heritage: "It does feel more gender neutral, or at least doesn't have quite the same baggage that dad and daddy have," Mx. Schankler said. Naming is particularly important to the pair as a means of signaling their queerness, since they "pass" as a straight couple. "We don't look visibly queer," Ms. Davidson said, "So in some ways, our choice of names helps us affirm our identities." The duo's ambivalence about traditional monikers is reflected in a study, currently under peer review, on the naming practices in same sex adoptive families. The study, by Abbie E. Goldberg, Clark University's pioneering L.G.B.T. family scholar; Melissa Manley, a doctoral student, and Emma Frank, a recent Clark graduate, is one of the few on the topic. It found that of 80 participants 20 lesbian couples and 20 gay couples recruited from adoption agencies across the United States, including cities with high concentrations of lesbian and gay populations, all opted for derivatives of mother and father. And nearly 13 percent 20 percent of the lesbian couples and 5 percent of the gay couples participated in some version of "undoing gender." Many do this by taking parental names from their native cultures or religions that strip away the binary in this cultural context, collapsing the dichotomy between terms by merging them, such as "Mather," a fusion of mother and father, or creating nicknames ("Muzzie," in one instance). Both Dr. Goldberg and Ms. Kahn surmise that the couples who are using new terminologies are willing to do so because of the hard won rights L.G.B.T. people have secured, particularly the right to marry. "Now there's more willingness to push some of those boundaries," Dr. Goldberg said, "because of greater legal recognition and acceptance." Also, Ms. Kahn said, some L.G.B.T. people don't want to seem as if they are aping heterosexuals: "There's a political component for some, which is that we don't want to seem like we're emulating or mimicking straight people." Similarly, there's a contingent of L.G.B.T. people who refuse marriage because they don't want to be "assimilated into this heterosexual, patriarchal society," Dr. Goldberg added. (Others feel the institution reinforces an unfair hierarchy that privileges matrimonial coupledom above all other forms of romantic coupling.) Dr. David Schwartz, a psychoanalyst and psychologist who has spent his decades long career thinking about the ways in which gender and sexuality get constructed, however, isn't so sure eschewing traditional parental labels is good for L.G.B.T. parents or their kids. While he's all for challenging the gender norms that inform the mommy and daddy dyad, he pointed out that children of L.G.B.T. parents are already steeped in a heteronormative culture that stigmatizes their families, and it would be doubly hard for them to have to explain why they call their parents some unusual names. "And," he emphasized, "you certainly don't want to do anything to devalue your family," noting that the legitimacy, visibility and value of L.G.B.T. people as parental figures is often called into question already. "I won't say it's a disadvantage," Dr. Goldberg said, "but it's a challenge. It requires a lot of explanation and clarification, maybe even pushback from schools in certain geographical contexts, less gay affirming areas of the country, like, 'What do you mean you go by 'Maddie'?" an amalgamation of mommy and daddy. "Nobody is going to know what that means. How do we explain that to other children?'" For families who decide to adopt atypical terms and want to minimize the potential risk of social discomfort, Dr. Goldberg suggested some parents might consider giving children the freedom to call them mom or dad "in certain settings and at certain ages," adding, "they may become more comfortable with alternative language as they grow older." Ms. Kahn guessed that the reason the vast majority of participants in Dr. Goldberg's study stuck with labels derived from mother or father is because becoming a parent was beyond the community's reach for so long. "It's so powerful to be a parent," she said, "to have the title mom or dad. A lot of us want that because for decades it seemed like it wasn't on the table for us to build a family, so there's almost like a privilege in finally being able to say 'I'm a mom' or 'I'm a dad.'" Eric Rosswood, author of "The Ultimate Guide for Gay Dads" and "Journey to Same Sex Parenthood," said we shouldn't get too hung up on parenting terms as a means of upending the status quo: "We're already defying labels and challenging gender stereotypes regardless of what we call ourselves." Dr. Goldberg agreed: "The label is not the role. Being a parent is being a parent," she said. "It's actually quite interesting that we don't have a de gendered parenting label in English, but in the 21st century our roles are far less gendered." For Ms. Davidson and 26 percent of the participants (14 lesbians and seven gay men) in Dr. Goldberg's study who believe that their parenting labels could change over time "naming is fluid and subject to infinite riffing." She cataloged a list of her many nicknames, which play off her first name, Amanda: Manzo, Manzers, Man and Sissy Man, among others. "I'm sure we'll riff, invent and gather up new words," Ms. Davidson said, "Felix will surely contribute some of his own. I'm open to what lies beyond 'Mama' ... I just don't know what it is yet."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Well
The New York Fed Chief Is Stepping Down but Not Quietly William C. Dudley, who has been president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since the financial crisis and became a forceful advocate for cultural change at large financial institutions, announced Monday that he will retire next year. He isn't leaving quietly. Only hours after his early retirement was announced, Mr. Dudley delivered a stark public warning against rolling back laws aimed at keeping large banks and Wall Street firms in check the latest Fed official to voice concerns about a trend toward deregulation under the Trump administration. Mr. Dudley's pointed comments, while delivered with the care and caution of a seasoned technocrat, come as President Trump looks to remake the Federal Reserve with policymakers who are more in tune with his anti regulatory mind set. Last week, he announced that he was nominating Jerome H. Powell to replace Janet L. Yellen as the new Fed chairman. Mr. Dudley, 64, succeeded Timothy F. Geithner as the New York Fed's president in 2009. He will step down before the end of his 10 year term expires in January 2019 to pave the way for a successor, who will be responsible for regulating some of the world's largest banks. In his speech on Monday, Mr. Dudley cautioned against making broad changes to the Dodd Frank Act, the web of rules and regulations put in place in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to prevent a repeat meltdown. He urged that any alterations be made "with a paring knife, rather than with a meat cleaver." He specifically counseled against watering down rules that require banks to hold extra capital to absorb unexpected losses. "We should not lose sight of the horrific damage caused by the financial crisis, including the worst recession of our lifetimes and millions of people losing their jobs and homes," Mr. Dudley said. "We had a woefully inadequate regulatory regime in place, and while it is much better now, there is still work to do." Mr. Trump and his top economic advisers have made no secret that they believe many post crisis financial regulations overreached and are now restricting banks from making loans and trading securities. By disposition and tradition, Fed officials are wary about criticizing administration policies. In recent months, however, as the administration's criticism of the Dodd Frank law have increased, the Fed's most senior leaders have become bolder in their defense of a tighter regulatory apparatus. Ms. Yellen gave a speech last summer defending regulations that she said made the "financial system substantially safer." And Stanley Fischer, who announced his plans to step down as vice chairman of the Fed earlier this year, said in an interview with the Financial Times that any move to tamper with Dodd Frank would be "mind boggling" and "extremely dangerous." Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. "There has been a broad message from the leadership of the Fed that Dodd Frank has been effective and that you have to leave it alone," said Chris Whalen, a financial consultant who worked at the New York Fed. Mr. Whalen said Mr. Dudley, more than any other Fed leader, was justified in arguing to keep a tight rein on banking activities. "Dudley did really well considering the magnitude of the collapse that occurred," Mr. Whalen said. "The Fed became a broker dealer overnight, and he had to oversee that." Mr. Dudley worked at Goldman Sachs for 20 years before joining the New York Fed in 2007. He became president of the New York Fed in 2009, where he played a critical role as both a firefighter overseeing the bailouts of financial institutions and as one of the architects of the rules and regulations that followed. By law, Mr. Dudley would have to step down as president of the New York Fed by January 2019, as that would have been 10 consecutive years in the job. But instead of finishing his term, the New York Fed said on Monday that he would leave his post in mid 2018 to ensure that a successor is identified before the end of his term. According to a person who was briefed on Mr. Dudley's thinking, his plan to leave the Fed six months early has been in the works for some time and was not related to Mr. Trump's bypassing Ms. Yellen for a second term as Fed chairwoman or the administration's more relaxed approach to financial regulation. "The American economy is stronger and the financial system safer because of his many thoughtful contributions," Ms. Yellen said in a statement. Unlike the Fed chairman, regional Fed presidents such as Mr. Dudley are not chosen by the president. They are selected by a committee composed of members of the Fed's board of directors who are not affiliated with financial institutions. The selection is subject to approval by the Fed board in Washington. Mr. Dudley called his time at the New York Fed "a dream job" in a statement on Monday, and he said he had "every confidence in the institution."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
The quest to right the ship at the New York Philharmonic moved forward this week when the orchestra and its players reached a new three year contract at a critical moment of reinvention. The new contract, which the orchestra announced Friday, was approved on Thursday by the Philharmonic and Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the players. Under the agreement the musicians will receive a 4.5 percent increase in wages over the next three years, raising the base salary at the orchestra to 153,504 a year from 146,796; musicians will pay more for health insurance. The deal will help prevent the kind of strife between players and management that led to strikes in recent seasons of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra and a lockout at the Minnesota Orchestra and at a moment in which many American orchestras have faced serious financial pressures. Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in a statement that the orchestra's board and administration respect the skill and artistry of the musicians, and "greatly value the longstanding spirit of partnership that allows the entire organization to move forward and fulfill its artistic mission."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
To deposit its eggs, the parasitic oak gall wasp pierces a leaf or stem with its ovipositor, a long tubelike organ that would be a stinger if this wasp were the kind that stings. The plant puffs and swells, forming tumor like growths called galls. These serve as tiny nursery domes, known cutely (for a parasite) as crypts. Within each crypt, a wasp egg develops until it grows large enough to chew a hole into the gall's crispy skin and emerge an adult. Thus goes the life cycle of Bassettia pallida. Unless the crypt keeper wasp Euderus set, a parasite in its own right comes along. The size of a pin, the wasp locates smooth, dome shaped galls created by the other wasps. Then, puncturing the gall, it injects its eggs, beside or inside the young oak gall wasp. As both eggs develop inside the crypt, the baby crypt keeper feeds off the body of baby Bassettia. There's more. Just as Bassettia begins chewing an escape hatch into the gall skin, Euderus stops it. Now the unfinished hole is too small to allow exit. Bassettia's head becomes caught, plugging it like a cork. The head is visible from the outside, but it is unresponsive. A few days later, Euderus will crawl into the head and chew its way out, the victor: a parasite's parasite. The crypt keeper wasp's manipulation of its host and exit through its head was first described in the literature in 2017. But as scientists have studied it further, things have only gotten weirder. It started when Scott Egan, an evolutionary biologist at Rice University who first described the crypt keeper, began collaborating with Andrew Forbes, an ecologist at the University of Iowa. Between 2015 and 2018, Dr. Forbes's lab had collected more than 23,000 galls from oak trees in Iowa, the Midwest, New England, North Carolina and Texas. His team had hoped to learn about the diversity of gall wasp species and find galls that had been parasitized. But the more he talked with Dr. Egan, the more they suspected that the crypt keeper was using multiple host species unusual behavior among parasites, which are usually very specialized. Dr. Forbes' lab confirmed the hunch by rearing some wasps and their gall crypts in plastic cups within a chamber that simulated changing seasons. The parasitoid crypt keepers did have many different species of hosts, and all the hosts had one key thing in common: the galls they occupied were small, smooth, non woody, lacking fuzz or sharp spines defenseless. These little crypts were perfect for Euderus' keeping. "Parasites or parasitoids are very specialized to a host," said Anna Ward, a doctoral student in Dr. Forbes's lab and lead author of the paper that reported this finding, which was published Wednesday in Biology Letters. "You'd think it was only attacking one host or a small subset. We were surprised to see that Euderus set was able to manipulate these very different hosts." That the crypt keeper seeks victims based not on their kind but on the vulnerability of their homes suggests that assumptions about an organism's behavior can sometimes cause people to miss important truths about how the animals really live. "These interactions can help us understand our impact on the world," said Ms. Ward. "With climate change, how can we know our true impact if we don't even know what's there?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
They aren't what you might think of as typical sanitation workers, but Haley Rogers and Lisa Brunie McDermott, two Sanitation Department employees, are women with a mission: to persuade New Yorkers to separate orange peels, eggshells and other organic waste from the rest of their trash. Ms. Rogers and Ms. Brunie McDermott, both on the cusp of 30, are two of the outreach workers in the department's recycling unit. As key players in a two year pilot program, for which 10 million was allocated in the fiscal year that ended in June, their goal is to transform the way New Yorkers deal with everything from used tea bags and half eaten burgers to apple cores and coffee grounds. The hope is that one day most of New York's discarded food will make its way to composting sites, where it will benefit the environment, rather than be trucked to distant landfills, an undertaking that costs the city more than 300 million annually. A highly visible side effect would be to reduce the city's rat population. With less food in curbside garbage cans, the thinking goes, fewer rats should come prowling around in search of a meal. "When we talk to people," Ms. Rogers said, "lots of time we lead with the rats, because they're such a visceral issue. It's like we're giving them a buffet every night." The "organics collection" program is up and running in all five boroughs, embracing 100,000 households that are home to about 250,000 people. It is also operating in some 350 schools, one result being that children come home and urge their parents to sign up. Although cities like Seattle have already established such programs, many eyes are on New York to see if such an effort can flourish in a denser and more vertical metropolis. If the pilot program, which ends next summer, is successful, the department will recommend to the City Council that it be expanded. As for critics who might dismiss the program as too small bore to address New York's formidable environmental challenges, Kathryn Garcia, the city's new sanitation commissioner, noted that, as a pilot effort, its scope is modest. "It is small for New York," she said, "but the area covered is comparable to a city like Orlando, Fla., or Madison, Wis." And there's no question that Ms. Rogers and Ms. Brunie McDermott bring considerable zeal to the task at hand. "This is what I got my degree for," said Ms. Rogers, who has a master's in environmental science and policy from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and credits her passion for environmental science to a first grade field trip to a recycling facility in her native Texas. "It feels as if we're making a difference, and it could have repercussions for the entire country." Ms. Brunie McDermott, who has a master's degree in environmental systems management from Pratt Institute, added: "To get someone who's not a believer to believe, that's awesome. I never felt I was having so much impact in a job as I do in this one." On duty, the two women wear agency issued blue oxford shirts emblazoned with a gold caduceus, the department's insignia, because, as Ms. Rogers explained, "The clothes help make us seem more official." And they do more than make house to house visits. They handle hotline calls. They show up at 2 a.m. to watch garbage being sorted at transfer stations. "We're very hands on," Ms. Brunie McDermott said. "We do everything but collect trash." On a recent drizzly Wednesday, their audience was residents and staff members of a red brick co op in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Until now, the building's 114 families have been disposing of their garbage the old fashioned way separating out recyclable paper, plastic and metal, and dumping everything else in gray plastic garbage cans that Andrzej Drozozal, the superintendent, lugs to the curb twice a week. But thanks to Annie Wedekind, a resident who learned about the organics collection program from a friend whose Brooklyn building had signed up, this was about to change. "My friend said the support you offered was so awesome," Ms. Wedekind said as she and Amy Martinez Miller, the board president, sat with the two visitors around Ms. Wedekind's antique oak dining table sipping coffee and discussing the benefits and challenges of organics collection. "Our super is a little skeptical," Ms. Wedekind acknowledged, "but we'll win him over." Discussion ranged from the four 21 gallon brown plastic organics bins with orange accents that would soon be installed in the basement to the array of informational posters, decals and other paraphernalia the Sanitation Department provides. Residents are instructed to put food waste in small containers in their kitchens and then to take the contents of those containers to the organics bins in the basement. The stuff in the bins can then be carted to composting centers. "We have posters in Spanish and Chinese, large ones and small ones," Ms. Rogers said. "Would those be helpful?" "Actually," Ms. Wedekind replied, "we could use signs in Russian or Polish." Unfortunately, no such signs are available. "We can also provide decals," Ms. Brunie McDermott said. "And fridge stickers, because people like swag." Ms. Wedekind agreed that swag was nice. "People love free stuff," she said. The women then trooped to the basement to describe the plan to Mr. Drozozal, who raised an issue that troubled him. "I worry about too many signs," he said, looking dubiously at the rainbow assortment of instructional posters plastering the basement walls. "We already have a lot down here." Ms. Rogers nodded. "I see what you mean," she said. "But it can't get any worse than it is." It's no secret that garbage disposal is one of New York's thorniest problems. Ms. Garcia, the sanitation commissioner, acknowledged that New York has been criticized for its recycling record. "Some neighborhoods, like the Upper West Side, are superb, and others do far less well," Ms. Garcia said. "But the fact is, refuse has been reduced 14 percent in the past decade despite an increase in the city's population." Professional environmentalists note that when it comes to recycling organic waste, New York faces considerable challenges because of its size and the configuration of its housing. "The real hurdle is high rises," said Jaime Stein, coordinator of the Sustainable Environmental Systems program at Pratt Institute. "Lots of people, especially those living in apartments, just want to dump all their garbage in a trash can. With a program like this, we're trending in the right direction. It's just a matter of changing the behavior of eight million people, one composter at a time." Admittedly, not everyone to whom the two outreach workers preach the gospel of organics collection is a believer. "There are always a handful of resisters," Ms. Rogers said. "Ten percent support the plan unequivocally, 10 percent resist, and the challenge is converting the 80 percent in the middle." Her colleague added: "Because of storage issues and the challenges of high rises, you can't just roll out a program like this. You have to win hearts and minds." When it comes to persuading New Yorkers to set aside their kitchen scraps rather than deposit them in an all purpose trash can, their greatest challenge is what they call the "yuck factor." "People say, 'Oh, that's gross,' " Ms. Brunie McDermott said. "Their gut reaction is, 'Yecch!' But we're already eating and disposing of our food. It's just a matter of putting it in a different bin."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Four years ago, a rancher in the Patagonia region of Argentina came upon an old bone sticking out of his desert property near La Flecha. With recent news of exciting dinosaur finds in that country in mind, he scratched around some more. Then he went to a local museum to ask paleontologists to come look for more fossils. Many important dinosaur discoveries are made by nonexperts in just this casual way. The rancher's find soon led to the exposure of skeletal remains of six of the biggest titanosaurs. These herbivores lived about 100 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous Period, on all continents, including Antarctica. They seemed especially plentiful in southern lands. Now, the most imposing one of these dinosaurs from the far south of South America, assembled from 84 fossil pieces excavated from the rancher's land, is the newest eyeful of ancient life on display at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The hulking skeleton cast made its debut as a permanent attraction on Friday. Museum officials and scientists called it a must see addition to the ranks of such popular icons as the institution's great blue whale and the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex. The new research is expected to yield insights into the physiology of dinosaurs and how they were able to grow and function as such large creatures. "Paleontology has become less geological and more biological in the last 20 years or so," said Mark A. Norell, chairman of the paleontology division at the museum and a leading dinosaur researcher. He cited the field's new "geochemical tools" for determining diet, growth patterns and locomotion. "All of us are simply biologists who work on fossils," he added. The exhibit is not only a centerpiece for the museum's fossil collections but also the start of a wide range of dinosaur programs for the year, including symposiums and another exhibition, "Dinosaurs Among Us," opening March 21. It will highlight the signal developments in remarkable research supporting a close relationship between dinosaurs and birds that are alive today. The Patagonian skeleton was not an easy fit in its New York home. At 122 feet in length, it was a bit too long for the gallery. Part of its 39 foot long neck extends through an opening in a wall toward the elevator banks, as if to welcome visitors to the fossil floors. This titanosaur was a young adult, gender undetermined. Its appetite for all kinds of vegetation must have been prodigious. Based on bone sizes, researchers estimated that this individual weighed 70 tons as much as 10 African elephants, the heaviest land animals today. Think of its possible heft if it were fully grown. Think of it satisfying its huge appetite by stretching its long neck to graze far and wide. With only a few shifts in position, it might have mowed the equivalent of all the grass in Yankee Stadium in a morning. Weight was also a factor in preparing the skeleton cast for display, a task undertaken by Research Casting International in Canada. The actual mineralized fossils were too heavy to mount. Instead, all "bones" are made from lightweight fiberglass based on digital copies of the original fossils. Much of the grueling excavation leading to the discovery was done by teams led by Jose Luis Carballido and Diego Pol, paleontologists at Paleontological Museum Egidio Feruglio in Argentina. They began excavating for months at a time after the rancher's visit. Sometimes it took a week of digging to isolate a single femur or a forelimb. Thighs and upper arms are critical to judging the size and weight of a dinosaur. Dr. Pol said the excavations revealed that at least six of these giant individuals, all young adults, had died at the site of what had been a flood plain near a river. Their deaths had happened at three distinct times, anywhere from a few years to centuries apart. Like many herding animals, they may have become isolated from the group and died of stress and hunger near their watering hole. "That's when we realized this was a once in a lifetime discovery," Dr. Pol said. Dinosaurs are the big game to fossil hunters, and these were some of the biggest plant eating dinosaurs ever found. The size and distinctive shape of an eight foot femur of one specimen astonished scientists. This appeared to be a previously unknown titanosaur species, yet unnamed. Dr. Pol said a report that is being prepared may soon propose a formal species name. In a bravura moment, Dr. Pol had his picture taken stretched out on the ground beside the femur, about the size of a living room couch. The photograph caught the attention of paleontologists at the natural history museum in New York, where Dr. Pol had done his Ph.D. research. "Maybe we can get that thing," one said. "That would look great for a renovated dinosaur gallery" another said. Early last year, Dr. Novacek signed the deal with the Argentine museum to build the full size skeleton cast for permanent display in New York.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
Almost as soon as Judge Amy Coney Barrett stepped onto the public stage at the largely unmasked Rose Garden ceremony in which President Trump introduced her as his choice to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the T shirts appeared. Touting the jurist as "The Notorious ACB," they featured Judge Barrett's face atop a simple round neck shirt and under a crown, a la Biggie Smalls (and RBG). And yet, as the Senate confirmation hearings have made clear, the image Judge Barrett is trying to project is pretty much the opposite of "notorious." Indeed, she even said, during her first day of questioning, that justices cannot "walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world." Thus did Judge Barrett enter the hearing room, accessorized with a single strand of pearls and a pair of practical pumps, her just below shoulder length hair neat but not the sort of sleek sheet that telegraphs "professionally styled." Thus did she take her seat, her children arrayed behind her like a bouquet: girls in dresses, boys in suits and ties. Thus was she bathed in the rosy domestic shades of mid last century: magenta, red, lilac and lavender. She may be about to ascend to the heights of legal power, ruling on cases that affect the lives of millions and shape future generations, but she does so cloaked in an image that calls to mind not the cliched glass ceiling breaker in a can't miss me trouser suit and power pin, but rather the P.T.A. In an arena of lawmakers poised to lob a variety of rhetorical grenades (aimed, to be fair, largely at one another), it was a strategic, disarming choice. Why does it matter, in this woman of unquestionable substance? The question was raised, fairly, when a female lawyer posted a critical tweet about the choice of a dress without jacket on Day 1. It's because the hearings are theater, enacted largely for the benefit of the viewers: the famed "American public," the senators kept addressing. After all, given the pandemic, the most logical choice would have been to hold the hearings, if they were to be held at all, remotely and via video. Instead, they took place live and in person (with some senators appearing remotely), allowing the senators to posture and speechify for the camera, both Democrats and Republicans, even though they all kept saying that the result was a foregone conclusion. Which suggested that the result was not the point. Public relations, geared toward an election, was the point. And in P.R., image matters. A lot. The hearings are a three day opportunity for Judge Barrett to present herself not as the caricature both sides are trying to draw (as she said), but as an individual of her own making. To frame herself beyond the page and prime the country's citizens to see her through the filter of their own free associations. To that end, how she looks is the visual equivalent of the prepared statement. And as such it is notable that ever since she has first appeared in the Rose Garden, Judge Barrett has primarily worn jewel neck dresses with bracelet sleeves, and discreet to the knee hemlines. Occasionally with a stylized bow. First there was the espresso dress she wore to accept her nomination. Then the navy style adopted for her first round on Capitol Hill. The magenta dress with a neat integral bow on Day 1 of the hearings. Even the red jacket with matching skirt or dress (it was impossible to tell) she wore on Day 2 echoed the silhouette: three quarter length sleeves, round neck without lapels or obvious shoulder pads, straight skirt hovering above her knees. Ditto on Day 3: the pastel blouse with the little upstanding frill at the neck, worn under the soft, nubby tweed jacket (again, no lapels and gently rounded shoulders) in a complementary pixelated shade, with matching straight knee length skirt. If you think, "Dress, big whoop," know this: During Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, after Michelle Obama was attacked for the fist bump and showing off her biceps, her style adviser at the time told her that to help change the narrative until the election, she would be wearing dresses with sleeves. That look, in the subconscious mind of the electorate, was nonthreatening and maternal. Familiar (familial). Reassuring. Playing on such stereotypes from our shared past is a basic part of the political playbook. It's a look that is more classically feminine ladylike, even than is usual in such situations, now that even movie stars tend to trouser suits and glasses. Notable in its consistency. But also noncontroversial and nonconfrontational. What is the opposition talking about, with their wild accusations? Golly gee. Are you going to believe them, with their endless repetitive questions about cases? Or are you going to trust in your very own eyes? She doesn't look like someone who thinks she is more clever than you, even though she graduated first in her law school class so ... duh. And she didn't need notes! She radiates preparedness, not in a smarty pants way, but in the way of the parent who leaves the house with wet wipes, a pen and a snack in her handbag. She looks decorous. She looks like someone who would as she said respect history and authority, rather than upend it. She looks like someone good at baking snickerdoodles. Though she didn't say that, and it may not be true. Still, if there's one thing she understands, it is precedent.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
In recent weeks, coronavirus led to the shutdown of many university campuses and other institutions for research and learning in the United States and around the world. There's always work that you can do from home. But parts of the scientific process can only be completed in the lab, or at another location where fieldwork or other hands on research occurs. What's a scientist to do when it's time to put some of their experiments on the shelf? Here is a collection of stories from around the world on how professors, graduate students and others in the sciences are coping with the effects of coronavirus on their lives and work. Itai Cohen's physics lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., uses genetically engineered fruit flies to study how insects fly. It turns out that the flapping of wings is an unstable motion that requires constant wing muscle adjustment. Usually, the flies live the usual life of a fly. But their nervous systems have been genetically booby trapped. Shine a red light on some, and that will activate a neuron of interest; a green light will turn off a neuron. "Then all of a sudden, they can't do what they were doing before, and we see what the difference is," Dr. Cohen said. "Some of them fall out of the air. Some of them do back flips. Some of them start rolling." Until that work can resume, they have other work to do. "Hopefully, we'll get more papers written during this time," Dr. Cohen said. "That's the optimistic view." But research is not what he is most worried about. His wife is pregnant, her due date in late April, when the coronavirus pandemic may be peaking. "In a month, are all the beds in the maternity ward going to be commandeered?" he said. They are planning for her to give birth at home. Kenneth Chang Lauren Boller knew her lab at Vanderbilt University would shut down when an undergraduate student came back to Tennessee from spring break and tested positive for the coronavirus. Ms. Boller, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate, studies the properties of tissue engineered bone constructs. She and her lab mates started taking steps to prepare for the shutdown. She froze her human stem cells, and discarded some experiments that would have otherwise taken two months to complete. Unfortunately, these were the last few experiments she needed to complete two papers she planned to submit for publication. Another ongoing experiment required her to stain rabbit tissues something that couldn't be done outside the lab. Last week, she went into the lab to retrieve data from a computer. Since 1988, a dozen colonies of E. coli bacteria each its own island have lived and changed for over 70,000 generations. Known as the Long Term Evolution Experiment, the project has offered a unique window into evolution in action. The colonies started out the same. But year after year, they have replicated faster and faster, each driven by different mutations. But on March 9, evolution was put into the freezer. Richard Lenski, who founded the experiment and runs it at Michigan State University, had kept an eye on the increasing number of coronavirus cases since January. "I think about the mathematics of populations all the time," he said. Every day, a graduate student must eye drop a little of each E. coli colony into a new flask, along with nutrients. But instead of transferring it to a new flask last Monday, the E. coli went into a freezer at minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit. That will interrupt a recent focal point of the lab's research. It started with a big surprise in 2003, when one colony evolved to eat citrate, a compound the other colonies couldn't metabolize. But in recent months, the lab had been studying how some of the citrate eaters were still getting sick from the compound and dying, even though it was allowing them to access more food. "We're still trying to understand what's going on there," Dr. Lenski said. Kiersten Formoso had planned to spend her spring break at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles marveling at mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ancient whales. "I was going to get a ladder and get really nice above angle photographs," said Ms. Formoso, a second year graduate student studying vertebrate paleontology at the University of Southern California. She also wanted to measure limbs and other bones of long extinct marine mammals in the museum's collections. Her plans are now frozen in time, like the fossilized specimens she was hoping to analyze. "I finally got to the point where I was ready to start my data collection," she said, "and this virus made the door slam shut right in my face." The museum has closed to nonessential employees, including research students like Ms. Formoso. That will prevent her from pursuing some of her work on how animals with ancestors who once lived on land evolved to swim in the water, like sea lions and manatees. It was to be the start of research she hoped to present at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in the fall. But the deadline for submissions is April 30, and she hopes the society will extend it. "If they don't, I don't know what I'm going to do," Ms. Formoso said. "I have no research to submit." Nicholas St. Fleur The work that goes on Administrators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ordered a "ramp down" of on campus research last weekend that took effect last Friday. "There are grad students all over campus rushing to finish experiments," said Maria T. Zuber, vice president for research. "We're hoping to reduce density of people in the lab to 10 to 20 percent of what it is now." There are a few exceptions work directly related to the new coronavirus, maintenance of expensive equipment, such as microscopes that operate at cryogenic temperatures to peer at the smallest molecules, and long term experiments for which important samples or large amounts of data would be lost if they were stopped. "If someone had an experiment going, they need to collect 18 months' worth of data, and they're a year into it, that would be a high priority for continuation so you don't lose the year's worth of data you have," Dr. Zuber said. "That's sort of the way we're thinking of it." She said there would also be consideration for graduate students close to finishing their doctoral research or postdoctoral researchers who are just about to enter the job market. And plenty of research can be sustained by scientists sitting at home instead of at the office. "A lot of the work that goes on on campus is computational and analytical and doesn't use a lab where you have to be in there," Dr. Zuber said. "For example, we take telescope observations from Hawaii." The development of Bangalore into India's technology hub has improved the standard of living for millions. But the effects of such urbanization on the city's surrounding farming regions are less clear. That was a subject that Pramila Thapa, a graduate student studying the impacts of urbanization on agricultural systems at the Universities of Kassel and Gottingen, Germany, hoped to study. "Everything was set up for a large scale social survey," said Ms. Thapa's adviser, Tobias Plieninger, a professor at Kassel and Gottingen. "We had developed a questionnaire, identified 60 villages and towns with a total of 1,200 potential respondents, recruited six interviewers." But with the coronavirus pandemic, the Karnataka state government in India shut down universities and other aspects of public life. And the German institution's partner in India had an additional concern about doing fieldwork at this time. "Some people were concerned that we could be made responsible for carrying the virus into the villages," he said. Ms. Thapa's project has been put on hold until the safety of her colleagues and the communities they study can be assured. The delay has been "very painful," said Dr. Plieninger, especially for graduate students in his department whose projects will likely have to undergo substantial changes. Annie Roth At Satchin Panda's lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., the coronavirus outbreak is pulling away the very people his research might be able to help. Dr. Panda studies circadian rhythms, the 24 hour cycles that rule our bodies. He's especially interested in how to keep those rhythms strong, and how disruptions harm our health. For example, research has shown that shift workers whose daily lives are out of sync with the sun, such as nurses or firefighters, are more prone to certain illnesses, including cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Some researchers, including Dr. Panda, have studied intermittent fasting limiting all of your calorie intake to eight to 12 hours out of every 24 as a means of strengthening circadian rhythms and fighting some of those conditions. In an ongoing clinical trial, Dr. Panda and Pam Taub of the University of California, San Diego, have been teaching firefighters to eat in this way, and measuring whether it makes them healthier. But now that firefighters are being called away to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency with the emergency response to coronavirus, the study is in limbo. "Our study on firefighters was extremely exciting, and we are sad that we may not be able to complete it in time," Dr. Panda said; the three year grant for this project was only supposed to go through August. "At the same time, we understand that the community in danger needs emergency personnel more." Elizabeth Preston
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
In "Back to Burgundy," Jean (Pio Marmai), the prodigal son of a winemaking family, returns to France from his current home in Australia after learning that his father is ill. The sensations of youth work on him like Proustian madeleines, though reuniting with his alliteratively named siblings isn't easy. Juliette (Ana Girardot) is delighted at his return, but Jeremie (Francois Civil) wonders why his brother away 10 years never acknowledged their mother's death. While Jean's spoiler ish reason for not returning then is surprisingly plausible, his estrangement in the intervening time is less so. As "Back to Burgundy" unfolds, it often seems that phone calls or the timely removal of a letter from a jacket pocket might have spared this clan wells of resentment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
WHAT WAS IT? The Subaru 360 was a 2 cylinder microcar briefly imported in the late 1960s. WHAT WAS THE POINT? Frankly, it's hard to tell. For some reason, absent a fuel crisis or any perceptible shift away from the bloated cars popular at the time, the auto entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin struck a deal with Subaru's parent to bring over the tiny, 25 horsepower, less than 1,000 pound underachiever. SLOW GOING Consumer Reports reported that it took an "agonizing" 37.5 seconds to reach 50 m.p.h. (A standard 0 to 60 test wouldn't have been possible, given the top speed of 56 m.p.h.) THE COMPANY SAID Early advertisements, titled "Happy Talk From Subaru," promoted the car's 66 m.p.g. fuel economy and 1,200 price. A promotional film was direct and refreshingly honest: "We call it cheap and ugly," said the narrator, who also pronounced the name Su BAH ru.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
Yet the pace of growth signaled that the wheels of the economic recovery were still spinning in place. The private sector added 67,000 jobs in August, with some of the strongest gains in health care, food service and temporary help, according to the Labor Department. That was higher than consensus forecasts, and the government upwardly revised its numbers for June and July, suggesting that job creation was slightly stronger over the summer than originally reported. But the continuing wind down of the 2010 Census, as well as state and local government layoffs, led to an overall loss of 54,000 jobs in August. With businesses adding about half the number of positions needed simply to accommodate population growth much less dent the ranks of the jobless the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent, from 9.5 percent. "The overall picture is one where the labor market is still kind of treading water," said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR Inc. "It's better than sinking, but it's certainly not surging ahead." The August numbers, which pushed up stock gauges on Friday, are likely to do little to assuage political pressure on the Obama administration in the run up to the midterm elections. Speaking from the White House Rose Garden on Friday morning, President Obama called the latest jobs report "positive news," but said he would be unveiling "a broader package of ideas next week" to shore up the flagging economy, although he declined to give specifics. The president once again urged Congress to pass a stalled bill that would offer tax breaks to small businesses and create a 30 billion program to encourage community banks to lend. "There's no quick fix for this recession," he said. "The hard truth is that it took years to create our current economic problems, and it will take more time than any of us would like to repair the damage." Optimists were taking their good news where they could. By the end of the day, the Standard Poor's 500 stock index was up 1.32 percent, continuing a rally that began in the middle of the week. Market reaction to the jobs data on Friday was tempered somewhat by a report that said growth in the services sector had slowed in August. "I can say with greater confidence that a relapse into recession now looks even more unlikely," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. "And the momentum is gradually building for a stronger fourth quarter and a better 2011." The Labor Department revised upward its private sector number for July, raising the number of jobs added to 107,000, from the 71,000 originally reported. And private sector hiring in June, originally reported at 83,000 and lowered to 31,000, was raised again to 61,000. Mr. Baumohl, who also noted that consumer confidence had edged up in recent surveys and that a closely watched index of manufacturing showed earlier this week that employment was increasing, pointed to the fact that the jobs report showed that average weekly earnings rose slightly, to 774.97 in August from 772.92 in July. The average workweek among private workers was unchanged at 34.2 hours, but among production and nonsupervisory employees, it edged up to 33.5 hours, from 33.4. Economists generally see such increases in pay and workweeks as an indicator that companies are pushing their existing workers harder to meet rising demand, moves that tend to presage hiring. According to the government, manufacturing, which has been a bright spot since the beginning of the year and remains so in some other measures, showed a surprise setback in the government numbers released Friday. For the first time since January, the sector lost jobs, a total of 27,000 in August. The Labor Department said the decline was in part attributable to the fact that carmakers did not shut down plants in July as they usually do, throwing off seasonal adjustments in August. Thomas J. Duesterberg, the president of the Manufacturers Alliance MAPI, said that the organization's members were slowly adding workers. "It's not the type of robust growth that we would all like to see and would need to see if we're ever going to get back to the levels that we had before the recession," Mr. Duesterberg said, "but nonetheless it's growth." Slow growth is certainly cold comfort to those who are out of work and seeking a job, a number that rose to 14.9 million in August, from 14.6 million in July. In one small sign of improvement, the number of people out of work for 27 weeks which grew alarmingly throughout the recession and its aftermath declined by 323,000, to 6.2 million in August from 6.6 million in July. The median length of unemployment fell to 19.9 weeks in August, from 22.2 weeks in July. The so called underemployment rate which includes people whose hours have been cut as well as those who would like work but have given up on the search out of discouragement, rose to 16.7 percent in August, compared with 16.5 percent in July. The number of people who were working part time because they could not find full time work rose to 8.9 million in August, from 8.5 million in July. Some struggling with unemployment say they will settle for any work, even with pay cuts. Susan Howard, a Leander, Tex., single mother with a master's degree, said she was laid off from her software on demand job in June and since then has been interviewing for jobs that would pay half her previous salary. But with only 406 a week in benefits and some child support, she has stopped paying her mortgage, deferred her car payments, reached out to a ministry for help with utility bills and enrolled her son in a reduced cost school lunch program. "My resume is posted on every career resume site there is," she said. "I have been called in for three interviews, but none of them have ever gotten back to me." There is unlikely to be much relief in the coming months. Most economists are forecasting lukewarm growth in the second half of the year. Growth in the second quarter was revised down last week, to 1.6 percent from 2.4 percent. Jan Hatzius, chief United States economist for Goldman Sachs, said he believed the economy would grow at about 1.5 percent in the second half. That is not nearly enough to start bringing down unemployment in a significant way. "Over all you generally need 3 percent G.D.P. growth or more to start making a dent in the unemployment rate on a consistent basis," said Mr. Hatzius, referring to gross domestic product.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
Performances by Renee Fleming, Daniil Trifonov and Sandbox Percussion are among those that have asked viewers to purchase tickets. When the coronavirus forced concert halls and opera houses to close in March, a flood of music came online. The livestreams proved especially gratifying, offering a jolt of you are there excitement. Many of these programs were offered for free. But musicians and institutions have to make money. Will the public pay for music online? The answer is just beginning to emerge. The artists and organizations who can draw sizable numbers of paying customers may be those who already had globally prominent brands before the pandemic. The Metropolitan Opera, for example, has recently begun a series of livestreamed recitals featuring star singers, sophisticated camerawork and vibrant audio. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann's recital last month, tickets for which cost 20, was viewed by 44,000 people not a bad gross. The second program in the series took place on Aug. 1, with the soprano Renee Fleming and the pianist Robert Ainsley performing live from Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (The film is available through Friday, and Sunday afternoon brings a new livestream featuring Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak.) Ms. Fleming was in splendid voice, singing with honeyed tone and elegant phrasing. She delivered some favorites, like "O mio babbino caro." But she also included novelties, like a coquettish aria from Leoncavallo's not Puccini's "La Boheme" and lesser heard arias from operas and oratorios by Handel and Korngold. And she began with a premiere composed for her: John Corigliano's eloquently understated "And the People Stayed Home," a setting of a poem written by Catherine M. O'Meara that went viral at the start of the pandemic. Prerecorded offerings might seem less fulfilling to music lovers who are longing for the live concert experience. Yet if the content is substantive and the quality of the video high, these programs can be rewarding. Caramoor, in Katonah, N.Y., is streaming the four musicians of Sandbox Percussion and the pianist Conor Hanick, through Sunday, for 10. Caramoor, usually a summer favorite just north of New York City, has this year presented a series of livestreams, with tickets for purchase, from its intimate, elegant Music Room. The programs have been adventurous and excellent, including a recent one featuring members of the Knights, a chamber orchestra, playing a premiere by Anna Clyne and a Brahms sextet. The Sandbox Percussion program had to be filmed in advance, since the works being performed utilized an enormous array of unusual and cumbersome percussion instruments. The concert included inventive pieces by Andy Akiko, Juri Seo, Amy Beth Kirsten and David Crowell, variously complex and demanding contemporary scores. But the premiere of Christopher Cerrone's "Don't Look Down," an 18 minute concerto for prepared piano and percussion quartet, was the highlight. As he explained in an interview before the performance, Mr. Cerrone began composing the score just as the shutdowns started in March, and finished it only recently. So it's a piece written in lockdown. The piano is prepared similarly to John Cage's innovative techniques, but with fewer screws and pieces of metal inserted between the piano strings, and more materials like putty which dampens and distorts sounds and fishing wire, which allows the strings to be bowed to create eerie, whining tones. The first movement, "Hammerspace," begins with the whooshing of a bike pump and droning gongs. In time, restless riffs played with mallets burst forth. Amid rushes of rhythmic, spiraling figures on the prepared piano, fragments for the percussion instruments coalesced into fleeting almost melodies. The second movement, "The Great Empty," is more elemental, with music gurgling and heaving over ominous bass tones in the piano. The final movement, "Caton Flats," is named for the mixed use development in Brooklyn where Mr. Cerrone lives. As he said in the interview, the music recalls the metallic noise of construction crews at work in his neighborhood this summer. Tanglewood, perhaps America's most eminent summer music festival, has opted for offering only prerecorded online programs some from its archives, but many filmed earlier this summer. One, recorded in June, was put online on Saturday evening: the pianist Daniil Trifonov playing Bach's "The Art of the Fugue" in one of the studios of Tanglewood's new Linde Center. (The program is available for 12 through Saturday, when a recital by another pianist, Conrad Tao, goes online.) Mr. Trifonov played this work, Bach's final piece, at a recital at Alice Tully Hall in early March, one of the final concerts in New York before the lockdown. His performance then was magnificent, combining youthful inventiveness, crisp articulations and, for a performer still in his 20s, profoundly insightful musicianship. The Tanglewood performance was even better, though the chance it offered to see Mr. Trifonov up close to watch as a finger on his right hand gave extra pressure to a crucial note may have made it especially absorbing. Though he was not required to do so, Mr. Trifonov performed wearing a mask, which came across as a gesture of solidarity with those watching from home. Playing these complex and compelling fugues, Mr. Trifonov displayed an unusual kind of virtuosity not flashy, but precise, nuanced and subtle. Rippling passagework was not like filigree but substantive: Each note mattered. For Fugue 14, which Bach died before finishing, Mr. Trifonov, who is also a composer, dared to do the job and played his own completion. Good for him that, rather than feeling intimidated, he paid homage to Bach by adding his own personal take. The intricate contrapuntal lines unfolded effectively, the music taking a quasi mystical turn and becoming harmonically elusive delicate and gentle, with a cushioned landing at the end instead of a full stop. Worth paying for? Worth waiting for? I'd say yes, on both counts.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times MILAN The current give and take between the worlds of men's and women's wear does not work in only one direction. In Milan, Lorenzi Milano is about to open its first store with a mission to not only preserve an Old World culture and civility but to cater to women. It should be welcome news for fans who include Johann Rupert, chairman of the luxury group Richemont; the designer Marc Newson ; Prince Philip; and Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, all of whom were fervent collectors of the knives, gentleman's grooming tools and esoteric cutlery of G. Lorenzi , and most of whom went into a kind of mourning when the brand shuttered in 2014. "G. Lorenzi was a completely masculine store," said Serena Lorenzi, 30, one of the family members behind the rebirth of the business as Lorenzi Milano. "Its owners were male, as were the sales staff. My grandmother would assist at Christmas but there was no space for women. They were supposed to be at home, making dinner." That was 1929, however, when the company was founded by Giovanni Lorenzi. Its new incarnation by Mauro Lorenzi, a grandson, aims to stretch the country's tradition of well crafted objects into a new, rarefied realm fit for the contemporary era. After all, women like to play with knives, too. The family run brand, which introduced its e commerce site in 2018, now plans to open its store this spring in an imposing 1920s palazzo on the Piazza Meda, within walking distance of the Duomo. Ms. Lorenzi said the marble and wooden counters on the 1,076 square foot ground floor will reflect the look of a traditional shop. Displays of scissors, razors, tweezers and brushes will be a nod to the brand's origins. And its best selling wares, all designed in house, include items like a chrome plated brass toothpaste squeezer, a nail brush inlaid with carbon fiber and a Canaletto walnut valet set on a white Carrara marble base will stand alongside new items like an oyster knife and wooden block for shucking them. There won't be any bling. Lorenzi Milano may offer a 29,000 cigar set fashioned with mammoth tusk but the boutique is to retail accessible keepsakes. Toothbrushes and nail brushes will start at around 25. "Luxury is not about price. It's something that makes you feel good," said Mr. Lorenzi, 62, who started working in the original store at 16 and has devoted his life to making such functional, yet luxurious goods. "An elegant person with taste, does not show off." "My craftsmen belong to the same generation that I knew 20 or 30 years ago in the Via Monte Napoleone store. They have followed me here," continued Mr. Lorenzi, who was born in the mountainous Italian region of western Trentino. In Napoleonic times, armies passed through those mountain valleys and, to repair weapons, its residents became expert knife grinders. He has maintained that legacy and passed it on to his daughters, Ms. Lorenzi, the company's business development manager, and her sister Linda, its production manager. The business's specialty items are produced in an atelier in the Navigli district of Milan, close to the city's canals. There, six artisans transform horn, bamboo, crocodile, mother of pearl and even dinosaur fossil into singular objects.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
Dr. Alfred G. Knudson, who deduced how certain cancers strike a family generation after generation, died on Sunday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 93. His death was announced by the Fox Chase Cancer Center, where Dr. Knudson worked for 40 years. Cancer, in which a genetic glitch causes cells to grow out of control, is generally thought to be caused by chance, exposure to toxic chemicals, or as a consequence of unhealthy behaviors like smoking. It thus seemed strange to think a propensity to some forms of cancer could be passed from parent to child. "Funny as it may sound, heritable cancer was hardly discussed in the 1960s and 1970s," Dr. Albert de la Chapelle, a professor in the human genetics program at Ohio State University, said in an email. Dr. Knudson, trained as a pediatrician, tackled the issue by looking at retinoblastoma, a cancer of the eye that strikes children, even newborns. Childhood cancers would be easier to understand, he reasoned, because there would be fewer confounding factors, like the random mutations that accumulate over a lifetime. "It had been known for a long time that there were inherited forms of retinoblastoma, that it would run in families," said Dr. Jonathan Chernoff, the chief scientific officer at Fox Chase. "And then there were, on the other hand, sporadic cases that didn't run in families. Some child would randomly get retinoblastoma." Dr. Knudson analyzed the records of retinoblastoma patients and found that the inherited form struck children at a younger age and often in both eyes, while the sporadic cases usually involved older children and just one eye. That led him to his "two hit" hypothesis, and his insight that cancer sometimes results not from a particular cause, but rather from the disabling of something known today as the tumor suppressor gene. Because people have two copies of a gene, for a sporadic case of retinoblastoma to occur, the tumor suppressor gene would have to suffer two "hits," or mutations, to disable both copies. But for the form that was passed from one generation to the next, children were inheriting a bad copy of the gene, leaving only one working version. Thus, one more mutation would unleash the cancer. Dr. Chernoff said Dr. Knudson was in some ways "the Mendel of cancer genetics," referring to Gregor Mendel, the 19th century monk who demonstrated, through the crossbreeding of pea plants, how traits are passed from one generation to the next. "He provided the conceptual framework for how we think about cancer now," Dr. Chernoff said. Dr. Knudson published his hypothesis in 1971. "Knudson's hypothesis was conceived before we had a clue about the underlying molecular genetic events," Dr. de la Chapelle said. "I believe Knudson's work stimulated retinoblastoma researchers so strongly that this led to an early breakthrough." Dr. Knudson's theory was proved in 1986, when researchers figured out the gene and the mutations that led to the disease. The same framework has since been used to understand other heritable forms of cancer, such as the BRCA1 gene associated with breast cancer. Alfred George Knudson Jr. was born on Aug. 9, 1922, in Los Angeles. He went to the California Institute of Technology thinking he would major in physics. "I had never had any biology in high school," he recalled in a 2013 interview. "Then, after two years of physics at Caltech, I thought: 'Oh, they know everything in physics. Why do I want to go into physics?'" The quantitative aspects of genetics appealed to him, he said: "It has some of the features I admire about physics, so I'll study that." He finished his bachelor of science degree at Caltech in 1944 and went on to receive a medical degree from Columbia in 1947. He returned to Caltech to earn a doctorate in biochemistry and genetics in 1956. He served in the Navy during World War II and the Army during the Korean War. After working at the City of Hope National Medical Center near Los Angeles, he became an associate dean of the health services center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1966. He moved to the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Houston in 1969 and joined Fox Chase in 1976. His honors included the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award in 1998 and the Kyoto Prize in Life Sciences in 2004. Dr. Knudson is survived by his wife, Anna Meadows; three daughters, Linda Gaul, Nancy Knudson and Dorene Knudson; three stepchildren, Brian Meadows, Adam Meadows and Elizabeth Meadows; 10 grandchildren and step grandchildren; and two great grandchildren. His first marriage ended in divorce. Dr. Knudson didn't just make scientific breakthroughs of his own; as an administrator, he also encouraged the work conducted by others at Fox Chase. In 1979, while Dr. Knudson was director of Fox Chase's Institute for Cancer Research, a scientist, Irwin A. Rose, asked him for 50,000 to extend the stay of two visiting scientists from Israel. The three were collaborating on experiments to understand how cells dispose of proteins once they are no longer needed. Although it was not his area of expertise, Dr. Knudson obtained the needed money. "I liked the project," he recalled in an interview with The New York Times last year. "I knew in a million years Ernie wouldn't come to me if it wasn't important." As a result of that research, Dr. Rose and his colleagues, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
New York real estate agents take on many roles, particularly when they're shepherding first time buyers. They're accountants, educators ("Remember: The contract isn't binding until both parties sign it"), decorators ("Just think how the foyer would look with a coat of Dorset Cream"), perhaps even stand up comics ("A dishwasher? A washer and dryer? A walk in closet? A second bedroom? Yes, all perfectly doable with your budget but wait, does the apartment have to be above ground?"). And, of course, they have to be psychotherapists with just the right words of reassurance and comfort at their command when a client loses a bidding war or gets turned down by a co op board. ("This wasn't meant to be." "Things happen for a reason." "When the right place comes along, everything will fall into place for you.") Sales agents whose resumes include jobs as mental health providers may be way ahead of the game. The skills they developed as counselors how to listen, how to interpret, how to advocate and negotiate couldn't be better preparation, they say, for guiding clients through the thicket that is home buying in New York City. The reasons for their career switch: burnout and the desire to make more money. "Real estate is really just social work in a different arena: In both, you have to understand what's being said and to interpret what's not being said," said Anna Hargraves Hall, 47, an agent at Stribling who has a Master of Social Work from Columbia. She did field work at a school for blind and low vision children, followed by a stint with Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City. "And there's a need to understand what a huge decision it is to buy an apartment, not just financially but emotionally," she added. "These are both relationship businesses where you're placed in a role of extreme trust," said Jenet Levy, 59, a sales agent at Halstead, who also has an M.S.W. from Columbia and has worked with teenagers in the foster care system and as a youth employment counselor. "It's important in both occupations for clients to believe you know where they're coming from, for them to believe that you're seeing things from their side." It's a point of pride for Carey Larsen that she doesn't have a sales pitch. "I think people often hard sell in this business," said Ms. Larsen, 42, an agent at Citi Habitats who spent seven years as a domestic violence counselor, an occupation, she said, that taught her the value of being a good listener. Ultimately, she decided that she wanted the flexibility of self employment. "When brokers say to a client, 'Isn't this a wonderful view?' before they have a chance to discover it for themselves, I think it's just annoying," Ms. Larsen said. "I've taken people to an apartment with a full on view of the Statue of Liberty, and I didn't point it out. I waited for them to see it and react before I said a word." Hank Orenstein, 59, an associate broker at Corcoran, worked as a resident counselor for adults coming out of psychiatric facilities, and as a social services director at a family shelter in the South Bronx before deciding, 11 years ago, that it was time for a change time for a more remunerative occupation. And after all, he had sort of grown up in the business: His father was a real estate tax assessor for the city. His skills, he quickly learned, transferred well. "We have a technique in social work called 'being where the client is,'" Mr. Orenstein said. "If, say, a parent is angry and upset that her 14 year old is out of control and cutting school, you need to find out what's going on with the child. But first you need to deal with the parent's distress and make clear that you understand how the parent is feeling and that you're not judging." "How that translates to real estate," he added, "is listening to people's criteria and not dismissing those criteria out of hand, no matter how unattainable." Recently, Mr. Orenstein worked with a woman who was insistent on a doorman building in a specific part of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at a specific price point, with a washer and dryer in the apartment. "I didn't tell her, 'That's not going to happen,'" he said. "I told her the percentage of co ops that had what she wanted, but that we would stick with the plan of finding such a place." It took a year; the place was found. Mr. Orenstein also relies on his mastery of what's known in therapy as cognitive reframing: pointing out that there's a gap between what people say they want and what they're willing to do to achieve it. "I might say, 'On one hand, you're telling me you want to live in a large one bedroom apartment with a doorman in the heart of the Upper East Side. But on the other hand, what the market is telling us is that what you're willing to spend isn't going to get you there,'" Mr. Orenstein said. "That's better than saying, 'You're not being realistic.'" During her 15 years as a private adoption consultant, Mary Jean Gianquinto worked with many women who had made the decision to become single parents. She had always been interested in real estate, she said, and after investing successfully in several properties, she felt the time was right, last summer, to go into the profession full time. Now an agent at Halstead, Ms. Gianquinto, 56, who has an M.S.W. from the University at Buffalo, has made something of a subspecialty of working with single women looking to buy an apartment. "When a single woman makes a decision to create a family, she is making a statement to the world," Ms. Gianquinto said. "A single woman who's looking to buy an apartment after a lifetime of renting is making a statement, too. In both cases, there's a lot of angst and trepidation." She recently found a co op near Prospect Park in Brooklyn for a single woman "who kept saying, 'Who am I to be doing this?'" Ms. Gianquinto recalled. "She felt she wasn't supposed to be doing this without a partner. I would tell her that it's O.K. to make the decision on her own; it's O.K. to feel you deserve something." The client who finds fault with every property? The one who drags her feet about signing a contract? The fight over a sconce "It's staying!" "No, it's going!" that threatens to derail a closing? Who better than someone with clinical experience to get to the bottom of an issue without losing the client or the commission? Joan Kagan, 48, the sales manager at TripleMint and a former counselor for developmentally disabled people and their families, recalls working with a woman whose recent divorce required her to vacate a grand apartment on Park Avenue. She was now downsizing to a co op in the same neighborhood. But the deal had stalled. Ms. Kagan's client was upset about a small crack in the ceiling. She complained that the door handles were cheap and that there was a problem with one of the electrical outlets in the bathroom. It was a very nice, affordable apartment, and the seller was getting frustrated that the contract hadn't been signed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Ben H. Bagdikian, a journalist and news media critic who became a celebrated voice of conscience for his profession, calling for tougher standards of integrity and public service in an era of changing tastes and technology, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 96. Over five decades, Mr. Bagdikian was a national and foreign correspondent for newspapers and magazines; a reporter, editor and ombudsman for The Washington Post; the author of eight books; and for many years a professor and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Born into an Armenian family that fled from genocide in Ottoman Turkey, he grew up in Depression America with a passion for social justice that shaped his reporting. He became an undercover inmate to expose inhumane prison conditions in Pennsylvania, rode with an Israeli tank crew to write about the 1956 Suez Crisis, and lived with oppressed families in the South to cover the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. He was The Washington Post's conduit for the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department study of decades of American duplicity in Indochina that was disclosed by the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg and published by The Post and The New York Times in 1971 in defiance of the Nixon administration's attempts at suppression as the nation debated its deepening involvement in the war in Vietnam. But he was perhaps best known as the author of "The Media Monopoly" (1983), which warned that freedom of expression and independent journalism were threatened by the consolidation of news and entertainment outlets in a shrinking circle of corporate owners. A mere 50 companies, he wrote, controlled what most Americans read in newspapers and books and saw on television and at the movies. By 2004, when he published "The New Media Monopoly," the last of seven sequel editions, the number of corporate giants controlling much of the flow of information and entertainment had dwindled to five. "This gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history," Mr. Bagdikian wrote. Journalists, scholars, corporate officials and the public still debate the drawbacks and merits of limited media ownership. But the Internet and desktop publishing have extended freedom of speech to anyone with a computer. Cable networks and online news and entertainment choices have proliferated, and some observers contend that the Orwellian perils envisioned by Mr. Bagdikian have receded or become moot. While Mr. Bagdikian was most vociferous against ownership concentrations calling for limits on the size of newspaper chains, for example, even if the limits ran afoul of the First Amendment his news media criticism ranged widely. He examined conflicts of interest and journalistic integrity, legal issues affecting the press, the media's responsibility to act in the public interest, and trends in investigative reporting. He rebuked newspaper publishers who pressed journalists to promote advertisers' interests, breaching the traditional wall between news and business. He was troubled by the wide use of anonymous sources in news reports, and by the credulity of reporters and editors who accepted the "official" accounts of self serving government spokesmen, especially when facts were being suppressed on national security grounds. He urged tougher standards of public service for broadcasters seeking renewal of their licenses. He advised Americans not to rely on television networks for news, calling them "one network in triplicate" because of their similarities. And he especially deplored the celebrity status of television network anchors. "The worst thing that can happen to a journalist is to become a celebrity," he told The Progressive in 1997. "The honest job of the journalist is to observe, to listen, to learn. The job of the celebrity is to be observed, to make sure others learn about him or her, to be the object of attention rather than an observer." Ben Haig Bagdikian was born on Jan. 30, 1920, in Marash, Turkey, the youngest of five children of Aram Bagdikian, a chemistry teacher, and the former Daisy Uvezian. The family fled the massacre of Armenians when Ben was an infant and made its way to America, settling in Stoneham, Mass. His mother died when he was 3, and his father became pastor of an Armenian Congregational church in Cambridge. He graduated from Clark University in 1941 and worked briefly as a reporter for The Springfield Morning Union in Massachusetts. In 1942 he married Elizabeth Ogasapian. They had two sons, Christopher and Frederick, and were divorced in 1972. His second marriage, to Betty Medsger, ended in divorce. In 1983, he married Marlene Griffith. Besides her, he is survived by Frederick. Christopher died in 2015. After serving as a navigator in World War II, Mr. Bagdikian joined The Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin in Rhode Island in 1947. Over the next 15 years he was a local reporter, a member of a team that won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for deadline coverage of a bank robbery, a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and a Washington correspondent. From 1963 to 1967 he was a Washington based contributing editor of The Saturday Evening Post and wrote freelance articles about politics, poverty, housing, migration and other subjects for The New York Times Magazine and other publications. He also covered the civil rights movement, sometimes as a companion of victims of intimidation and violence. His first book, "In the Midst of Plenty: The Poor in America," was published in 1964. His other books included "The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media" (1971), "The Effete Conspiracy and Other Crimes by the Press" (1972), and a memoir, "Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life and Profession" (1995). Frustrated by the "sins and omissions" of reporters and television crews at news events, he began writing media critiques in the 1960s after formulating a Bagdikian Law of Journalism: "The accuracy of news reports of an event is inversely proportional to the number of reporters on the scene." Mr. Bagdikian studied the news media for the RAND Corporation from 1967 to 1969. After joining The Washington Post in 1970, he became an assistant managing editor and the ombudsman, representing the newspaper's readers. From 1972 to 1974, he wrote for The Columbia Journalism Review. He taught journalism at Berkeley from 1976 until retiring in 1990, and was the graduate school's dean from 1985 to 1988. "Never forget," he told his students at the outset, "that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
As if we needed another sign that Valentine's Day is getting awfully expensive, the coupon Web sites have now gotten into the game. LivingSocial offered deeply discounted candy to New York City residents on Tuesday. Two days later, Groupon offered 40 worth of flowers from FTD for 20. These group buying sites may be trying to strike decent bargains for users. But now that so many people subscribe to their e mails, gift givers have to be playing a weird psychic game with themselves. Will he know I used a Groupon? Will she think less of me for doing so? Cut rate romance feels somehow wrong, so plenty of people simply pay up. It's a special day, after all. Once you head down that road, however, it's hard not to feel like a sucker, swept up in the frenzy of an occasion that might not have endured were it not for the Hallmark crowd. After all, there is something kind of pathetic about having to designate a day to be good to your mate. Still, we dutifully participate in this mass ritual of public devotion, paying extra for the prix fixe while packed elbow to elbow with others when it would be way more romantic to have a great restaurant mostly to ourselves the next night. It all seems wrong somehow. So I set out to prove that successful couples have gotten wise to all the fuss and spend less on gifts for one another as time passes. No such luck, alas. The data does not seem to exist. What I did discover, however, was that many of us were probably taking the wrong approach to quantifying our generosity in the first place. Long term relationships do not survive without gifts, to be sure. But they are not the gifts you may think. Allen M. Parkman has been married 37 years, though his parents divorced in 1944, when he was just 4 years old. Figuring out why marriages fail has driven part of his research as an economist and (now emeritus) professor of management at the University of New Mexico. His 2004 article in the journal Economic Inquiry, "The Importance of Gifts in Marriage," went a long way toward cracking the code, he says. It began by noting, as other researchers had, that unlike people in his parents' generation, those marrying more recently were seeking increases in psychological welfare in addition to material gains. To his mind, many gains come from gifts, which he defined as an offering where you incur a cost but receive no direct or immediate benefit. That certainly encompasses all of the usual trinkets and baubles. While we don't know how total spending on these things changes over time, Thomas Bradbury, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies marriage, noted that the grand totals were not the right metric. He suggested considering the proportion of income that people spent instead. This makes a lot of sense. After all, there is a display of plumage that goes on during many courtships, a wooing based in part on establishing one's credentials as an exceedingly generous soul. A lot of disposable income goes toward this sort of thing. The De Beers people seized on the metric in a brilliant and insidious way, suggesting that no price was too high for an engagement ring simply pile up two months' worth of salary. But this is only half the story, Mr. Parkman says. Many gifts are of the psychological and intangible sort. They range from simple empathy, affection and a catch all category called "understanding," to complex actions like sacrificing your career so your family can move to a city where a spouse or partner has a new and better job. This is a useful construct during tough economic times. Worrying about the gift giving ritual is a high class problem, after all. But if you count yourselves among the working (or nonworking) class and can't afford to buy many gifts, it sure seems as if there are still plenty of gifts you can give. Generosity on this front, however, is a harder thing to test for during courtship. And you can't just go out and buy these psychic gifts as a partnership matures, even if you make a lot more money than when you first met. So it's no wonder that failure here tends to sink lots of marriages, according to Mr. Parkman's research. Regularly scheduled giving, then, is not necessarily a mark of successful marriages. Charlie Turpin and his wife, Jewell, of Minneapolis have been married 56 years. Mr. Turpin describes traditional gift giving as something they have outgrown. "It really is liberating," he said, noting the stress that came from needing to read one another's mind on command because of a mark on the calendar. "Early in life, presents and occasions are important, but as you get older, you have everything you want." Now, he and his wife channel much of their generosity toward their family. "We gave away a lot of money, but it wasn't tied to an occasion, and it was not required," he said. "You know you are doing the right thing. It's not stressful at all." A gift can also be as subtle as granting implicit permission for a spouse to pursue a passion that is somewhat pricey, even if you're not a spender by nature. Bob and Mary Kuhn of Glen Mill, Pa., decided to call a halt to traditional gift giving on state occasions at least 15 years ago. The couple, both 68, have been married for 43 years. Ms. Kuhn laughed as she recalled her husband's radio controlled airplane habit. "Those things crash," she said. "So that can be a gift until someone is no longer interested in that sort of hobby." Shelly Lundberg, an economics professor at the University of Washington who has studied bargaining within marriages, likes this example for the signals it sends. "It shows not only that I know what you like, but that I value an aspect of you that you consider important," she said, say a mechanical mind or a tinkering spirit. The other nice thing about Ms. Kuhn's offering was that there was no occasion she was observing when she made it. Ike and Mae Mosher, who have been married for 70 years, never established much of a traditional gift giving ritual between them because they stretched their finances early on in their relationship to support his mother and sister when his father died. Ms. Mosher's sacrifices early on were her own gift to Mr. Mosher and his family. Over time, their giving to one another became more spontaneous. "He would give me gifts just for the sake of giving me a gift," said Ms. Mosher, who lives with her husband in the Classic Residence community in Chevy Chase, Md., "not necessarily because it was a day you have to give a gift." This maps exactly, it turns out, to some of the findings of Terri Orbuch, a professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan who leads a continuing study of married couples that dates to the mid 1980s. "Romance and passion is all about using the elements of surprise and the elements of newness," she said. "That's what couples say, and that's what I've found in the research." So practice random acts of generosity, whether it's with traditional gifts or more psychic ones. And if you and your better half want to partake in this national ritual of devotion, it certainly can't hurt. But it probably isn't necessary, either. "It is very sweet and nice when you are 20 or 25," said Ms. Mosher, 92. "But we are so safe and secure in our love for each other, there is no need for that kind of thing."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
AMSTERDAM In 2010, Latif Mukasa, an artist and gay rights activist from Uganda, was forced into hiding after his name and photograph were printed in a newspaper's list of "Uganda's 100 Top Homos" with the words "Hang Them." When the police issued a warrant for his arrest, he escaped. He managed to make his way to the Netherlands, where he was offered asylum seeker housing in a former prison complex. It was not ideal, but he was happy to be safe. Last week, Mr. Mukasa, 33, who is both an artist and a refugee, was guiding a group of visitors through the Temporary Museum, a pop up exhibition inside the Bijlmerbajes in Amsterdam, another former prison that is now a center for asylum seekers, and where those who fled are presenting works that help the public understand their migrant experience. "This whole migrant situation what they call a crisis is for me much more than an article in a newspaper or an item on television," said Nathalie Faber, director and curator of the Temporary Museum. "It's all about people, and when you talk to people it's so completely different. We have learned so much from doing it about how just to talk to each other and work with each other." In a corner of a 4,300 square foot exhibition space inside the former prison visitors' center, Mr. Mukasa stopped in front of his own painting, "The Gods of Africa," (2017) depicting a large clownesque figure hovering over a small group of stick figures, painted in hues of green. His work is one of a half dozen that are part of the installation "APKAR (Artist Previously Known as Refugee)" from 2017, all made by former refugees and curated by the local Dutch artist Maze de Boer. Surprised that the tour guide was also a painter, Saskia Leefsma, one of the visitors in the group, asked, "Do you have a studio now?" Mr. Mukasa admitted that no, this was the very first painting he'd made in a very long while because he had been suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. "As time goes on, I hope I will find a voice again, and this is just a beginning," he said. The guide continued on to the next installation in the exhibition, a work called "The Maquette of Dreams," by the Lebanese born artist Mounira Al Solh, a metal bed topped with a foam mattress taken from an asylum seeker's bedroom. Pasted onto the wall next to the bed were cards that visitors could open to read about the migrants' dreams and nightmares. Mr. Mukasa sat down on the bed. "Please, have a seat," he said, motioning to Ms. Leefsma to join him. Ms. Leefsma, who works as head of documentation for a museum in the nearby Dutch city of Utrecht, sat down and read one of the texts inside the cards: "My father is pregnant." "It felt curiously intimate, in a way, and I was very honored," Ms. Leefsma said later. "What I found incredibly touching was that he was an artist from Uganda who hadn't been able to work ever since his flight. It made me think about what it is to have no home." Their tour included about a dozen art installations. "Teun Castelein," a traditional Syrian style hammam (bathhouse) by the artist Moe Al Masri, was being built inside a windowless isolation cellblock. A Brazilian artist, Mayra Sergio, has filled the main exhibition hall with the scent of rose petals and chamomile for her work, "To Break Ground" (2017), which consists of dried herbal teas from Syria piled in heaps on large mountain like ramps, then collected and boiled and served ritually to visitors in the main hall, as a way to remind asylum seekers of home. "In all that time I had no sense of how long it would be," he told the tour group. "It would have been nice to have had a date, to be able to say: 'In a year, I'll be in a different place.' But it's hard, because every day you go outside and see everyone getting up and going to work and parents pushing strollers, and all you have is the hard walls of a cell. It's about living for another day, and every day becomes the same day." But he said that bed became a haven for him, a place that gave him a great sense of security and peace. "I'd wake up from a nightmare and I'd find myself on that bed, and it was so relaxing," he said. "It's a single bed, a nice bed, and I can't say it's a bad bed. I'm still here." Mr. Mukasa was finally granted residency papers in the Netherlands, and he now has an apartment of his own in Amsterdam's western Bos en Lommer neighborhood. He said that being a tour guide at the Temporary Museum had given him a sense of purpose, but that it sometimes stirred up those ghosts from his past. "At first it was kind of hard," he said. "But the more you do it, the more the ghosts run away."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
"Don't get vaccines. Illuminati are behind it." "Do you still treat your kids with leaves? No? And why don't you vaccinate them? It's medicine!" With messages like those, Russian internet trolls meddling in the 2016 presidential election also lashed out at Americans debating the safety of vaccines, a new study has found. But instead of picking a side, researchers said, the trolls and bots they programmed hurled insults at both pro and anti vaccine advocates. Their only intent, the study concluded, seemed to be to raise the level of hostility. "You see this pattern," said David A. Broniatowski , a computer engineer at George Washington University and lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. "On guns, or race, these accounts take opposite sides in lots of debates. They're about sowing discord."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, Kamasi Washington previews "The Epic" follow up, Carrie Underwood embraces an imperfection and Florence and the Machine show there's beauty in restraint. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Timing, huh? For the last week, it's been Cardi, Cardi, Cardi the saturation is real. For Nicki Minaj, who's released new music sparingly of late, this hip hop realignment might be fraught. But rather than keep her distance, she's instead leaned into the moment, or perhaps stepped on it, with a pair of new songs, "Barbie Tingz" and "Chun Li." Perhaps appropriately, these are sparring records loose, pugnacious, a little uncentered. "Barbie Tingz" has the cold snap of early '80s hip hop and electro, and "Chun Li" swaggers with the authority of the mid 90s. As is the norm, Ms. Minaj aims shots at unnamed antagonists, but in the past, that bluster felt truly targetless. But now, for the first time since the beginning of her career, there's someone who might plausibly shoot back, and win. JON CARAMANICA When Kamasi Washington released "The Epic" in 2015, the country was being scarred on what felt like a daily basis by images of black people being killed at the hands of police. Mr. Washington's triple album was a bursting, grandiose statement that, though recorded years earlier, seemed to speak directly to the needs of the moment: His scorching tenor saxophone and orchestral backing represented both the enormity of fury and the magnitude of a healer's ambition. This week Mr. Washington announced a double disc follow up titled "Heaven and Earth." Its first two singles bear a lot of the previous release's markings: tons of horns, voices and strings; lengthy tunes, often in minor keys. But while "The Epic" delivered music of spiritual regeneration and self affirmation, this new thing is a call to arms. On "Fists of Fury," over a familiar Washington rhythm of Latin tinged funk, the voices of Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible declare, "We will no longer ask for justice. Instead, we will take our retribution." GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Florence and the Machine, 'Sky Full of Song' Once again, Celtic rooted melody carries outsize emotion for Florence Welch in her band's Record Store Day single, "Sky Full of Song." She's singing about tricky long distance relationships and about the euphoria and exhaustion of losing herself in music: "Grab me by my ankles/I've been flying for too long." But she and the band resist their longstanding tendency to head straight into chiming anthem mode; the first verse is a cappella, and much of her accompaniment throughout is just a sparse bass line. Though the orchestra and choir do eventually arrive, the song backs away from its peak, as if it's questioning easy grandiosity. JON PARELES Late last year, Carrie Underwood took a spill at her home, causing injuries to her wrist and face; she's barely been spotted in public since. On Sunday she'll perform at the ACM Awards, and has just released a new song, "Cry Pretty," that smuggles an allusion to the incident into a message: "I apologize if you don't like what you see/but sometimes my emotions get the best of me/And falling apart is as human as it gets." Like the best Underwood songs, it swells mightily, but unfortunately, it never quite crests. But for an artist who has long thrived on extreme polish, the acceptance of imperfection is welcome. J.C. A few years ago the Robert Glasper Experiment gained a huge following and two Grammys with its "Black Radio" albums, which featured a different vocalist on almost every track. The quartet retrenched on "ArtScience," a no guests allowed record from 2016. That's out the window on "The ArtScience Remixes," out Friday. The band invited Kaytranada an experimental producer with debts to classic house and early 2000s hip hop to rework its originals from the album, and Kaytranada brought along some guests of his own. On his remix of "No One Like You," over a Mark Colenburg drumbeat fortified by gallons of extra bass, the vocalist Alex Isley lays down some sleepy vocals. We miss out on Casey Benjamin's alto saxophone solo (consult the "ArtScience" version for that), but all told, this cut provides more satisfaction than the original. G.R. Much of Nels Cline's playing is about sleight of hand and anti gravity: This guitarist uses effects and delay to envelop you, lift you up, upset your sense of time. But Mr. Cline is also an irrepressible improviser, with straightforwardly dazzling guitar chops. And in the Nels Cline 4 a new band that's just released its debut album, "Currents, Constellations" his sterling fretwork is the big attraction. That, and the way it tangles with the equally fluent playing of Julian Lage, a wunderkind guitarist one generation Mr. Cline's junior. Together with the bassist Scott Colley and the drummer Tom Rainey, the guitarists toggle on "Amenette" between speedy swing and tinkering rubato. The piece has an oscillating logic unrelated to any typical song form; it finally climaxes in a rough crumple, before the playful melody leaps forth one final time. G.R. A self indictment delivered like an R B love song, "Stolen Moments" itemizes a lot of good reasons to back out of a romance with the singer: "I'm so afraid of intimacy." "Don't trust me in me." "I don't want to tell you that I love you." "No love is perfect for me." Josh Karpeh, who records as Cautious Clay, croons those and more over cozy acoustic guitar chords and a creeping bass line, with wisps of falsetto vocals and saxophone in the background. "I think that loneliness would serve us well," he concludes, hoping not to be believed. J.P. It's been more than 20 years since Eliane Elias, an esteemed Brazilian pianist, was commissioned to record her take on the songs from "Man of La Mancha," a Broadway musical based on the tale of Don Quixote. The commission was provided by Mitch Leigh, the music's composer. Those recordings are finally seeing the light of day thanks to Concord Records, which just released Ms. Elias's "Music From Man of La Mancha." On the title track, she's joined by the bassist Eddie Gomez and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, and the trio creates a flamenco like flow, moving comfortably from major to minor as Ms. Elias's elegant solo gives way to a rumbling, extended statement from Mr. DeJohnette, forceful but not overpowering. G.R.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Consistently ranked among the top ski resorts on the North American continent, Whistler Blackcomb is the opposite of a well kept secret. Seventy five miles north of Vancouver, in Canada's Coast Mountains, the resort technically two mountains, tethered by a two mile long, peak to peak gondola was the host of the 2010 Winter Olympics and hasn't looked back. Diverse terrain with a mile long vertical drop, a ritzy alpine village and epic mountain scenery have proven irresistible to travelers, around three million of whom visit each year. Acquisition by the international behemoth Vail Resorts has only accelerated, for better or worse, resortification of the one time backcountry playground. With beefed up infrastructure like a new gondola and lifts have come high ticket prices (around 180 Canadian dollars, or about 138, for a one day ticket, or around 150 dollars if bought in advance online) and grumbles from locals that the mountain is increasingly catering to a globe trotting elite. The question for travelers: Is there still a ski bum soul to be found beneath that glitzy surface? Or has Whistler become like Las Vegas or Ibiza one of those unreal places on the planet where soul searching is beside the point? Well, a little of both. A weekend in Whistler uncovers plenty of one percenter indulgences, from fine dining to retail therapy, some positively out of this world skiing, and hints of the quaint mountain town that up until the 1960s had no road access, electricity or running water. (Oh, and a favorable exchange rate for American visitors makes those lift prices a little easier to bear.) Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains don't open for skiing until around 8:30 a.m. But early risers can take the gondola up beforehand for the Fresh Tracks breakfast at Whistler's Roundhouse Lodge, a mountaintop gondola hub with cafeteria style seating inside. The all you can eat buffet (26 dollars) offers the standard eggs, bacon and pastries. But the food isn't the draw as much as the chance to be among the very first skiers to hit the newly groomed (or powdered) slopes when the first tracks bell rings. The largest ski resort by area in North America, Whistler Blackcomb covers a combined 8,000 acres of skiable terrain with more than a dozen bowls and hundreds of runs. For newbies, the mountain map, a dense web of colored lines, is about as readable as a big city subway plan though a few hacks can help. Whistler is regarded as the more family friendly, or "beginner" mountain, though its upper reaches are anything but. For casual skiers, Blackcomb's Catskinner zone (served by a newly upgraded chairlift) affords a nice combination of leisurely green runs and slightly more challenging blues. The T bar accessed glaciers high on Blackcomb Mountain, with their yawning bowls and access to double black diamonds, are a magnet for ski pros the world over. For those planning to squeeze every run out of their pricey lift tickets, Rendezvous Lodge on Blackcomb Mountain offers a prime spot for quick lunchtime refuge and refueling, though seats can be hard to find on busy days. Inside, skiers still in boots and bulky gear vie for space at long shared tables adjacent to the food court, which offers standard burgers and fries fare, plus a taco bar, Thai station and great soups. But if your toes are already frozen and legs turning to jelly, descend to the village for better dining options. Tiny Bar Oso, little more than a bar and a few tables, brings tapas back to their Spanish roots, with excellent salted cod croquettes (9.50 dollars), tortilla espanola (10.50 dollars), and lamb albondigas (17.50 dollars). The land Whistler Blackcomb resort sits upon was first inhabited by the Squamish and Lil'wat First Nations. Today, they offer one hour guided tours inside the Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre, an airy, wood and glass building big enough to accommodate towering totem poles (admission 18 dollars). Artifacts inside range from canoes carved from red cedar to blankets made from the "wool" of the Salish dog, a now extinct, Pomeranian size canine from the area. With Whistler's lifts closing early, there's plenty of time for apres ski diversions. Garibaldi Lift Co. Bar Grill, right at the base of the mountain, is a venerable, if well worn, Whistler institution. The open interior, dominated by a large fireplace, feels equal parts dive bar, ski lodge and dance club. It's packed most afternoons with skiers fresh off the slopes, downing beers, shots and enormous plates of poutine (16.50 dollars, with locally sourced cheese curds). An upscale alternative a short walk away, the ritzy Bearfoot Bistro features a baby grand, inventive cocktails and exhaustive wine list, and a dedicated oyster sommelier with an encyclopedic knowledge of mollusks far and near (plate of six East and West coast oysters, 30 dollars). Whistler's crowds and high end trappings can get a little exhausting after a while. Fortunately, there's plenty to explore outside the village. Just south of town, a new, half mile long section of the Sea to Sky Trail (a 112 mile stretch of pathways, some still in progress, running north and south of Whistler) leads to a swaying wooden footbridge suspended over the Cheakamus River. On the other side, hikers are greeted by smashed steel boxcars scattered in the wilderness the remnants of a 1956 train wreck, now covered with Basquiat worthy graffiti and appropriated as ramps by local mountain bikers. Nearby, the Function Junction neighborhood offers a more rustic alternative to the alpine glam of Whistler Village and a hint of what the area may have once felt like. Inside Coast Mountain Brewing really just a skinny communal table and a couple of taps at the bar locals in ski boots and flannels sip their way through tasting flights (four tasters for 10 dollars) of locally brewed sours, I.P.A.s and session ales. Situated (dangerously) right next door, Forged taps into the current vogue for recreational ax throwing. One hour sessions (38 dollars per person) include instruction in everything from the basics of sticking your target to double ax trick throws.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
A residential development near the stadium site. D.C. United has offered to promise local benefits, like summer jobs, but the District has rejected community requests to guarantee that housing would be preserved. The area proposed for the stadium now includes a closed electric power plant, sand and gravel plants, a salvage yard, and acres of parking lots and unused space. Jason M. Levien, D.C. United's managing general partner, says the stadium is expected to prompt nearby hotel and retail construction. "We think it can spur some economic development," he said. "We want to be part of that." The stadium, rendered here, would be home to D.C. United, the Major League Soccer team that has played in the 53 year old Robert F. Kennedy Stadium since 1996. City leaders say the project will serve as a catalyst for economic development in the surrounding area in southwest Washington. A rendering of the 20,000 seat stadium, which would be about a mile from the Capitol. Buzzard Point, in a neglected corner of Washington on the Anacostia River, is the site for a proposed 300 million Major League Soccer stadium. Buzzard Point, in a neglected corner of Washington on the Anacostia River, is the site for a proposed 300 million Major League Soccer stadium. WASHINGTON There are no buzzards at Buzzard Point, a blighted, tucked away corner of the nation's capital that waits silently for prosperity to come its way. Its time may not be far off. On Wednesday, the District of Columbia Council is expected to take a major step toward realizing that hoped for future by approving financing for a 300 million Major League Soccer stadium to be built near the Anacostia River, in an area now largely regarded as an industrial wasteland. Under the plan, the D.C. United team and the District government will split the cost evenly. If all goes as planned, the stadium will be completed in 2017. The District's half will go toward land acquisition and related infrastructure improvements, while D.C. United will pay to build the stadium itself. City leaders say the 20,000 seat stadium will serve as a catalyst for economic development for this area of southwest Washington, the way that Nationals Park, home of the Washington Nationals baseball team, did for its formerly stagnant neighborhood just a few blocks north and east. This has been the case in other Washington neighborhoods after the city voted to approve major new public venues, including the Verizon Center, home to the N.B.A.'s Wizards and the N.H.L.'s Capitals since 1997, and the 2.3 million square foot Walter E. Washington Convention Center, completed in 2003, in revitalized Mount Vernon Square. Council votes on these earlier projects were close. By contrast, council support for the soccer stadium is unanimous. In addition to the stadium, D.C. United has plans for development on three adjoining acres, according to Jason M. Levien, the team's managing general partner. "We don't want to have just a stadium in isolation," he said. "We've had discussions with several folks in the hotel and retail space and gotten some real interest. We think it can spur some economic development. We want to be part of that." Right now, there is anything but. In these few blocks wedged between Fort McNair and South Capitol Street, a main artery, are a closed electric power plant, sand and gravel plants, a salvage yard and acres of parking lots and unused space. Though the location seems remote, it is about a mile from the National Mall and the Capitol. The District of Columbia has sales agreements with two of the three property owners affected. A deal to sign the third, a major local developer, had been part of a complicated land swap. The owner, the Akridge real estate firm, was to get the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Center, in Washington's booming U Street corridor, as partial compensation for two acres at Buzzard Point. Akridge planned to redevelop the Reeves site. The deal fell apart after the council's consultant said the Reeves building had been undervalued. District officials have indicated that they may acquire the property by eminent domain, in which case a court could establish its fair market value. "We just want to be treated fairly," said Matthew J. Klein, president of Akridge. "We are open to constructive dialogue with the city to make sure this all happens." Akridge is also eager to develop an additional seven acres it owns at Buzzard Point. "We bought this property in 2006 with the idea this would be in the path of development," he said. While new baseball stadiums have helped reinvigorate inner cities across the country, many soccer stadiums are not in a city's center but on its periphery, or even in suburbs. Mr. Levien said D.C. United, which has been playing in the 53 year old Robert F. Kennedy Stadium since 1996, "scoured the District" for a new location. "There is really no other area with this development opportunity so close to downtown, close to the Capitol," Mr. Levien said. "We're very bullish on it." He and a partner acquired a controlling interest in the team for 60 million in 2012. Mr. Levien said the team was not yet profitable, in part because of the lack of lucrative corporate suites at R.F.K. Stadium. D.C. United, however, has won four Major League Soccer cups, he noted, and attendance has been steadily growing to about 20,000 a game. The new stadium will be the most expensive to be built in the 19 team league, but city officials say they believe it will pay dividends. Other cities are making similar bets. Orlando, Fla., whose expansion team will join the league next year, is building a new soccer stadium and anticipates 1.2 billion in long term economic benefits. In Las Vegas, which is competing for a franchise, a new stadium is being promoted as a way to gain 1,000 jobs and 3 billion in economic benefits. Can a soccer stadium transform a neighborhood? In Washington, where a seemingly inexorable march of redevelopment and gentrification is sweeping across the city, the D.C. United stadium is seen as the next logical step. "Soccer is so much the sport of millennials and attractive to those diverse audiences not necessarily attracted to baseball and hockey," said Ellen McCarthy, the District of Columbia's acting planning director. The soccer stadium, she said, "is the spice, the ingredient that can make further investments occur in that area and enliven it." With only 20 home games on the team's schedule, Mr. Levien said the owners were looking forward to holding other events at the stadium, including concerts, college football, lacrosse games and rugby matches. Mayor Vincent C. Gray predicted last week that the D.C. United stadium would create "by our best estimates" 1.6 billion in "economic opportunity," support more than 1,000 full time jobs and generate a total of about 65 million in "other benefits" related to the project. Mr. Gray said the District's direct investment, capped at 150 million, was expected to be less than half the total cost closer to 139 million. The 406 page, 200,000 consultant's report presented to the council last month buttressed such optimism, but also cautioned that "Buzzard Point is highly unlikely to repeat the rapid large scale development boom" that followed construction of the other sites. That would be just fine with Rhonda Hamilton, 37, a resident of nearby Syphax Gardens, a public housing project of garden apartments built in 1960. Ms. Hamilton, who grew up there, fears that gentrification could result in the loss of affordable housing. Already, planning is underway to convert another low income complex, Greenleaf Gardens, into mixed income housing. Altogether, about 1,000 units of subsidized or public housing are within a few blocks of the stadium site. "This project has the possibility to put the housing in jeopardy," said Ms. Hamilton, who represents Syphax and James Creek, another housing project, on the District's advisory neighborhood commission for the area. "I'm fearful with all the changes," she said. "There is the potential to change it from the community all of us love and enjoy." The neighborhood has a draft agreement with D.C. United for the team to provide community benefits, including summer youth soccer scholarships, summer youth jobs, free meeting room space and community use days at the new stadium for nonprofit groups. But the District rejected community requests to guarantee legislatively that the housing would be preserved. Mayor elect Muriel Bowser, who heads the council's economic development committee, said preserving affordable housing was also "a very big concern" of hers. "We can't afford to lose one unit of public housing," Ms. Bowser said. But she said the stadium would have "absolutely no impact on the public housing there."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Back in March, the casting notice for the show had requested an actress "confident with chopping onions and mincemeat," noting that "the cooking should look fun and easy." At this particular moment, however, Mr. Zuabi wasn't looking for fun. "Put the emotional energy into the knife," he said. Mr. Zuabi, a Palestinian, grew up in the predominantly Arab city of Nazareth in Israel and now lives in Haifa. His extended family ("more like a tribe") is divided among Syria, Jordan and Israel. In 2013 he traveled to a refugee camp in Irbid, Jordan, with the actress Corinne Jaber, who would go on to originate the role in "Oh My Sweet Land." One day a man walked in to the tent where they were conducting research interviews, wearing a blue button down shirt "like the one I'm wearing now," Mr. Zuabi said. They looked at each other: "spitting image." After a quick exchange of names, they learned that they were relatives. The man had escaped from Syria a month before. "I felt " Mr. Zuabi paused "spared." After that trip, "I didn't want to do something artsy," he said. "It felt dishonest." The refugee stories that Ms. Malouf's character recounts over the slap of meat on the counter and the food processor's guttural whine have the urgency of reportage. Moments of black comedy creep in: A journalist fakes his death as a cover for fleeing the country, then is saddened by the low turnout at his funeral; an outspoken actor, beaten to a pulp by the Mukhabarat (the Syrian secret police), bonds with his interrogator over a shared love of fine leather shoes. Other stories are unbearably intimate. One girl shows Ms. Malouf's character her scarred over head wounds, saying there are worms sealed inside; a widow holds up a photograph of her husband, who was "killed twice" first stabbed, then revived by doctors, only to have his oxygen tube slashed in a raid on the hospital. Misery "hits you from all directions," Mr. Zuabi said of his time at the refugee camp in Jordan. "I don't have solutions," Mr. Zuabi said. "And I'm not vain enough or stupid enough to think this is going to change anything on the ground in Syria." He knew that cooking would frame the monologue. "Maybe the biggest value in the Arab world is generosity, manifested by you feeding others," he said. "It's old desert code: Feed your guests." (Ms. Malouf, whose parents are of Syrian, Lebanese, Greek, Italian and French heritage, concurred. "My family talks about what we're having for dinner when we're having breakfast," she said. "You're upset? Let me feed you. You're happy? Let's eat.") He chose kibbe because it requires skill and patience, and is a dish universal to the Middle East: "Every village has its own recipe." Mr. Zuabi hazards that Ms. Malouf will be able to complete only five or 10 kibbe at most if they don't "combust," per her dire prediction. Still, he insisted that the kibbe must be edible. "We're not going to cheat," he said. Ms. Malouf went further: The kibbe must be delicious, she said. "My ethnic pride will not allow me to mess up."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
LOS ANGELES The next marquee event at Hollywood's film academy: "Identity Crisis Part 2." On Tuesday, the 51 member governing board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which normally convenes at night, will meet in a rare morning session. And high on the agenda, it is expected, will be the assessment of an Oscar show whose ratings tumbled as its host, Chris Rock, dealt bluntly with the racial politics engulfing the organization. About 34.4 million people watched the show on Feb. 28, close to a record low. The number of viewers ages 18 to 49, a demographic that advertisers pay a premium to reach, was believed to be the lowest on record, though the Oscar show remains the most watched among entertainment prize ceremonies. The annual review will take place against an increasingly messy backdrop. In an unusual step, the academy has asked ABC to begin negotiating a renewal of the network's 10 year agreement to air the Oscars, which does not expire until 2020. The move was described by people briefed on the situation, who requested anonymity because of confidentiality strictures, as an effort to guarantee future revenue as the historically cash rich academy confronts the unaccustomed demands of its planned museum and 350 million in new borrowing that will be used to support it. But ABC, frustrated by the academy's bureaucracy and concerned about declining ratings, has asked for more control of the show. (In another disruption, the academy's chief marketing officer, Christina Kounelias, quit on Thursday to take a marketing position at Participant Media.) At the same time, academy governors on Tuesday will again wrestle with deep changes to the organization's membership and core mechanisms, as promised at an emergency session in late January, when the current crisis occasionally verging on what seemed like a nervous breakdown began in earnest. To bolster diversity in the makeup and governance of the academy, which includes about 7,000 film professionals, a large majority of whom are male and most of whom are white, the board then said it would add three members to be appointed, not elected. The goal is to increase the representation of women and ethnic minorities. But some of the emergency changes ran afoul of the academy's own bylaws. On Tuesday, the governors are expected to implement the diversity changes with a formal revision of the bylaws. The new vote will follow a storm of criticism from academy members who objected to the speed and secrecy of the board's earlier action, which came on the heels of the Jan. 14 announcement of the Oscar nominations, with their all white acting lineup. It also follows fierce resistance to an accompanying plan that would purge the awards voting rolls of older, inactive members. Some governors are now expected to propose a softening of the so called activity requirement, perhaps by granting lifetime voting privileges to those who have worked in each of three decades, starting from their first film credit, rather than from the date of their academy admission, as currently planned. While that change seems minute, it might allow hundreds of members to sidestep the planned purge. But it might also make it harder for academy officials to meet their goal of doubling the number of female and nonwhite members in five years. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. The academy is reviewing the possible effect of such an adjustment. It is also studying a system that would give its branch committees such as the actors or directors groups some flexibility in counting credits, people briefed on the matter said. An academy spokeswoman declined to discuss its deliberations. But confusion, discord and considerable anger will probably remain part of the group's new normal, at least until the next awards season rolls around, regardless of what happens at the meeting. The rancor is a particular challenge for Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the academy's president, who in the coming months has the option of standing for one more term, her fourth, as president, and for Dawn Hudson, its paid chief executive, whose three year contract was renewed in 2014 after a contentious board fight. While the two have worked largely in harness through the diversity crisis, they are divided by personal style, institutional loyalties and designated functions. Ms. Isaacs, a former publicity executive for Paramount and New Line, is described by those who have worked closely with her as conservative by nature and deeply loyal both to academy traditions and to the sometimes invisible craftspeople effects and design artists and such who were instrumental in her election. Ms. Hudson, who joined the academy after serving as the executive director of Film Independent, a small art film organization, is said to be less patient with the academy's old ways, more closely aligned with high profile actors and filmmakers, and eager to break down a seeming cronyism that has contributed to its white, male makeup. Ms. Isaacs, like other recent academy presidents, has been increasingly involved in day to day operations of the organization. Ms. Hudson, at the same time, has not been shy about voicing strategic aims and concerns. In a January interview with the Hollywood Reporter, in which she spoke jointly with Ms. Isaacs and bizarrely claimed that the changes had been well received, Ms. Hudson questioned whether older academy members were sufficiently attuned to racial and gender issues. "Look, some of these things are generational, they just are," she said. For Ms. Isaacs, Ms. Hudson and their many colleagues, the challenge will be to maintain consensus as the academy works through issues that may further alter the identity of the institution and its awards ceremony. In preliminary talks with ABC, for instance, the network has asked for more control over the content and promotion of the annual Oscar broadcast. One likely pool of resistance to any such network request: Those craft voters who elected Ms. Isaacs. They are wary of any move that might edge their categories out of a broadcast that almost everyone agrees is too long. As it confronts its identity issues, the academy will most likely also bump into another uncomfortable question: Might its new "global campaign" to recruit new members actually tighten the squeeze on African Americans? Already, two thirds of the Oscars awarded on last month's show including most of the six awards for the Australian made "Mad Max: Fury Road" went to artists from outside the United States. That contrasts sharply with the 1970s and '80s, when Americans dominated the awards, and a path opened for African Americans including Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Margaret Avery. To navigate those challenges will test the strength of any alignment between Ms. Hudson and Ms. Isaacs. They have been seeking common purpose at least since a conciliatory lunch that followed Ms. Hudson's contract renewal, which for a time Ms. Isaacs had opposed. "So weird," Ms. Hudson wrote of her post renewal session with Ms. Isaacs, in a May 9, 2014, email to the academy governor, and a supporter, Amy Pascal. "I truly had love in my heart, and took her hand and said, 'Let's forget everything behind us and move forward.' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
After Bert Weber retired from his three decade teaching career, he occupied himself with consulting contracts, but kept hunting for more satisfying, full time work. His son Christian was running a small environmental nonprofit; he, too, was unfulfilled. Christian had dreamed of owning a craft brewery, and father and son enjoyed home brewing together. On a long drive one weekend five years ago, they decided to take the plunge and go into the beer business. "I liked the concept," Bert said. "I loved the idea of my son for a business partner." So despite having no experience running a brewery, they created a plan and secured a small business loan. In 2014, they opened Common Roots Brewing Company in South Glens Falls, N.Y. Now, the brewery has 20 employees and is growing steadily, set to sell 5,000 barrels of beer this year. Setting up a multigenerational enterprise can be a smart way for retired baby boomers and their grown children to combine resources and abilities. The adult children bring hustle, and they're comfortable with the latest technologies. Parents often offer capital and work experience. That said, the financial risks associated with entrepreneurship are daunting, especially for those in their retirement years. The time to recover from a failed enterprise is short, and the consequences of financial losses may be considerably greater for an older person. On top of that, navigating the transition from parent and child to business partners isn't always easy. And starting a new business is always stressful. Looking back over the past three years, Christian sounds relieved. "We aren't living as much hand to mouth," he said. Bert added: "I'm sleeping better now." Small business researchers don't offer much in the way of data on how many new multigenerational start ups there are like the Webers'. Still, there are a few statistics: 25.4 percent of new businesses formed in 2016 were started by people age 55 to 64, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, up from 14.8 percent in 1996. Largely because of two major societal shifts, it's quite likely that rising numbers of retirement age parents and their adult children will at least consider making the leap into entrepreneurship together. "From what I see, the boomer generation gets to the retirement years, and they're choosing a different version of retirement than the World War II generation," said Dennis Ceru, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. Multigenerational entrepreneurship is "one such option," he said. The second factor is evidence that many boomer parents and their adult children get along well enough to at least entertain the prospect of starting a business. "Most boomers have a much more friend based, adult to adult relationship with their children than boomers did with their parents," says Steve King, partner at Emergent Research, a consulting firm in Lafayette, Calif., that concentrates on the small business economy. "It's a big social shift." For the first time since the 1960s, living with parents is the most common household arrangement for the 18 to 34 year old age group, reports Pew Research Center. In 2014, more than 32 percent of young adults lived with their parents, up from 20 percent in 1960. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Much of that reflects tough economic circumstances and delayed marriage, experts say, but the trend seems broad enough that it may also involve lifestyle choices and good relationships. Comparing intergenerational survey data from the 2000s with data from the 1980s, the authors of the academic study "The baby boomers Intergenerational Relationships" note that in 1988 less than half of parents surveyed offered advice to their grown child in the past month, compared with 89 percent in 2008. In addition, 31 percent provided practical assistance in 1988, compared with 69 percent two decades later. These results echo the key finding from a 2012 survey commissioned by AARP: that young adults "communicate more, interact more, and are comfortable sharing more with their parents compared to boomers when they were young adults." For parents who go into business with their grown children, a foundation of mutual trust and ongoing communication should improve the odds of success, Mr. King said. Take the experience of the Burches of Hudson, Wis., who decided, over lunch one day, to open a retail store a decade ago. The lunch included Elizabeth, a part time college professor, then 65; her husband Dan, a retired pastor, then 69; and two of their children, Sarah, 37; and Leah, 43. They debated how to lean against what they saw as increasing polarization in society, while also earning an income. Together, they came up with an idea: a gift shop selling sustainable, often handmade items with what they called bipartisan appeal. Six weeks later, they opened the Purple Tree in Hudson, with the parents putting up some 10,000. (The name plays off purple as a mix of red and blue.) "We don't always agree," says Sarah, the only family member working full time at Purple Tree. "But we have managed to successfully agree to disagree and we have been able to reach compromises. We always find a way to talk things out." The rest of the family shares income from the shop. Less benign factors can play a role in the embrace of multigenerational entrepreneurship. Age discrimination can be a major hurdle to employment for those 50 years and over. At the same time, young people can find it tough to land a job that's engaging and offers a career path. For both age cohorts, starting a business can often be a better alternative. Those were the realities that Rick Harris and his son Tim faced a few years ago. Rick had worked for years on factory floors in California before building a small business in the Bay Area that specialized in setting up office interiors for start ups. But business fell off during the financial crisis of 2008. In 2009, the family moved to Minneapolis, where Rick's wife, Donna, took a job as head of a private high school in Minneapolis. At age 62, Rick started a new commercial interior venture in the Twin Cities, but the market proved tough for an outsider to break into. He said he soon began to ask himself, "How long do I want to work?" At this stage, his son, Tim, was still a student. Tim started college in California but transferred to Concordia College in St. Paul, near his family, and graduated in 2015 with a degree in communication studies. Tim pursued jobs with advertising and public relations agencies in the Twin Cities. He had plenty of interviews, but they went nowhere. After the unsuccessful job hunt, Tim asked his father if he could join him in his still young business, Ideal Commercial Interiors which was essentially a one man operation. Rick said yes. "What got me rejuvenated is my son wanting to come into the business," Rick said. "Tim wants to grow the business. He can be a lot more successful than I ever was." They have their moments, usually sparring over technology but the partnership is working out. Ideal did between 300,000 to 400,000 in business two years ago, a figure that rose to about 1.3 million last year. For all the successes, entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about 20 percent of small businesses fail in their first year, and by year five, half close. Those are discouraging odds, especially for older Americans contemplating retirement. In addition, not all families get along. Even for family members who do like one another, dealing with blurred boundaries can be trying.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
YouTube's list of "Trending" videos typically includes funny clips, updates from popular YouTube personalities, movie trailers and viral TV segments. On Wednesday, for a brief time, the No. 1 trending video on YouTube featured David Hogg, a survivor of the massacre last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The caption claimed, falsely, that Mr. Hogg, 17, was not a student, but an "actor." The video, originally posted last August, was a brief local news segment. In it, Mr. Hogg was interviewed by the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles after witnessing a dispute between a lifeguard and a swimmer at Redondo Beach. On Tuesday, a YouTube user who went under the name "mike m." copied and re uploaded the video with a new caption: "DAVID HOGG THE ACTOR...." With that terse descriptor, "mike m." tapped into conspiracies circulating online that the survivors of the Parkland shooting, many of whom have recently spoken out in favor of gun control, were "crisis actors" hired to do the bidding of left wing activists. The reposted video moved its way up the trending list overnight. By Wednesday morning, it had accumulated more than 200,000 views. "I had no idea where all the attention was coming from," said "mike m." in an online chat interview with The New York Times. "I just noticed it started to take off." Many commenters were confused. "Why is this on trending, especially on news? Nothing special," wrote one. Others, tipped off by the caption calling Mr. Hogg an actor, knew exactly what they thought they were seeing: "Someone get this kid an Oscar!" one wrote. It was not the first time that YouTube had served not just as a source of fringe conspiracy theories, but as an accomplice in their rapid spread. After the massacre in Las Vegas last October, YouTubers filled a void of information about the killer's motives with dark speculation, crowding the site with videos that were fonts of discredited and unproven information, including claims that the tragedy had been staged. 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. After a mass shooting last November at a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., those seeking news about the event on YouTube were overwhelmed by videos falsely claiming it had been a "false flag" attack meant to spur gun control measures or a plot carried out by the so called antifa (short for anti fascist) movement. In the wake of this latest tragedy, which left 17 people dead at the school in Parkland, YouTube still seemed caught by surprise by the rise of another video meant to peddle a baseless theory. "In 2017, we started rolling out changes to better surface authoritative news sources in search results, particularly around breaking news events," YouTube, which is owned by Google, said in a statement. "We've seen improvements, but in some circumstances these changes are not working quickly enough. In addition, last year we updated the application of our harassment policy to include hoax videos that target the victims of these tragedies." Unlike the other unhinged clips that have garnered significant attention on YouTube in the recent past, the video of the Parkland survivor originated with neither a conspiracy oriented media organization like Infowars nor one of the popular YouTubers who have catered to far right subcultures and fringe political factions. The protests calling for stricter gun control measures come on the heels of other youth movements, but the momentum they have gained makes them stand out. "Children are dying." "I will fight every single day." "I just want to speak." "We call B.S." These students survived a shooting at their school. Now they're leading a national movement for stricter gun control. Just days after the shooting, they called for school walkouts around the country, traveled to the Florida State Capitol "You failed us" and planned a nationwide march. Some of them can't even vote yet. It's clear these students are doing things differently. Here's how. NeverAgain is leveraging social networks to mobilize faster than most movements before it, according to experts who study the rise of social and political movements. One week after the shooting, the NeverAgain Twitter handle is verified and has more than 81,000 followers. In just a few days, student leaders have crowdsourced more than 3 million through online campaigns and celebrity donations. They're also handling their own crisis control by directly responding to critics. "I lost a best friend who was practically a brother, and I'm here to use my voice because I know he can't." These survivors are presenting their personal stories of loss as part of their fight, converting grief into power by getting in the face of adults. "So, Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the N.R.A. in the future?" The NeverAgain movement wasn't formed in a vacuum. It's riding on the most recent wave of youth activism, which picked up speed around 2010. Student protests ebbed after the antiwar movement of the '60s and '70s. "We are fed up." Young people today are getting involved to change systemic inequalities they were raised to believe had already been taken care of. The Dreamers, students against sexual assault, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Matter movement all had strong involvement by college educated millennials. These groups have had modest success. President Barack Obama made sure campuses did more to investigate cases of sexual assault. And he later protected Dreamers from deportation. "You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law." It's too early to tell if the NeverAgain movement will sustain the momentum it needs to bring tangible change. But it's an election year, so politicians might find their demands difficult to ignore. The protests calling for stricter gun control measures come on the heels of other youth movements, but the momentum they have gained makes them stand out. His uploads included a handful of little watched videos suggesting he is an avid fan of conspiracies. What inspired him to traffic in an unfounded theory about the Parkland shooting aside from "having more time on my hands these days," he said were posts he had seen on the popular conspiracy site Godlike Productions. He pointed to comments on the site that claimed Mr. Hogg had been "coached" before giving interviews to members of the media who covered the massacre. It's also where he found references to the beach video from last August. Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Mr. Hogg addressed the explosion of conspiracy theories head on. "I'm not a crisis actor," said Mr. Hogg, who had been visiting family and friends when he appeared in the Los Angeles news segment. "I'm someone who had to witness this and live through this and I continue to be having to do that. I'm not acting on anybody's behalf." What propelled this one to popularity and eventually into YouTube's promotional apparatus came from outside the platform. Links to the video proliferated on 4chan, where users have gleefully embraced the conspiracy theories and mocked the shooting victims. When it hit YouTube's Trending page, some on 4chan celebrated: "TRENDING IN THE USA," began one thread in the far right politics board called /pol/. "WE'RE BREAKING THE CONDITIONING." The "mike m." video also found traction on Twitter, on Facebook and in stories and comment threads on conspiracy sites. It rose in the circuitous and unexpected manner of a viral video, rather than one that had been calculated to game YouTube's algorithms by seizing on interest in breaking news or tragedy it had no catchy headline, no recognizable personality, no vast theorizing. And yet it blasted through YouTube's safeguards and somehow kept going, exposing the platform as vulnerable to sudden influence from inside and outside its walls. After YouTube removed the video, "mike m." said his account had received a "strike" that is how YouTube warns users that they have broken the site's rules or violated its guidelines. (Three strikes and you're out.) "I mean, why strike me over a beach confrontation video???" he said. A second video he had posted about the shooting was gaining popularity Wednesday morning, he said, until it, too, was deleted, and another strike was added to his account.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
The problem with a lot of the advice that teenagers and their families get about higher education debt is that it's totally, utterly bloodless. The federal Department of Education takes its shot in its role as the de facto provider of advice to people borrowing their first federal student loans and repaying them. That counseling is mandatory for borrowers, but because the topic is dense and the department's content is devoid of anecdotes, it's tough to make the lessons stick. So in my column last week, I asked readers to share their own stories and offer the most important thing they wish they had known before they borrowed money and began to repay it. The comments painted a troubling picture of clueless teenagers, frazzled parents and college administrators who may not always take students by the shoulders and question their debt levels. Not one person suggested that college was a mistake (though a few regret going to law school). Borrowing too little is dangerous if it leads to dropping out or never attending in the first place, and undergraduates who borrow from the federal government without taking on additional private loans are unlikely to get in trouble if they manage the repayment process well. Still, it's obvious that too many families know too little about student loan debt. Here's what past borrowers would have families and schools learn and do: THE LIST As the fifth child in his family, Tim Ranzetta already knew the deal. His family income was too high to receive any need based financial aid. His parents might put aside some money for college when the income tax refund arrived each April, but they weren't going to be writing any checks once he enrolled. So at the age of 16, he sat down and made a list that summed up his savings and his overall "financial situation." The year was 1983 and it required no computers or graph paper, just basic awareness about money that every child should have by that age but that far too many do not. If your teenagers have no idea what you have saved or can afford to pay, tell them. Even if college is a few years away, start explaining the financial aid and loan system to them now so that they are capable of plotting out their own situation. You don't want their introduction to personal finance to begin when they confront their first confusing financial aid "award" letter and the five figure bill that arrives later. Mr. Ranzetta now runs a nonprofit group called Next Gen Personal Finance, where he helps teachers who are looking for better ways to teach their students about money. I particularly like his online collection of videos and documentaries about student loans, which can serve as a sort of family movie fright night a year or two before applying for college. THE COUNSELING Mr. Ranzetta sees no reason the federal government cannot require that people who borrow money from private lenders like Sallie Mae undergo mandatory counseling the same way that federal student loan borrowers do. Federal law makes it difficult for people to discharge student loans in bankruptcy court and private lenders benefit greatly from this restriction. Auto lenders and credit card companies don't have that same privilege. So why not require a separate counseling session for private loan borrowers, who may not immediately grasp the distinctions between that kind of debt and any loans that come directly from the government? Alfred MacDonald, a 26 year old graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio and a resident of that city, suggested making it crystal clear that private loans do not come with the same guarantee of flexibility as federal loans, with their income driven repayment options. THE COURSE Many teenagers come from families where parents don't have the knowledge, time or English speaking skills to teach their children about the financial aid system. So Ben Lindsey, 27, who graduated from Oklahoma Christian University with about 100,000 in student loan debt, said he wished that colleges would require all new students to take a basic course about money that forced them to run their overall loan projections at the beginning of their first year. It's tempting to denounce the small percentage of the indebted who have this much debt and say that they should have known better. And Mr. Lindsey isn't looking to point fingers or evade responsibility. Plus, college was great for him in many respects he met his wife and has a good job in the commercial loan field in Oklahoma City, far from the shakier economy in his native Delaware. THE CHECKUP The one complaint that I heard repeatedly was this one: Given the hopscotch manner in which students take on debt each year, loan by loan, it is much too easy to lose track of your running total. Shannon Doyle, a financial counselor with Lutheran Social Service in Minneapolis, says families often come into her office with no idea how much a student owes and with mistaken ideas about how parent loans can be combined with student loans after graduation. She advises students and families to keep score on three pages of a spreadsheet that they update each term. The first one should have federal student loans, divided into subsidized ones (where the government covers the interest while the student is enrolled) and unsubsidized ones (where the interest accrues during school). The second page is for private loans, if any, from entities like Sallie Mae, and the third is for any loans the parents take out themselves. Sites like tuition.io can help with this sorting task. My conversations with Ms. Doyle ended with a plea of sorts to the schools: Please, do your best to provide a running total of debt on the financial aid statements you send out each year. "There should be no barriers to students knowing how much they have borrowed," she said. THE DAILY INTEREST Before Kim Liao's enrollment at Georgetown, the story of her family had been one of downward mobility. Her father had died, the family had struggled and there was pressure on her to work part time as an undergraduate not to pay her way but to send money home. She considers herself lucky to have graduated with just 22,500 in student loan debt in 2006, but that didn't sit well with her. What really flipped the switch in her head was when a phone representative at her loan servicer told her that she would be paying 2.23 in interest each day. "So you start out with zero dollars to your name, and you're going negative by that amount every single day," she said. For people repaying their loans, it may be worthwhile to confront that figure when they make their daily spending decisions. "The calculators will tell you how much interest you'll accrue over 10 or 20 or 30 years," said Ms. Liao, who paid her debts off much faster than that and now works for the Federal Reserve. "But the fact that I was spending 2.23 each day without actually buying anything for myself resonated with me so much more."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
Many hotels have themes drawn from art, music or literature. The new Hotel Football in Manchester, England? That would be soccer, of course. Opened last month opposite Old Trafford stadium, the home of the team Manchester United, the 133 room hotel is backed by five former celebrated Manchester United teammates, including Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Philip Neville, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt. Guest rooms feature subtle sports nods, such as hexagon shaped wallpaper that references the patterns on a soccer ball and the occasional shower tile or piece of furniture in the team's signature red. Among public amenities, the soccer themed Cafe Football serves sports pub fare like burgers and sausage rolls. The hotel caters to fans on match days in the Old Trafford Supporters Club, an entire floor with a bar, oversize TV screens and pool tables.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
Since winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, "Parasite" has been a consensus favorite among critics, audiences and awards judges, and a coronation for its Korean director, Bong Joon Ho, who's been a favorite in cinephile circles for years. But is there any consensus on what it is, exactly? Is it a thriller? A dark comedy? A family melodrama? A piece of social commentary? Even the meaning of the title is up for debate, perhaps recalling Bong's earlier breakthrough, "The Host," which was also perplexing when it was released in 2007. Word of mouth recommendations for "Parasite" have boiled down to "just go see it, O.K.?," because the less you know about the film going in, the more delighted you'll be by its exquisitely calibrated series of surprises. It's about a poor family infiltrating the lives of a wealthy one, but the way they do it and what awaits both as they become more entangled rewards the viewer with such diverse riches as white knuckle tension, class resentment and great gales of laughter. It is genuinely unclassifiable. Where to watch "Parasite": Stream it on Hulu or buy it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and Google Play. As part of the New Korean Cinema that electrified the festival circuit in the early 2000s and beyond, Bong joined directors like Kim Ki duk ("The Isle"), Park Chan wook ("Oldboy") and Kim Jee woon ("A Tale of Two Sisters") in reinvigorating genre pictures with stylistic bravado and a willingness to play around with tone. More than any of his Korean contemporaries, however, Bong has consistently defied categorization, with seven films that snake across the borders that normally separate creature features from family tragedies from grim procedurals from slapstick comedies. All of Bong's seven features are currently available to stream, so it's a good time to track the progression of one of the world's most exciting and unpredictable filmmakers. Bong's feature debut, "Barking Dogs Never Bite," (2000, South Korea) sounds like an intolerable affront to animal lovers, relating the story of an out of work college lecturer (Lee Sung jae) who gets so annoyed by the yapping dogs at his apartment complex that he takes drastic action. That he proves utterly inept at dognapping doesn't obscure his horrific efforts to silence every small pup that comes to his attention, nor does it prevent the janitor from contributing in his own macabre way to the missing dog epidemic. A satirical play on the popular Belgian story "A Dog of Flanders," "Barking Dogs" ventured further into the outre extremes of Korean cinema than any of Bong's later films have, but there's a lightness and silliness to the comedy that takes the edge off a little. And the careful attention Bong pays to the apartment building as an interconnected organism makes the film feel like a dry run for "Snowpiercer," which links train cars as humanity in microcosm. Where to watch: Stream it on Hulu or rent it on iTunes, Amazon and Vudu. American audiences are so accustomed to seeing serial killer mythos unpacked in thrillers and documentaries that it's nearly a genre unto itself, but what about a culture where such a phenomenon doesn't exist? Bong's one of a kind policier, "Memories of Murder," takes a tonally audacious approach to the investigation into South Korea's first serial killer, a predator who raped and murdered 10 women in a rural backwater in 1986. In his first collaboration with Song Kang Ho, who'd later appear in "The Host," "Snowpiercer" and "Parasite," Bong calls on the actor to bring humor and pathos to the role of a local detective who investigates a double murder with his partner (Kim Rwe Ha), but quickly gets in over his head. It wouldn't seem possible for bungling physical comedy to coexist with the overwhelming grief of a region's people coming to terms with an inexplicable evil in their midst, but "Memories of Murder" doesn't allow one to take away from the other. There are moments of out and out slapstick, as the two investigators try various off the book methods to crack the case, and there are moments when the film considers this deepening tragedy with the full weight it deserves. In his own way, Bong is reinventing a type of movie that doesn't have much precedent in Korean cinema. Where to watch: Stream it on Popcornflix. Although "Memories of Murder" brought him more acclaim and his first distribution deal in the United States, it was Bong's 2007 monster movie, "The Host," that really put him on the map. Laced with a potent critique of American imperialism, "The Host" begins with an American military officer dumping gallons of formaldehyde in the Han River, which results in a genetically mutated sea creature that rises from the water six years later. The initial daytime monster attack is a marvel of Hollywood level effects and wide eyed Spielbergian looks, and the crowd pleasing action accounts for why it was such a box office sensation in Korea and elsewhere. Yet some distinctive Bong touches emerge, like the oafish snack bar clerk (Song) who becomes his unlikely hero, the sincere emotion of a family in crisis and the coexistence of lowbrow yuks and satirical wit. "King Kong" and "Godzilla" have made creature features a universal cinematic language, and "The Host" helped Bong broaden his appeal across hemispheres. Where to watch: Stream it on Hulu or rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. Four years later, Bong finally took a bold leap into big budget filmmaking with the sci fi allegory "Snowpiercer," which plays like Stanley Kramer's "Ship of Fools" (1965) if it were some combination of a postapocalyptic, "Mad Max" style thriller and a devastating political satire. In 2031, after a global climate event has rendered the earth uninhabitable, the last remnants of humankind are packed aboard a high speed train that will never stop and that no one can ever leave, for fear of certain death. In a none too subtle reference to Margaret Thatcher, Tilda Swinton hams it up spectacularly as the official in charge of enforcing the train's brutal class system, which separates the grimy commoners in the back from the privileged elites up front. The violent progression from back to front gives Bong an opportunity to comment on the stratification of this mechanized dystopia, which echoes the current conversation on economic inequality. His international cast of Americans (Chris Evans, Octavia Spencer), Britons (Jamie Bell, John Hurt), and Koreans (Song, Ko Ah sung) is appropriate to the story, but it also looks ahead to a cinematic future in which the borders between cultures aren't so strictly defined. Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. That globalist spirit informs "Okja," which is about the merits and perils of living in our much smaller modern world. Just like "The Host," "Okja" is about a supernatural creature unleashed by American environmental negligence, but here it's a friendly, hippo size super pig, developed by an international conglomerate as a delectable food source. Of the first generation of super pigs, raised in different locations around the world, Okja is the proudest specimen, but the 10 year old girl who's helped raise it in the Korean mountains (An Seo Hyun) isn't willing to relinquish it so easily. There are shades of "E.T." in the bond between the child and her friend, but "Okja" is significantly darker and weirder, delving into extreme animal activism, insidious corporate spin and, in one unforgettably wry sequence, the song craft of John Denver. It's also a deeply strange and semisatirical jab at corporate greed and omnivorous gluttony, featuring Swinton as the deranged scion of an international conglomerate, Jake Gyllenhaal as the deranged host of a kids' nature show and Paul Dano as the deranged head of an underground animal rights operation. Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
While Americans were able to catch a few glimpses early in the day, the full spectacle of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics came into view Friday night. The theme of the ceremony was "Peace in Motion," which was highlighted by musical performances from some notable South Korean artists. But who are they, and what's worth knowing about them? Here's a look at the performers. The children's choir, known as the Rainbow Chorus, performed "Aegukga," the national anthem of South Korea. The choir is sponsored by the South Korean government, and it was created to educate the public about multiculturalism and to help integrate immigrants and multicultural families.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
On Instagram, devotees of a diet called the Whole30 have shared more than a million colorful photos of gluten free, sugar free, alcohol free and dairy free meals, and the occasional image of people showing off their bodies after 30 days of diet restrictions. The comments are heavy on exclamation points! "Back on the salad grind today for lunch!" For 30 days last summer, facing a demanding work schedule and lacking energy, I joined the flock. I approached the Whole30 as a nutritional reset, and the Whole30 hashtag was a place where I could get ideas for making it through the month without so much as a single packet of Splenda for my coffee. The rules for repenting for my dietary sins were simple: Eat as you normally would, just without dairy, sugar (real or artificial), grains or legumes. Easy, right? At first, I lurked on the hashtag, wondering if I could really spend 30 days whittling down my options for brunch, happy hours and dinners out, the activities that punctuate a workweek and make many of us feel connected. But by the end of the 30 days, I had stopped lurking and had shared photos of guacamole, which kept me going; shakshuka, a go to brunch dish; and kale and apple salads that took about 90 seconds to make. I was adding to Instagram's engine of visual inspiration. The site is used by dieters as a modern version of sticking photos on the fridge, a support program without the hassle, public exposure or cost of joining a group in person. The Whole30 is one of seemingly endless like minded communities that, for the most part, emphasize healthy living over weight loss. On the WeightWatchers hashtag, there are more than 3.5 million posts dedicated to the diet, with a lot of before and after photos. People living the Paleo lifestyle which focuses on basic foods ostensibly eaten by our prehistoric ancestors have posted more than 7.5 million photos. And both are dwarfed by the FitFam hashtag, a grab bag of nutrition, workout and fitness inspiration and memes that boasts a whopping 46 million posts. Melissa Hartwig, who has worked as a sports nutritionist and fitness instructor, cocreated the Whole30 program in 2009. A book, "The Whole30," was published last year and has sold more than 500,000 copies. "Not only do you want to feel like you belong to something bigger than yourself," Ms. Hartwig, 42, said, "but it's important to stay connected so you have the accountability and motivation." Last year, Bonnie Spring, a professor in preventive medicine at the Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, published one of the few existing studies on why people turn to digital communities for weight loss. The report, called " 'Friending' Your Way Thin," analyzed data from CalorieKing.com, an online weight loss community. The study used nearly a year of anonymous data from 27,382 Calorie King users, including their age, height and weight, gender and activities like weigh ins, friend requests and online communication. The scientists studied the frequency of online exchanges without looking at actual messages, but the members who were the most active with other members lost more weight, they found. The study found that Calorie King users who connected with 10 or more friends lost on average 8 percent of their body weight over six months, compared with an average of 5 percent weight loss among those who made between two and nine friends, and 4 percent for those who essentially "watched" but did not participate socially on the site. While the most connected users in the Calorie King study lost the most weight, it's notable that the less active users also lost a significant amount of weight. And losing even just 5 percent of your body weight improves your health, research shows. Some people flock to these online communities for active social support, and some are attracted because they want privacy and don't want to share as much. Dr. Spring said the urge for privacy was found in a 2012 study by the Northwestern group, in which 96 people were given access to a chat application that encouraged a weight loss competition. Researchers found that most of the people in the study did not want to share stories of weight loss. The few people who tried to do so were ignored or insulted by other group members. In a more recent test by the Northwestern researchers, 300 college students were asked to join a private Facebook group. That group is interacting with reading materials, but they're still afraid of being "that person" who jumps in and shares their story, Dr. Spring said. Dr. Spring said that Instagram may have success as a dieting platform because it is actually "a little bit less socially connected" than other platforms, serving the online dieters who value privacy and want minimal interaction with others. "Some people feel highly motivated and egged on to succeed when they can post their accomplishments on a leader board and compare their progress to others'," Dr. Spring said. "Others cave under that kind of pressure and public scrutiny." I fell into the latter category. When I was plugged into the Whole30, I found that Instagram could be a cheap way to keep myself motivated without trumpeting my journey to the world. Kacie Carter, a nutrition consultant who lives in Los Angeles and often posts Whole30 recipes to Instagram, said she warns her clients to keep a healthy balance between using platforms like Instagram for inspiration and being realistic about their own goals. "Social media accounts have a tendency to promote everything as being perfect and rosy," she said, "That stress can and does offset the benefits from the healthier lifestyle they are trying to create." After my Whole30 was done, I returned to tracking my eating and exercise habits. But it was nice to know that if I need to locate an adventurous guac recipe, I have a few good hashtags at the ready.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
Stop. Drop the sponge and step away from the microwave. That squishy cleaning apparatus is a microscopic universe, teeming with countless bacteria. Some people may think that microwaving a sponge kills its tiny residents, but they are only partly right. It may nuke the weak ones, but the strongest, smelliest and potentially pathogenic bacteria will survive. Then, they will reproduce and occupy the vacant real estate of the dead. And your sponge will just be stinkier and nastier and you may come to regret having not just tossed it, suggests a study published last month in Scientific Reports. Bacteria are everywhere, so it's no surprise that a kitchen sponge would be full of them. But previous research had underestimated a sponge's quantity and range of bacteria. By looking at the DNA and RNA in samples from 14 used sponges that may be as dirty as the one sitting in your sink right now, Markus Egert, a microbiologist at the University of Furtwangen in Germany, and his team identified 362 different species of bacteria living within them. And the scientists were surprised to find how densely microbes occupied such close quarters: About 82 billion bacteria were living in just a cubic inch of space. "That's the same density of bacteria you can find in human stool samples," Dr. Egert said. "There are probably no other places on earth with such high bacterial densities."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
Twyla Tharp is writing about rehearsing, touring and creating new work, 50 years after her first dance concert. Time can be lost in space. I know we are in Los Angeles and in our third week of touring, but moving through a series of buses, hotels, backstages, airports, I have lost track of what day it might be. This condition is not helped when, checking into our hotel at midday, I step out of the elevator into a black mirrored void. I am disoriented, suspended in space with no east or west and a time zone yet to be determined. Time can be very, very long. Sitting waiting for a curtain, five seconds can be a lifetime. Time nails value. Novelty is fugitive. That which endures, timeless we say. We like to believe age brings wisdom. Not always so. Thursday night's show is our fifth opening night in three weeks. Opening night shows are tricky because their audiences are reserved and often self conscious. They tend to withhold and worry about being uninformed. They respond politely. They do not really tell me what they feel. That's why I am looking forward to a group of youngsters coming the next morning. Friday at 11 a.m. five busloads of kids from inner city Los Angeles high schools are filling the seats of the Wallis Center for a performance of "Yowzie," one of the dances on our touring program. Speaking with the center's education director beforehand, we decided to let the kids have a real show: no curtain speeches telling them what they are about to see, or lectures on the value of the arts in their lives. Just take up the curtain. And the dancers perform. Full show, full energy. Afterward, I take questions from the audience. I begin by asking, "What did you see?" "There's some drunk people, like in New Orleans." Again I agree and say that New Orleans comes not from what they saw but what they heard. The music is composed by Jelly Roll Morton and it is really early jazz. From New Orleans. Got that right. And they go on to prove that they are a really smart audience. They see a man and a woman, dreaming, fighting. Splitting up. The woman is "lost" quite a long while; she was a victim but then gets her act together. Rises over them all. Then she and the guy get back together, but it is the same old, same old. Someone yells out, "Devil best known." But another speaks up: "No, not the same. She's leading now. She's in front." Yup, I say and then I add, we have a finale, right, we celebrate, right? Because we are all alive and because someone has learned something. And then another comment, about a subplot: "The guy who was chasing the girls wanted them all but he didn't get either one." Another suggests, "No maybe he got both." And someone else says, "Either way you got to be careful what you wish for you might get it." And I have the feeling that many of these kids are probably from families with one parent and that in many of those with two, both are working 10 to 12 hours a day. These kids have seen a lot and seem to have seen this story already. I did not make it up, there is truth in it for them. And I am grateful to them for sharing with me. The biggest laugh of the day comes when I say, "Ask more questions, that way you can stay out of school longer." So one kid asks, "How long does it take to make a dance?" "A lifetime," I say. "My first Jelly Roll Morton piece was in 1969. But it was very different. I hope you too will find a way of connecting to something you can think about for a really long time." Another question: "Why did you do it?" This one I respond to with: "Because theater can make a better world. Look at us; diverse crowd and we are unified. This is a political story. In this country I can make this dance and you can see it. And it can tell the story of a woman who has a really tough time of it but comes out ahead. Not in every country can you tell this story." And then I thank them for being with us and tell them they have been a really great audience and have done a fine job reading this dance. And for me, here's the most important part: They got it by themselves. I did not tell them what they were seeing, they told me. One last question: "How do you know you're done?" The answer used to be, "When I know the title." But recently I have taken to answering, "When I am bored." Really the answer is, "When it is." Saturday I am still not sure it is time to let go. I spend several hours reviewing back of the house video from a number of our performances. I am looking to see if moments that do not quite land are in the execution or in concept. For example, late exits that are stepping on the toes of action center stage: execution. A gag that is not playing for the trio: change the business. I have set an hour apart for notes later that evening before the show's warm up. It is the first of these tuneup sessions I have scheduled since leaving New York. Notes of this sort cannot be given just in words and will sometimes need to be massaged before a performance. This time round, the dancers are very responsive and humor keeps it light. The Saturday night show goes very well. Both "Preludes and Fugues" and "Yowzie" are solid, well phrased, sparkly, the dancers even more secure after our notes session. On the way backstage after, I comment to my assistant, "Brady, a really good show." He agrees, for I have elbowed him very little this evening: we use a "pokeage" system for notes. During a performance, he will write the place in the dancing where I elbow him and then we debrief the notes after the show. Very few pokes. Tomorrow's notes shouldn't take long at all. With so few notes, I know "Yowzie" is done. Also, finally I understand the title. When I settled on "Yowzie," it was because we needed a title for promotion long before the dance was finished, and I saw the word only as an exclamation inside a cartoon balloon. But the students' comments on Friday helped me see that Yowzie was a person, and that she had grown up into quite a strong young lady capable of telling her own story. Now the work exists in its own space and time zone apart from mine. I may still be needed for maintenance work, a tuneup every now and again, but Yowzie can take over. I wish her a very long life.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
When a group of young men moved into a 7,800 square foot mansion on a quiet street in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles in late January, their new neighbors took notice. Some assumed they were tech entrepreneurs. How else could they afford rent? Soon, the block's residents began to observe what one might call frat like behavior. The young men and their friends blasted music until late at night. They received a steady stream of food delivery, unusual in a family neighborhood where most cook at home. The garage, which was frequently left open, was piled high with Amazon boxes. Trash accumulated on the sidewalk. A giant TV that had been destroyed sat outside for several days. The neighbors traded stories and speculated about what was going on in a block wide group chat. Finally, one neighbor confronted them. That's when the men identified themselves as members of the Sway House, a collective of TikTok and YouTube influencers. This has caused further problems for their neighbors. One neighbor said that women have shown up her doorstep at least four times in the middle of the night after mistaking her home for that of the Sway House. (The Times agreed to grant her anonymity in order to speak without repercussion.) She said she and her husband feel scared and violated. (Cellphone service on the street is limited, and several houses don't have clear street numbers, so it's easy to confuse one address for another.) Renee Maltz, 62, has noticed an uptick in foot traffic in the area since the social media stars moved in. "You see the youngest people in the street, just standing," she said. "They stand there sort of zombielike." Her husband, Jeff Charlston, 70, said the house has become a sort of a nightclub on occasion. "I've seen girls parking down the street then walking down in groups, almost as if they don't know if they're going to get in," he said. Two neighbors say they have confronted the members of the Sway House directly about the chaos. Others have called the police to file noise complaints. After Ms. Acevedo texted Mr. Hall on May 21 to let him know that she was once again filing a noise complaint with the L.A.P.D., he chided her by responding, "Aren't you the babysitter?" "To our knowledge there have been no formal noise complaints," said Warren Lentz, the C.E.O. of TalentX, who manages the house's members and provides them with the house in exchange for content. "We have been in frequent communication with both the L.A.P.D. and City Council to ensure the safety of the neighborhood. In order to follow proper protocol, we hired security for our clients and the house." The owner of the property did not return a request for comment. In interviews, several neighbors said that they wanted to resolve things with the Sway House members directly but were concerned about possible repercussions. "There's an undercurrent of fear and intimidation both from all the stories in the media about people getting doxxed, swatted, harassed, especially if you're a woman, which many of these neighbors are who are dealing with this stuff are," said Mr. Runchal. "With fans and actual people mistakenly showing up to our houses, there's a virtual and a physical threat." Members of the Sway House regularly hang out in an empty lot across the street from their rental property. A couch has appeared in front of the lot. Some neighbors say they have seen Sway House members and their guests hanging out there, in some cases smoking. "It's like they're testing limits for the very first time in their life," said Ms. Maltz. Given all that's going on in the world, people who live near the Sway House said they felt bad complaining about unneighborly behavior. But those on the neighborhood group chat were pleased to learn last Saturday night that at least two of the house's members, Mr. Richards and Mr. Hossler, would be moving out and into their own apartment. Their departure followed a recent road trip across America which resulted in the arrest of two house members on drug charges, as well as some online backlash. (Addressing the backlash in a Medium post on Sunday, Mr. Richards wrote: "I would like to apologize to everyone: my supporters, my Sway House family, my team, and my community. I let the fame get to me; I allowed the LA partying lifestyle to consume me; and I lost my way for a bit. I forgot why I was here.") Residents took it as a sign that perhaps things would soon return to some semblance of normalcy. "Things have quieted down significantly in the past few days," Mr. Charlston said. "I feel bad when I'm like, 'You don't belong here,'" Ms. Acevedo said, acknowledging that she too is a "guest" in the neighborhood. "But I wish they cared more about anything other than getting famous on the internet."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
As bedrooms continue to replace boardrooms in the financial district, another prewar bank building is becoming a residence. This time it's One Wall Street, a prominent tower last occupied by BNY Mellon and most famously the longtime home of Irving Trust. Macklowe Properties is redeveloping the 50 story Art Deco edifice into a 566 unit condo, and brokers believe the building should benefit from its memorable name and address at a busy corner of Broadway. "The location is attractive," said Richard N. Rothbloom, an associate broker with Brown Harris Stevens who is not connected to the project but frequently works in the area and has lived there for almost two decades. "But it is a crowded market. And the question is, how different will the building be?" Answering that question, for the moment, is not so easy. One Wall, a limestone spire with landmark protection, is very much a work in progress. Although it was possible to appreciate views of New York Bay from its upper stories during an official tour this spring, the building's interiors were still gutted and raw, making it hard to envision living there, and there are few renderings available. Sales are scheduled to begin in the winter, with the building slated to open in 2020.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Could this be the year that a comprehensive tax reform law is passed by Congress and signed by President Obama? On the face of it, the very idea sounds absurd. To call the current Congress dysfunctional would be an understatement. Simply reaching a budget compromise this week was viewed as a surprising accomplishment. But the below the radar reality is that a lot of work has been taking place in the tax writing committees, at least to some extent on a bipartisan basis. They have churned out thoughtful reports and proposals that go into real detail on several complicated issues. Moreover, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp of Michigan, faces a deadline. Under Republican caucus rules, he must step down as chairman at the end of this year. Until recently, it appeared his Senate counterpart, Max Baucus of Montana, faced a similar deadline. He had announced plans to retire at the end of this Congress. But Senator Baucus will now leave far sooner than that. He has been nominated to be ambassador to China and will leave the Senate after he is confirmed. The new chairman of the Finance Committee will be Ron Wyden of Oregon. That could be interesting. Few senators have shown as much eagerness to work across the aisle as he has. He has been pushing his own tax plan in concert with Senator Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana. That plan at least broadly follows the lines of any tax overhaul now possible: a reduction in stated tax rates, with the loss in revenue made up by closing loopholes and exemptions. Senator Wyden is not talking about his plan now, pending his ascendancy to the chairmanship, but it remains on his website. That plan is not, it must be said, a profile in courage. It goes after some loopholes and preferences but not enough of them to justify the cuts in rates that are included in the proposal. He is more specific than some, however, in saying that he would end the practice of not counting as income the value of employee fringe benefits. That would substantially raise the reported income of a lot of people and would not be popular with many, including labor unions. Even so, the net result of the plan, according to an analysis done by the Joint Committee on Taxation in 2011, would have been to lose revenue. That is not what we need now. Federal tax revenue in recent years has been at historical lows, at least as measured by a percentage of gross domestic product. One cause of that was the Great Recession, but it was not the only one. The fundamental problem was that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 were too great. Tax revenue soared in the late 1990s, for reasons that were not well understood. The economic analysis supporting the cuts simply overestimated how much revenue would come in during future years. If Congress is serious about tax reform and about curbing the power of special interest lobbyists to carve out exemptions and special breaks for favored industries there is, it seems to me, one relatively simple way to go about that. Congress would start with an estimate of how much money needed to be raised an estimate that would be based on what the entire Congress was willing to spend. That estimate would be over a multiyear period, for the course of an economic cycle. The government should be expected to run deficits during recessions, as revenue shrinks and safety net spending grows, and to offset them during good times. They could even program in an assumption of a multiyear surplus. The next step would be to decide how much revenue should come from the corporate income tax a tax that now has the highest stated rates of any leading country but that produces shockingly little revenue. That odd combination reflects in no small part the ability of many multinational companies to avoid paying significant taxes. The rest would presumably come from individual taxes, including payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare. 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. I know none of that would be easy. But if it could be done, the interesting part would start. First, the government could have the tax experts estimate the marginal tax rate needed to produce the desired revenue. If they wanted, they could maintain some progressivity with higher rates on higher incomes. That estimate would produce astoundingly low necessary tax rates. It would do that by assuming the elimination of every tax preference, deduction and credit. It would also assume no deductions for mortgage interest or charitable giving and no exemption for interest on municipal bonds. It would assume that the value of health insurance provided to employees would be taxed just like any other compensation. It would assume the same tax rate for capital gains and other income an assumption that would automatically end a lot of games that are played now to convert ordinary income into capital gains. The "carried interest" tactic used by private equity firms the one that enabled Mitt Romney to pay so little in taxes is just the most famous of those. On the corporate side, it would assume that all income was subject to tax when it was earned, including overseas income. There would be tax credits for foreign taxes actually paid. But all the special incentives to invest in low income housing, or in wind energy projects, or in a myriad other things would be assumed to vanish. Senator Ron Wyden will take over soon as chairman of that body's Finance Committee. With that as the starting point, Congress could debate restoring as many of those as anyone wished. But each proposed amendment would have to pay for itself with higher rates. A vote to preserve the mortgage interest deduction would clearly be a vote to raise taxes on those who don't receive that deduction. The same goes for the capital gains preference and the charitable deduction. All too often now, we pass tax benefits as if they had no cost to others. This would make it clear that is not the case. If we start with the assumption that a certain amount of revenue must be raised, then giving me a break means making everyone else pay more. On the corporate side, it could lead to a splitting of interests among business groups. If General Electric and Apple can come up with ways to largely avoid actually paying federal income taxes, that means that other companies, including small ones, must pay more. Some of them would suddenly have reasons to lobby against complicated breaks that, in the past, had no real opposition. On the individual side, perhaps, it could lead to a similar change in attitude. If a rich person is able through perfectly legal use of tax breaks to pay a very low tax rate, then the rest of us will have reason to resent the fact that those breaks exist. If they did not, we could pay lower rates. It might be reasonable to phase out some existing breaks rather than cancel them immediately. Some breaks could be maintained but revised in a way to keep them from being overly generous to high income people. Currently, a 1,000 charitable deduction from a person in the 39.6 percent bracket saves 396 in taxes, while a similar contribution from a person in the 28 percent bracket saves only 280. Offering a 280 tax credit instead would cost the middle income giver nothing but would raise revenue from higher income taxpayers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
Bon Appetit: The term "cozy mystery" always makes me laugh you do realize there's a corpse here, right, people? Surely some enterprising novelist will churn out "Murder Most Hyggelig" soon. Until then, the coziest cozies remain those by , whose Hannah Swensen culinary mysteries star a small town Minnesota baker and feature recipes alongside the dead bodies; her latest, "Banana Cream Pie Murder," is new at No. 3 in hardcover fiction. Fluke is an avid baker herself, who often promotes her books on the cooking segments of TV morning shows. But that doesn't mean she's never suffered a kitchen disaster. "Of course, anyone who has ever tested a recipe knows how easy it can be to get it wrong," she told me in a recent email exchange. "Once when I was living in northern Minnesota I decided to throw together a tuna casserole ('tuna hotdish' in Minnesotan) for dinner ('supper' in Minnesotan). I used the recipe that's been around forever: cooked pasta, a can of tuna, a small package of frozen peas, a little onion, pepper and whatever seasonings you like, all mixed up with a can of condensed cream of mushroom, cream of chicken or cream of celery soup. I completed everything I'd even crushed some potato chips to sprinkle on top and went to the pantry for the soup. But I hadn't checked beforehand, and all I had was Campbell's condensed tomato. The result was so awful, we sent out for pizza." The recipes in Fluke's books come from three main sources. Some are from fans, who may be rewarded by having a minor character named after them. Others are hand me downs from Fluke's family. ("The best have smears of butter or chocolate and unidentified fruit stains all over them.") And some are Fluke originals. "I love to experiment in the kitchen," she said. "Once I tried to make a cookie using pureed watermelon. It was so awful that not even the neighbor's dog would try one and Rex would eat any people food. My husband took one taste of these very gray looking cookies, spit it out and said, 'Please don't make these again, honey!' I now have a recipe for watermelon cookies. But they are made with watermelon flavored Kool Aid." Art Of War: "Portraits of Courage," a collection of George W. Bush's paintings of military veterans, hits the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 1. In The Guardian recently, the critic Joshua David Stein was especially struck by its subject matter: "Bush seems somehow to be working through what might not be a sense of guilt exactly he's never expressed remorse for Operation Iraqi Freedom but is certainly a deep seated sense of duty. . . . Does it matter, from a critical standpoint, that Bush might not be aware of his obsession? Certainly he would defer the interpretation laid forth above. But it's precisely this dramatic irony that gives 'Portraits of Courage' its numinous and haunting quality. This book isn't just art though it is art it is also alive and painful and, above all, real."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Books
THERE was a time, not long ago, when some Hamptons residents were flipping homes here for obscene returns. Christopher Burch, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, started buying oceanfront properties in Southampton in 1997. He renovated and resold them, usually doubling his money every two years, he said. In the decade between 1997 and 2007, "all the properties I bought on the ocean went up between five and seven times in value after a little bit of work," he said. Mr. Burch, 59, was luckier than most. Marketwide, prices about doubled in the Hamptons in that decade, and most sellers tripled or quadrupled their investment after renovating, said Jonathan J. Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraisal firm. When I caught up with Mr. Burch the other day at a book signing at his Southampton home for the author Gigi Levangie Grazer, he spoke about high end Hamptons real estate as if there had been a death in the family. "I just don't think it has come back at all," he said. In fact, the volume of sales of prime Hamptons properties is down more than 20 percent from when the market peaked in mid 2007, brokers said. "If homes aren't priced correctly, they probably won't even be shown," said Harald Grant, a broker at Sotheby's International Realty. While the luxury Hamptons market with sales over 20 million is recovering at a faster pace than the rest of the market, there is little wow factor in what's been happening lately. The Hamptons provide a stunning contrast to what's going on some 90 miles away in Manhattan, where high end sales continue to break records and the potential for a 100 million sale no longer boggles the imagination. That's a far cry from the spectacular sales in the boom years, like the 103 million that the billionaire Ron Baron paid in 2007 for 40 acres of undeveloped waterfront property in East Hampton. Mr. Grant still remembers one woman that year who turned down an unsolicited offer of 70 million for her Southampton home. "The trophy sales aren't really happening any longer," Mr. Grant said. "In our market for oceanfront, 28.5 million was an average price." The high end Hamptons market has moved in fits and starts. Last year there were two sales over 30 million one for 32.5 million in Southampton and another for 36 million in North Haven. And this year there have been six sales of 20 million or more, all closing before May. The lost market that Mr. Burch laments may have been built on loose credit and associated Wall Street profits, as Mr. Miller impressed on me. But perception is often reality. Conversation around the Hamptons punch bowl used to touch frequently on the rising prices of people's estates, but it rarely does anymore, Mr. Burch said. "People were excited about making good investments and that their property values were going up," he said. "Today, real estate is just not as much of a conversation piece as it was in the past. People talk about their families, their kids' schools, about preserving the environment." That was certainly the case at the event to celebrate Ms. Grazer's latest beach read, "The After Wife" (Ballantine), about how a Los Angeles woman copes with the death of her husband. The low key event drew a smattering of celebrities, socialites and the powerful. The mogul Russell Simmons made the rounds, as did Rita Schrager, the ex wife of the hotelier Ian Schrager, and Michael Michele, an actress who appeared in the movie "Ali." There was talk of the presidential election Mr. Simmons said he had just returned from a "strategy session" with President Obama and plenty of chatter about the fifth book from the leggy and hilarious Ms. Grazer, the ex wife of the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. The next day I took a drive down Meadow Lane, one of the most coveted streets in Southampton. Calvin Klein is building a huge, glassy contemporary home on a 10 acre lot there that brokers say is destined to become a major trophy property. At the other end of the street, near the heliport, the designer Tory Burch, Mr. Burch's ex wife, recently sold a house for 11 million that she had bought for 22.5 million in 2009. While it was considered a teardown because of extensive damage caused by a flood, brokers still cite it as an example of the extreme price reductions that sellers are swallowing. Other examples abound. Paul Brennan, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, is selling a four acre spread on the ocean along Montauk Highway for 19.5 million. Three years ago it was listed for 35 million, he said. Oddly, the price cuts have become a sort of badge of honor in Hamptons society, said Susan Breitenbach, a broker at Corcoran. In today's Hamptons being a bargain hunter is more chic than ever. And nobody wants to overpay. "The worst thing that could happen is you are at a cocktail party and somebody could say, 'Oh, you paid that for that?' " Ms. Breitenbach said. "They are more concerned about that than anything else." The Wall Street types who helped propel the Hamptons market to new heights are still around, but these days they are less eager, Mr. Brennan said. "I have had any number of Wall Street guys and real estate guys saying, 'Show me the deals, show me somebody who needs to sell,' " he said. Many people are trying. As of Wednesday, there were 62 active listings over 20 million, 133 between 10 million and 20 million, and 302 from 5 million to 10 million, according to Miller Samuel. "I think the market is flooded in the middle," Ms. Breitenbach said. "If a customer is looking for something between 5 million and 10 million you could send them 60 to 100 listings." Before the crash, the mix of buyers in the Hamptons included the Wall Streeters, as well as foreigners and Americans from around the country. These days there are fewer foreigners buying, even as they continue to push condo prices higher in Manhattan, brokers said. Mr. Grant says 90 percent of his buyers are New York based and most work on Wall Street. "We are not getting that distant buyer any longer," he said. Ms. Breitenbach, for her part, said she had "a bunch" of prospective buyers from the West Coast, as well as Russians, Germans, even one wealthy South American. "This week I was out with people from France," she said. "They are looking, but I haven't signed a contract on anything yet." While a tad wistful, Mr. Burch isn't losing much sleep over the dip in the Hamptons' fortunes nor his sense of fun. The day after the book signing I attended a party he gave for 400 guests. The highlight was a performance by Mini Kiss, a five man tribute band of "little people" who performed four songs from the '70s heavy metal band.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
A new film about the life and writings of Flannery O'Connor will receive the first Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. The award was announced on Wednesday by the Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation. The new prize, made possible by the nonprofit Better Angels Society and the Boston based philanthropists Jonathan and Jeannie Lavine , was created to recognize documentarians who focus on some aspect of American history. The prize includes a 200,000 grant for costs associated with postproduction, outreach and marketing, as well as a consultation with Ken Burns and his production company, Florentine Films. "I remember for me way back with my first film, that last money was the hardest to come in and such a relief" when it did , Mr. Burns said in a phone interview. He added the money could go toward "the final prints, the final corrections, the final edits, to pay the rights to the footage or the photographs or whatever it might be." Before selecting a winning film with the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, six films were pared down from a total of 80 submissions and reviewed by a jury of academics and filmmakers. It was from those finalists that Mr. Burns and Dr. Hayden chose "Flannery," a biographical documentary about the Southern Gothic writer directed by Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Apartment lore has it that 3L started out as a share inhabited by Jewish men. But sometime during the past decade, the lease for the West 92nd Street rental transferred to a group of Jewish women who opted not to install walls the customary way to cram four people into a two bedroom. Instead, they split the bedrooms as sisters might, with twin beds separated by a shared night stand a tradition that has been passed down with the apartment itself, as roommates, who have been mostly modern Orthodox Jews over the years, leave to marry or attend graduate school. As a result, camaraderie is as much a part of the apartment as are the kosher kitchen and the Friday night Sabbath dinners, according to Anna Schon, 31, who moved in five and a half years ago the longest tenure among the four current roommates. Sharone Waldman, 36, a learning specialist, arrived two and a half years ago. Moving from New Jersey, she didn't want to live in a shoe box and "every place I looked at had a cold chill in the air, or was too expensive, or something. But when I came here, they were like, 'This is a very supportive apartment.'" The statement was unexpected, but also nice. "A huge downside is I'm sharing a bedroom, but it's worth it," Ms. Waldman said. The other two roommates are Hannah Rosen, 36, who moved in last year, and Temima Loeb, 25, who arrived in May. Ms. Loeb met Ms. Schon at a religious retreat in the Berkshires they caught each other's eye because they're both a hair under 4 foot 11. "And now we share clothes!" exclaimed Ms. Schon. "She shares all my clothes," corrected Ms. Loeb, who is known in the apartment for her enviable Anthropologie wardrobe. When Ms. Curtis responded to their ad, they told her that it probably wouldn't be a good fit, as they keep a kosher kitchen (no ham sandwiches) and are Sabbath observant (no laptop in the living room on Friday nights). She surprised them by being up for the challenge of the house rules, though it took her a while to get the hang of them. A former roommate gave her two books on Jewish dietary laws, she said. "I also had the rabbi's number and would call him from the grocery store and take photos of kosher symbols and text for approval." "We threw out a lot of dishes," Ms. Waldman said. A system of Post it notes eventually did the trick, and during Passover the three other roommates covered the higher cost of groceries. Ms. Curtis, who now lives in Florida, compared living in the apartment to her time in the Peace Corps in Mali. "Even though you're living in a culture that's somewhat alien to you, you're part of the family and part of a tradition," she said over the phone. "I didn't know when I moved in that it would become one of the best apartments I ever lived in. In the U.S., it's considered shameful if you live with roommates, like you haven't been successful. But it's nice to come home to people. The two years that I lived there, I had academic difficulties, personal difficulties, health problems. It felt good to know that you weren't by yourself." There have, naturally, been some disagreements. Notably, over a wall that several roommates wanted to build in the living room to create an extra bedroom for a fifth roommate, which would have reduced everyone's share of the rent. But the women concluded that a spacious living room, which lends itself to hanging out and holding 20 person Sabbath dinners, is part of what makes the apartment special and sharing a bedroom a worthwhile trade off. Decorating is a more frequent source of contention. "When I first moved in, we had hours and hours of conversations about what color to paint the walls," said Ms. Waldman. "Notice the walls are still white." Consensus is often reached by a house rule: Everyone has to feel comfortable. If one person strongly dislikes something, out it goes, as was the case with a whimsically painted, purely decorative French door that only three of them adored. A pair of signs protesting "The Death of Klinghoffer," an opera about a cruise ship seized by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front in 1985 considered anti Semitic by some for what they assert is a sympathetic portrayal of the hijackers serve as a reminder that the apartment can accommodate weightier differences, too. When the Metropolitan Opera staged the production in 2014, a former roommate protested daily against it. Meanwhile Ms. Schon, who was an understudy dancer in the production, had watched hundreds of performances, and did not consider it anti Semitic. After the opera's run and protests ended, Ms. Schon had the signs framed. They now hang in the living room, with all four roommates' approval.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
A new series about the 9/11 attacks starring Jeff Daniels arrives on Hulu. And Tyler Henry, the Hollywood Medium, is back at it. THE LOOMING TOWER on Hulu. This highly anticipated 10 part series is ostensibly about the Sept. 11 attacks. But the main adversaries here are not the United States and Al Qaeda but rather the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. Based on Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize winning book, this series begins with the 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and shows how infighting between the two federal agencies and their unwillingness to cooperate or share information may have allowed Al Qaeda to move forward with its attack. The television drama stalwarts Peter Sarsgaard and Jeff Daniels square off against each other in lead roles. CASABLANCA on FilmStruck. While other streaming services are locked in an arms race to create original content, FilmStruck's latest gambit was to add more than 600 classic films from Hollywood's Golden Age, including "Singin' in the Rain," "Citizen Kane" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Film buffs will debate this, but the crown jewel might very well be "Casablanca," Michael Curtiz's indelible World War II era romance. You probably already know: Ingrid Bergman walks into Humphrey Bogart's gin joint; Sam plays it again; the usual suspects are rounded up; a beautiful friendship begins. It's worth a second watch, and a third. HEARTLAND 9 p.m. on Up. If you live beneath the 49th parallel, you might not be familiar with the Fleming sisters. But they're the center of the longest running hourlong scripted drama in Canadian television history. This show follows life, love and horses on an Alberta ranch; its 11th season started in Canada last fall and arrives on American television on Wednesday. In the first episode, the family welcomes a new member: the baby daughter of Amy (Amber Marshall). HOLLYWOOD MEDIUM 9 p.m. on E! Some are skeptical about Tyler Henry's ability to communicate with the dead: "Mr. Henry plays the role of naif but is a con man of the highest order," Jon Caramanica wrote in The New York Times. But whether he has clairvoyant powers is almost beside the point. The allure of his show comes with the reactions of his famous guests, who often break down and show a very different side than their usual chipper selves on the talk show circuit. (Ellen DeGeneres said he changed her life.) In the third season premiere, Mr. Henry pokes around the minds of Kristin Cavallari, Jim Parsons, and Todd and Savannah Chrisley. WACO 10 p.m. on Paramount. This mini series has received largely positive reviews for its depiction of the 1993 Waco siege in which David Koresh, a Texan with apocalyptic Christian views, led Branch Davidians into an F.B.I. standoff. In real life, the confrontation led to the deaths of more than 70 people. In this sixth episode, the standoff comes to its violent end.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. Firm predictions about the fate of professional sports leagues continue to be futile in the midst of a global pandemic. What N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver has proclaimed to be "the single greatest challenge" the league has ever faced remains its most fluid challenge, too. Early in his conference call Friday night with the N.B.A. Players Association, Silver did say, "Since we stopped the season, the goal has been to restart the season." Yet it is still only a goal, two months into the suspension of play, in part because no one not even Silver is sure whether the league can stay back, so to speak, once it comes back. "No decision we make will be risk free," Silver told the players, according to a recording of the teleconference reviewed by The New York Times. "We're going to be living with this virus for the foreseeable future." Imagine a rebooted N.B.A. season in July or August. Playing on in the face of new positive tests, player trepidation, gloomy forecasts about a second wave of infections, criticism from countless external forces and the inevitable obstacles we can't even pinpoint yet it all looms as deeply daunting stuff. Sean Doolittle of the Washington Nationals may as well have been speaking for several of his N.B.A. counterparts on Monday when he unleashed a 16 tweet thread to publicly question what Major League Baseball has planned in terms of "protections for players, families, staff, stadium workers and the work force it would require to resume a season." The N.B.A., mind you, is not without hope. There has been some real progress in the testing arena, starting with the Orlando Magic's ability to secure clearance last week from local health officials and the league to test asymptomatic players and staff members. With the Lakers and Clippers also expected to soon receive similar blessings in Los Angeles, Orlando's breakthrough makes it somewhat easier to imagine the N.B.A. reaching a point in coming weeks where all 30 teams can administer tests freely without worrying about taking tests from needier segments of the public. A far thornier issue for Silver, in his contact sport, figures to be answering the array of health and safety questions akin to those Doolittle so forcefully posed to M.L.B.'s elders. Perhaps the resistance is not universal, but there are surely N.B.A. players apprehensive about returning. The question and answer session of Silver's call began and ended with complaints from Oklahoma City's Chris Paul and the Nets' Kyrie Irving that some of their peers already feel pressure to return to team practice facilities for individual workouts in what surely rank as the most sanitized gyms on Earth at the moment even though only two teams (Cleveland and Portland) had opened their practice facilities at the time of the call. "It's an issue employers everywhere are going to have to confront," Michele Roberts, the union's executive director, told ESPN's Ramona Shelburne last week. "Because I guarantee there's going to be at least one player, if not many more than that, that are going to have genuine concerns about their safety." Silver does not want to apply pressure. He made it clear to his Friday audience that, while there can be no such thing as a risk free return without a coronavirus vaccine, players cannot be forced back to work by team owners or the league office. "We're not going to make any decisions that aren't joint," Silver told them. As I've been advising for weeks, keep your eye on Germany as a possible preview of what awaits Silver's league this summer. Bundesliga soccer isn't N.B.A. basketball, but the Bundesliga is a league of global stature and poised to return to operations this weekend with what it calls "ghost games" matches without fans. The Bundesliga approach calls for any player or team staff member who tests positive to be quarantined for 14 days while the rest of the group carries on. Could that sort of protocol work on these shores? Would N.B.A. players really stomach the idea of showing up for the next day's practice or game after a teammate or two was forced into quarantine? Are teams in North America, and their fans, prepared to accept the possibility that a star player will be forced to leave the team for up to two weeks in the middle of the playoffs as if he had sustained a more common injury? Are the star player's teammates going to be willing to play without him? Do we dare limit our focus to those sufficiently unsettling questions without asking: What if someone dies? We don't have any detailed answers yet. Nor, frankly, do the German soccer authorities, who are at least two months ahead of the N.B.A. Dynamo Dresden, in the Bundesliga's second tier, will not return to the field this weekend as scheduled, because local health authorities demanded that the entire team be quarantined after two new coronavirus cases, overruling the league officials who would merely have isolated the individuals who had tested positive. So we repeat: Coming back is one thing. Staying back is another entirely. There is no mystery, by contrast, about the forces behind the push for a conclusion to the 2019 20 season. Nearly 80 percent of the 82 game schedule was completed before play was suspended, but crowning a champion, as the N.B.A. has managed to do in each of its previous 73 seasons, is a secondary aim at this point. It's a money thing as much as anything. Silver told players that game night income from fans accounts for roughly 40 percent of the league's annual revenue, drawing focus to concerns about the financial consequences of a canceled season how that would affect the salary cap, free agency, future earnings and the very existence of the current collective bargaining agreement. The gravity of Silver's statement, with no one in the league expecting to see fans in its buildings before 2021 at the earliest, needed little elaboration. Yet the money vs. safety calculus is as tricky as it gets. Critics will say that the N.B.A. is irresponsible in hurrying to come back before there is a significant medical development to combat the coronavirus. Defenders will counter by pointing out that there's little benefit to waiting for a comeback when the conditions may be no more favorable in the winter than they are in the summer or fall. Silver stressed to the players that no decisions have to be made before June 1 that there's still time but the clock's ticking will surely get a lot louder for everyone the closer we get to July. The math will have to get done at some point. The lone comfort for the players is that they will have a louder voice than usual. The very personal assessment involved in deciding "how much risk we're all comfortable taking," as Silver put it, was nobody's idea of player empowerment when the season started. But here we are. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing in from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line. (Responses may be condensed and lightly edited for clarity.) Q: I'm so confused as to why a non playoff team with nothing to play for would open their doors. Can anyone explain this? joey buckets3 from Twitter Stein: The Cleveland Cavaliers aren't going to the playoffs even if the N.B.A. manages to restart its 2019 20 season. Yet the Cavs were the first franchise to welcome players back Friday when teams in states where shelter in place restrictions have been eased were allowed to unlock their practice facilities. One of the best explanations came from Cleveland's Larry Nance Jr. After spending about 90 minutes Friday lifting weights and partaking in some catch and shoot drills, Nance said, "It was more for mental health than physical, to be honest with you." Allowing players to return to the gym, even if teams are initially limited to a maximum of four players inside at any time, is the first step back toward normalcy for athletes whose lives have been disrupted like never before by the coronavirus. It's also a matter of safety. League and team officials think it's wisest to make their own facilities available to discourage players from seeking out unauthorized gyms that aren't sanitized to the same standard. But there are other good reasons. The N.B.A., for starters, has made it clear that it hopes to resume play with a few regular season games involving all 30 teams, not just those who were playoff bound when play was halted March 11. Another one: As we've discussed in the newsletter previously, many N.B.A. athletic training staffs would want to give their players up to six weeks' worth of supervised prep time before games restarted after such a long layoff. The more likely scenario is a ramp up period closer to three weeks to give the league as much of the summer as possible to complete as much of the remaining schedule as it can. From a league perspective, by making facilities available to players well before teams officially reconvene, it can assert that players have been provided a theoretical head start on the road to getting back into basketball shape to compensate for the potential forthcoming crunch. Q: Why do league rules prohibit teams from buying these hoops? NateAllard from Twitter Stein: Nate's question comes in response to my recent piece with Scott Cacciola on the reality that many N.B.A. players, counterintuitive as it sounds, do not have a basket at home and thus have struggled to get shots up during a suspension of play that hit the two month mark on Monday. In March, the league informed teams that furnishing players with "individual workout equipment of a modest cost" was permissible. But buying a hoop, they were told, would be considered salary cap circumvention. The list of approved equipment for teams to supply includes workout mats, workout balls, resistance bands and "modest" free weight sets. Paying for the delivery of boxed meals to players is also allowed. Q: Great memories from that Knicks Lakers Game 7 in 1970. I, too, was there as a 13 year old, like Spike Lee, and went with my friend, whose father had tickets in Section 106. A reporter from Los Angeles, Bud Furillo, helped us get some autographs. I recognize Donnie May and Mike Riordan in the main photo that ran with your story, but who is the player on the right? Paul Winston Stein: Leaping in the air in that photo, in celebration, was Cazzie Russell. We initially had the photo captioned improperly last week, but the error was quickly spotted by a few Knicks die hards who wrote in like Morton Frank of Redwood City, Calif. As Mr. Frank put it, "Cazzie's Adidas sneakers and comparatively low socks" are clear giveaways for some fans. "To this day, I can give you the same detail and trivia on the whole team," he wrote. "To love the old Knicks is to love them all the way." I really enjoyed talking to Spike and Marv Albert (and our own Harvey Araton) to learn more about that team and that series, because I certainly wasn't consuming any of it as a 1 year old. It's always bothered me that history doesn't get passed down with the same vigor in basketball as it does in baseball, which has sparked me in adulthood to embrace every opportunity to find out more about the long overlooked 1970s, which was a period of great struggle for the sport. For Knicks fans especially, Friday's 50th anniversary of the win that clinched the first title in franchise history was a welcome respite, since this season was otherwise destined to be remembered for the curiously timed ousters of David Fizdale and Steve Mills; James L. Dolan's shabby treatment of Lee; and multiple instances in which the sad state of the franchise inspired loud "Sell the Team" chants. With 36 points and 19 assists in the Knicks' Game 7 triumph over the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1970 N.B.A. finals, Walt Frazier is one of only four players in league history to post at least 20 points and 10 assists in a Game 7 of the league's championship series, according to Basketball Reference. The others: None Jerry West (42 points, 12 assists and 13 rebounds in the Lakers' Game 7 loss to Boston in 1969) None James Worthy (36 points, 10 assists and 16 rebounds in the Lakers' Game 7 victory over Detroit in 1988) None LeBron James (27 points, 11 assists and 11 rebounds in Cleveland's Game 7 win at Golden State in 2016 to complete the Cavaliers' comeback from a 3 1 series deficit against the 73 win Warriors) For all the attention Willis Reed's thigh injury in the 1970 finals understandably still gets, we can't forget that knee surgery limited the Lakers' Wilt Chamberlain to a career low 12 games during the regular season. Chamberlain played the final three regular season games after a four month absence and then appeared in 18 games that postseason for the Lakers, averaging 22.1 points and 22.2 rebounds. Michael Jordan lost nine of his first 10 N.B.A. playoff games with the Chicago Bulls. Jordan led the Bulls to a playoff mark of 95 31 in winning six championships between 1991 and 1998, although he missed the 1993 94 N.B.A. season while playing Class AA baseball for the Birmingham Barons. With Jordan in uniform, Chicago was pushed to only two Game 7s in the 1990s and won both, outlasting the Knicks in the 1992 Eastern Conference semifinals and defeating Indiana in the 1998 Eastern Conference finals. The N.B.A. has instructed teams to refuse admittance to practice facilities for anyone who registers a temperature higher than 99.1 degrees. The threshold was 99.5 degrees for Taiwan's Super Basketball League when it checked players as they entered the HaoYu Basketball Training Center during the S.B.L.'s recent playoffs. Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( marcsteinnba). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
AT T pulled its advertising from YouTube in 2017 because it was appearing near offensive content too often. AT T thinks YouTube is safe for advertisers again. The company, one of the nation's biggest marketers, yanked its dollars from YouTube in 2017 because its ads were appearing alongside offensive videos. But on Friday, AT T said it had been persuaded to resume advertising on the video platform. The decision reflects the progress that Google owned YouTube has made with advertisers in the 22 months since a number of them discovered that some of their ads were appearing during, or before, videos promoting hate speech, terrorism and other disturbing content. AT T was among the first companies that stopped paying to advertise on YouTube, telling it that they wouldn't return until it made improvements. YouTube has since introduced a series of changes aimed at making the platform "brand safe" that is, an appropriate place for companies to run advertisements. It has raised the number of subscribers and the viewership that video makers must have in order to carry ads, and is subjecting videos to more human and automated oversight. "The testing took time, and we needed to be 100 percent confident throughout our organization that it met the standards that we were aiming for," Fiona Carter, AT T's chief brand officer, said in an interview. "We want a near zero chance of our advertising appearing next to objectionable content, and that's a high standard." Companies have long paid close attention to the content that they fund with their television commercials. Shows like "Gilmore Girls," for example, were backed by an advertiser group that sought to produce more prime time programming for families. Lowe's and others dropped ads from ABC's "Desperate Housewives" in 2004 because they thought it was too racy. And after revelations that Bill O'Reilly had reached settlements with women over allegations of harassment and inappropriate behavior, at least 50 major brands said they would not advertise on his Fox News show, hastening his exit from the network. Many brands were not paying the same attention to their online advertising, outside of avoiding the obvious, like pornography sites. In the past two years, however, the business of brand safety has boomed, and major marketers have sought new control over their digital presence even if that means leaving platforms that reach vast numbers of young people, like YouTube. The advertiser exodus brought a focus to the potential risks of digital ads, which often follow individuals on whatever content they are viewing. Questions were raised about what that meant for advertisers, which could inadvertently end up funding disturbing material and be associated with such content by viewers. "We care deeply about where we appear and whether it reflects our values and whether it breaks that trust with our consumers," Ms. Carter said. "It was a moment to remind us that marketers must have their hands on the wheel at all times of their brands' destiny." The outcry over YouTube occurred as brands were discovering their automatically placed ads on websites promoting conspiracy theories and other toxic material. JPMorgan Chase, for example, reduced the number of sites that could run its display ads to about 5,000 after The New York Times showed the company one of its ads on a site called Hillary 4 Prison, where a headline promised to reveal "the horrifying truth about the Satanic liberal perverts who run Hollywood." Previously, the company was running ads on about 400,000 sites a month. At the same time, brands came under pressure from activists to pull their ads from Breitbart News, the hard right, nationalist website closely tied to President Trump's administration. Most of the brands were unaware that their ads had been appearing there. To some, the action by advertisers was a shift of a pendulum that had swung too far toward automation. 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. Ms. Carter wrote in a LinkedIn post on Friday that while she was "thrilled" to be back on YouTube, she was "glad that we packed up our ads and walked away in the first place." "As powerful as digital platforms are in today's advertising ecosystem," she added, "they can't be permitted to disempower the brands that use them to reach their customers." Still, even as YouTube wins back major clients like AT T, that doesn't mean the platform is "out of the woods in terms of brand safety issues," said Brian Wieser, a media analyst at Pivotal Research. "Any nonhuman curated platform will have risks," he said. "The question is, are advertisers willing to take the risks? And generally speaking, the answer is yes. Brand unsafe or inappropriate things will still happen, and it just comes down to you hope to get the obvious things." Testing that AT T conducted after the problem arose showed that it was widespread. Ms. Carter gave credit to Google's and YouTube's leaders, who "leaned into the issue when they realized from the evidence we produced that perhaps it was a broader issue than they were aware of." Marketers and their agencies have also learned more about the types of content that they may want to avoid. For example, Ms. Carter said, AT T looks to avoid gaming videos, where the chances of unsavory chatter and behavior may increase. "Having to have more subscribers and more viewing hours has really helped with eliminating fringe content that we might not want to advertise against," she said. In AT T's latest test of YouTube's Brand Suitability System, which avoids categories like violence, extremist and hate speech, and adult content, almost zero ads ran alongside offensive content. In April, Procter Gamble, the world's biggest advertiser, confirmed that it was returning to YouTube after they worked together "extensively" to ensure that its ads would be placed in appropriate environments. Procter Gamble spent 2.8 billion on ads in 2017, according to data from Kantar Media. AT T, the second biggest advertiser in the United States, spent 2.4 billion in the same period. "Over the past year, we've worked hard to address concerns raised by our customers," Debbie Weinstein, vice president of YouTube Video Global Solutions, said in a statement. "We're committed to retaining their trust in YouTube, and ensuring they can realize the unique value of our platform." YouTube has an enormous audience of viewers in their teens and 20s, and Ms. Carter said on Thursday that she was keen to reach that group again. She added, however, that AT T and its agency would continue testing to make sure its guidelines were being met. "Technological advancements mean you have to be on your game and you have to be constantly vigilant in this area," Ms. Carter said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
BORNS at Terminal 5 (Feb. 16, 8 p.m.). Borns is on the way up. The Michigan born electro pop singer's breakthrough hit in 2015, "Electric Love," has been streamed well over 100 million times on Spotify, and his recently released album, "Blue Madonna," opens with a duet with Lana Del Rey, as if to underscore his ascent to the higher realms of pop stardom. It's no wonder, then, that tickets to this performance at the 3,000 person capacity Midtown club Terminal 5 sold out quickly. Fans of Borns's fabulous falsetto can find reasonable options on the resale market or wait until he inevitably returns to headline at an even more formidable venue. 888 929 7849, terminal5nyc.com PHOEBE BRIDGERS at Music Hall of Williamsburg (Feb. 22 23, 9 p.m.). "There are no words in the English language / I could scream to drown you out," Phoebe Bridgers sings on "Motion Sickness," an immediate highlight from her 2017 debut, "Stranger in the Alps." (The album's title refers to a line of shouted dialogue in certain versions of "The Big Lebowski.") These Brooklyn shows, with support from the lucid singer songwriter Soccer Mommy, are sold out, but the secondary market is worth a look. 888 929 7849, musichallofwilliamsburg.com CARLA BRUNI at the Town Hall (Feb. 16, 8 p.m.). On her 2017 album "French Touch," the former first lady of France interprets songs by the Rolling Stones ("Miss You"), Depeche Mode ("Enjoy the Silence") and even AC/DC ("Highway to Hell") in a pleasantly languid chanson style. The sound evokes dim lit clubs and Gauloises smoke, but it should suit the Town Hall's historic auditorium just as well. 212 997 6661, thetownhall.org SIDNEY GISH at Silent Barn (Feb. 21, 8 p.m.). Close followers of Boston's indie rock scene have been listening to Sidney Gish for a while, and her most recent album, "No Dogs Allowed," seems poised to win a wider audience for her crisp, inventive songwriting. (Hit play on "I Eat Salads Now" or "Good Magicians" for proof.) Ms. Gish is opening for the tuneful pop punk band Remember Sports at this show. Get there early to make sure you don't miss either act. 877 987 6487, ticketfly.com HOVVDY at Baby's All Right (Feb. 16, 8 p.m.). Tempos stay slow and voices tender in this Austin, Tex., duo's music, which is well suited to anyone who's ever loved Yo La Tengo's quieter moments. Their latest album, "Cranberry," unfolds like an afternoon whose warm mood you remember long after the details have faded. Hovvdy (pronounced "Howdy") will mark the LP's release with this Brooklyn show. 877 987 6487, babysallright.com INTERFERENCE AV at AMC Empire 25 (Feb. 19 21, 8 p.m.). This free festival will turn the AMC Empire 25, a large Times Square movie theater, into a temporary hub of avant garde music. On Monday night, the Midwestern electronic producer Jlin will headline; on Tuesday night, the long running noise rock act Lightning Bolt will take over; and the Sun Ra Arkestra will close out the event on Wednesday night. Experimental video projections, D.J. sets and more will round out the festivities. withfriends.co/clocktower ANDY BEY at Minton's Playhouse (Feb. 22, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). With his round and crinkled baritone, Mr. Bey can turn jazz vocals into a vessel for close inspection and surprise (that beats the more typical role they play: delivering comfort and emotional payoff, without much work from the listener). Audiences in the 1960s knew him for his work in Andy and the Bey Sisters, a vocal trio, and in the '70s he staked out distinctive terrain in the funk fusion landscape. But since the 1990s, Mr. Bey, who doubles on piano, has thrived as a soloist. He performs jazz standards and his own poetic originals, letting the songs open up and slow down and sometimes nearly dissolve on his tongue. 212 243 2222, mintonsharlem.com GERALD CLAYTON QUARTET at Jazz Standard (through Feb. 18, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Clayton, a pianist with a lissome and prayerful touch, leads a quartet here featuring the bassist Yunior Terry, the drummer Obed Calvaire and the percussionist Gabo Lungo. The group is joined during this run by two special guests: On Friday, it's the young vibraphonist Joel Ross; on Saturday and Sunday, the alto saxophonist Yosvany Terry. All of these musicians can play with ease and assurance, as if submitting to some ecstatic momentum, but they get there by different routes. Mr. Clayton's piano playing cascades, illustrates and embellishes, whereas Mr. Ross likes to interpose and chatter, like a kinetic conversationalist. And Mr. Terry, on saxophone, treats the tousled rhythmic logic of Cuban rumba as his foundation, moving in arcs and dashes and sweeps of color. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com CORCORAN HOLT at Ginny's Supper Club (Feb. 17, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Holt, a bassist known for his work alongside the saxophonist Kenny Garrett, moved to New York from Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago. The title of Mr. Holt's newly released debut album, "The Mecca," nods to the idea that New York is jazz's promised land. But the record's sound suggests something else: the proud complexity of his hometown's own musical history. (For much of the 20th century, after all, Washington was a jewel of black arts and letters nearly on par with Harlem.) There's the sturdy, Southern tinged swing feel; the proud, muscular harmonies beneath the lead lines; the occasional hand drum rhythms, suggesting a lifelong exposure to go go music. He'll play songs from "The Mecca" here with Keith Loftis on tenor saxophone, Ashlin Parker on trumpet, Benito Gonzalez on piano and McClenty Hunter on drums. 212 421 3821, ginnyssupperclub.com ALLEN LOWE at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Feb. 20, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Lowe doubles as an alto saxophonist and a kind of alternative cultural anthropologist. His histories of American popular music ("That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History 1900 1950" and "God Didn't Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950 1970," among others) reflect a fathomless musical knowledge and an iconoclastic streak. Those elements define his music too: a loose meld of American folklore, halcyon pop and free jazz. For this concert, Mr. Lowe has convened a 13 piece band to honor the heavy influence of John Coltrane's 1960s work. He's doing it in decidedly unconventional fashion, reaching back to the polyphonic sound of early 20th century New Orleans. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys MIN XIAO FEN WITH REZ ABBASI at Roulette (Feb. 18, 4 p.m.). Ms. Min plays the traditional pipa and other Chinese lutes with a hard bitten, unflinching power. A conceptualist as well as a folklorist, she will present a new, original score for "The Goddess," a seminal silent film from 1930s Shanghai. The music she has written draws from across the spectrum of Chinese heritage, including references to Tibetan chants as well as other folk forms, while remaining in contact with her jazz influences. Accompanying her is the prodigious guitarist Rez Abbasi. 917 267 0368, roulette.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Paul Taylor might seem like an odd way to get into a discussion of avant garde dance. But once upon a time, he was at its forefront. In the documentary "Dancemaker," there's a still image from Mr. Taylor's 1957 "Duet," in which, for four minutes, he did nothing more than stand behind a woman seated on the floor with her skirt draped over her legs. This work and others in "Seven New Dances" made history as did Louis Horst's review in the magazine Dance Observer: four inches of blank space. "Well," Mr. Taylor says in the film, "you try things." But Mr. Taylor's studies of gesture, pedestrian movement and stillness add up to more than just a gimmick or, as Mr. Horst insinuated, a blank void of meaning and intelligence. Experimental corners of the dance world are still obsessed with that historic program. Wouldn't it be thrilling if Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance revived those early works? That will probably never happen. Instead, for the group's coming season, we'll be treated to a pair of what are likely to be easy does it dances by Doug Elkins and Larry Keigwin. Most large institutions rely on the status quo, the safe and the sometimes dull. That's why it's so important to seek out dance that exists on the margins. Risk is crucial for an art form; so is failure. They're necessary for growth. And following a choreographer is an investment. You don't watch just one Quentin Tarantino movie, you watch them all. Similarly, choreography is a progression: one long piece shown over years. Each January, the spirit of "trying things" is celebrated and alive in the contemporary dance world. Festivals like Coil 2016, organized by Performance Space 122, and American Realness, put together by Ben Pryor and held mainly at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, begin early in the month. Both are presented in conjunction with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters showcase, in which artists show works in excerpt or complete form for theater directors and programmers from the United States and abroad. Much surrounding the association showcase is disheartening, including its meat market approach. But what's especially disappointing is the way many productions are presented as excerpts. Dance both to make and observe takes time. These days, following contemporary dance is a little like digging for treasure in a junkyard. What I'm always looking for are choreographers who are not pushing boundaries blindly but investigating the myriad possibilities of modern dance and the body and how to situate both in popular culture. I keep up the search because of those moments during a performance when, suddenly, my spine straightens: I'm in the presence of an artist and not an impersonator. Performance ready is not the point, and new is never quite new. Imagination and a sense of theater matter enormously. I would rather see struggle, a dance full of tension and questions, than another generic, spirit free, derivative work. How do dances even get made these days? Since I started covering it in 1995, contemporary dance has deteriorated not the work, which will always ebb and flow, but its structure and support system, museums aside. And while it's nice (or is it?) that the visual art world is interested in presenting dance, the involvement by museums, from the Whitney to the Museum of Modern Art, has resulted in artists trying to validate their ideas more through words than movement. The heart of a dance cannot exist as just a museum catalog. It's easier to talk your way around a dance than to make one. While there are exceptions, the company model, in which a choreographer works with a steady group of dancers and puts on a show once a year at the Joyce Theater, has waned for most daring dance makers for reasons that I think are both artistic and financial. Now many choreographers hire dancers according to the project at hand. It's not new Twyla Tharp has done it for a long time but it has become the norm. The impossible economic climate of New York (yes, rent) makes it hard to imagine a return to the spunk and spirit of the 1960s and '70s. Now, it seems, choreographers and dancers spend more time teaching Pilates than working in the studio or training, and that has seeped onto the stage, where technique has dwindled. Is this why simple, repetitive phrases have become so ubiquitous, since mastering a variety of intricate steps is harder than just repeating a few? The alternative, in which a dancer tries to attain the kind of presence that emanates from the inside out, is profound in the skilled bodies of dancers like Molly Lieber and Melanie Maar. It may look easy, but there's nothing simple about such subtle work. Do it halfheartedly, and it's nothing. Over the years, American Realness which will branch out this spring with a tour of France has been uneven, but there have been memorable performances, including two by Europeans: Marten Spangberg's "La Substance, but in English," performed over four and a half hours at MoMA PS1, and Ivo Dimchev's "FEST," a brilliantly satirical look at the performance festival circuit. This season, there are plenty of artists in which to invest some time: Jillian Pena, who works in video, will continue her fixation with unison movement and choreographic kaleidoscopes in the premiere of "Panopticon," a meeting point of mirrors, film and movement. And the earthy, experimental choreographer and improvisor Yvonne Meier, one of the most important members of the East Village dance scene of the '90s, presents her new prop heavy "Durch Nacht und Nebel." In "Culture, Administration Trembling," another '90s dance fixture, Jennifer Lacey, returns to New York from Paris to team up with the choreographer Antonija Livingstone and others for a series rooted in "time based sculptures." What does a dancer's discipline look like? "Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A.," a one off presentation by the Austrian choreographer Michael Klien, features performers past, present, future from the Martha Graham Dance Company as they explore their relationship to that modern master. In late January, Ann Liv Young, the brash and wise performance artist, takes on Sophocles in "Elektra." The point is to embrace unpredictability. But here's a safer bet: If you missed David Neumann's "I Understand Everything Better" last April, there's another opportunity to delve into this choreographer's deeply personal look at death and dying. Mr. Neumann has been hiding behind his virtuosic performance skill for the past few years. In "I Understand," he peeled back those layers; he showed himself. Do I support that? Always.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
FAIRFIELD, Conn. Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic university tucked in the tidy suburbs along Connecticut's southern coast, has been around since 1963 and has had a men's ice hockey program for 27 seasons including nine straight losing seasons entering this one. Sacred Heart is no hockey school, but it is making a big bet that it can be. The university is building a 60 million, 4,000 seat arena set to open in 2022 for its men's and women's teams in an effort to step into the ranks of college hockey's most competitive programs. With only about 60 men's teams and 40 women's teams, major college hockey is a much smaller world than, say, Division I basketball, so it is more likely for a program to improve quickly, and for a small university to compete with big ones. At least that is the thinking of Sacred Heart's athletic director, Bobby Valentine. Yes, that Bobby Valentine. The former manager of the Mets and the Boston Red Sox, Valentine is still energetic at 69 years old and is driving the growth of the university's facilities, with the hockey arena set to be the final jewel in the process. "There's a plan now, with the arena being a shining star, for all of our sports having a facility to call home in a short period of time," he said in an interview. Valentine grew up in Stamford, just a 25 mile hop down the Merritt Parkway. But he had no idea where the school was until he was contacted about becoming its athletic director in 2013. To that point, Sacred Heart had experienced only a glimmer of success in hockey. C.J. Marottolo, who still coaches the men's team, had a winning record and took the Pioneers to the Atlantic Hockey championship game in his first season, 2009 10. The team won only 42 games total over its next six seasons. Since the inception of the program in 1993, the Sacred Heart men have played at the 1,000 seat Milford Ice Pavilion, on the other side of Bridgeport. The women's team has played since 2014 at the 800 seat Sports Center of Connecticut in Shelton, 10 miles away. Not an ideal setup for a team hoping to sell itself as a hockey powerhouse. The teams needed a new home, but Valentine's options were limited. This is where Lou Lamoriello enters the story. Long before Lamoriello became the general manager of the N.H.L.'s Devils, Toronto Maple Leafs and Islanders, he was manager of the Yarmouth Indians of the Cape Cod Baseball League in 1967, when Valentine, then 17, was on the team's roster. The two stayed in touch over their careers. Valentine, as a newly minted Sacred Heart athletic director, called Lamoriello for advice about hockey facilities. "I was still learning how to spell hockey and A.D. at the same time," Valentine said. He had an option to have the team play games at Webster Bank Arena, an 8,500 seat arena in Bridgeport, 15 minutes from Sacred Heart, but he felt the site was too big. In the four seasons the Pioneers men's team has played its home games at Webster, its fortunes have changed. All but four of the 29 players on the Sacred Heart men's roster are from outside New England, with six international players: five Canadians and one player from Denmark. Sacred Heart's men's team was 16 17 4 last season and 18 8 2 in conference play this season, winning the first Connecticut Ice tournament, which included Connecticut, Quinnipiac and Yale, in January. The men's team, 21 10 3 over all, was ranked in the top 20 nationally at times this season, and the women (21 11) won 18 of 20 regular season games in the New England Women's Hockey Alliance. The Sacred Heart men have never been to the N.C.A.A. tournament, but the Pioneers were considered to have a good chance to qualify this year before it and the Atlantic Hockey tournament were canceled last week because of coronavirus concerns. "It's no secret that getting the rink is the next step for a program, where players want to come," Patrick Dawson, a freshman defenseman, said. In that light, the arena idea still seems audacious: a private Roman Catholic university without a big hockey portfolio funding an arena on its own, through borrowing and fund raising, ticket sales and concessions, and by renting the ice and the facility to outsiders once it is completed. "Sacred Heart's investment, while understandably difficult to comprehend and easy to criticize due to the cost, may actually make sense if the institution is able to realize many of the positive consequences that can flow from having a nationally visible hockey program," Scott Rosner, a sports business professor at Columbia University, said. "It is fair to ask if the success of newly minted hockey powers like Quinnipiac and Union is achievable and sustainable for another relative athletic minnow like Sacred Heart and question if it will be yet another institution in pursuit of fool's gold," Rosner added. "The answer comes down to execution." Union College, a 2,200 student institution in Schenectady, N.Y., won the N.C.A.A. title in 2014. Quinnipiac University, in Hamden, Conn., a 10,000 student school that is a keen athletic and academic rival of Sacred Heart's, advanced to the national championship game in 2013 and 2016. The Bobcats play in a 13 year old facility with separate areas for hockey and basketball and are members of the ECAC Hockey conference, a more powerful league than Atlantic Hockey. Valentine said of the Sacred Heart arena: "It's going to be the best building to play in in the tristate area. Quinnipiac is there, but we're going to be newer."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
The saga of Arie Luyendyk Jr. on ABC's 22nd season of "The Bachelor" ended in a two part finale, stretched agonizingly over two nights. On the first night, viewers watched Mr. Luyendyk choose Becca Kufrin as his wife and then, after several weeks of coupledom, break up with her in horror film like real time footage to pursue the show's runner up, Lauren Burnham. On the second night, he proposed to Ms. Burnham before a live studio audience. She accepted, they were hurried offstage, and the wronged woman, Ms. Kufrin, was anointed as the next star of the dual franchise. She accepted the awkward live praise of a cavalcade of men who will woo her for our benefit this spring on "The Bachelorette" should we choose to watch. Here, The Times's Bonnie Wertheim, Carla Correa, Lindsey Underwood and Jon Caramanica dig into the treacheries and satisfactions of the show's "most dramatic finale ever." Bonnie: Last fall, when ABC announced that Arie Luyendyk Jr., a long ago former contestant on "The Bachelorette," would be the next Bachelor and everyone said "who?" we knew the show might be bland, but I didn't think he'd be cruel. That "unedited and uncut" (say it one more time, Chris Harrison) footage of Arie's breakup with Becca K. was hard to watch, or at least much harder to watch than the routinely infuriating stuff on "The Bachelor." I've only watched a few seasons and don't claim to be any kind of expert. But everything I've seen relies on train wreck theatrics that make it hard to look away. The "we didn't know our contestant had Nazi tweets" problem from Rachel's season. The murky "Bachelor in Paradise" sexual assault production scandal. And now, the public humiliation of Becca K. I think the franchise would stop short of serious violence, but there's seemingly little the producers won't do for good TV. Carla: The breakup was not the problem. The problem was that Arie blindsided Becca and ambushed her with cameras and then refused to leave when she politely asked him to do so seemingly because he wanted her to absolve him of his guilt. Producers be damned, he should have split with her off camera. Lindsey: I actually appreciated the "unedited and uncut" footage. For once, Chris Harrison didn't lie to us. It was unlike what we normally see on "The Bachelor" and on reality TV in general. It also made many viewers truly uncomfortable, probably because we saw a lot of the real emotions that we're normally shielded from. We're used to seeing contestants cry. But we don't normally see them truly wronged. Many of the scenes in the first part of finale, and the cuts to Chris Harrison staring at the camera with the studio audience sitting in stunned silence, were jarring. It felt really icky that someone's pain was shown for our entertainment. But the way it was shown wasn't highly manipulated for once. Jon: I would argue that this is the exact point of the show to remind you that happiness comes with a price, and not always the one you expect. Naturally, there is going to be a backlash against Arie, who proposed and then recanted and then proposed again. But to me, it's more interesting that the default position about the show has, over the years, shifted from skepticism "Can you believe these people are getting married?" to credulousness that can be fractured "I can't believe he dishonored his proposal!" That tells you loads about how popular perception of "The Bachelor," and reality television in general, has evolved. Bonnie: Sitting on that couch talking to Chris Harrison, Becca put it plainly: "I signed up for this." If she can live with that, I think we can too. Lindsey: Right, and by the end of last night's episode, my roommate and I were grinning at the TV as Becca met her new suitors. We fell for the whole redemption charade. Carla: The second night was a smart move by producers. Here's why: The season was flat. Ratings were down. Arie was the wrong choice for the lead. Then he proved to be the ambivalent man that sleuthing viewers (well, Reality Steve) had revealed him to be. There was no good way to end this season unless ABC split the show in two and incorporated fans' ardent reactions to his betrayal on social media in the second part of the episode. The PR machine was hard at work last night. Women from earlier in the season chimed in. Chris Harrison was able to show fan engagement most incredibly, that some paid to put up anti Arie billboards, and other bought drinks for Becca by sending her money on Venmo. (Becca then said she'll donate the thousands of dollars to charity, and Harrison said the show would match it. What a public relations win!) Then Becca was announced as Bachelorette. Once again, ABC has a beloved lead for its hit reality show and viewers will tune in for next season. Jon: Arie had been without a personality for so long that it came as something of a relief that he finally secured one: villain. In truth, Arie did what many people have done. He made a poor choice, then tried to make it right. This is not radical stuff. It takes on extra dimension because it's the gasoline for a network television reality competition franchise, loved and reviled by millions. But while you can quibble with how he handled things, especially by not leaving the room when Becca persistently asked him to after he dumped her, he was or was presented as a reasonably stand up guy. Lindsey: But that's the thing with The Bachelor that gets to me. We learn so little about the people on the show, that it's hard to see why they even like each other beyond the physical. I loved when Arie asked Lauren a "tough question" about what she imagined a day in their life would look like outside of the show. She said they'd wake up and have coffee, walk their dogs, go to work, come home, make dinner and drink some wine. He agreed. What a unique life, so glad they found each other! If that's not a connection, I don't know what is! Carla: Early on, viewers saw Lauren say to Arie: "I know you want someone who has a flexible schedule, but what else are you looking for?" A flexible schedule? How romantic. Bonnie: I went into Monday night's episode expecting Arie to walk away single, based on his apparent indecision and the hyperbolic promos. But that quick turn from melodrama to "everything is fine!" repeats itself every season in some fashion, and we keep falling for it. Jon: By the end of the two night spectacle, Becca had been raised high and given a new chance at love; Arie had been redeemed, then erased; and Lauren was rescued from her couch and given a new, albeit imperfect, romantic fantasy. It was hard not to feel bad for Lauren last night not because she's choosing a life with Arie, but because her proposal came in rushed fashion, in front of a studio audience skeptical of her man, and with Becca in the green room, waiting to come back out and steal the narrative back. The innovation this season was the choice to split screen the breakup, and to present it without editing that's a nod to the intensity of the raw footage. In the just released book "Bachelor Nation," the journalist Amy Kaufman details the production and editing chicanery that goes into making the show's emotional arcs so effective.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
In Campaign Against Racism, Team Names Get New Scrutiny Guy Jones had been advocating for 21 long years, hoping for the day when Anderson High School, outside Cincinnati, would drop the nickname he found vulgar and insulting to his Native American heritage. A member of the Hunkpapa Lakota nation from the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota, he and three white Anderson students in 1999 sought to persuade the school board to change the nickname that "made me cringe every time I heard it." The school board voted down their proposal, and did so in 2003 and in 2018. But last week it finally relented and voted to erase the name for good, in part, Jones said, because of a wave of momentum fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement. "Things are changing," he said, "and I'm glad they are." The very next day, Jones heard more news that cheered him out of Washington, where for years the N.F.L. team that uses the same nickname, Redskins, had vowed never to change it. But in a surprise move, Daniel Snyder, the Washington owner, promised to conduct a "thorough review" of the name. With that, pressure mounted on other teams to respond. Within hours the Cleveland Indians vowed to engage with community and Native American leaders on the topic, too. Activists have waged a long and, at times, frustrating campaign to persuade teams to change names, logos and mascots. But suddenly, after so much resistance, a new willingness to reconsider long cherished names and logos at the professional, college and high school levels, is giving fresh impetus to change team names long considered untouchable. Some of the pressure is coming from corporate sponsors like Nike and FedEx, whose request for Washington to change the name preceded the team's announcement. Amazon, Target and Walmart have also moved to drop the team's merchandise. "It's happening in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and all that implies of Black people and Indigenous people in our country," said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American activist, who has been at the forefront of the movement to change the Washington team's name. "What's happening right now is such a broad swath of society." For decades, groups like these have appealed to professional sports teams, colleges and high schools to eliminate names and logos that they say are dehumanizing, disrespectful and racist. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. The results have been mixed, and resistance to change has been fierce, aided recently by President Trump, who scolded protesters in a recent tweet by saying the nicknames project strength and should not be changed. Raymond Wood II, a Native American and longtime Republican town councilman in Killingly, Conn., said he was not offended by the Washington nickname or the name of his hometown high school, the Killingly Redmen. "I doubt there was any malice in people's hearts when they formulated these teams and selected the imagery that they thought would best represent them," he said in a Facebook message. "If there was, it backfired." Citing arguments like that, holdouts have resisted calls to change, including the Atlanta Braves, the Chicago Blackhawks and the Kansas City Chiefs. The Braves and the Blackhawks both issued statements recently indicating they would not alter their names, but said they planned to work harder with Native American groups to promote awareness and respect. They also reiterated the common refrain of teams with Native names, that they honor the heritage of those peoples. "There is absolutely no evidence of that," countered Stephanie Fryberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a member of the Tulalip nation in Washington State. She recently published a study showing that about two thirds of Native Americans who frequently engage in cultural practices are offended by the names and logos, and also some of the behavior of fans of those teams. "When you use a person's identity in a sports domain," she said, "and you allow people to dress in red face and put on headdresses and dance and chant a Hollywood made up song that mocks Native tradition and culture, there is no way to call that honoring." Many of the people opposed to Washington's name believe it gives cover to a host of college and school teams that use it, too. But Anderson's vote could indicate that is cracking. In the days since Anderson's school board voted, 4 1, to abandon the moniker, news reports from around the country point to other schools considering dropping Native American mascots. More than 2,200 high schools use Native imagery in their school names and mascots, according to Mascot DB, a database of team names. That is 600 fewer than once existed a trend that was accelerated after a 2014 ruling by the U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board that voided the Redskins trademark as "disparaging of Native Americans." The ruling was later overturned. It is not only Native Americans names and imagery that cause offense. Some schools employ names and iconography celebrating the Confederacy, and with statues to Confederate generals toppling and Mississippi taking the Confederate bars off its state flag, school names could be next. Lee Davis High School in Mechanicsville, Va., is known as the Confederates, and a local N.A.A.C.P. chapter said it would revive an effort to change the name. Avi Hopkins, a Black running back who graduated in 1994, recalled his anguish when, after scoring touchdowns, cries of, "Go Confederates," would ring in his ears, a needling reminder that the school's name honored the pillars of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. "It really broke me in half," said Hopkins, who later played at the Virginia Military Institute. "I knew that my success was bringing a positive light to men who negatively impacted my ancestors." But much of the momentum to change mascots or team names has focused on Native American references, particularly the name the Washington team uses. It has defenders among schools that use it, too. Loudon High School near Knoxville, Tenn, is one. Jeff Harig, the football coach, said it was originally adopted to respectfully reflect the area's Cherokee Nation heritage and history. "I would like to think that we embody the positives of the Native American culture," he said. "So for me personally, I hope we can keep the Redskins name." In Bucks County, Pa., Neshaminy High School also goes by that nickname (one of its rivals is the Council Rock North Indians). In 2013 Donna Fann Boyle, who is Native American, filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, charging that the nickname was racist and encouraged harmful behaviors at the school, where her son graduated in 2016.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
Rolling Stone, a magazine that for decades helped shaped music and popular culture but now finds itself facing significant legal and economic challenges, has brought in an outside investor for the first time in its nearly 50 year history. BandLab Technologies, a Singapore based music company co founded and led by Meng Ru Kuok, the son of the Asian business magnate Kuok Khoon Hong, will take a 49 percent stake in Rolling Stone, forming a partnership with the magazine's parent, Wenner Media. Rolling Stone, founded by Jann S. Wenner in 1967, says the partnership is intended to help the magazine expand into new markets and bolster its brand internationally. "We really were looking for a strategic partner," Mr. Wenner's son Gus, who is currently the head of digital for Wenner Media, said in an interview. "This was kind of as strategic as I could possibly find because we have a shared vision and they're going to be extraordinarily additive as we continue to evolve and transform our business." He added: "This is purely a move and a partnership that is aimed at setting ourselves up with a plan and a strategy to be successful." As part of the deal, which was announced on Sunday, terms of which were not disclosed, the two companies will form a wholly owned subsidiary called Rolling Stone International that Mr. Kuok will lead from Singapore. The investment, however, comes as Wenner Media, which also publishes Us Weekly and Men's Journal, faces significant challenges that have raised questions about the fate of the company and Rolling Stone, in particular. Rolling Stone has been battling several lawsuits in connection with an article published two years ago about what it said was a gang rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia. The magazine later retracted the article, "A Rape on Campus," but pending litigation looms, along with any potential damages. Last week, a judge ruled that one of the lawsuits, filed in Virginia by Nicole P. Eramo, the associate dean of students at the university, could proceed to a jury trial, which is set to begin in mid October. The company also faces a separate lawsuit, filed by the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity against Rolling Stone and Wenner Media, which is in the early phase of discovery. Another suit, filed by three former fraternity members, was dismissed in June. Wenner Media also carries significant debt, which will be due in the coming years. Gus Wenner, 26, who some in the media industry speculate will soon take over for his father at the company, said there were no plans to discontinue the print version of Rolling Stone. (He declined to comment on whether he would replace his father.) But he said the emphasis was on continuing to expand the magazine's presence online. Its digital audience has increased; digital revenue, he said, has risen 90 percent in the last two to three years. "I think it's paramount for us to diversify the areas of business that we're in and not just be reliant on the publishing business, which is pretty volatile right now," he said. "The strategy to move forward and to evolve obviously doesn't involve investing in print and doubling down in that area, but it's an important part of who we are."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
Anna Sui at the Museum of Arts and Design, where she has a newly opened retrospective. "My parents said, 'Why would you want to be a dressmaker when you can be a doctor or lawyer?''' she recalled. Like some kind of industrious magpie, the designer Anna Sui has spent decades assiduously gathering up shiny oddments from the pop culture landscape and shaping them into a singular career in fashion design. Her deeply researched collections 84 of them to date exploit a welter of tweaked archetypes (surfer meets Kawai schoolgirl) and the giddy mash ups of incongruous archetypes (pirate encounters pre Raphaelite) that are her specialty. Though she has not, perhaps, radically altered the face of American fashion, she has become one of the industry's durable presences, a designer overdue for the fresh appraisal provided by "The World of Anna Sui," a retrospective that curators at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York adapted from a 2017 exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. On a recent morning, Ms. Sui walked a reporter through an exhibition of 75 looks and hundreds of related objects dresses, shoes, jewels, mood boards, wardrobe items from famous friends, videos and backdrops from her storied fashion shows drawn from an archive that Ms. Sui, 67, has maintained since arriving in New York from her hometown in Detroit nearly a half century ago. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. The retrospective opens with a photograph from the 1960s of you as a child visiting New York for a family wedding. While everyone else in the picture is focused on the bride, you're staring straight out of the frame. Your parents were first generation immigrants from China who met at school in Paris and immigrated to Michigan for your father to pursue a master's degree. How did they react to your plan? My parents said, "Why would you want to be a dressmaker when you can be a doctor or lawyer?" I had a baby sitter who read Seventeen. In the back of the magazine I discovered these ads for Parsons School of Design, and from that point on I geared my whole curriculum toward getting into Parsons. New York seemed so far away then. I would go once every summer and would get my one glimpse of what I thought was fashion. I'd visit the Biba boutique at Bergdorf Goodman, and it was the first time I'd ever seen all those incredible colors: dusty rose, charcoal, plum, teal murky colors that I'd never seen before. You have said that newsweeklies provided a cultural lifeline for you and used Life magazine pages to demonstrate your response to its reports on the "counterculture." I remember seeing an article on Mia Fonssagrives and Vicky Tiel doing the costumes for "What's New Pussycat?" and I was obsessed with the sketches they ran. Many years later I went back and read it again and realized that Mia was Irving Penn's stepdaughter. How did those early influences ultimately inform your work? In the opening section, there's a coat belonging to Baby Jane Holzer, who was a Warhol superstar and one of my idols who later became a close friend. I knew who Baby Jane was from Life. They ran a story about underground fashion and there she was in some incredible dress and the most incredible hair. Diana Vreeland loved her and gave her this column in Vogue where she would cover the new boutiques. That was Jane's assignment to shop. For the show, we borrowed this purple fur coat of hers that I'd seen in an exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida called "To Jane, Love Andy: Warhol's First Superstar." It's the coat she wore to the Frazier Ali fight. She wore it with a pair of Chelsea Cobbler boots and hot pants underneath. Jane was never the type to wear a plain mink coat. Steven photographed her and told me she was at the studio and for some reason invited me over. You mean the fashion photographer Steven Meisel? I've known Steven since we were both at Parsons School of Design. In those days, design students were not allowed to go to the school lunchroom because we weren't supposed to mingle with the art school riffraff. But I would sneak down, and Steven would be holding court. A friend was talking to him and mentioned that they were all going out dancing and that I should come, too. I went with my boyfriend to Tamburlaine and saw Steven with his entourage and he said, "Ditch the boyfriend. Come sit with us." Of course. I kept the friendship with Steven. In those days, I had an apartment in the city, and Steven grew up in Queens and was still in school, so my place became club central. And Keith Richards's girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, whose striped Lurex Biba pantsuit is in the show? I met Anita because my roommate at the time was Walter Lure. He was in that band The Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders, and they spent a lot of time in London. He knew Anita from London and when she was in New York she would hang out. I remember her telling me that if she didn't have the life she did, she would have become a fashion designer. Eventually she went to Central Saint Martins and we reconnected when she came to do an internship with Marc Jacobs . It seems that your friendship with Meisel had another dividend: access seemingly to every top model and new face. Even before I started doing shows, because I was friends with Steven, I knew Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. When the time came to do a show, Steven said Linda and Naomi will help you get all the girls. People by now know my association with Steven and he helps with the castings every season. We've gone through many phases the Belgians, the waifs, the Brazilians, the Russians. But nothing else ever had the electric effect the supermodels had. I can still recall gasp from the crowd when Naomi hit the runway in your fall 1992 show wearing chaps with nothing underneath but a thong. She also had a rose tattoo on her behind. It is cliche to say, but does New York feel different now from the city of your youth, when the fashion world was much smaller? It's the economics. I mean, No. 1, in the '70s, you could be poor. You could shop in a thrift shop and look like a movie star. People thought I only wore Saint Laurent for a while when he did the petticoats underneath fitted '40s jackets. I had a '40s jacket and I would get these bright petticoats in vintage stores. I got some from a place where you could bring a grocery bag and fill it with as much as you wanted for 5. Your shows have always drawn on music and you've known many of rock's more louche personnel the Stones, the New York Dolls, Billy Corgan and James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins. Did you live a rocker sort of life? Mick Jagger was my first men's wear customer. I met Keith through Anita. I used to go to the Dolls rehearsals. I was always really into rock 'n' roll, so I would see all these people and meet them, but I really never was into drugs or rock as a lifestyle. I was too determined. I had to get up in the morning. I couldn't indulge. When I was listening to the New York Dolls a lot, I was thinking about how everyone in those days wore black and white stripes and roses. So I used that by making a print with roses on black and white stripes. When I was listening to a lot of punk music, it seemed natural to use androgyny as part of a grunge collection. Is that the collection where you sent a man and a woman out in matching baby doll dresses? I was so caught up in that. Was it the cover of Spin or maybe the Face that had the famous Davis Sims image of Kurt Cobain in a dress? I was obsessed with that image. There was also another famous video of Billy and James of Smashing Pumpkins wearing '30s dresses on an ice cream truck. Those pictures don't look particularly shocking now. Were they at the time? Not really. It's funny but the show's curator told me that what shocked her is that visitors to the show think androgyny is a new concept. They'd never seen it before. We know better. You pay homage to many women Betsey Johnson, Norma Kamali, Zandra Rhodes, the Disney artist Mary Blair but do you think of yourself as a feminist? At all my first jobs, everyone was male. But then, little by little, women started getting head designer positions. They started moving out of the workrooms. I was lucky in that I was a product of my time and had these role models like Norma and Betsey to show me the way. The fact that women's liberation happened in the period when I was growing up made everything much more possible for me, but, no, I never considered myself a feminist. Still, I would not be the first person to see sexism in how long it took the industry to appreciate your work. How emotional was it to take this long retrospective view? For so many years, I never looked back. You don't have time when you're designing all these collections. And I found the sad thing about putting together the exhibition was that when I looked at all those clothes, what I thought about is how all these companies that made them are gone. The garment district has disappeared. There used to be so much within a couple of blocks of my office on 39th Street: the trimmings people, the buttons people, the zippers guy plus all the patternmakers and contractors. It was heartbreaking to see that all the fabrics we were using were made in America. We had the most incredible textile industry, and so much of it is gone. Didn't the garment industry also function as a creative resource? I used to walk around and ask the fabric stores to let me go into the basement to look for old stock. There was a company, Plitt Segal, that had been around since the 1940s. They made velvet, but it was very stiff. So I once asked the owner, Jules Segal, why he didn't sell velvet that was limp and soft like old fashioned velvet. "We call that coffin velvet," he said. "What we have to do is wash it." So I took some home and washed it in the washing machine. They still make it, though he's long gone. Did the internet replace all that? Yes and no. You can never replace the garment district. But for our last show, I wanted these anime wigs that I saw kids wearing online. We Googled them, and another whole world opened up. Through Feb. 23 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan; 212 299 7701, madmuseum.org.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
Any devotee of the television series "Sex and the City" knew who Manolo was and why Carrie happily blew thousands of dollars on his gorgeous shoes. Born in the Canary Islands to a Spanish mother and a Czech father, the acclaimed footwear designer Manolo Blahnik studied art and languages in Geneva before moving to Paris and working as a theater set designer. In 1970, the then editor in chief of American Vogue, Diana Vreeland, encouraged him to design shoes. Two hundred of his designs, shoes, boots and sketches go on display in Toronto, in a show called "Manolo Blahnik: The Art of Shoes," which opens May 16 at the Bata Shoe Museum. It's the exhibit's only North American visit, the final stop in a tour that included St. Petersburg, Milan, Madrid and Prague. The show runs until Jan. 6, 2019. Mr. Blahnik will be speaking at the museum on May 16. His colorful and exuberant designs include beads, feathers, lace and even semiprecious stones. His favorite materials are textiles especially silk, satin and taffeta. "I belong to the 18th century," he said. The following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Blahnik about his work, the show and the museums he likes to visit. How has the exhibition been received so far? The show at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg was the first one they've done focused on fashion and on shoes. I feel very proud of that, but was also nervous. An incredible amount of people came, old and young. They saw the shoes as objects, not as a shoe. I found them much more observant of the work than other Europeans. I was shocked, but also inspired to have a reaction like that. Russia really was the most interesting, as this kind of exhibition is unusual for them. They even wrote me poems in Cyrillic. Prague is a small, beautiful town, and I am also half Czech. The show in Madrid was very successful. On the first day, we had 3,500 visitors lining up. After all, Madrid is my city. As for Milan I work there and people really admire me there. Do you enjoy meeting the public at these shows? I do think I owe people this moment of contact. I like to meet people. I like to see their reaction. This is the only way to share with people what I do. To give them some pleasure. Every day should be fun in your work. Tell us about some of the designs in the show. The idea for the thigh high Rihanna boots came to me from a visit outside Paris. I saw some fishermen in the river with boots that high, so I did it in satin. I see something no one else does. The Ossie Clark shoes from 1971 are my favorite ivy green with ivy leaves going up the leg. It includes cherries, something I'm still doing. I love cherries! I put them everywhere. I do an incredible amount of flats. Sometimes a woman is more feminine in flat shoes. But high heels do have one advantage. It's a transformation, a piece of theater. You move differently. You sway. Galleries, museums, the world. I'm very curious. I'm a museum addict. It's like a drug to me. In New York, I do love the Met and MoMA, which is right next to our office. But my favorite, favorite, favorite is the British Museum. I love the huge rooms filled with Greek statues. What tools do you use? Camera? Instagram? I'm a visual person, so I remember what I see. I don't even do mood boards. I think social media is very, very dangerous for creative people now. The internet doesn't do anything for me. Most of the time it's confusing to see other people's work. It's too much. How has your work evolved over 45 years? If I think I've done a design before, immediately it's out. I try to edit myself when I see something I've done before. I might try using new materials, like titanium or PVC. I use all the new materials. I'm now using farmed crocodile from Louisiana. I love it! Which current shoe designers do you admire? I'm a victim of the old ways. I was distraught when the fashion designer Azzedine Alaia died. It's a very, very short list of designers. I've been trying to tell people that success in this world is not something quick. But Pierre Hardy that boy is incredible. I adore him!
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
So, here's the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It's actually good for America. Also, it's a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it's no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we'll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn't believe in science. From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we've gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we've been fearing. And the results aren't looking good. The story of the Trump pandemic response actually began several years ago. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump began cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading in turn to an 80 percent cut in the resources the agency devotes to global disease outbreaks. Trump also shut down the entire global health security unit of the National Security Council. Experts warned that these moves were exposing America to severe risks. "We'll leave the field open to microbes," declared Tom Frieden, a much admired former head of the C.D.C., more than two years ago. But the Trump administration has a preconceived notion about where national security threats come from basically, scary brown people and is hostile to science in general. So we entered the current crisis in an already weakened condition.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
More than a year ago, the New York City Parks Department inaugurated the program Parks Without Borders. The idea? An obvious one: There are thousands of forbidding, disused, gated corners, squares and parks in town. They should be opened up, made accessible, inviting and useful. The Parks Department asked New Yorkers to propose sites. In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers have laid the groundwork for giving away hundreds of millions of acres of federal land. And these last few days have reminded us that we express who we are, and what we believe, in public spaces, not just big ones like the National Mall. Every year, five million people visit the American Museum of Natural History in Theodore Roosevelt Park. The park stretches from 77th to 81st Streets, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Increasing numbers of pedestrians have made those blocks along Columbus with a Shake Shack serving as a de facto museum cafeteria, and a farmer's market during weekends among the busiest on the Upper West Side. The roughly acre size southwest quadrant of the park has long been gated and closed to the public. Around the time Parks Without Borders was announced, the museum unveiled plans for a large expansion facing Columbus. The expansion will take over a precious quarter acre of parkland near 79th Street. In return, I wrote back then, the museum ought to nudge the Parks Department and neighborhood representatives to unlock the closed area at Columbus and 77th Street and also offer to chip in for landscaping and maintenance. The area could get the same treatment as the north side of the park, which is a network of winding paths through gated lawns under pretty, old trees. In other words, add just a path and some benches, with the lawns fenced off for security and to keep costs down.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
Fascist people like to use the word to describe any politician they don't like on both sides of the aisle. Now it might seem like an exaggeration to call Trump a fascist. I mean, he's not calling for a genocide or imprisoning his own people without due process. But I want you to reflect for a moment on his words, on his political tactics on his rhetoric, if you will. I've devoted the last decade of my life to studying fascist propaganda. And if you use history and philosophy as a guide, it's easy to see parallels between Trump's words and those of the most reviled fascists in history. That scares me. And it should scare you, too. music We've flirted with fascism before. "They wore Hitler's uniforms, but they wrapped themselves in the American flag." But how are we seeing these images echoed in 21st century America? "Build that wall!" Well, the formula for fascism is surprisingly simple. And it gets repeated a lot. Italy and Germany, of course, but fascist movements are on the rise today in India, Myanmar, Hungary, Turkey, and right here in the United States. No matter where they come from, fascist politicians everywhere are cut from the same cloth. Fascism first takes root when politicians conjure up a faith in a mythic past a past supposedly destroyed by liberals, feminists and immigrants. For Mussolini, it was the Roman Empire. For Erdogan in Turkey, it's the Ottomans. Hungary's Viktor Orban rewrote the Constitution with the goal of "making Hungary great again" a line that sounded great to someone. "Did you ever hear this before? 'Make America great again.'" cheering and applause Fascists create an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a past that is racially pure, traditional and patriarchal. From Mussolini to Hitler to Erdogan, fascist leaders position themselves as father figures and strongmen. "I want to thank you for getting this country moving." "I can't thank you enough for the privilege that you've given me." "Greatest privilege of my life." As long as he and yes, it's always a he remains in power, everything is possible. Without him the whole system collapses. "I'll tell you what. If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor." Once you've got your mythic past, you need the next ingredient. Division, whether it's between Germans and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, citizens and foreigners, whites and blacks, fascists succeed by turning groups against each other. The Nazis said Jews had no value because they supposedly did no mental or physical work. In Myanmar, the Rohingya have been denounced as rapists and criminals, a line which will sound familiar to many Mexicans. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." When you divide, it's easier to control. Once fascism has taken root, it spreads through propaganda and, in particular, a kind of anti intellectualism. "They can make anything bad, because they are the fake, fake, disgusting news." Fascists attack the truth because truth is central to a free democracy. "It's somebody's version of the truth, not the truth." "Truth is truth. I don't mean to go " "No, it isn't truth! Truth isn't truth!" This environment creates a Petri dish for conspiracy theories. Have you seen this symbol at a Trump rally recently? It's a sign for a popular online conspiracy theory that the "deep state" is working to bring down Trump. It's not a million miles away from Viktor Orban's wild campaigns against a global Jewish conspiracy. With the truth under attack and lies running wild, no one can agree on what's true anymore. And fascists love it when that happens. You might think I'm trying to frighten you by making these parallels. And do you know what? I am. My parents survived the Holocaust. And my grandmother, in her memoir, wrote about how Jews in Germany didn't see the Nazi threat until it was too late. "In 1937, we were still able to leave the country," she wrote. "We could still live in our homes. We could still worship in our temples. We were in a ghetto. But the majority of our people were still alive." I want you to be scared, because if you're not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long, it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we're all in trouble.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
Class B office buildings are known for being old, no frills and off the beaten path. What they are usually not associated with is energy efficiency. That may be changing. In the last few years, a handful of those buildings in New York, in Hudson Square, the garment district and Times Square, have taken steps to shrink their carbon footprints, as their fancier Class A counterparts have done for years. While landlords of Class B buildings find it difficult to recoup what they spend on green features from their tenants, energy savings can be significant, analysts say. And with mounting pressure from city officials on landlords to make their buildings more energy efficient under the threat of possible punishment if they do not similar properties are expected to do the same soon, analysts add. "It took a long time for the market to shift, but it's happening," said Dana Schneider, an energy specialist and a senior vice president with the Jones Lang LaSalle commercial brokerage. APF Properties, a New York based firm focused on Class B buildings, recently completed the bulk of an eco friendly makeover of 28 West 44th Street, a 22 story, 370,000 square foot prewar building it owns with Prudential Real Estate Investors. Many of the improvements to the 1919 building, which for decades housed The New Yorker magazine near Fifth Avenue in Midtown, have received approval from multiple agencies. Putting in low flow toilets, for instance, has helped the building, which is also known as the Club Row Building, cut water use by 25 percent, according to APF. Motion sensors were added to hallways so lights shut off automatically. Those measures have helped the building receive high scores from the Energy Star program, which monitors utility use and is overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. Also, this summer, 28 West 44th Street received a rare gold level rating from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, or LEED, which is run by the U.S. Green Building Council. A point based system that mainly ranks various green retrofits, LEED liked that the building had replaced fluorescent bulbs with versions that consume less power. The gold rating, which is LEED's second highest behind the platinum rating and was made in the full building category, was also based on APF's turning a storage area in the lobby into a bicycle room, which contained 10 bikes on a recent afternoon. That custodial crews use nontoxic cleaning solvents when mopping the floors helped. Recycled paper products also counted, as did the Energy Star plaudits. Some critics say LEED ratings overstate green bona fides by assigning too many points for access to public transportation; that overweighting is especially problematic in Manhattan, they add, because so many buildings are close to subways anyway. The fact that most tenants commute to 28 West 44th Street without driving partly accounted for 16 out of 110 points. Berndt Perl, an APF managing member, has made other moves that were not required by LEED, but are likely to lower energy use, like replacing hinged doors in the lobby with a revolving door, so less heat escapes. Still, Class B buildings receiving any of the four LEED ratings, certified, silver, gold or platinum, number about a half dozen in the city compared with about 80 Class A buildings with some type of LEED ranking, according to the Building Council. Although there is no official distinction, Class A offices tend to be well designed on major streets with full services. Class B buildings are generally on side streets with fewer services, smaller tenants and declining rents Landlords have not always had strong financial incentives for green renovations, analysts say. Mr. Perl, who bought 28 West 44th Street from SL Green Realty Corporation in 2011 for 161 million, said he had spent 9 million on renovations, 1.5 million of it for environmental upgrades. But asking rents in that building, whose tenants include the City University of New York, have not really budged beyond 55 a square foot, he said. "Right now the kind of tenants we attract, small and medium sized, don't really care about paying more for LEED," said Mr. Perl. He has solar panels at his home in the Hamptons and uses solar power to heat his pool. "We do this because we believe it makes the world a better place," he said. In more prominent Class A properties, rents can reflect a premium, up to 15 percent, according to Ms. Schneider of Jones Lang LaSalle, who has been instrumental in the renovation of the Empire State Building. About a fifth of its 550 million has gone to green improvements, like insulating 6,514 windows. "A lot of times people think that it's hard to make these old buildings green, but they actually have the capability of being much more efficient than newer buildings" with large windows that may leak more heat, she said. Renovating offices does pose some singular problems. Ripping down walls can expose contaminants like lead and asbestos, said Richard Paradis, a director of the National Institute of Building Sciences, a nonprofit group that focuses on retrofit projects. And, removing ceiling panels to let in more daylight, another common goal, can result in rooms that are noisy, he said. "It's all a balance," Mr. Paradis said. Next year, the city will issue new standards for buildings to help them cut their emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The standards, which will be written by more than a dozen people from the real estate industry, including developers, engineers and architects, will function like a road map. Landlords will be given a set of phased goals, tailored to certain types of buildings, which will allow them to arrive at the 80 percent goal. Part of a push by Mayor Bill de Blasio to curb fossil fuel use, the plan seems to have more teeth than previous efforts, because the goals will be mandatory. And, the city will enforce them, possibly through the Department of Buildings, according to Daniel Zarrilli, director of the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which was formed this year. But Mr. Zarrilli added that it is much too soon to know if enforcement would include fines. Acknowledging the cost of such renovations, including for Class B landlords who may have less capital than their Class A counterparts, the mayor will also start programs like Retrofit Accelerator, which will offer technical assistance and advice on where to find financing. "We need to see the whole sector achieve these kinds of reductions," Mr. Zarrilli said. "This is a moral imperative."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Bill Mason and Sherri Rosen Mason are credentialed white liberals, having fought for 15 years to increase the diversity of the student body at the New Hampshire boarding school where he is the headmaster and she the director of admissions. But when their college aged son applies to Yale and is deferred and his best friend, whose father is black, gets in diversity suddenly becomes discrimination. Misbehavior ensues. That's the setup for "Admissions," a new play by Joshua Harmon ("Bad Jews," "Significant Other") that he describes as a satire of white privilege and white guilt. The satire is premised on the Masons' staunch belief in a good education, despite the evidence that their own son, who angrily decides to withdraw all his Ivy applications, may have learned the wrong lessons from his. At least five Off Broadway premieres this spring "Admissions" opens at Lincoln Center Theater on March 12 take up this theme, from several angles. In the wake of notable recent examples, including Dominique Morisseau's "Pipeline," Anna Deavere Smith's "Notes From the Field" and Julia Cho's "Office Hour," these new plays, all set in and around schools, question the idea that an education is universally and always positively transformative, rewarding any sacrifice or subterfuge entailed in getting there. That theme is addressed most directly in Lucy Thurber's "Transfers," which opens at MCC Theater on April 23. The play concerns two students Kristofer, who is Latino, and Clarence, who is black studying at a South Bronx community college in hopes of nabbing a scholarship to a top university. Everyone's assumption is that their efforts will be worth it should they succeed; "Transfers" is partly based on Ms. Thurber's own experience as a scholarship student at Sarah Lawrence. But "Transfers" also wonders whether success in such situations is always achievable. As "Pipeline" demonstrates, many elite schools are better at identifying diverse talent than at supporting it; cultural assumptions and ways of speaking can make a new environment a bad fit even if it isn't overtly hostile. "Transfers" considers the plight of students who, however intelligent, may not be "ready academically or socially," as Ms. Thurber puts it, for the education they've been taught to want. Still, Ms. Thurber is a true believer in the rebalancing effects of elite schooling: "The place where these problems get solved in our country is in education," she has said. A new play by that name "Education" is less sanguine. In this drama by Brian Dykstra, which opens at 59E59 Theaters on March 14, a high school senior is suspended for an art fair project that includes the burning of an American flag. His girlfriend is similarly taken to task for the "filthy" poem she performs at a slam. Both have good reason to question the values their education imparts, and because they see those values as an expression of society's immutable hypocrisy, they doubt that college will make any difference. For Bekka, the poet, school is just another required and hopeless step on the path of downward mobility: "Our parents, and their parents, they used everything up. They left us with jobs in retail." "Education" and "Admissions" (if not "Transfers") make it seem that every high school's required curriculum includes a course in cynicism. But in "This Flat Earth," by Lindsey Ferrentino, who won the Kesselring prize in 2015 for "Ugly Lies the Bone," the doubt and despair begin much earlier. In this case, the cynicism is clearly justified: Julie and Zander are 13 year olds stuck at home after a mass shooting has shut down their middle school. The focus of the play, which opens on April 9 at Playwrights Horizons, is their effort to understand the trauma; Julie is shocked to learn that the massacre is hardly an isolated event. But "This Flat Earth" also questions the value of the moral trade offs that parents make, even at lower levels of education, on behalf of their children. It turns out that Julie's father finagled to get his daughter into the "better" school, in a wealthier community, because the one for which she was properly zoned had no music program. Also, he says, "when I toured it, there was a fight in the hall." Ms. Ferrentino is asking a loaded question: How can we hope to deal with making schools good and fair if we can't even muster the political will to make them safe? That question, topical as it is in the United States, looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the students in "The Fall," a play devised by seven members of the Baxter Theater Center at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. This docudrama, opening at St. Ann's Warehouse on March 12, tells the true story of the 2015 student movement to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, one of the architects of apartheid, from its prominent and provocative perch on campus. As a protest play, "The Fall" is naturally pugnacious, and not just in depicting the fight against the university administration. Trenchantly, it pits the competing agendas of the different student factions against one another and also denounces the way the men in the movement recapitulate white dominance over blacks in their dealing with women and self defined queers. But one thing the students (and thus "The Fall") never question is the value of attending the school they are fighting so hard to reshape. A fissure in the movement arises when the medical students beg for permission, despite a general strike, to sit for final exams. It may be a long time before we see an American play that takes the value of such dedication to coursework for granted. Until then, a British work "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," opening on Broadway on April 22 will have to do. It begins as Harry's son Albus heads off to Hogwarts.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Medical literature has overstated the benefits of talk therapy for depression, in part because studies with poor results have rarely made it into journals, researchers reported Wednesday. Their analysis is the first effort to account for unpublished tests of such therapies. Treatments like cognitive behavior therapy and interpersonal therapy are indeed effective, the analysis found, but about 25 percent less so than previously thought. Doctors have long known that journal articles exaggerate the benefits of antidepressant drugs by about the same amount, and partly for the same reason a publication bias in favor of encouraging findings. The new review, in the journal PLOS One, should give doctors and patients a better sense of what to expect from various forms of talk therapy, experts said, if not settle long running debates in psychiatry about the relative merits of one treatment over another. Five million to six million Americans receive psychotherapy for depression each year, and many of them also take antidepressant drugs, surveys find. Most people find some relief by simply consulting a doctor regularly about the problem, experts said. Engaging in a course of well tested psychotherapy, according to the new analysis, gives them an added 20 percent chance of achieving an even more satisfying improvement, or lasting recovery. Before accounting for the unpublished research, that figure was closer to 30 percent, a difference that suggests that hundreds of thousands of patients are less likely to benefit. The new paper is the latest chapter in a broad retrenchment across science in which researchers are scrutinizing past results to weed out publication bias and other, more deliberate statistical manipulations. "We need to seriously consider publishing all completed studies," whether encouraging or not, said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. Other researchers cautioned that the analysis was hardly the final word on the effectiveness of psychotherapy. "The number of trials they looked at was fairly small, and the different psychotherapy approaches were all pooled together," said Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University. In the study, a research team led by Ellen Driessen of VU University in Amsterdam tracked down all the grants funded by the National Institutes of Health to test talk therapy for depression from 1972 to 2008. The team found 55, most of which used so called manualized approaches, in which therapist and patient use a standardized manual to guide the treatment. The most commonly studied of these are cognitive behavior therapy in which people learn to identify and defuse automatic, self defeating assumptions, like "I'm unlucky in love" or "I always choke" and interpersonal therapy, which focuses on reshaping how people interact with others. These studies typically have subjects engage in weekly, hourlong sessions with a therapist for three to four months. The researchers found that 13 of these funded studies were completed but never published, usually because those who did the trials did not think a finding of no benefit stood much chance of being published. The team contacted each of the 13 investigators originally paid to do the work and requested their data. Once that data was included with those from the other, published papers, the effectiveness of the therapies dropped significantly by about a quarter. "That seems to be the magic number, a quarter about the same as you see in the pharma trials" of antidepressants, said a co author, Dr. Erick Turner, an associate professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health Science University and the lead author of the 2008 paper detailing bias in those drug trials. The team did not have enough information about the original studies' designs to determine whether the authors massaged any data to make the treatment look better than it was, as happened in some of the drug trials. Had study designs been available, Dr. Turner said, the benefits of psychotherapy might have been lower. His co authors were Steven Hollon of Vanderbilt University, Claudi Bockting of the University of Groningen, Pim Cuijpers of VU University, and Dr. Driessen. The way to think about the results, Dr. Hollon said, is that antidepressant drugs and talk therapies are modestly effective, and the combination is better than either approach alone. But for those who do well or fully recover, "psychotherapy, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, seems to be most effective in cutting the risk for a relapse long term," Dr. Hollon said. The new report's findings did not come as a big surprise to many therapists who use talk therapy. "Depression is a tough disorder to treat, and it's very difficult also to judge treatments because the symptoms of the depression naturally wax and wane it's a moving target," Dr. Hofmann said. "There's a sense of desperation out there because we do need something new, and there's very little on the horizon."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (May 13 July 6). The Italian theatrical form commedia dell'arte, popular from the 16th century to the 18th century, introduced the mischievous Harlequin and the object of his affection, Columbine, whose father attempts to thwart their playful relationship. Marius Petipa made a ballet of their antics in 1900, and Alexei Ratmansky reimagined it, based on Petipa's notes, for Ballet Theater, where he is the artist in residence. Ratmansky's cheery "Harlequinade" made its debut last June, and now it kicks off the company's spring season with a week of performances. 212 362 6000, abt.org DANCE BROOKLYN at City Tech Theater (May 11, 7 p.m.). This annual celebration of Brooklyn based dance companies is a smorgasbord of global styles. Participants will include Something Positive Inc., which will contribute a dance reflecting an Afro Caribbean blend of African and French social styles; the Brooklyn Irish Dance Company, which will perform an excerpt from "A Celtic Christmas Story"; and Ninja Ballet, which fuses ballet and martial arts. Other artists will add salsa and belly dancing to the mix. This free event is presented by Purelements, an East Brooklyn arts organization and dance company that will do a work by Hollie Wright. dancebrooklyn.eventbrite.com SIMONE FORTI, STEVE PAXTON AND YVONNE RAINER at Dancespace Project (May 16 17, 8 p.m.). Forti, Paxton and Rainer first met in 1960 while studying under the modern dance pioneers Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. A few years later they forged another path, participating in the founding of Judson Dance Theater, which ushered dance into its postmodern phase. They have remained influential artists ever since, and all have written books. This event reunites them for performative readings of their material, illustrating an important narrative thread in the story of American dance. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org LA MAMA MOVES! DANCE FESTIVAL at La Mama's Ellen Stewart Theater (through May 26). This eclectic annual festival features local and global artists hailing from China, South Korea and Norway, among other countries, curated, as from the beginning, by Nicky Paraiso. This week, the choreographer Hari Krishnan, whose work draws on both queer theory and South Indian dance, presents four pieces that each dissect, satirize or subvert cultural stereotypes (Sunday, 7 p.m.; Monday, 3 p.m.). From Wednesday to May 19, Bobbi Jene Smith, a magnetic former member of the Batsheva Dance Company who now makes her own raw, mesmerizing work, offers "Lost Mountain," which she performs in along with 11 other musicians and dancers. 212 475 7710, lamama.org NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater (through June 2). For the first time, the work of City Ballet's founding choreographer, George Balanchine, and that of its current resident choreographer, Justin Peck, are on a program together (Friday, Tuesday and Thursday), cementing Peck's status as the heir apparent and the shaper of the company's modern identity. In between, spread over two shows and mixed in with other Balanchine classics, Peck's latest piece and new dances by Pam Tanowitz and Gianna Reisen enjoy a few encores. On Wednesday, Balanchine gets his own program that comprises the large scale "Brahms Schoenberg Quartet" and "Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3." 212 496 0600, nycballet.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. JODY OBERFELDER at the Flea Theater (May 15 18, 7 p.m.; through May 19). This week, Oberfelder concludes her trilogy examining the biological wonder and symbolic meanings of our bodies. In 2013, she focused on the heart in "4Chamber" and, in 2017, turned to the head in "The Brain Piece." Her latest, "Madame Ovary," explores gender and the anatomy of sex, using Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" as a point of reference to track how far we have and have not come in conceptualizing gender and its social role. Oberfelder's multimedia approach includes dance, film, spoken word and an original score by Missy Mazzoli. 212 226 0051, theflea.org PARSONS DANCE at the Joyce Theater (May 14 15, 7:30 p.m.; May 16 17, 8 p.m.; through May 26). In a review of Paul Taylor's "Runes," which had its premiere in 1975, the New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff called it "spellbinding." One of its performers, David Parsons, went on to form his own company and create dozens of attractive, athletic dances. For its two week residency at the Joyce, Parsons Dance will perform "Runes" in tribute to Taylor, who died in August. The program will also include Trey McIntyre's "Eight Women," which honors another recently deceased artist, Aretha Franklin; Parson's own "Nascimento"; and his enduring light trick dance, "Caught." 212 242 0800, joyce.org SUNDAYS ON BROADWAY at Weis Acres (May 12, 6 p.m.). Five years ago, Cathy Weis opened up her downtown loft for this intimate series of one off performances, readings and discussions by veteran artists and newer voices. This week, she curates the offering with Emily Climer. The participants are Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada, whose work explores the practice of physical communication; Kota Yamazaki, who performs a solo that references his recently completed "Darkness Odyssey" trilogy; and Doug LeCours, who does a duet with Anna Witenberg in which their bodies become atoms that attract, repel and collide. cathyweis.org VANGELINE THEATER at Theater for a New City (May 16 18, 8 p.m.; through May 19). Tatsumi Hijikata, a pioneer of the haunting postwar Japanese performance art butoh, once said, "Since the body itself perishes, it has a form. Butoh has another dimension." That idea of disappearing and tapping into another realm was a catalyst for "I'reIZ (Erasure)" by the New York based butoh artist Vangeline. In the hourlong solo, she attempts to render herself symbolically invisible so as to allow room for women who have been erased throughout history. The intention, she writes in an artist statement, is that they may then "come back and dance through me." 212 254 1109, theaterforthenewcity.net
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
FACE FORWARD The 2013 Ram 1500 offers an efficient new V 6 engine with an 8 speed automatic transmission, a new interior and other significant refinements. WHITEFIELD, N.H. Some latter day puritans contend that excess is a moral abomination and just plain wrong. In the case of the latest Ram 1500 pickup, they would be wrong. Excess is precisely why the revamped Ram is so good. The Ram 1500 was wholly redesigned for the 2009 model year, so the 2013 model was supposed to get what the auto industry calls a freshening. This typically involves a few small changes adding some chrome here or an extra doodad there. The real work goes into the news release, which usually seeks to redefine the common understanding of the word "new." But when the Chrysler Group approached the freshening of the 1500, reality disrupted the process. Market research indicated that fuel economy was becoming a bigger concern among truck buyers. So the product planners decided to install the 3.6 liter Pentastar V 6 engine that was already found in many of the company's vehicles, along with an 8 speed automatic transmission. Thus began a sequence of developmental dominoes in which one upgrade tumbled into another. For example, Michael Cairns, the chief engineer for Ram Truck, said his team realized that the air suspension of the Jeep Grand Cherokee would work on the 1500 pickup. That was added to the wish list. But the air suspension required a new frame, and one was developed. After looking at rivals like the Ford F 150 and mindful that a new Chevy Silverado would soon come to market the team decided the interior needed changing. Then electric power steering was added to improve fuel economy, and new tires and wheels. "When you add all those things up, it became pretty much a major program," Mr. Cairns said. The engineer said the package cost four or five times what would normally be spent on refreshments, although he politely declined to provide a dollar amount. He said he expected a challenge when he asked top executives including Sergio Marchionne, the Chrysler chief executive to spend the extra money. But the upgrades were approved, and they have substantially transformed the Ram truck that is now on sale. Like most full size pickups, it comes in a dizzying variety of cab sizes, bed lengths and trim levels, with names like Big Horn and Longhorn seemingly intended to stimulate cowboy fantasies. The least expensive version is 23,635 for a regular cab with two wheel drive, a 4.7 liter V 8 rated at 310 horsepower and a 6 speed automatic. But ticking off the option boxes can push the price past 50,000. Most of my time was spent in a four door Crew Cab SLT with part time 4 wheel drive and the Pentastar V 6 with the 8 speed automatic. Options pushed the 37,735 starting price to 42,835. Not surprisingly, considering the price, the cabin offered all the comforts of a well equipped sedan. The rear has 40 inches of legroom, almost as much as the front, which means two six foot adults will easily fit fore and aft. With bench seats in front and rear, six people could be carried. For carrying cargo inside, the bottom cushions of the rear seat fold up; unfortunately, the floor isn't flat, which makes stacking things a problem. When it comes to basic controls, the review is mixed. Instead of changing gears with a lever, there is a large dial on the dash. It is out of the way, easy to use and clever. But making the cabin warmer or cooler requires using small buttons that you have to seek out visually. There's also good news for those who want the four door Crew Cab but need a long 6 foot 4 cargo bed. Previously the Crew Cab came only with a 5 foot 7 bed. Indeed, it was. And over two weeks driving on Interstates and mountain roads, it was clear that the new Ram handles quite well, particularly for a truck with a curb weight of almost 5,200 pounds. The new electric power steering lacks feel, as is the case in most cars and trucks that use it. The weighting is also a bit inconsistent, getting a little lighter when the vehicle is turning. But it is predictable, and for a large pickup the Ram is surprisingly willing to head into a turn. Hard cornering on a rumpled surface like washboards doesn't make the rear skitter. The body also feels solid. Hitting a bump or pothole doesn't generate the quiver one might expect with a body on frame design. I also spent some time in a regular cab model with 2 wheel drive and a conventional suspension. That Ram was bouncier but rode reasonably well, although it couldn't match the air suspension. Three engines are available, including two V 8s; another choice, a 3 liter turbocharged diesel, arrives late this year. The V 8s include a 4.7 liter that makes 310 horsepower and 330 pound feet of torque. With a 6 speed automatic and 4 wheel drive, it is rated at 14 m.p.g. in town and 19 on the highway. But with the new V 6, the 4.7 is redundant and will be discontinued in March. The second V 8, a 5.7 liter Hemi, produces 395 horses and 407 pound feet. Mated to a 6 speed automatic, it is rated at 13/19 m.p.g. with 4 wheel drive. In the spring the Hemi will be available with the 8 speed. The Pentastar V 6, rated at 305 horsepower and 269 pound feet, carries a respectable fuel economy rating of 16/23 m.p.g. with 4 wheel drive. The V 6 and 8 speed make an impressive combination. While cruising at 55 m.p.h. that eighth gear lets the engine loaf at a drowsy 1,300 r.p.m. There's virtually no pause when you punch the pedal, and under hard acceleration the transmission will hold a gear until the engine speed nears the red line, prompting an upshift. The transmission was cleverly calibrated. While climbing a hill it will settle into a gear and hold it without second guessing itself and shifting up or down. The 8 speed can be shifted manually, with small buttons on the steering wheel, though paddles behind the wheel would be better. The standard towing capacity for my main test vehicle was 4,100 pounds; buying a rear axle with a different ratio (3.51) raises the capacity to 5,800 pounds. That compares with 6,550 pounds (and 8,600 pounds with the 3.51 gear ratio) for a comparably equipped truck with the 5.7 liter V 8 and the 8 speed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
Carlos Ghosn was long one of the most admired executives in the auto industry. He was hailed as a corporate savior when the French automaker Renault bought a stake in Nissan and dispatched him to Japan on a rescue mission. He built a thriving global alliance between the two companies, and for 12 years he led both simultaneously. "Carlos Ghosn did some great things," said Scott Smith, the owner of four Nissan franchises in Georgia. "He gave us a lot of good product. He was the Lee Iacocca of Europe." Mr. Ghosn's career was abruptly halted 14 months ago with his arrest in Japan on charges of financial wrongdoing. After an audacious escape from custody and a surreptitious trek to Lebanon, he declared that he was determined to restore his personal reputation. But however his legal troubles play out, there are growing questions about another aspect of his reputation: whether he left Nissan in good shape. Less than three years after Mr. Ghosn gave up the top job at Nissan, it has slipped into a deep slump. Revenue and profits are falling in markets around the world. Sales in the United States its most crucial market after China fell 10 percent in 2019, a staggering decline at a time when auto sales are at near record levels. "Almost nobody calls now and says, 'I want to buy a Nissan franchise,'" said Alan Haig, president of Haig Partners, which advises buyers and sellers of auto dealerships. "Carlos pushed too hard. He had very ambitious goals, and he pushed his managers to achieve them. He created a temporary situation that looked good for a while, but it was artificial." In an interview last week in Beirut, Mr. Ghosn said Nissan was doing fine when he stepped aside as chief executive three years ago, and he blamed his successor, Hiroto Saikawa, for the company's problems. "I think he's unfit to be C.E.O., particularly when he spent this time not taking responsibility for the situation in which the company was," Mr. Ghosn said. Mr. Ghosn, who was educated in France, started his career at the French tire maker Michelin, becoming head of its North America operations. He moved to Renault in 1996 as executive vice president and helped lead a turnaround. His skill at improving profitability earned him the nickname "Le Cost Killer." When Renault bought its stake in 1999, Nissan was near collapse. Mr. Ghosn slashed thousands of jobs, drawing criticism in a country not accustomed to mass layoffs, but Nissan quickly returned to profitability. In 2005 he was named C.E.O. of Renault as well, becoming the first person to head two Fortune Global 500 companies at once. By then, Nissan was often more profitable than Renault, although the French company remained the senior partner in the alliance. In 2011, as the industry was recovering from the deep recession of 2008 and 2009, Mr. Ghosn stood before hundreds of reporters in Yokohama and announced an ambitious plan for Nissan. Over the next eight years, he said, Nissan would raise its share of the global market to 8 percent, from 5.8 percent. He planned to do this by investing heavily in the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The United States market, where the economic recovery promised several years of rising auto sales, had a special role. There, he promised, Nissan's market share, including the Infiniti luxury brand, would rise to 10 percent by 2017. Dealers often sold cars at fire sale prices in the last days of the month to make it over the line. That irritated customers when they learned that a neighbor paid thousands of dollars less for the same car, some dealers said. Other dealers simply bought cars themselves, held them for a few months and then offered them as used cars. By the middle of the decade, many dealers were losing money, despite the robust economy, and looked to sell their franchises. The owner of a dealership in Framingham, Mass., simply turned out the lights and walked away, unable to find a buyer. AutoNation, the country's largest dealership group, had 21 Nissan franchises in 2014, and sold 10 of them by 2018, according to its annual reports. "Nissan was convinced that stair steps were the way to go, and we did not agree with this strategy for our business," said Marc Cannon, an AutoNation spokesman. It didn't help that Americans were gravitating strongly toward trucks and sport utility vehicles which produce bigger profits and away from sedans and compacts, which Nissan relies on for a large portion of sales. With the deadline for Mr. Ghosn's goal of 10 percent market share a few years away, Nissan's United States executives increasingly took aim at smaller dealers, imposing ever more demanding terms to ramp up sales. Inside Nissan, the effort was known as "Grow or Go." The company also began favoring a few large dealers, quietly agreeing to provide funding to them that was not offered to others nearby. In Coral Gables, Fla., Bernie Moreno had a confidential agreement calling for Nissan to pay him 4.4 million over several years to fund an opulent Infiniti dealership, he said. Nissan also agreed to give him 6.5 million more for two new Nissan dealerships he opened near Cleveland. Even with extra money from Nissan, Mr. Moreno eventually struggled. One month in 2018, Nissan raised the sales goal of his Infiniti store to 180 cars about twice as many as it would naturally sell. Without the old incentive scheme, Nissan dealers stopped offering bargain prices every month. "Customers had become trained to shop for the deal," Mr. Smith said. In the six month period ending Sept. 30, Nissan's operating income fell 85 percent from the same period a year before. In North America, profit declined 57 percent. In September, Mr. Saikawa resigned after an internal investigation found that he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars more than he was owed. The head of Nissan's China operations, Makoto Uchida, was named chief executive in October. He has vowed to focus on profits and installed a new management team in the United States. For all Nissan's troubles, Mr. Smith is determined to continue as a dealer. He said a turnaround would take time, but added, "I'm optimistic." Mr. Moreno, on the other hand, is giving up on selling cars, in large part because of his experience with Nissan. Over the past year, he has sold his two Nissan stores in Ohio and about a dozen dealerships of other brands. A deal to sell Infiniti of Coral Gables and a Buick GMC dealership in Ohio is expected to close in a few weeks, he said. "Then I'll be out of the auto business completely," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
When John Ashbery died last week at 90, many of his obituaries included photographs of a stout, distinguished looking white haired gentleman. Before becoming known as perhaps the premier American poet of the last half century, however, Mr. Ashbery embodied the poet as pin up, with his chiseled lips, undone shirts and lush mustache. "He was something of a looker, wasn't he?" said Susan M. Schultz, a professor at the University of Hawaii Manoa and the editor of "The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry" (1995). A photograph by Gerard Malanga, a longtime assistant and collaborator of Andy Warhol, shows the poet on a New York City sidewalk, with his sleeves rolled up, hands jammed in his pockets and the wind apparently playing with his thick locks. Mr. Ashbery struck a similarly studly pose for Gustavo Hoffman on the cover of "Three Poems" (Viking, 1972), leaning against a railing at the painter Robert Dash's place in Sagaponack, N.Y., with barns in the background. Ashbery as dorm poster culminated with the cover shot by the artist Darragh Park for the Penguin paperback edition of "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975). The poet stands in all his hunky glory, hips slightly cocked, windowpane shirt open to midchest. The tight slacks have no belt loops. Provocative author photos are nothing new. Truman Capote's first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (1948), created a stir as much for its suggestive Harold Halma dust jacket portrait of the young writer reclining on a chaise longue as for its contents. Mr. Ashbery took this approach to another level. "I'm laughing, because I'm thinking of those covers, especially 'Self Portrait,'" Ms. Schultz said. "I remember thinking how cheesy it looked. It reminded me of a cheap romance novel, like the kind you'd see near the checkout counter of a drugstore." Mr. Ashbery unbuttoned a bit more for a book jacket in 1975. It wasn't always thus. A preppy product of Deerfield and Harvard, Mr. Ashbery was buttoned down for years. "Ashbery, when I first knew him in 1967, would wear a tie and a jacket and he always looked very natty," said David Lehman, the general editor of the "Best American Poetry" series. "He liked J. Press. "But in the '70s, with the loosening up of styles and the newly emergent gay movement, that changed," Mr. Lehman said. Ashbery's look in that glamorous "Self Portrait" photo, Mr. Lehman said, "was after Stonewall. Gay men were out, without defensiveness and fear. In a way, he became more visibly and publicly who he was." The poet and collage artist Ian Ganassi, a student of Mr. Ashbery's at Brooklyn College, also found himself drawn to photos of the man. Mr. Ashbery in 1972. The setting is Sagaponack, N.Y. "I was very naive and didn't realize that he was gay until later on," Mr. Ganassi said. "I remember seeing those photos of him, and it was a very '70s look. But there was something more to it. "He was a very beautiful man," Mr. Ganassi said, "and I identify as heterosexual." Ms. Schultz said she found it curious that a poet whose output was often elusive and anything but confessional would project himself so boldly. "I'm struck by the tension between the work, which is so diffuse and uncentered, and the cover photographs, which are so centered," Ms. Schultz said. For Mr. Ganassi, Mr. Ashbery's physical forte was neither chest hair nor 'stache. It was the penetrating gaze, which registered strongly several times on the cover of the American Poetry Review. "His eyes just reinforced the feeling that there was something supernatural about his abilities," Mr. Ganassi said. "There was an aura about him."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
Alonzo King rehearsing with his company, Lines, in San Francisco. "Dancers dance who they are," Mr. King says. "You can see who's afraid." In his dual role of choreographer and teacher, Alonzo King is training the heart and the mind as well as the body. "You are presenting choices," he said in a recent telephone interview from San Francisco. That goes for his dancers, too. "What is the motive in your movement?" he continued. "Are you working with your left hand at the barre to get a job, or are you really trying to transform your life? Is there something that you want to bring to this art form that no one else has brought to it?" Such questions have informed Mr. King's dance philosophy since he founded the ballet company, Lines, in 1982. On Wednesday, the troupe appears at SummerStage in two of his works: "Sand," with music by the jazz artists Jason Moran and Charles Lloyd; and "Biophony," a collaboration with the natural soundscape artist Bernie Krause and the composer Richard Blackford. Born in Georgia to civil rights activist parents, Mr. King, who chooses not to give his age, was raised in Santa Barbara. "Wherever I looked," he said, "I could see the horizon. I could see ocean. I could see mountain." His training brought him to New York, where he attended the School of American Ballet and the Harkness School of Ballet, among others, before heading back to California to form Lines. Mr. King's teaching method and approach to dance have as much to do with energetic force as they do with plies and tendus. And his influence radiates out. Silas Farley, a member of the New York City Ballet, was 10 and a student at the North Carolina Theater School of Dance when Mr. King choreographed a ballet there and featured him in it. Mr. King introduced Mr. Farley to ballet as a world of ideas. They haven't formally worked together again, but Mr. Farley said he considered Mr. King "a mentor from a distance." On a recent trip to San Francisco, Mr. Farley, who teaches at the City Ballet affiliated School of American Ballet, paid a visit to Mr. King and watched him teach class. "His whole manner is very intentional, with deep streams of thought," Mr. Farley said. "There is nothing superficial, artificial, phony about anything he says, or the way he teaches or choreographs." Mr. Farley described how Mr. King taught a movement phrase to his students and had them repeat it until it was ingrained in their bodies: "He said: 'Now let go of your fancy plans. I don't want to see you thinking; I want to see you dancing.'" For Mr. King, getting to the essence is everything: Great movement is like great thought. "You look at dancers, and dancers dance who they are," Mr. King said. "You can't get away from it." Here are edited excerpts from a recent phone conversation with Mr. King. Did you discover dance through your mother? Yes. She took creative movement at university, and when I was a kid she would teach me stuff, and I loved it. It was a form of intimacy. I noticed that she moved different than other people. What was it about her dancing that was different? Why did you want to create a dance to natural sounds? What was fascinating to me about Bernie Krause's story is that he had this obsession with recording sound. He said that he was A.D.D., and in order to capture the sounds, he had to be perfectly still. What did that reveal to you? That was such a beautiful illustration of how when we fix our mind on something, all the gnats, flies, mosquitoes, worries, doubts and impediments really get pushed aside. He said that that work transformed him as a human being. And that's the same thing that dancers are doing or anyone who's serious about their life. I watched you teach an open class, and I found it to be both mystical and concrete. When you choreograph, do you create a similar atmosphere? To be really frank, that was a taste. It was different because outsiders were present? Laughs The kind of vulnerability and the kind of candor that happens with people who trust you and feel safe with you is for private spaces. But I do know that the way people use artists tells you what they feel about humanity. I can use dancers like Legos, but I believe that human beings are brilliant. Science tells us now that the human body is electromagnetic energy it is swirling in nonstop energy with billions of cells that are dying and being born in a second. That is mind boggling. That is just the body. The other thing is uniqueness and brilliance. I've never met a stupid person, but I've met people who were blocked. How does that relate to dancers? You don't want to use someone the same way all the time. It's unfair. They have to have a large diet and have a huge appetite. You trained in ballet from a very early age. Yes. I came to New York and was at practically every school that there was at full scholarship. Antonina Tumkovsky was an inspiration; she accepted me at the School of American Ballet. I saw her fighting for me. She made a big difference in my life. She saw something in you. How do you describe talent? Most people think that it is a facile body, but I think talent really has more to do with 10 character traits. Perseverance. Courage. Inspiration. Believing in yourself even when there is apparently no evidence. I love that last one. I'm going to write it on the wall. Laughs That's what you're looking at onstage. Like I said, dancers dance who they are. You can see who's afraid. You recently created a work for San Francisco Ballet. How do you bring your philosophy to dancers you're not so familiar with? You'll find that when you go and work with other companies that there are people who think just like you do, but they were keeping quiet. Laughs And there are people who are so tired of being used the same way again and again. So you look. You find your people.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
The Pearl Theater Company, which took the old fashioned approach of assembling a resident acting company to mount classic plays in increasingly expensive spaces in Manhattan, announced Wednesday that it had filed for bankruptcy and was closing after 33 years. The Off Broadway troupe's demise reflected both financial pressures faced by many small performing arts organizations these days, and a series of missteps that the Pearl had made. In recent years, as the company was buffeted by rising rents, it moved from its longtime home on St. Marks Place in the East Village to New York City Center Stage II in Midtown to its current home on West 42nd Street where executives signed a 20 year lease in 2012 on a theater that quickly proved unaffordable. "Artistic enterprises are live beasts, and everything that's live has a life span," Shepard Sobel, who founded the company in 1984 and led it until 2009, lamented in a telephone interview. "I'm not sure that this was a possible dream from the beginning." If struggles were always part of life at the Pearl, they grew increasingly dire in recent years. Large deficits became the norm. The company spent most of its already small endowment in 2012, depleting it to 28,066 from 241,354, to help with its moving and construction costs. And the costs of its new 42nd Street home were rising: the company's most recent annual report said its minimum lease payment would be 282,825 this year, growing to 329,317 in 2020.
0
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. After the nation's latest mass shootings, in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio, late night hosts on Monday excoriated Congress for inaction on gun control, devoting significant portions of their monologues to the issue. They found ways to inject humor into the subject, though thanks in large part to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has blocked legislation that would require background checks for gun buyers. "Over the weekend, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tripped at his house and broke his shoulder. On the bright side, it'll be harder for him to shrug off gun control." JIMMY FALLON "Now, there are two bipartisan background check bills that have passed the House but are being blocked by Senate majority leader and this month's centerfold of Corruption Monthly, Mitch McConnell." STEPHEN COLBERT "You can't put a price on human life, but it doesn't stop Mitch from trying." STEPHEN COLBERT "We're not going to solve America's gun problems in half an hour, but we'll probably do more than Congress." TREVOR NOAH "It's all well and good to offer thoughts and prayers, but sometimes you need shouts and swears." STEPHEN COLBERT In his speech about the shootings on Monday, President Trump suggested that violent video games were partly to blame. "If video games were so influential, they should make one about Congress called ' Expletive Do Something.'" SETH MEYERS "On the surface, that sounds like a pretty good argument. America has always had guns, America has always had evil, but mass shootings have only taken off over the past, what, 20 years? And what has been new in the past 20 years? Violent video games. Although, by that logic, anything that's been invented in the last 20 years could have contributed to mass shootings, like Crocs were invented over the last 20 years, and I know they inspire anger in me." TREVOR NOAH "I know it's crazy to take Trump's words seriously, but some people do. In fact, as we've learned, the mass shooter in El Paso left behind a manifesto that included the same phrases Trump uses every day 'fake news,' 'immigrant invasions.' In fact, the only reason you know it wasn't written by Trump is because the grammar was correct." TREVOR NOAH Trump's speech also included a call to condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. "I try my best every night, but you're still in office." STEPHEN COLBERT "This weekend's tragedy garnered so much attention that President Trump couldn't respond with his usual sad tweet. Instead, he had to come out and give a formal address to the nation this morning where he condemned white supremacy and domestic terrorism. Unfortunately, he offered condolences to the people of Toledo, which is not one of the cities that had a mass shooting. So that was basically the mass shooting equivalent of saying the wrong person's name in bed." TREVOR NOAH "And by the way, the word 'Toledo' wasn't even in the teleprompter. Somebody got this shot: It clearly says Texas and Ohio. Nice work, Don Burgundy. You're doing great." JIMMY KIMMEL "Wrong city, but don't worry, sir. It's not like Ohio's that important in presidential elections." STEPHEN COLBERT In his "Selfie Interview" segment, David Spade asked Tina Fey who would play her in a movie, and what popular film she'd never seen.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
Indoors, for Allison Janae Hamilton, is always a kind of compromise. She grew up in Florida first in Miami, attuned to the ocean and the Everglades, then in Tallahassee, with its exuberant tree cover, and where she enjoys kayaking in the haunting cypress swamps. Childhood summers were spent in western Tennessee, returning for planting and picking time on her maternal family's farm. Her multimedia art never strays far from her concern with the land, especially the Southern land, and its occupants, especially its black occupants. "Landscape is this incredibly beautiful plane that we get to live on," Ms. Hamilton said. "But it's also a plane that has been wielded by those in power in a very violent way." Her work has an unabashed pastoral quality. Yet every rustic setting where she stages her photography, every clip and sound in her video works, every artifact in her installations the fencing masks, the tambourines, the bundles of horsehair, the taxidermy alligators is present for a reason. Her aim is to manifest history: that of her family, the black South, and by this method, the nation. Ms. Hamilton, 34, is based in New York: She arrived here in 2006, fresh out of Florida State University (where her father, Leonard Hamilton, is the head basketball coach), and after a stint in fashion, began earning graduate degrees. Before receiving her M.F.A., from Columbia in 2017, she already had a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University, where she studied with the photography scholar Deborah Willis and wrote a dissertation on the carnivalesque in black visual culture. In the summer, she goes upstate weekly to ride horses. This year New York tightened its claim on her when she landed a spot in the Studio Museum in Harlem's artist in residence program, a prestigious incubator of black talent, alongside fellow residents Sable Elyse Smith and Tschabalala Self. But even as her star rises in the art world, Ms. Hamilton is determined to invest in her soul base, the South, and eventually buy her own land. "There's just more space," she said. "And in order for me to think about these issues, it's important for me to be there, and in the community." Recently, she explored the legacy of the turpentine industry that dominated the Southeast well into the 20th century, in which workers in backwoods camps, isolated and kept in debt by company scrip, tapped the pine trees for resins. Her research took her to abandoned camps in the forests of Florida and Georgia. "Pitch," her first museum solo exhibition, currently at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., through March, is titled for the resinous substance that shipbuilders used to make vessels watertight. She installed a deconstructed pine forest in a gallery of the old mill complex, with locally sourced 12 foot trunks, imposing and straight, set in twos and threes. The pine fragrance drifts through the gallery, along with the choral track, insistent and incantatory, of a video installation in a small walk in room. In it Ms. Hamilton, her face concealed by a beaked mask, rides a brown horse. Insects hover across swamp waters. An African American congregation worships in a country church. Elsewhere, plywood panels lean against walls, roughly painted in the manner of Southern yard art, with splotches, stars or lettering. Photographs place their subjects in vistas of forests, fields, cabins, dressed in vintage apparel. One is Ms. Hamilton's mother, masked and holding a pheasant. In another room, two taxidermy alligators bite their own tails, in the classic ouroboros motif; a silent row of fencing masks looks on, some adorned in feathers or beads, while spears decorated with horsehair line the wall. It makes for a visual language that both edges toward Southern Gothic and sets itself apart, with reminders of how different fates unfold in the same landscape, shaped by ancestral custom but also by stark hierarchies of race and class. The mystic references come from hoodoo, the knowledge of rural black healers, for whom hunting or cultivating are inextricably spiritual and economic. The pine trees express the beauty of a grove, but also the exploitation of land and labor. "It's always interesting when an artist builds a vocabulary, a set of tools, and is able to skillfully utilize it," said Larry Ossei Mensah, who curated "Pitch" with Susan Cross and who is now senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Ms. Hamilton's method, he said, is so original that he struggles to identify exact precursors. "There's a very clear line of sight," he added. "She has a clear sense of direction, which I think is refreshing." Hallie Ringle, the curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, and until recently assistant curator at the Studio Museum, said Ms. Hamilton's practice reminded her of the Chicago based painter Kerry James Marshall. "Maybe it's the richness of the composition, or the colors that she's tapping into," said Ms. Ringle, who selected Ms. Hamilton for "Fictions," the Studio Museum's showcase exhibition last year. It's an intriguing connection: the Chicago painter and the rural South mixed media artist, yet both invested in the spirit material of African American life. "Her installations are super smart," Ms. Ringle said. "They're really layered, and they unfold almost as paintings." In "Fictions," Ms. Hamilton showed "Foresta," a walk in installation that paired her signature objects the masks, the taxidermy forms with shimmering footage of swamp waters. The installation in "Pitch" is both similar and different. "I repeat some footage," she said. "I figure if you can have motifs that repeat in drawings or painting or objects, why can't video have that too? I like having a marker." On a recent afternoon, Ms. Hamilton's studio in the Studio Museum's temporary work space in Harlem, where it has taken up quarters during construction of its new building, was tidily arrayed with her tools. Alligator heads, agape and toothy, rested on a shelving unit beside antlers and pelts. Women in her family have all hunted, but Ms. Hamilton only shoots targets. "I'm not a good enough shot to give a clean death," she said. Her alligator skins come from friends who hunt for meat. "I try to get things sustainably that way." The artist, who favors a vintage casual look, from jeans and boots to fitted jackets and frills, fabricates the costumes that her portraiture subjects wear as she art directs them in the woods. Next to the sewing machine in the studio were confections in progress like a fur collar mounted with cloth roses. With her Mass MoCA exhibition up as well as an outdoor sculpture at Storm King, part of a collective show on climate change she is back in research mode, starting the process toward her residency exhibition in the spring. On her mind are hurricanes. This month, Ms. Hamilton watched from afar as Hurricane Michael walloped the north Florida coast and her home city. "Every hurricane season you feel more helpless being away," she said. Her attunement to the sting of these storms is partly a rural inheritance: "My grandmother can tell you everything about climate change," she said. But now her research takes her into the history of hurricanes from the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 to this year's Florence and Michael and their impact on black communities. She knows that after the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, which appears in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," at least 1,600 black migrant laborers were buried in mass graves archaeologists suspect many more. Katrina, a shaping event for society and politics today, had precedents. "My concern is which communities are more vulnerable," Ms. Hamilton said. "Which ones are given the least care, which ones are always on the wrong side of the levee; and how that relates to the history of power, and of the country."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
KANSAS CITY, Mo. When Kansas City failed to make the cut for the 2016 Republican National Convention, some officials chalked it up to politics. What wasn't to like? Over the last 25 years, 6 billon has poured into downtown to build an entertainment district, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Sprint Arena, Bartle Hall Convention Center expansions, housing and other amenities. But Michael Burke, a development lawyer and a former board member of the Kansas City Convention and Visitors Association, knew that the decision stemmed from a lack of downtown hotel rooms. It was an excuse that he had heard from other groups that passed on the city, and it was one that had helped drive away the National FFA Organization, once known as the Future Farmers of America, which had met in the city for 70 years until 1999. This summer, the City Council approved using public money to pay for half or more of a new 308 million, 800 room Hyatt convention center hotel. With expectations of a groundbreaking early next year and an opening in 2018, the hotel has already helped the city land a handful of new events in recent days, including the Shriners International 2020 convention. "We've had a great renaissance downtown," said Mr. Burke, who is part of the team developing the Hyatt. "Meeting planners come here and they love it. They say: 'Things are so much for the better. But where do my people stay?'" Kansas City is not the only place meeting planners are asking that question. From Seattle to Miami Beach, cities are chasing convention hotel development, typically of 600 to 1,200 rooms. The goal is to attract groups whose members will put money into the pockets of waitresses, bartenders, shopkeepers and cabdrivers as well as the public till. The 800 room Omni Nashville Hotel, the 1,175 room Marriott Marquis Washington, D.C., and the 1,012 room JW Marriott Austin in Texas have opened in the last couple of years, and convention hotel construction is either underway or about to start in Chicago, Portland and Houston. In Cleveland, which the Republicans chose for their 2016 convention, a Hilton is under construction. Strong news about the lodging industry and improving exhibition and trade show business are helping to drive the developments. Hotel occupancy nationwide hit an average of 73.5 percent in July, the highest level recorded by the lodging industry researcher STR, whose corporate headquarters are in Hendersonville, Tenn. Similarly, average revenue per available room, a measure of profitability, reached 93.61 in July, a year over year increase of 8.3 percent, according to STR. According to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research in Dallas, an organization that has tracked trade shows nationally since 2000, 68.9 million people attended exhibition events in 2014. That was up 12.8 percent from the bottom in 2009 and slightly above the previous peak attendance in 2006. The need to stay competitive is behind the buildup, too. That means not only boasting about ample room supply, but also simplifying the lives of meeting planners by giving them two or three lodging contracts instead of seven or eight. "Meeting planners are under pressure to get high attendance, so they want to make sure that attendees will be accommodated in big, new, nice hotels," said Lauro Ferroni, senior vice president and global head of research for the hotel and hospitality group at JLL, a real estate services firm in Chicago. "Luckily, we're in a growth cycle." With a few exceptions, public money is flowing into the convention hotels. Either local government authorities own the properties, for example, or private developers are tapping citywide occupancy or tourism related tax revenue, future property and sales taxes generated by the hotels' operations, and other sources. Such subsidies typically set off debate over whether public financing of hotels is a good policy. But cities that have invested heavily in convention centers and supporting amenities often to foster urban renewal have few alternatives if they want to stay on the radar of a group that selects its locations years in advance, says Tom Baker, corporate managing director for the hospitality group at Savills Studley, a real estate services firm in McLean, Va. "It becomes almost a dog chasing his tail: How do you keep up with the demands of the clients to ensure your spot in the rotation?" he said. "There need to be incentives that goose the returns for these projects, or they won't pencil out financially." Heywood T. Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, challenges the notion that convention centers contribute to urban economic development and criticizes a consulting industry that he considers far too optimistic when projecting the financial payoffs of convention centers and hotels. Among other questions, he wonders whether the demand exists to justify the amount of convention space in the country, which by his count increased to 71.2 million square feet in 2013 from 52.1 million square feet in 2000. Largely gleaning publicly available data and excluding local events like consumer shows, meetings and banquets, Mr. Sanders has tabulated attendance at individual convention centers over several years and generally has found demand to be flat or flagging. The nation's largest convention center, McCormick Place in Chicago, drew more than 1.5 million attendees in 2003, for example, and bottomed in 2011 at 769,000. In 2014, only about 882,000 attended events there, he said. He also cites struggling convention hotels like the 757 room Hilton Baltimore, a 300 million city owned project that opened in 2008. It reported a loss of 5.6 million in 2014, although bond issuance documents in 2006 forecast a 21.6 million profit. "We know that the amount of space is growing and that cities are adding hotels and other amenities to compete," said Mr. Sanders, author of "Convention Center Follies" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). "So if everybody is essentially doing the same thing, is anybody likely to get ahead?" Thomas A. Hazinski, a managing director for the convention consulting firm HVS in Chicago, argues that Mr. Sanders fails to consider nonconvention hotel demand, which varies from market to market. He added that Mr. Sanders's critique of the Hilton's performance in Baltimore versus projections, which were based on HVS's feasibility study, was skewed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
William Powhida, one of our most trenchant and acerbic political artists, used to work regularly as an art critic and basically still does, in a continuing series of brilliant text drawings produced over the past decade. Many of them, done in graphite and colored pencil, are trompe l'oeil images: sheets of crumpled notebook paper covered with handwritten lists and statements excoriating the art world as a gatekeeping money machine. The work is Unabomber crazy, very funny and depressingly on target. Recently, he has extended his compass to international politics, with pungent results, though in "William Powhida: After the Contemporary," which opens on Sunday, March 5, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., he returns to contemporary art the pretension, the money, the bloat in what promises to be a critical takedown geared to a larger nightmare of a political moment. (aldrichart.org)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. It's eerie how effective Juice WRLD's melancholy sing rapping feels when aligned with the aspirated chill of Ellie Goulding, a singer with a keen melodic instinct but not much vim. In this duet, they're well matched. Goulding's resentment is a little distant and processed, which is her wont, and Juice WRLD's is characteristically raw: "Tell me how I'm trash and you could easily replace me/Tell me that I'm strung out, wasted on the daily/Probably 'cause there's nobody around me numbing all my pain." JON CARAMANICA Of course she knows better. "You remind me of my past/That's why I know that this won't last," admits Julia Michaels, the songwriter who specializes in the self destructive pop bummer. On this song from her EP "Inner Monologue Part 2," her breathy voice bounces across acoustic guitar chords and a looping beat; with eyes open, she's "ready to be hurt again," wishing for the best while expecting the worst. PARELES The way Daniel Caesar sings his way through a lyric is signature and poignant: He shows up, is emotionally present, and as his voice trails off at the end of each line, he leaves a gut punch in his wake. Caesar just released his second album, "Case Study 01," which includes this duet with the R B star Brandy. She's a much more forceful singer than he is, so it's intriguing to hear her emulate his gestures in this tale of a connection that never quite takes, he sounds resigned, while she sounds like she's seething, but trying to keep it under control. CARAMANICA Vocal harmonies twist and turn, completely a cappella (overdubbed) at first, in "Receipts" as Josiah Wise a.k.a. serpentwithfeet ponders a series of grateful questions surrounding "Who taught you how to love me?" and Ty Dolla Sign poses even more. A fitful beat, a few piano chords and some strings pizzicato and sustained drift in and out. Although there's no rapping at all, the cadences and origami folded wordplay "chlorophyll" rhymes with "skills to steal" of hip hop thoroughly inform this song. PARELES Did you say something about punk, Jon? I'll be over here celebrating the return of rock with the Hives, the dapper Swedish band led by the charismatic, daring and always precise frontman Howlin' Pelle Almqvist. In case memories are foggy: the Hives' "Hate to Say I Told You So" joined the White Stripes' "Fell in Love With a Girl" and the Vines' "Get Free" as the backbone of many a rock 'n' roll dance party in the early 2000s. "Good Samaritan," half of a limited edition 7" out Friday on Jack White's Third Man Records, heralds the arrival of the band's first album since 2012, due later this year. The timing couldn't be better. GANZ Javier Limon, who has won a Latin Grammy as producer of the year, has worked with singers who draw on the vocal catch and cry of Moorish Iberian tradition, among them Buika from Spain, rooted in flamenco, and Mariza from Portugal, rooted in fado. He chose Nella, a Venezuelan singer living in New York who can convey flamenco tension even in a near whisper, to perform a full album of his own songs. They are poetic outpourings of longing and resolve accompanied mostly by pristine acoustic picking, with Iberian and Latin American underpinnings. The title song, "Voy" ("I Go"), is about leaving everything behind; there's proud determination behind its delicacy. PARELES On his new album, "Antidote," Chick Corea revisits the celebratory vibe and some of the repertoire from "My Spanish Heart," his 1976 love letter to the traditional sounds of Spain: classical, flamenco and Afro Latin music. He originally recorded "Duende" for a different album, but this 10 minute long, suite like rendering underlines the tune's Iberian angles, particularly thanks to Corea's zipping, two handed piano runs and the strutting waltz rhythm carried off by the drummer Marcus Gilmore, sounding at once punctilious and free. RUSSONELLO Emily Sprague moved to Los Angeles, leaving Florist's other two members in New York, and recorded her latest songs by herself. The result is the straightforwardly titled album, "Emily Alone," due in July. "Time Is a Dark Feeling" meditates on a separation from "somebody you knew and now you don't," with a bedroom recording quietude, cycling through three picked chords with occasional ghostly doublings of voice and guitar. "These are the days like the deepest caves you would never dare to descend into," Sprague sings, but somehow she's consoled. PARELES This joyful ballad is a highlight from Ibrahim's songbook, and he makes it the centerpiece of his latest release, "The Balance." Devoted to his late wife, the vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin, it was originally recorded for the pianist's classic album "Water from an Ancient Well," but here it receives a loving restoration at the hands of Ekaya, his current septet. The alto saxophonist Cleave Guyton expertly fills the role once reserved for Carlos Ward, building a solo of praise that spirals upward. At the end he never returns to the melody; instead his saxophone just glides into the horizon: a gentle wail, then a warble, then a stealing away. RUSSONELLO
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Aaron Mattocks, a Bessie Award nominated dancer and producer who has worked with the Mark Morris Dance Group and Big Dance Theater, will be the Joyce Theater's next director of programming, the organization announced on Thursday. Mr. Mattocks will start on Feb. 1 and succeeds Martin Wechsler, who led the theater's programming for 22 years before stepping down at the end of last year. "After an extensive search that produced several wonderfully talented candidates, I am extremely confident that we have identified the best person for the position," Linda Shelton, the Joyce's executive director, said in a statement. "Aaron's multilayered background as a dancer, artist and administrator is sure to enhance our programming on many levels." Mr. Mattocks is the executive director of Big Dance Theater, the troupe led by the artistic directors Annie B Parson and Paul Lazar. He has also worked with Ms. Parson on her choreography for the film "Ricki and the Flash," starring Meryl Streep. He is the producing director for Pam Tanowitz and, from 2002 to 2010, was the company and general manager of Mark Morris Dance Group.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
Some 26,000 women in the United States give birth to a stillborn child each year. It's a harrowing experience for parents, and many eventually want to know what went wrong, in part to avoid going through a similar experience in the future. But in the days after delivery, when tests to search for a cause must be conducted, doctors are often hesitant to suggest them, and grief stricken parents often reluctant to permit them. A rigorous study released on Thursday found that two tests are particularly effective in determining the cause of a stillbirth, a death of a fetus at or after 20 weeks of gestation. An examination of the placenta helped find a cause in about two thirds of stillbirths, and a fetal autopsy helped in roughly 40 percent of cases, researchers reported. Genetic testing was the third most useful test, helping to pinpoint a cause 12 percent of the time. "These tests have an impact, and now there's more of a scientific rationale for their use," said Dr. Emily S. Miller, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University who was not involved with the study. She predicted that this critical new data would not only persuade more obstetrician gynecologists that placental testing "is something we really need to recommend," but also help convince bereaved parents that follow up testing is "worthwhile." In some cases, knowing the cause of a stillbirth can help to guide management of subsequent pregnancies. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has long recommended a slew of possible tests after stillbirths, but this study, published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, is the first nationwide attempt to calculate the relative utility of each. Researchers analyzed 512 stillbirths from 2006 to 2008 from 59 hospitals in five states: Utah, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Georgia and Texas. The cases are part of second analysis of a study by the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network, a group funded by the National Institutes of Health that aims to improve stillbirth reporting and to pinpoint its causes. That network of researchers had previously determined that complications during the birth process, including preterm labor and premature rupture of the amniotic sac, accounted for 30 percent of stillbirths. Before labor, placental problems were the most common cause of stillbirth, accounting for roughly a quarter of cases. Genetic conditions or birth defects were responsible for about 14 percent of stillbirths, infection for 13 percent and umbilical cord issues another 10 percent. Researchers defined whether a test was useful if it helped establish a probable or possible cause, or if it ruled out a possible cause. A detailed evaluation of the placenta is not always done after stillbirth because a perinatal pathologist is not available or a physician may not send it for analysis, experts said. And prior studies have estimated that fewer than half of stillbirths are evaluated by autopsy. Some of that reflects parents' reluctance. "People are angry, upset, and they feel like it won't make a difference," said Dr. Robert Silver, the interim chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center and the study's senior author. Some parents have cultural objections to autopsy, or think it's God's will that they suffer a loss, or they worry unnecessarily that the body won't be back for burial in a timely fashion, he said. Physicians, meanwhile, also often struggle to have that difficult bedside conversation with grieving parents. "It's uncomfortable," said Dr. Silver. "Doctors just want to run away," he said, but "it's worth working through any reservation they may have." Several experts said the very act of trying to find a cause can bring emotional healing to some parents, even if no cause is ultimately determined. "Patients often come back after a loss wanting to know what their recurrence risk is," said Dr. Kathryn Gray, a high risk obstetrician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who participates in reviews of stillbirth cases. "There's a lot of anxiety." Many parents don't realize, however, that determining the risk of recurrence often relies heavily on tests like placental examination that must be done soon after delivery. For women who had high blood pressure during their pregnancies, for example, placental examination helped determine a cause in 90 percent of cases; autopsy was able to pinpoint a cause in about half of such cases. Autopsy was particularly helpful when stillbirth occurred at early gestational ages, the study found, often revealing evidence of sepsis, or body wide infection, in women who had had their membranes rupture preterm and pre labor, or in women whose membranes were inflamed by a bacterial infection. In some cases, knowing a probable cause can help guide a patient's care in future pregnancies. If a baby is small, for example, the mother can be tested for so called "antiphospholipid" antibodies, which can indicate a problem with the maternal immune system. Then, Dr. Silver said, "Treatment in the next pregnancy may improve outcome." Another example: If a baby has abnormal features and an autopsy reveals birth defects and genetic test shows Trisomy 18, a common chromosomal problem, he said, "Genetic testing next time may be useful." Despite the tests, some stillbirths remain unexplained. "It's frustrating," Dr. Miller said. But, she added: "Feeling like we are doing everything we can to understand why can bring emotional closure." Two years ago, Dr. Eleni Michailidis, 40, delivered a stillborn son, Alexander, at 38 weeks; she recounted her story in an oral history to The New York Times in 2015.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Well
In my high school's production of "The Odd Couple," I played Roy, one of slobby Oscar Madison's poker buddies. For the costume, my mother let me pick from among my father's second best suits and slightly frayed dress shirts, which worked for the character (I grandly believed) because Roy was an accountant and my father was a banker. No matter that I had to hitch the trousers with a belt and suspenders to make them stay up; I still got my laughs. "His refrigerator's been broken for two weeks," ran one of my lines. "I saw milk standing in there that wasn't even in the bottle." Pow! The play was surefire. That was in 1975; it had not taken long for "The Odd Couple" to percolate through the soil of American culture from its 1965 premiere, to the 1968 movie adaptation, to the 1970 ABC sitcom and, in a final burst of glory, to Harriton High. By then its author, Neil Simon, was surefire too: In 1966 he had four hit shows on Broadway at once. His domination of the field would continue for another 25 years, through "Lost in Yonkers" in 1991, making him the most successful American comic playwright ever and, for lack of much competition, probably the greatest. But Mr. Simon, who died Sunday at 91, didn't know he was standing directly over a fault in American culture, one that even as he hit his stride started gapping and would eventually pull him down. Until then, he reliably provided the pleasure of exaggerated self recognition, reflecting life but with palpable structure and better punch lines. In the theater, the shared assumptions between the playwright and his very homogeneous late century audience largely white and urban, often Jewish or at least Jewish adjacent had the redoubling effect necessary to raucous comedy. With expert actors (and his plays attracted the best: Maureen Stapleton, Walter Matthau, Nathan Lane, George C. Scott, Linda Lavin, Irene Worth and Mercedes Ruehl) those shared assumptions came to seem like common ground. Only it wasn't really common ground. The initial bloom of Mr. Simon's success soon soured, at least for critics. In the late '60s and early '70s, as independent films were diversifying their outlook and shaking off the formulas of Hollywood storytelling, Broadway boulevard comedies like "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" and "California Suite" tales of the befuddled nouveau riche in a new world began to look mass produced and middlebrow. Mr. Simon had a seismograph's sensitivity to criticism, but did not seem to understand the change in the environment. He thought that the diminishing reputation of his plays was a response to their continued commercial success. He tried to adapt to the new expectations, aiming highbrow but missing big with clunkers based on Chekhov ("The Good Doctor") and the Book of Job ("God's Favorite"). It was autobiography and the darkening of his palette that renewed him. The 1980s trilogy of "Brighton Beach Memoirs," "Biloxi Blues" and "Broadway Bound" were commercial and critical successes; "Lost in Yonkers" won the Pulitzer Prize. The strengths of those plays are undeniable, yet to me they seem like transitional works that never transitioned anywhere. They come off as Depression dramas to which someone has added an intermittent and implausible laugh track. I prefer the early plays. That's in part because they literally don't write them like that anymore. The increasing premium critics have put on seriousness as well as the fractionalization of the audience into clans with little in common have almost wiped out the form; the last successful Simonesque comedy on Broadway was Larry David's "Fish in the Dark," a one off. But I like those early works "The Odd Couple" and also "Plaza Suite" and "The Sunshine Boys," among others because even though they are comedies, they are coherent as drama. The trick was structure: Mr. Simon's sense of the situations he devised was so clear he could write boffo gags that did not seem to come from him, but rather from the character and conflict. Sometimes, in the way that can happen when writers momentarily grab the tail of the zeitgeist, the laughs were even prescient. This was especially true in plays that addressed, inadvertently or not, the shifting gender roles and politics of the Ms. Generation of feminists, as experienced by slobs who didn't know what hit them. When Roy complains about Oscar Madison's refrigerator he is talking about more than cleanliness. He is talking about the inadequacy of men. Remember that "The Odd Couple" concerns two divorces Oscar, a sportswriter, and a spectacularly fussy newsman, Felix Ungar who wind up sharing an apartment miserably. It's a play about the confusion and anger of men who can't live with women or, apparently, without them. They have no way to see themselves for what they are dinosaurs and neither does the play, whose only women characters are a pair of twittery English sisters whom Oscar and Felix attempt to double date. Yet in all its unreconstructed old school masculinity, "The Odd Couple" has integrity (making its laughs feel natural) and pathos (making its laughs feel meaningful). Same with Mr. Simon's other comedies of the period. They may be unjust to the harridans, simps and playthings he stocks them with but they tell a real story of male collapse that was relevant to the culture at the time they were first produced, and might still hold up better than the later, more "serious" works. I think I understood that back in high school when, putting on my father's clothes, I saw how poorly they fit. These kinds of men were already under siege, as everyone in "The Odd Couple" sensed without saying so. Which somehow made the laughs even bigger.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
SAN DIEGO Aaron Boone, the Yankees manager, was settling into the visiting manager's office at Petco Park on Thursday hours before the team's do or die Game 4 in their American League division series against the Tampa Bay Rays when pitcher Gerrit Cole walked by. Boone said he stopped Cole, the team's ace, and the two locked eyes. Before anything more could be said about Cole potentially starting on short rest for the first time in his career the following day, Boone said Cole declared, "Just give me the ball." Thanks to a 5 1 win over the top seeded Rays later in the day, the fifth seeded Yankees can do exactly that on Friday: They will give Cole the ball in their biggest game of the year, a Game 5 against the division rival Rays that will determine who advances to face the reviled Houston Astros, who are making their fourth straight appearance in the A.L. Championship Series. "You always want to be out there in the big moment," said Cole, whom the Yankees signed to a record nine year 324 million contract with October glory in mind. "Either team would have liked to have won this series before Game 5, but, hey, we're here and it's part of the path of where we ultimately want to get to." The Yankees pulled their season back from the brink on Thursday thanks to four stout innings from Jordan Montgomery, their fifth best starting pitcher; five scoreless innings from their three most talented relievers, Chad Green, Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman; and home runs from Luke Voit and Gleyber Torres. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. It was the Yankees' best all around performance since Game 1 on Monday, when Cole guided them to a victory with six solid innings. He gets a second shot against the Rays, but this time on just three days of rest. "If we're going to have somebody out there, I want it to be him," Montgomery said of Cole. With the Rays deploying an opener, Ryan Thompson, in Game 4, the Yankees took a 2 0 lead in the second inning with a solo blast by Voit who led the major leagues with 22 home runs during the regular season but had none in his playoff career before Thursday and then a sacrifice fly by D.J. LeMahieu. "We needed that fiery 'Get the boys going' tonight," Voit said. "I knew I needed to step up. I had been pretty dreadful this series." Montgomery, who had been eagerly awaiting his first career postseason start, ran into trouble in the third and fourth innings, but escaped with only one run allowed on a groundout by Brandon Lowe with the bases loaded. "I would have loved for 30,000 fans to be in the stands," said Montgomery, who was making his first start since Sept. 24. "But with the season being on the line, this team has got more fight." The Yankees pulled away from the Rays in the sixth inning when Torres smashed a ball 410 feet into the upper deck of the Western Metal Supply Co. building that forms part of left field at Petco Park. The two run blast from Torres, 23, gave the Yankees a 4 1 lead. The only younger Yankee to hit a home run in a postseason elimination game was Mickey Mantle, then 20, during the 1952 World Series. "We were really confident tonight," Torres said. "We never felt panic." Prepared to turn to the bullpen early if Montgomery was struggling, Boone pieced together the final five innings with two from Green, one and two thirds from Britton and one and a third from Chapman. All of those relievers may be called upon again on Friday, as the Yankees hope to get 27 outs from their best pitchers with the season on the line. "We knew this was going to be a crazy and suspenseful series," Voit said. "We're up for the challenge no matter what happens." Asked how the Yankees felt heading into Game 5, the always blunt Voit said, "We're going to win it." Boone was more understated: "To be able to hand the ball to probably the best pitcher in the game, there's comfort in that." Since Game 1, Cole said, he had been preparing to start Game 5 if there was one, and didn't need anyone to tell him to do so. But he said Boone smiled at him after Game 4 was over and told him he would officially start the next day.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
An Upper East Side gallery owner has acquired the 71st floor of the Midtown tower 432 Park Avenue. Hillel Nahmad, the scion of a powerful art family, bought two half floor penthouses there through a limited liability company, paying a total of 60 million, according to property records: 34.8 million for unit 71B and 25.25 million for 71A. He is expected to combine the two units. The sales were the most expensive closings for the month of June in New York City. Mr. Nahmad, who is known as Helly and is the founder of the Helly Nahmad Gallery on Madison Avenue, already owns the entire 51st floor of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the result of several purchases made over the past couple of decades. Four years ago, he was confined to less glamorous quarters when he served five months of a one year sentence in a federal prison after pleading guilty to financing an illegal gambling operation. There were several other noteworthy transactions throughout the city during June. On the Upper East Side, another art dealer bought a full floor co op on 79th Street owned by Laurence D. Fink, the chief executive and chairman of the investment firm BlackRock. Jack Welch, the former chief executive and chairman of General Electric, purchased a Fifth Avenue home as he awaited the sale of a larger apartment at One Beacon Court on East 58th Street. The broadcast journalist Katie Couric also sold a co op, on Park Avenue. And the estate of the noted writer and editor Jean Stein sold her Gracie Square duplex, where Ms. Stein jumped to her death last year. On the Upper West Side, the renowned architect Cesar Pelli sold his apartment at the San Remo, and a few blocks away, Philip I. Kent, the former chief executive of Turner Broadcasting System, sold a condominium on West 57th Street.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
PARIS A few years back, I asked Robert A. Lutz, who was then vice chairman of General Motors, why the auto industry seemed slow to ditch old fashioned gasoline engine technology in favor of ideas about exciting new means of propulsion like electric motors. "I believe the old internal combustion engine still has a few tricks up its sleeve," he said. "Some big improvements big leaps forward in efficiency could be ahead." One of those "tricks" may have surfaced here at the 2016 Paris Motor Show. The technology, displayed by Nissan's Infiniti luxury brand and called VC Turbo, would make it possible for the first time in a production ready vehicle to vary the compression ratio in the engine's combustion chambers while the car is being driven. So what? the layperson may ask. It matters because the compression ratio the relationship between the smallest and largest volume in an engine cylinder during the piston stroke is among the factors that determine the fuel efficiency and the power of an internal combustion motor. A lower compression ratio is desirable when the goal is to use less fuel and to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. A higher ratio is what you want when the purpose is to drive fast, temporarily ignoring fuel economy and environmental concerns. "The ability to vary an engine's compression ratio has been a holy grail quest of engine engineers for decades," said Frank Markus, an automotive engineer and technical editor at Motor Trend magazine. Mr. Markus is among those who say the new technology, if the cost comes down below luxury car levels, could help the auto industry meet its fuel economy and emissions targets in coming years without necessarily sacrificing engine performance. Infiniti demonstrated VC Turbo technology here in a 2.0 liter turbocharged four cylinder engine on display. (Here's a video rendering of the inner workings.) Alongside the engine was a muscular looking QX Sport Inspiration S.U.V. concept vehicle that was also on display here. Infiniti said the S.U.V. could be the first to come equipped with the new engine, in a production version scheduled to go on sale in 2018. The VC part of its nomenclature refers to variable compression. In today's fixed compression engines the most common ratios are in the range of 8:1 to 14:1 although they might go as low as 6:1 for economy cars, or up to 17:1 for Formula 1 beasts. Heretofore, engine designers have had to choose what kind of performance they wanted from an engine. Then a design has been created around that ratio. That is why some vehicles are racecars, while others are grocery getters. In the VC Turbo technology, the engine is designed with articulating, multilink moving parts to facilitate operation at different variable compression ratios, depending on throttle demand. In the case of the Infiniti engine, this is a range of 8:1 to 14:1 (and every ratio in between). The variable design gives the engine management system a choice of the optimal range of operation at all times. This explanation is a huge oversimplification. But the point is easy to grasp: power when you need it, and economy when you don't. Besides offering the range of performance, the VC Turbo technology fits in a smaller engine size just two liters but it churns out about as much power as Infiniti's own much larger 3.5 liter V6. Because it is smaller, it also saves weight: The 2.0 turbo here is 25 kilos, or 55 pounds, lighter than the V6. That is the type of weight savings that auto engineers dream of. Many advances in vehicle weight are measured in mere ounces. Infiniti says the little 2.0 liter turbo here, which produces 268 horsepower and 288 foot pounds of torque, is 27 percent more efficient in terms of fuel economy and operation than a V 6 of similar output. That would be the equivalent of a gasoline engine that gets 40 miles to the gallon improving to a 62 m.p.g. rating. That is efficiency equivalent to a similarly powered four cylinder diesel engine, Infiniti said, although with extremely low emissions especially compared with soot spewing diesels. More than 300 key patents, and many more lesser ones, have been granted over the two decades that it took to develop this engine, Infiniti said. The company said final performance and durability testing was carried out in cooperation with the Renault and Infiniti Red Bull F1 teams, using their rigorous testing regimens. The chief engineer for the Infiniti VC Turbo project, Shinichi Kiga, was not sure how to define it when asked whether the VC Turbo was an engine, or a technology. "Both," he said, after some thought. "Some of both. But it is the technology inside this engine." The technology is scalable, Mr. Kiga said, so it could be built into other engine architectures.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
RISE UP After you've spent a month conversing almost exclusively with family members, it's a treat to hear Alicia Keys's voice over the phone. Even more refreshingly, the 15 time Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter, actress, producer, entrepreneur and activist doesn't play down her excitement over the success of her memoir, "More Myself." She says, "I made it to the best seller list and I'm ecstatic!" Keys describes her book, currently at No. 9 on the hardcover nonfiction list, as "the honest journey of how I found my way to becoming who I am as opposed to being what I've been told to be." The book begins when she's 7 and follows her path to stardom, potholes and all including reflections on her father's absence and the shame she felt, at 19, when she was manipulated into posing provocatively at her first magazine cover shoot. After that, she writes, "I swear that I will never again let someone rob me of my power." Working on the book was cathartic for Keys a process she describes as "getting down recollections, thinking, realizing, uncovering, starting, stopping, ebbing and flowing." She didn't know her co writer, Michelle Burford, beforehand but now, she laughs, "I know her better than anyone on the planet. I never had a better therapist." Of the difference between putting words on a page and setting them to music, Keys says, "With any creative endeavor, you're on the line with people's judgment, with your own idiosyncrasies and neuroses. You're going to have fear. You're going to have to overcome the fear. You're going to have doubt. You're going to overcome the doubt. You're going to have anxiety. You're going to overcome the anxiety." "Never in a billion years" would Keys have imagined that "More Myself" would land in a world on lockdown, but she believes the book raises questions that are relevant right now: "How do we go forward from this state of vulnerability? Do we find out who we are or who we want to be? How do we gather the strength to go forward?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Books
Credit...Mark Carwardine/Minden Pictures In 1996, when war broke out in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, just 31 northern white rhinos remained in Garamba National Park, the last stronghold of this endangered species. Armed militias reached the park less than a year later, and half of the park's elephants, two thirds of its buffalos and three quarters of its hippos disappeared in three short months. Poaching of northern white rhinos also resumed, despite conservationists' best efforts. Today, after a succession of armed clashes, only three northern white rhinos survive all transplants from a zoo in the Czech Republic, and all confined to a single Kenyan conservancy. That the rhinos' habitat included a part of Africa plagued by human conflict was "desperately unfortunate," said Kes Hillman Smith, a Nairobi based conservationist and author of "Garamba: Conservation in Peace and War." "The endless wars there have taken their toll on all the wildlife in the region." Many case studies have demonstrated that war can affect the survival of local populations, sometimes threatening entire species. But the research is mixed: In some cases, conflict actually seems to aid animals. Now researchers have published a quantitative study of war's consequences for African animals the first multi decade, continentwide analysis. The findings, published in Nature, are both surprising and encouraging. Compared to all other measured factors, conflict is the most consistent predictor of species declines. Yet the northern white rhino is the exception. War rarely leads to extinction, a finding that underscores the importance of post conflict restoration efforts. "We show that war is bad, but not as bad as you might assume," said Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton University and an author of the new study. "There are really two alternative hypotheses you can imagine," he added. "One is that war is just a disaster for everything, including environments. And the other is that pretty much anything that causes people to clear out from an area can be beneficial for wildlife." Indeed, Dr. Pringle noted, the Demilitarized Zone between North Korea and South Korea offers respite for rare species such as red crowned cranes and Asiatic black bears. The researchers then calculated various animal population trajectories over time and compared them with known conflicts. Their final list encompassed 253 populations of 36 species of herbivorous mammals including elephants, giraffes, zebras, hippos and wildebeests in 126 protected areas throughout Africa. The scientists found that it takes relatively little conflict just one event every two to five decades to push animal populations to lower levels. "Even with the onset of what could be a fairly minor conflict from a human perspective, we see the average wildlife population declining," Dr. Daskin said. Conflict frequency, in fact, was the most significant variable predicting wildlife trends among 10 other factors the researchers analyzed, including drought, the number of people living near a protected area and the degree of corruption found in a country. The more frequent the conflict, the greater the impact. "This continentwide assessment confirms what many case studies have hinted at war is a major driver of wildlife population declines across Africa," said Kaitlyn Gaynor, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied armed conflict's influence on wildlife. The losses are likely the result of a combination of factors, said Dr. Hillman Smith, who spent 22 years in Garamba conserving the park and its northern white rhinos. In times of war, poached bushmeat may feed troops, local people and refugees, while valuable assets like ivory and rhino horn may be used to fund the struggle. Arms and ammunition also tend to become more widely available, Dr. Hillman Smith said, and a general breakdown of law and order makes poaching easier. Conservation organizations, she added, also tend to pull out when the shooting starts. "The greatest losses in Garamba happened in the absence of international support and when active patrolling was stopped," she said. "While warfare needs to be taken into account as a conservation factor, it should not be seen as a reason not to invest or to pull out too soon." Yet all is not lost during war, even when conservationists are forced to flee. Animals sometimes become scarcer and more difficult for hunters to find, Dr. Daskin said, and the populations persist at lower levels. That conflict is detrimental to wildlife but rarely causes extinctions is the most important message of the paper, according to Edd Hammill, an ecologist at Utah State University, who was not involved in the research. The finding suggests that rapid intervention by conservationists can be critical for ensuring the survival and recovery of remnant populations, he said. Indeed, in the 1980s post conflict conservation in Garamba doubled both the northern white rhino and elephant populations in just eight years. Renewed fighting, politics and other factors ultimately prevented the northern white rhino's recovery in the wild. But Dr. Daskin points to Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park as a hopeful alternative. Following 15 years of devastating civil war, Gorongosa lost more than 90 percent of its animals. The elephant population declined to 200 from 2,000, while wildebeest and zebras numbered fewer than 50 each, down from several thousand.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
Giant tech companies are fighting over the technology in court. Start ups around the world are racing to develop new versions of it. And engineers say it is essential to making autonomous cars safe. "We believe it will be the basis for autonomous driving," said Guillaume Devauchelle, who oversees innovation at Valeo, a major parts supplier to automakers. The technology, which uses near infrared light to detect the shape of objects around it, is the centerpiece of an intense court fight in California between Uber and Waymo, the self driving business operated by Google's parent, Alphabet. In the case, Waymo accuses a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, of stealing trade secrets about the company's lidar designs for his own autonomous driving start up which he sold to Uber for nearly 700 million. Lidar pronounced LIE dar is shorthand for light detection and ranging. It is a type of sensor that is at the heart of many autonomous car designs and is critical to several worldwide high resolution mapping efforts. The same technology is used to delineate terrain from airplanes and detect speeding violations. A lidar sensor from Luminar. The technology uses near infrared light to detect the shape of objects around it. The advantage of lidar is that it can generate precise three dimensional images of everything from cars to trees to cyclists in a variety of environments and under a variety of lighting conditions. While autonomous car designs use numerous sensors, including ultrasonic, radar and video camera components, lidar has unique abilities. Unlike cameras, for example, lidar cannot be fooled by shadows or blinded by bright sunlight. The biggest hurdle to widespread lidar adoption is an economic one, and that is where the battle is being waged. When Google initially started its autonomous vehicle research eight years ago, the lidar sensors it used cost roughly 75,000. Those sensors were made by Velodyne Lidar, an industry leader. Velodyne declined to say what the current pricing is for such systems, but Waymo's chief executive, John Krafcik, said in a recent presentation that his company had reduced the cost of its lidar system by 90 percent. But even at 7,500, such systems are seen as too expensive to meet automakers' demands. "Car companies want it to cost 100 and perform 10 times better, be smaller and very reliable," said Omer Keilaf, chief executive of Innoviz Technologies, a lidar developer based in Israel. "So there's a big vacuum in the industry right now." The race to fill that void is largely focused on producing solid state lidar systems, which would shrink the size of the sensors, eliminate moving parts involved in the optical mechanisms and enable the kind of mass manufacturing that could bring costs down, said Hongbo Zhang, a research associate at Virginia Tech who is working on a lidar design. Established automotive suppliers, such as Velodyne and Valeo; technology companies like Waymo and Uber; and relative newcomers like Innoviz, LeddarTech and Quanergy all have their sights set on making less expensive sensors. Solid state lidars tend to have a reduced field of view, about 120 degrees compared with the 360 degree view offered by rooftop models. "So to create a cocoon around the car, you need to integrate four to six solid state lidar sensors," said Marc A. Morin, a spokesman for LeddarTech. But most of the researchers working on these designs still believe they can produce them for much lower prices, and Hyundai has demonstrated in its Ioniq autonomous test cars how such sensors could be made less conspicuous and concealed in the bumpers and roof pillars of vehicles. Luminar Technologies, a lidar company that recently came out of stealth mode, is focusing on improving the performance of sensors by extending the effective range of lidar past 200 meters. (Top of the line sensors now have a range of 120 meters.) Austin Russell, Luminar's chief executive, said the company accomplished the longer range by using a more sensitive receiver, as well as a more powerful light output that remains safe enough to avoid damaging people's vision. Velodyne, which says it is the only current third party lidar supplier for fully autonomous vehicles now being tested, is well aware that start ups are gunning for its business. Velodyne is working on its own solid state Velarray lidar sensor, said Mike Jellen, Velodyne president, and it plans to start mass producing them next year in a 200,000 square foot factory in San Jose, Calif. While there has been considerable speculation about how Velodyne will face the potential price competition, Mr. Jellen declined to estimate how much the new sensors might cost, saying only that a complete lidar sensor package for future vehicles might be priced in the "low thousands" per vehicle. "In five years, for ride sharing cars, it could be an 8,000" option, said Jeffrey Owens, chief technology officer for Delphi. Delphi recently announced it was working with Intel, BMW and Mobileye on an autonomous driving platform. "In 2025, it could be 5,000," he said. "The problem is that we're still in A.I. learning mode and only buying in quantities of a couple thousand," said Velodyne's Jellen, referring to artificial intelligence. "The problem is, the market isn't there yet." There are also some technical kinks that need to be ironed out with new systems. Different versions of lidar paint images of the world around them in different ways, said Mr. Zhang at Virginia Tech. That means different lidar sensors from different companies cannot simply be exchanged for one another on an autonomous BMW or Ford vehicle. How a car is trained and learns will partly depend on the specific type of lidar used. In spite of these challenges, Mr. Keilaf of Innoviz and many others say there will not be fully autonomous cars without lidar and it will have to be cheap. It will also have to meet exceptionally high standards. "An autonomous vehicle that's 99 percent safe won't be good enough," said Mr. Russell of Luminar. "This is mission critical. You can't afford to miss a single object because that object could be a person."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
John is homeless, drunk and delusional. He eats squirrels. Raw. And Jane? She's dead. Will these two really lost souls work it out? Amina Henry's "Hunter John and Jane" at Jack is one funny valentine. Silly at times, but also wrenchingly empathetic, it is a musical, a murder mystery, a ghost story and a love story. John (Bob Jaffe, believably dissipated), a vagrant with a history of mental illness, takes shelter in a Styrofoam strewn city park. (The set, by Brett Banakis, will give environmentalists the shivers.) Occasionally harassed by a pair of cops, he's mostly left to spend his days muttering and shooting those squirrels with a bow and arrow. One day Jane (Erin Cherry, affecting) appears. "I'm not like most people," she tells him, "I'm dead." She's heard John boasting about having eaten his mother's pancreas, so he's the guy for her. She doesn't remember much about her life Jane is short for Jane Doe but she knows that her bones are buried somewhere in the park. She orders John to find them. "Hunter John and Jane" trades in a gentle and then not so gentle absurdism, a fun house reflection of contemporary life. There's a running joke in the play: "What kind of tea is hard to swallow?" Give up? "Reality."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
But after suffering the indignities that can occur over years of sitting vacant as a stalled condominium project, 290 Mulberry Street, at East Houston Street, is bouncing back this time as a rental. Called the Mulberry House, the 12 story tower offers 9 units, all of them 3 bedrooms, in a configuration that the building's promoters say is among its most appealing qualities. "There's never been a lot of new developments in New York at that size, and there's a huge demand for them," said Lucie Holt, an agent with Town Residential, which is handling the marketing. But just how the apartment house, whose lumpy chocolate brick facade once flirted with eyesore status, has pulled off its comeback is equally interesting. When the current owner, Karass Development, bought it for 25 million in 2011 from Cardinal Real Estate Investments, the company that unloaded it in the aftermath of the recession, the interiors were mostly raw. "It looked like a construction zone," Ms. Holt said. But many of the materials meant for its apartments had already been ordered before the site was essentially abandoned in 2009; they just needed to be tracked down, according to Greenlight Construction Management, which is overseeing the project. In the building's ground floor retail area, Greenlight happened upon a stash of thousands of square feet of wide plank walnut boards, which were in great shape despite having been left in the cold, drafty space for years, said Matthew Tritt, the president of Greenlight. The boards have since been installed in the units' floors, warmed with radiant heat. Similarly, white Schiffini cabinets destined for the kitchens were tracked down in a warehouse in New Jersey. And there are familiar faces: SHoP Architects, the designer for the first go round at the address, is also at the helm now. But the Mulberry House also has some new elements. Karass, which invested another 4 million in the building, decided to put in different kitchen sinks, picking ones that include garbage disposals; the developer also opted for different types of glass tile for the bathrooms. Presumably, both the current and former development teams were drawn to the site by its views. Many of the terraces, which are in every unit but one, offer views of bustling East Houston. The three levels of outdoor space in the triplex penthouse take in St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, a NoLIta landmark. Yet the most distinctive panorama may be from the fourth floor, where a living room looks out on a gold leaf statue of Puck, the Shakespearean character who preens on a corner of a building named for him across the street. Renting in what by all appearances passes as a condo after all, white marble lines the lobby is predictably expensive. Monthly rents start at 10,500, for a second floor unit with 1,800 square feet, or about 70 a square foot. And they climb sharply by floor. The 2,700 square foot penthouse is 25,000 a month, or about 110 a foot. Move ins are expected in August, Ms. Holt said. But Mulberry House may be competitive. At 55 Thompson SoHo, a nearby nine story rental from the Manhattan Skyline Management Corporation that opened in 2011, the least expensive two bedrooms listed recently at 16,750 a month, or about 135 a square foot. Those involved in the Mulberry project, which has required a year of construction, say they're relieved to see it draw to a close. "Stalled sites are some of the most complicated because you never know what you'll find when you go in," Mr. Tritt said. "But we've really brought this place back from the dead." Karass, whose other New York property is the mixed use Second Empire at 901 Broadway, which it bought for 24.6 million in 2009, is headed by Vladimir Kokorev, an author and a lawyer. His father, also Vladimir Kokorev, is a Russian shipping magnate. Mr. Kokorev says inheriting any building that sits dark and empty for years is challenging. "You are bound to find problems due to years of no construction progress and lack of proper maintenance," he wrote in an e mail. "Needless to say, this is very time consuming and often frustrating, but in the end, absolutely worth it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Bruce Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist and member of the Kardashian family, ended months of speculation Friday night when he announced during an ABC television special that he identified as a woman and was making the transition from male to female. "For all intents and purposes, I am a woman," he told Diane Sawyer in an interview. "People look at me differently. They see this macho male, but this female side is part of me, it's who I am. I was not genetically born that way." The announcement made him among the highest profile people to publicly come out as transgender. For the purpose of the interview, Mr. Jenner said he preferred the pronoun "he," and Ms. Sawyer called him Bruce. He said that he had been undergoing hormone therapy for a year and a half but had not made up his mind about reassignment surgery. He declined to provide the name he might use during or after his transition, citing privacy concerns. Rumors about a possible transition have been trumpeted for months by tabloids and celebrity magazines. He and his third wife, the former Kris Kardashian, who divorced in 2014, and members of the extended Kardashian family among television's biggest reality stars had remained coy about his plans. Kris Jenner did not comment for the special but later sent out a Twitter message supporting him. Mr. Jenner's first two wives, Chrystie Crownover and Linda Thompson, also expressed their support, as did all six of Mr. Jenner's children and his Kardashian stepchildren. Mr. Jenner, 65, said that when he told his children, "They all cried, mainly because they don't want anybody to hurt Dad." Mr. Jenner parlayed fame as the decathlon champion at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal into a sporadic acting career that included movies like the Village People vehicle "Can't Stop the Music" in 1980. He returned to the public eye for a new generation when he became a central figure on "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," which made its debut on the E! network in 2007. E! will also chronicle his transition in a documentary series that will begin broadcasting this summer. With Friday night's announcement, Mr. Jenner joins transgender celebrities like the actress Laverne Cox; Lana Wachowski, who directed the "Matrix" films with her brother, Andy; and Chaz Bono, Sonny and Cher's son. Mr. Jenner's announcement is the latest example of the growing presence of transgender people and characters on television. 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. There are nuanced transgender characters on scripted shows like "Orange Is the New Black" on Netflix and Amazon's Golden Globe winning hit "Transparent," and transgender people have appeared on reality shows like "Dancing With the Stars" and "America's Next Top Model." Several reality series, some still in the planning stages, are centered on transgender people, like TLC's "All That Jazz," about the teenage transgender activist Jazz Jennings, and VH1's "TransAmerica," about the model and activist Carmen Carrera. Nick Adams, the director of programs for transgender media at the gay rights organization Glaad, said that any time a transgender celebrity comes forward with his or her story, "it goes a very long way toward educating people about who we are and the challenges that we face." "Every transgender person's journey is unique, and by choosing to share this story, Bruce Jenner adds another layer to America's understanding of what it means to be transgender," Mr. Adams said in a statement on Friday night. Mr. Adams, who is transgender, said that media portrayals of transgender people had improved since he transitioned 18 years ago. But, he said, such reports need to more fully explore what it means to be transgender. "When the media is talking to transgender people now, they're still focused on that coming out narrative and not very focused on giving that portrayal of transgender people as well rounded family individuals," he said. Mr. Jenner reflected that he had appeared in more than 400 episodes of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" over almost eight years. He said his secret had eaten away at him all that time. "The one real true story in the family was the one I was hiding, and nobody knew about it," he said. "The one thing that could really make a difference in people's lives was right here in my soul, and I could not tell that story."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
WHAT could be better than a sprawling home in one of the Hamptons' most exclusive enclaves on the banks of the tranquil Sagg Pond, with sweeping views of the ocean? What if that home sat on one of the largest parcels of privately owned land in the area 33 acres to be exact and was bordered by dozens of acres of protected land, ensuring privacy and pristine conditions in perpetuity? The seclusion may be the biggest selling point of the estate belonging to Robert Hurst, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, which was just listed by Debbie Loeffler of the Corcoran Group for 65 million. The price doesn't quite compare to the 103 million that the investment banker Ron Baron paid for 40 acres of undeveloped waterfront property in East Hampton in 2007, but it would set a record for a home sale. That record was set in 2008, with the purchase of an eight acre estate on the ocean in Southampton for 60 million, said Jonathan J. Miller of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
At Tuesday's hearing on social media and misinformation, much of the discussion focused on the minutiae of how Facebook and Twitter carry out the process of moderating the billions of pieces of content regularly posted to their networks. Both Democrats and Republicans zeroed in on the issue, according to a tally by The New York Times. Out of 127 total questions, more than half or 67 were about content moderation. Democrats asked 12 questions aimed at how Facebook and Twitter could increase their moderation efforts around topics like hate speech, while Republicans asked 37 questions about why some points of view were censored online and how content moderation could be decreased in some areas, according to the tally. (The remainder of the questions about content moderation did not indicate a clear desire for more or less moderation.) In particular, Republican senators like Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas focused on the unproven idea that Facebook and Twitter unduly moderated posts by conservatives, compared with the amount of time spent labeling or taking down posts made by liberals. That has been a recurring refrain from conservative Americans over the past few weeks as scores of people have claimed they will leave Facebook and Twitter for more permissive platforms like Parler, Rumble and MeWe. Facebook and Twitter have maintained that political affiliation has no bearing on how they enforce their rules.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
New York Live Arts, as its longtime visitors know, has changed. Once a destination almost exclusively for dance in a previous life, it was Dance Theater Workshop it has opened its doors, under shifting leadership, to a wider range of disciplines and cross disciplinary programs, for better and for worse. This fall brought the first installment of a contemporary music series, with the exciting indie classical ensemble yMusic in residence for three months. Two estimable dancer choreographers, both in their 60s Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of Live Arts, and Dianne McIntyre joined the six young instrumentalists for "Come Around Part IV," the last of their four concerts, presenting solos to a new composition by Marcos Balter. Why these choreographers with this music? Neither pairing seemed natural perhaps it was the generational rift though the contrasts between the dances were intriguing. Appearing on alternate nights in the program's second half, Mr. Jones on Wednesday (with his first solo in nearly a decade) and Ms. McIntyre on Thursday, the two took the same shimmering score, titled "We Carry Our Home With Us Which Enables Us to Fly," in strikingly different directions. Mr. Jones, known for his outspokenness, gave himself the first word or sound clicking his tongue from a crouched, kneeling position. Rising and extending one hand in the shape of a gun, he shouted "drop it!" as he whipped his body around the first in an arsenal of verbal and gestural phrases laden with meaning. A few minutes passed before the musicians on viola, violin, trumpet, clarinet, cello, flute and vocals joined in with a warbling chant, laying the foundation for many more undulatory layers of sound.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
"We are becoming like all the other nations," the queen says in a moment of despair. "We have unhappy prisoners, indifferent citizens and the young people refuse to reproduce." Actually, the nation she rules with her husband, Roy, has just one of each of those things: one prisoner (a recent hostage, good at chess), one citizen (a doofus interested in pyrotechnics) and one young person (the 17 year old prince, currently away on a mission). That's because Terra Firma, as the queen has named it, is a micronation: a self declared kingdom located on an abandoned 6,000 square foot antiaircraft platform six miles out to sea. It may not boast much land or populace, but it has a national anthem, a tatty flag, a centralized health service and a constitution if the queen could ever complete it. "Terra Firma," the play by Barbara Hammond about this country, likewise seems in need of more work. Ambitious and smart, it is not yet coherent, at least not in its world premiere, which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center. Shifting from whimsical comedy to light satire to lumpy allegory, it quickly strips its gears and stops cold. The whimsy, coming right at the start, proves especially deadly in Shana Cooper's staging for a newly founded theater company called the Coop. Mild humor about the micronation's pretensions to real statehood seems especially vaporous on the imposing set (by Andrew Boyce) and amid the foreboding ocean roar of Jane Shaw's sound design. But at least the absurdity of the premise has a historical precedent: Terra Firma is based on a real place called Sealand, established in the late 1960s off the east coast of England. The humans seem less precedented . As the citizen (John Keating) and Roy (Gerardo Rodriguez) hoist their hostage (Tom O'Keefe) onto the platform and proceed to interrogate him, we might almost be watching a Three Stooges routine, except with less finesse. Clumsily handled as well is the back story: The citizen and Roy, believing that recent nearby explosions are the work of enemies bent on their destruction, are desperate to understand the danger they're in. That danger, we quickly understand from the script's broad hints, is ecological. When the young prince (Daniel Molina) returns from his reconnaissance mission, he brings with him a sliver of a hedge to decorate the homeland; it is apparently the last piece of greenery left in the world. And when a weather beaten diplomat (T. Ryder Smith) arrives to negotiate the hostage "crisis," we learn that the reason he is the first to heed Terra Firma's calls for help delivered in bottles cast out to sea is that there may be no one else left to answer. The queen, unwilling to credit such dire suspicions, doubles down on her queenliness. Because she is played by Andrus Nichols the marvelously grave Elinor in Kate Hamill's "Sense Sensibility" a character that could easily turn camp instead comes across as somehow both deluded and brave. Despite her stained blouse and paste tiara, she practices holding her right arm aloft whenever she appears, as if searching for the perfect salute to comfort a grateful people. This pathos gets at what the play does best: It understands and in some way forgives human limitation. It fares less well when it attempts a critique of rulers who reject reality even if it's a reality they helped create. A parallel is suggested between the characters' pride and the disaster now engulfing them, as if Terra Firma were the industrialized West in miniature, unable to steer away from the brink of climate change. In an author's note, Hammond writes that she saw in the story of the real Sealand "a metaphor for the human predicament." But that comparison is under drawn and illogical; a few people stuck on a massive steel life raft for several decades cannot have much to do with rising sea levels and whatever else is eating the rest of the world. The Terra Firmans aren't nuclear physicists who built faulty reactors like the characters in Lucy Kirkwood's "The Children," a much more sophisticated treatment of the same theme. They're refugees. So, in a way, are the members of the Coop, recently formed as a kind of breakaway republic from another theater company, Bedlam. "Terra Firma," the Coop's inaugural production, matches its mission to stage plays "that resonate with timeless themes and universal truths," but in this case resonance isn't enough. That's a problem built into the bloated mash up of genres: Comedy is based on particularizing human behavior, but allegory is based on generalizing it. In trying to be both, and an ecological tragedy as well, "Terra Firma" pulls in too many directions. Though the cast especially Nichols, O'Keefe and Smith is strong, and Cooper makes lovely stage pictures on the rusty platform, there's something thin and self defeating about the resulting circular logic. Like most life raft stories, "Terra Firma" doesn't hold water.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater