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LONDON The stage filled with women in Princess Diana masks, smashing VHS cassettes with hammers. A dancer wove her way through a bar, muttering about kittens. A figure wrapped in a filthy comforter emerged from a tent, crawling among clubbers dressed in fetish gear. Welcome to The Yard: London's only theater slash nightclub. The Yard opened in 2011 in a warehouse in Hackney Wick a district of East London that was once run down but has recently gentrified. The theater venue, with a 110 seat, purpose built auditorium inside a former warehouse, was meant to be temporary; eight years later, it still has a rough and ready feel, all recycled wood and corrugated roofing. Beyond staging some of London's most avant garde theater productions, there is a large bar that hosts club nights for as many as 250 people. The Yard's artistic director, Jay Miller, 34, said the festival was "really the more radical end of our program," made up of "innovating and risky" work. So far, this year's festival, which runs through Feb. 16, has featured "Diana is Dead" by F.K. Alexander the aforementioned royal revenge fantasy as well as an evening of contemporary dance: Jamila Johnson Small, performing as Last Yearz Interesting Negro, and Rowdy S.S., a musician and performance artist, writhed across the stage in front of close up video images of dreadlocks and nipples. Highlights yet to come include a show by the performance artist Ira Brand about dominance and submission, and a playful monologue about time travel from the celebrated experimental theater company Forced Entertainment. Everything The Yard does is underpinned by three values, Mr. Miller said. The first is that "the stories we tell have to feel like they aren't being told by mainstream culture," Mr. Miller said. "The second is we create a space where audiences and artists feel able to take risks together. The third is we really celebrate the idea of the live moment, and what that means in a society mediated by technology." This can result in work that feels modish, with recent shows about social media and selfie culture. But the Yard has also produced acclaimed productions driven by bold directorial choices a relatively rare thing for new writing in British theaters, where the director is more often expected to invisibly "serve" the script. The theater's hip, edgy work attracts an unusually young crowd: 70 percent of the audience is under the age of 35, according to Mr. Miller. And it is breaking down the boundaries between watching a play, hanging out with a beer and raving till 6 a.m. "Audiences are cross pollinating," Mr. Miller said. "We're creating a new theater audience, who see that it can be as invigorating as dancing in a club." Communicating the unusual dual nature of The Yard has proved tricky, he added. Marlen Pflueger, a dance student who stuck around after a for a recent "Lates" offering, said she'd been to the Yard before for dance parties. "I didn't know it was a theater," she said, adding, "I think it's such a good idea to have this combination of a club and performance space," she said. Although it receives about 150,000 pounds, or nearly 200,000, a year in government funding, Mr. Miller said that the Yard made more money from running its own parties and renting out the bar space for events than it did from the theater, where ticket prices never go above PS20. Putting on plays and club nights can be "exhausting" he said, but doing so allows the Yard to stage the kind of work that other London theaters don't. Mr. Miller was drawn to Hackney Wick because it was cheap, he said. The Yard initially moved in for free. Warehouses were often broken into, and their owners were spending a lot on security, Mr. Miller said, adding, "Us being here meant there was less chance of that happening." He founded The Yard in 2011 with just PS9,000 and no idea how long he could keep it going. But additional money from the government and private donors allowed Mr. Miller to turn it into something permanent at a time when Hackney Wick was changing drastically. The area's revival began with construction for the 2012 Olympics, which were largely held in East London. Today, there are plenty of trendy bars, restaurants and clubs, as well as luxury apartment developments. Mr. Miller said the changes made him uneasy. "Artists go to places that are free, and then they're not free for other people," he said. Ben Bishop, The Yard's music and events coordinator, was hired in 2017, having run off grid warehouse parties for years. He said that he had always liked to collaborate with performance artist friends, and that working at an arts venue like The Yard seemed like a good way to blend both worlds. Mr. Bishop said he saw The Yard as playing an important role in supporting London's subcultures, through nights such as Pride of Arabia, which defines itself as being for "queers from the Arab world," or Murder on Zidane's Floor, an event run by Goal Diggers, an East London soccer club for women and people who identify as nonbinary. Ben Bishop, The Yard's music and events coordinator, said the venue played an important role in supporting London's subcultures. Andrew Testa for The New York Times The recent narrative around London's night life has been a largely pessimistic one, with many venues closing for good, and others facing soaring costs or the denial of licenses because of concerns about noise. Mr. Bishop said that if the city's late night culture is to thrive, rather than just survive, artists and late night venues needed to collaborate. "We should be seeing more types of art and expression in clubs," he said. Such cross pollination is rare in London. But The Yard is encouraging it, whether that's getting techno clubbers to buy tickets for a play, or encouraging theatergoers to stick around for a late night event. It may be an unusual vision for the future of theater but it's happening right now at The Yard.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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When Julian Olidort returned to his Manhattan office after a business trip to Israel five years ago, he said his first priority was "to assemble a team of co workers" to assist in the delicate handling of a once in a lifetime opportunity that emerged 6,000 miles away in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was an investment he was eager to pursue. Her name was Sivan Aloni. "She was a very beautiful and intelligent woman with a very different outlook on life," Mr. Olidort said. "She lived every day at her own pace, and that was something I deeply admired, so I thought if there was ever a chance to meet her again it would be so magical, so worth it." Mr. Olidort, now 29 and an associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Ms. Aloni, now 31 and the adviser to Ambassador Dani Dayan, consul general of Israel in New York, met in Jerusalem in May 2014 at the first Genesis Prize award ceremony. The annual event recognizes achievement steeped in Jewish values. (Michael R. Bloomberg was the first recipient.) "Looking back, that was a lot for a young guy to handle," Mr. Olidort said with a chuckle, "but then again, so was Sivan." Ms. Aloni, then a 26 year old student at Hebrew University of Jerusalem working for the Israeli production company that produced the event, was stationed in the guest relations area in charge of coordinating the flow of journalists, panel judges and other attendees during the course of the evening. "I saw her standing there and just kind of froze for a moment," Mr. Olidort recalled. "I immediately told myself, 'If this girl could be the one, then I'm satisfied, I'm set for life.'" Unsure how he might relay that sentiment to a woman he had never met in a room teeming with security guards and media personnel, Mr. Olidort continued to stare squarely at Ms. Aloni as he began walking in circles. "I wanted to look busy," he said, "so I walked out of the room three times, and each time I had to re enter through security." Ms. Aloni, who was in the company of several colleagues, could not help but notice the peripatetic stranger who appeared to not know whether he was coming or going. "I glanced over and saw this guy who looked dashing in his suit," she said. "He also looked like he was half the age of everyone else in attendance." Mr. Olidort decided the best plan would be to make a beeline for Ms. Aloni, and upon arrival, he did not mince words. "Look, I don't want to embarrass you in front of your friends," he said to her, "but may I have your number, I'd love to take you out." Ms. Aloni, who said she found Mr. Olidort's bold approach "rather charming," agreed to have a drink with him later that night, which was a Thursday, but in the company of friends. Mr. Olidort, scheduled to return to New York the next day, chose to join her friends. Despite the fact that he did not get the alone time with her that he desired, he said he awoke the next morning "feeling that she was someone I would flip the whole world over to be with." He rearranged his travel plans, canceling a trip to Turkey and extending his time in Israel by three more days until a Tuesday to get to know Ms. Aloni on a more personal level. He told her he was staying to take care of some unfinished business, but failed to tell her that she, in fact, was the unfinished business. He asked her out to dinner on a Saturday evening, and though Ms. Aloni accepted the invitation, she arrived with several friends in tow, leaving Mr. Olidort a bit flustered. He explained his frustration to her the next morning, on a Sunday, two days before he was to return to New York, and followed his one on one request with yet another dinner invite, this one to Manta Ray, a restaurant on the beach in Tel Aviv. Ms. Aloni accepted, agreeing to go solo, she said, "because I could tell by then that Julian was a very sincere person, and a really nice guy." Mr. Olidort settled in and the two got to know each other. Ms. Aloni told him that she was born in Petah Tikva, a city in the central district of Israel, and raised in Tel Aviv, the only daughter of Zivit Furstenberg, her mother, who lived in Korazim, Israel, and Raviv Aloni, her father, an information technology specialist who remarried after divorcing Ms. Furstenberg and moved to Brisbane, Australia. Ms. Aloni spent many of her summers in the company of her stepsister and stepbrother in Australia. She graduated from Thelma Yalin National High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv, before serving two years in the Israeli Army, where she was a sergeant in its Yiftah unit, which developed materials for special infantry operations. She went on to Hebrew University, earning a dual degree in Jewish thought and political science. Ms. Aloni and Mr. Olidort soon realized that art played an integral role in both their lives. Her mother was an independent jewelry artist. His mother, Nadia Klionsky Olidort, was a landscape artist and the senior studio artist for the Echo Design Group in New York, where she designs scarves. She inherited her artistic talent from her father, Marc Klionsky, a Soviet born artist who developed a nuanced form of American Realism through the eyes of new immigrants in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. Klionsky, who died at age 90 in 2017, painted the portraits of many notable leaders and musicians, including Golda Meir, B.B. King and Dizzy Gillespie the latter still hanging at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Mr. Olidort, the younger of two sons born to Ms. Klionsky Olidort and Joseph Z. Olidort of New York, graduated from Brandeis University and received a master's degree in international finance and economic policy from Columbia. He was a Fulbright scholar in Sweden, where he conducted economic research on the Swedish glass industry while blowing glass at a factory in the southern Smaland region. He later told Ms. Aloni that after meeting her in Jerusalem, he returned home so fearful of losing her "by saying the wrong thing," that he turned to his co workers "for some advice and coaching," on what they felt were the proper things to say to maintain his newfound, long distance relationship. "For two months, people kept popping into my office with new ideas, new things to say to her via phone or text," Mr. Olidort said. Six months later, Mr. Olidort's emotional investment began paying dividends, as he and Ms. Aloni arranged for a second official date in Venice, Italy. "He was always up front about his feelings for me," Ms. Aloni said. "So at that point, I had put a lot of trust and faith in him." Their rendezvous in Venice, Mr. Olidort said, "felt more like an incredible honeymoon than a second date." In February 2015, Ms. Aloni visited Mr. Olidort in New York, where she did some sightseeing, job hunting and soul searching. In October of that year she returned once more, this time considerably shortening the distance of their long distance relationship by moving into Mr. Olidort's Manhattan apartment. She had also accepted a job as a director in the public diplomacy department of the Israeli consulate. "Throughout our relationship Julian kept talking about getting serious and wanting us to have a great life together, and that always felt right with me," Ms. Aloni said. "So I moved in with him without hesitation and without worry." They were married on a Tuesday morning, April 2, by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan. The couple were joined by the groom's parents and his grandmother, Irina Klionsky, who is also the widow of Marc Klionsky. Renee Schreiber and Eran Polishuk, colleagues and friends of the bride, also attended. The bride's mother tuned in via Skype from her home in Israel. "By the power vested in me as a rabbi and because of the fact that I registered with the city clerk 60 years ago in order to be able to do such a ceremony, I now pronounce you husband and wife, according to the law of the State of New York," Rabbi Lookstein said playfully. "You are not yet married according to the law of Moses and Israel." When the brief ceremony ended, the small wedding party went to a nearby deli to celebrate over coffee and bagels. "We fell in love with Sivan the moment we met her," said the groom's mother, Ms. Klionsky Olidort, who was seated inside the deli next to her husband, Joseph Olidort, a civil engineer at Aecom, an engineering firm in New York. "She is his sunshine, the person who brings him the most joy." The newlyweds would eventually call a cab for Irina Klionsky, 82, and escort her back to her SoHo apartment, where she and Mr. Olidort manage her husband's art estate. It was also the place where Mr. Olidort proposed to Ms. Aloni in March 2018. (Mr. Olidort said he hoped to put together an exhibit in the near future of Mr. Klionsky's works, several pieces of which have never been on public display.) "The Jewish community is an important part of our lives," Mr. Olidort said. "We are both passionate about the continuity of the Jewish people and innovative Jewish education to inspire and engage young people to remain involved with their Jewish heritage." On April 16, the bride and groom will take part in a celebration ceremony in Jerusalem before 300 family members and friends. Rabbi Lookstein will officiate again at a traditional huppah and reception at Olmaya, an events space there. "I only wish my husband was here to see all of this," said Irina Klionsky, smiling before her cab arrived as she stared across the crowded deli at the bride and groom. Standing side by side at the noisy deli counter after their wedding, the couple laughed as they pointed to a variety of bagels and other tempting choices on a menu hanging high on a wall above a colorful and somewhat chaotic New York scene. This was modern day portrait of youthful exuberance the likes of which Marc Klionsky might have captured in his heyday.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Josh Lindblom, a pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers, was not expecting a lot last weekend when he turned on his television looking for sports. But what he found was a bit much. "They had two guys on there playing Tetris against each other," Lindblom said, laughing. But now, American sports fans starved for live games may find a measure of salvation from an unlikely source: South Korean baseball. The Korea Baseball Organization season begins Tuesday, and ESPN has announced plans for live broadcasts of its games. Lindblom, 32, planned to be watching. The right hander, currently riding out the pandemic with his family in Lafayette, Ind., pitched four and a half seasons in the South Korean league, winning back to back Choi Dong won awards (given to the league's best pitcher) in 2018 and 2019 and the league's Most Valuable Player Award last year. On behalf of baseball aficionados eager for some live action, then, The New York Times asked Lindblom and a group of insiders for advice on how best to savor the South Korean brand of baseball. "People are clearly looking for something to cheer for," Lindblom said, "something to follow other than the news." Baseball on the other side of the world is still baseball even if spitting on the field has been temporarily banned. But American fans will notice subtle differences and quirks in the South Korean game. There is, for example, a ton of variability in talent on K.B.O. lineups. A team might field a player who could be a star in Major League Baseball but also play someone who would just barely make an M.L.B. bench and others who would fit best in the minor leagues. "There's 65 or 70 high schools that play baseball in Korea, so they're drawing from a much smaller talent pool," said Aaron Tassano, an international scout for the Samsung Lions, whose season opening game against the NC Dinos aired on ESPN on Tuesday. The K.B.O. is regarded as an offense centric league, with cozy ballparks. But the league has taken steps in recent years to shift the advantage away from its hitters, including "de juicing" the ball and expanding the notoriously small strike zone. And while the Korean game has more firepower and players swinging for the fences than the Japanese league, it might still come across to fans as "refreshingly old school," Tassano said. "There's bunting and stealing," he said. "Their game has not been taken over by launch angles and spin rate to the degree it has here. I love those things about the game here, but there's a purity to the game there that I enjoy." Every person interviewed for this story rued the same thing about Korean baseball's current chance in the spotlight: the lack of fans because of restrictions related to the virus. Korean games provide nine innings of near constant noise and color: Each club has a cheerleading team that guides fans through buoyant singing routines, with bespoke songs for every batter who steps up to the plate. "And they'll be singing even if you're losing, 15 0," said Brett Pill, who played for the Kia Tigers from 2014 to 2016 and is now the hitting coach for the Tulsa Drillers, the Los Angeles Dodgers' Class AA team. The typical K.B.O. game, then, combines the raucous energy of a college football stadium with the subject specific singing of an English soccer match. "They can make a 20,000 seat stadium sound bigger than the 50,000 seat stadiums we have in the States," said Eric Hacker, who pitched in South Korea from 2013 to 2018. For now, though, the ballparks have been so quiet that the sound of players swearing and umpires making calls could be clearly discerned on preseason broadcasts. Who are the Yankees of the K.B.O.? Dan Kurtz, a stay at home father in Tacoma, Wash., created the website MyKBO.net in 2003 for the small community of English speaking fans of the league. These days, the website, which maintains its charmingly homemade aesthetic, remains one of the best sources of up to date results for teams and players. Asked which teams American fans might want to follow, Kurtz noted that fandom does not always adhere to some complex logic. He joked, for instance, that anyone who used a Samsung phone could root for the Samsung Lions. The Doosan Bears have had the most success recently, making it to the championship series in each of the past five seasons and winning it three times. And the Kia Tigers have the most historical success, with 11 championships, leading fans to compare them to the Yankees, even if they have been less than stellar in recent years. Kurtz said Mets fans, on the other hand, might relate to the L.G. Twins, who play second fiddle to the Bears in Seoul, have not won a title since 1994 and, to really drive home the comparison, have a reputation for falling short of expectations. Most baseball fans now know that celebratory bat flips, frowned upon or worse in the M.L.B., are prevalent and accepted as harmless in South Korea. Korean baseball, then, clearly has its own decorum. For instance, if a pitcher hits a batter with the ball, there is an expectation that he will tip his cap or make some other conciliatory gesture toward his opponent. And in a country where age based hierarchies often dictate interpersonal behavior, apologies toward older opponents tend to be even more pronounced. "If you're a 24 year old pitcher and you hit Lee Dae ho, you better take off your hat and bow," Kurtz said, referring to the 37 year old slugger for the Lotte Giants. "Benches have cleared because of things like that." Lindblom said he embraced opportunities to offer displays of sportsmanship to highly regarded opponents like Lee Seung yuop, the K.B.O. career home runs leader, who retired after the 2017 season. "Every time he would step in the box, I would bow, just as a sign of respect," Lindblom said of Lee, who hit a combined 626 homers in Korea and Japan. Get to know South Korean stars. Fans in the United States might naturally be drawn to the American players in the league teams can have up to three international players on their rosters or Korean players who spent time in the major leagues. But our experts encouraged fans to learn more about lesser known South Korean players. Pill was most enthusiastic about a pudgy 33 year old pitcher for the Doosan Bears named Yoo Hee kwan, who throws a curveball that sometimes hovers around 50 miles per hour. "He's this very small, little left handed pitcher, who probably tops out at 83," Pill said, referring to his fastball velocity. "But he would hit the inside corner every time and then throw a changeup that just fell off the plate. You saw the ball well, but you couldn't hit it." Lindblom said the best overall player in the K.B.O., in his opinion, was Yang Eui ji, the 32 year old catcher for the NC Dinos. "He's a really smart player, a great situational hitter and is also a guy who's got some power." Lindblom said. "He's just a tough out. He's one of the better defensive catchers, also." Kurtz mentioned three Korean players who seemed most likely to make the jump to America in the coming years: Kim Ha seong, 24, a gifted shortstop who batted .307 last season, with 19 home runs; Na Sung bum, 30, an athletic outfielder with good power and a strong arm, who is trying to come back from a serious leg injury he suffered in 2019; and Yang Hyeon jong, who compiled a 2.29 ERA and 163 strikeouts in 184.2 innings last year and has won two Choi Dong won awards in his career. "You've got to have an open mind," Kurtz said "You're going to see some good players, and you're going to see some stuff you've probably never seen, even in the minor leagues. But that's why you watch."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG Notes on Wonder By Brian Doyle If you are in love with language, here is how you will read Brian Doyle's posthumous collection of essays: by underlining sentences and double underlining other sentences; by sometimes shading in the space between the two sets of lines so as to create a kind of D.I.Y. bolded font; by marking whole astonishing paragraphs with a squiggly line in the margin, and by highlighting many of those squiggle marked sections with a star to identify the best of the astonishing lines therein; by circling particularly original or apt phrases, like "this blistering perfect terrible world" and "the chalky exhausted shiver of my soul" and "the most arrant glib foolish nonsense and frippery"; and, finally, by dog earing whole pages, and then whole essays, because there is not enough ink in the world to do justice to such annotations, slim as this book is and so full of white space, too. Brian Doyle died in 2017 at 60 of complications from a brain tumor. He left behind seven novels, six collections of poems and 13 essay collections. The whole time he was writing, he was also working full time as the editor of Portland Magazine. This collection was one of our most anticipated books of December. See the full list. It's an amazing creative output, but Doyle was never famous. In 2012 The Iowa Review called him "a writer's writer, unknown to the best seller or even the good seller lists, a Townes Van Zandt of essayists, known by those in the know." If there is a God and Doyle fervently believed there is "One Long River of Song" will change all that. This book is what Van Zandt's greatest hits would look like had he lived to be 60, and if every song on the record hit the bar set by "Pancho and Lefty." Doyle was a practicing Catholic who wrote frequently about his faith, but this book carries not a whiff of sanctity or orthodoxy. The God of "One Long River of Song" is a kindergartner wearing a stegosaurus hat, a United States postal worker with preternatural patience ("God was manning the counter from 1 to 5, as he does every blessed day"), the "coherent mercy" that cannot be apprehended but may be perceived by way of "the music in and through and under all things."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Sharon Tate, the tragic ingenue who epitomized the breezy Hollywood style of the late 1960s, has been gone for nearly five decades, but these days she seems anything but dead. With the approach of the 50th anniversary of her gruesome 1969 murder at the hands of the Manson family, which to many symbolized the end of the '60s, Ms. Tate is the subject of three coming films, including Quentin Tarantino's star studded "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," with Margot Robbie as Ms. Tate. But fans who cannot wait for the screen bonanza can get their own piece of the Tate legacy on Nov. 17, in an auction of a vast trove of designer clothing and personal possessions at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Online and telephone bids will also be accepted.) The artifacts, which have been in the Tate family for five decades, are a boutique's worth of period fashion collectibles: Betsey Johnson minidresses (estimate: 600 to 800), a black Christian Dior minidress Ms. Tate wore to a film premiere in 1966 ( 15,000 to 30,000) and the ivory silk moire minidress from her 1968 wedding to Roman Polanski ( 25,000 to 50,000), as well as mod era sunglasses, scarves and jewelry. This a huge collection. Does it represent basically everything Sharon owned at the time of her death? Pretty much. I had it in my home for the longest time, and my home was broken into. Three pieces were stolen the wedding dress, the mink coat and then a mink that Sharon had made for my mother, which is in the sale. The police apprehended the culprits, and I got the items back. But that put me on high alert, and I went and rented a cold storage facility to store everything properly. Why did your family decide to keep so much of her stuff in the first place? There are people that cherish and almost worship and revere the circumstances of her death, so any of her possessions are extremely valuable to those kinds of people. This is why the family guarded them literally with our lives for all these years. I prefer to call it "re homing" her possessions. I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which also took the life of my younger sister at 42 years old. That was the first time I ever faced the reality that I wasn't going to be here forever, and what would I do with all of this stuff? I toyed with the idea of doing a museum so her fans could come, but as I looked into those type of things, they fail rapidly. So I decided it was much better to re home the collection to people that will love and adore and cherish these things as much as I have. It's time to share, right? Do you worry about pushback from the public over selling this treasured collection? I take a lot of guff from the trolls, people trying to blame my motivations. They are extremely insensitive. Honestly, I want it to go to people that will be in a better position to love it and cherish it as my family has, as Sharon did, and see it go into the future as far as possible. A lot of these designer clothes would look utterly on trend today. Do you think anyone might actually buy these items to wear, not just collect? If they have the right dimensions they might. But the fact of the matter is, it's all over 50 years old, so they're very delicate. I don't know if I should tell you this, but I had one of the best patternmakers in the industry look at the garments, take measurements, and I made patterns on everything in the collection. So if I have the energy after all of this is done, I would like to do a little Sharon line for the everyday gal. Sifting through all these personal effects must have brought back a flood of memories for you. Just about everything did. Sharon and I had a unique relationship, because we were military brats my dad set up missile stations for the NATO nations so we were always traveling, often into a different country, and that makes it hard on keeping friends. So the only thing that you have really is each other. I was at the house in Los Angeles, where the pregnant Ms. Tate was murdered most of the summer. I actually wore some of these things. When they would go out to a private club, I'd often dress in one of her minis to go to the Candy Store, or the Daisy, or the Factory. And then fashion took a huge swing, and it was freestyle, and minimalistic. They needed a face and a body that was equally free spirited and un coifed, but yet beautiful and gentle, which is what the '60s were all about, right? I know your old brother in law Roman Polanski long ago signed over these items to your family. Are you still in touch with him? I have a great relationship with Roman. When we get together, it's like time stood still. I can see Sharon in Roman's eyes, and he evidently said the same thing about my eyes he could see her as well. Aside from his legal troubles, there have been allegations over the years that Roman lured Sharon into a seamy Hollywood scene. What was your view of their marriage? Sharon absolutely adored Roman. She was head over heels in love with Roman. There are a whole lot of people that have said things, but it's pure fabrication. Roman and Sharon were a true love story, that's what I observed. And I was there, the first person to meet him when she brought him to Sausalito to meet my mom and dad. Apparently you endorsed the Tarantino film after some initial doubts. Why? I had reservations about it at first. It's what I said to Quentin: "Given your name and your style and the name Manson, people are going to have a natural assumption." Which I did as well. But he gave me the script to read. I did not have to sign an NDA. He trusted me, and I trusted him, and I think it's a wonderful story. I gave him my word that I would not discuss it. The only thing I can say is, it's a love story to the Los Angeles of that era. He's gone to great lengths to recreate entire streets of the period. I mean, everything about this movie is going to blow your mind. Back to the auction: Is there anything you are keeping for yourself? There are a few things that I just couldn't give up, so they will live with me, like her Chanel bag and a coverlet that was on her bed. When I go, I will pass those things to my daughter. Everything that I do with victims' rights, and my mother did before me, and my little sister, is not something that I want to pass on to the next generation. I don't want the burden to be passed on, you know what I mean? This interview has been edited and condensed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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The Aman Spa at the Connaught hotel in London, part of the Maybourne Hotel Group, is such a proponent of the benefits of meditation that it is opening its doors to the public for the first time with free 20 minute classes every weekday. The sessions are held at 1 p.m. in a treatment room at the spa and are limited to eight participants. They are led by therapists trained in mindfulness meditation, which is an adaptation of Buddhist meditation that encourages one to focus on the moment rather than being consumed by the pain of the past or anxiety over the future. Guests should reserve a spot through phone or email and will be welcomed in the lobby by an Aman representative and ushered to the spa. They can arrive 10 minutes early to enjoy lemon grass or ginger tea or stay to drink a cup after class. Meditation can help renew your mind and spirit, according to the spa manager, Rene Van Eyssen. "It encourages you to observe your emotions, which improves awareness of the present moment, bringing clarity and peace," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Not since the invention of penicillin, or maybe even Play Doh, has an accidental discovery been as epic as the revelation that the Academy Awards show doesn't need a host. Just visualize it: No host. O.K., not a great visual but it's only TV. Blind luck has often played a role in world changing breakthroughs and, in the case of the Non Hosted Oscars, blind luck drizzled with bad taste, bad vetting, bad foresight, bad values, pitiless social media and widespread early onset flop sweat, added up to a delightfully obvious remedy to a 91 year old problem: The Academy Awards as drying paint. Now, with momentum at its back, the academy should ride its sudden wave of innovation. With a few more newfangled tweaks, the Academy Awards telecast can someday be right there on the cutting edge of passe. Which brings us to the other fangle that the academy should consider: the No Thanks Amendment, in which Oscar winners are forbidden to thank anyone. Unlike most new laws, grasping the rationale behind this prohibition requires insight as unexceptional as the no host verdict. First: The typical, lifelong Academy Awards show viewer a demographic couched somewhere between Lipitor and Synthroid has lost roughly three weeks of life to the phrase "I would like to thank ..." These viewers deserve to be made whole. They are the people who still watch movies in theaters. They read reviews written by people paid to be film critics. They know who Irving Thalberg was and vaguely who Kevin Hart is. They are even savvy enough to find it refreshing if, say, a makeup artist accepts an Oscar and says: "The truth is, this film was not a total team effort. My work with facial toner is all that saved this project from complete disaster." Traditionally, after saying, "I would like to thank ..." Oscar winners mention 10 to 50 names. Unfortunately, American viewers tend to have little awareness of anonymous people. There are at most six documented cases of a Michigander saying, "Oh, she's repped by Ben Anderson at C.A.A. Now it all makes sense." Hence, in the unlikely event Emma Stone ever needed help in her career, the No Thanks Amendment would compel her to thank her agent at the valet stand. Or at the Vanity Fair after party. Or over the phone months later. After thanking their professional hangers on, winners thank spouses, parents and children. In an industry at demonstrable odds with most family values, such gratitude rings hollow and stupefyingly meh. Sure, there are instances when something super fun occurs during these moments like when Hilary Swank thanked everyone on two coasts except her husband but such anomalies hardly offset a thousand hours of "All right, enough already." Home, or ski home or Martha's Vineyard home or Malibu home is where the heart is. Families thanked at all four will most likely get over their nationally televised snub. Finally, there's the ultimate in pointless gratitude: "I would like to thank the academy." A) Just because you "would like to" do something, doesn't mean you have to. B) It's quite possible you would be thanking a body in which only half the voters chose you. In fact, with potentially 10 best picture nominees, Oscar winners could wind up expressing heartfelt gratitude to seven of 10 people who didn't like their film in the least. Note to academy: Go back to five best picture nominees. This is an Oscar, not a participation trophy. What was "an honor to just be nominated" is now "a slap in the face" not to be nominated. C) In thanking the academy, you don't know who you're thanking. We all get academy screeners that we illegally mail out to relatives in other cities. But who are these people who actually vote? No one knows. Rumors of a Hollywood skin deep state crop up but go unconfirmed. Someday the truth will emerge. In the meantime, unless an Oscar winner is so richly undeserving (oh, say, "The Artist" as best picture, 2012) that the academy deserves thanks purely for its horrific taste, we can toss this bit of obligatory politeness out with the others. O.K., that's the broad strokes of the No Thanks Amendment. Not bad, huh? Well, in fairness, there is a potential downside. Judging from scattered reports that reach Los Angeles, America is going through troubled times, and movie people tend to take all forms of injustice more personally than those victimized. With the No Thanks Amendment freeing up much of the 45 seconds allotted for acceptance speeches, political speechifying could become highly oppressive, possibly polarizing and certainly incoherent. Consider the idea of enclosing in the winner's envelope a list of three issues affecting our nation from which the Oscar recipient must either choose one to spout off on or none. Oscar winners, accustomed to working off a script may very well choose none, then have little else to say before leaving the stage. And really, isn't that the dream? In fact (oh my God!) here's another brilliant innovation: If you win an Oscar and simply grab your statuette and walk offstage without saying a word, you get one past violation of political correctness expunged from your record and 10 percent off the 30,000 fee for your star on the Walk of Fame. Wow, beyond mere progress being made, we could be inching toward a revolution. A revolution that will be televised. And draw incredibly modest ratings.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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People of all ages fell for the cute gnome like alien at the center of Steven Spielberg's 1982 movie "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial." But some fell extra hard; Katherine Bernhardt, who turned 7 the year the movie premiered, was smitten enough to paint portraits of E.T. in art school. In her latest show, "Done with Xanax," she returns to him, pushing her distinctive fusion of Pop Art, Color Field and graffiti toward a more vulnerable, narrative expression and more complex painting process. Ms. Bernhardt has at times seemed stuck in her signature patterns formed by repeating images of popular commodities and motifs cigarettes, sharks, cellphones, slices of fruit and floating emojis on expanses of bright color. She has painted fictional figures like the Pink Panther, Babar the Elephant and Garfield, but E.T. is more dimensional, complicated by a kind of saintliness, otherness and conflict: He is a stranger in an inhospitable land who has healing powers and wants to go home. Ms. Bernhardt renders E.T. single and large, like an icon, often outlined in gold or silver spray paint and frequently raising his glowing forefinger in benediction. She evokes but also takes liberties with moments from the movie, making them vaguely recognizable in the way that scenes from the Bible can be. For example, the paintings "Halloween in California" and "Halloween E.T. Strawberries" show the extraterrestrial wearing the blond wig from the dress up session in Gertie's bedroom and a patterned muumuu that suggests suburban California of a certain era. In others, he's famously aloft, in the basket of Elliott's bicycle, or surrounded by push button telephones reflecting his oft stated desire to "Phone home!" Especially good is "Sick," where E.T. is shrouded in a brilliantly white blanket that is unpainted canvas. It symbolizes the way Ms. Bernhardt has opened up her work and her style. Hopefully, her progress will continue. Last year, Michael Rakowitz got more attention for his protests than his participation in New York museums. He was the first artist to withdraw from the 2019 Whitney Biennial, providing a template for others whose departures eventually helped drive a tear gas magnate from the museum's board; later, in a move aimed at a board member of the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Rakowitz tried to pause his own video work from a show at its sister institution, PS1. Mr. Rakowitz's current show at Lombard, at least, lets us assess his work on its own terms. Here the Chicago based artist is showing the latest chapter in an ongoing project, "The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist," which reconstructs looted or destroyed Iraqi antiquities out of humble materials. An earlier exhibition focused on objects stolen from Baghdad's National Museum; here, he and a team have remade reliefs of an Assyrian palace that was blasted by the Islamic State out of packets of mixed herbs, newspapers and other scraps from the regional economy. I suppose the colorful reliefs have a baleful relevance for those of us already incensed by the cultural (and human) devastation of Iraq. But they are also rehearsed and self contained, and that goes double for "The Ballad of Special Ops Cody," a haughty work of stop motion animation filmed at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which depicts a U.S. Army toy figurine inspecting the museum's Near Eastern collection while a voice over recounts various lootings and atrocities. Mr. Rakowitz is better when he pushes his historical and political engagement into generosity, as he did in his moving "Return," his contested video at PS1, which allegorizes the Iraq war and refugee crisis through his red tape choked efforts to import Iraqi dates to Brooklyn. The life altering peculiarities of the American immigration system collide, in Hunter East Harlem Gallery's group show "The Extraordinary," with the slippery problem of defining artistic success. The show, curated by Arden Sherman with Nora Maite Nieves, began with an open call to artists who had or were pursuing the O 1 visa for extraordinary ability: Promising works by Yue Nakayama, Woomin Kim, Shimpei Shirafuji, Firoz Mahmud, Catalina Tuca, Anna Parisi and Sarah Mihara Creagen might earn them permission to live and work temporarily in the United States, or renew the permission they already have, if their inclusion in the show helps persuade the immigration service that they're renowned in their field. Ms. Nakayama's video of child actors performing incongruous monologues is strangely fascinating, as are the tabletop "minerals" that Ms. Kim makes from everyday materials like colored chalk or acrylic nails. But the show's distinct highlight is a short narrative video, "The Challenges of Imagination," made by the Iranian artist Ramyar Vala, who has an O 1 visa with no re entry stamp, with his older brother Rambod, whose O 1 was rejected. The only piece to treat the show's premise explicitly, the video includes amazing real life details like an immigration officer pointing out to Ramyar Vala that he's not as famous as Jeff Koons. But it's equally a critique of the art world itself, which can be just as blithe about treating market success as a proxy for inherent merit. As an Iranian exile, Mr. Vala would clearly find the most success here by making work about his situation but what if he wants to make work about something else? The video's last scene, which captures Rambod Vala in the tub, eating Haagen Dazs and singing along to Lou Reed's song "Perfect Day," is an exhilarating rebuke to the very notion of success. What if Max Beckmann had made a painting about illegal abortion? He might have produced something like Juanita McNeely's 1969 "Is It Real? Yes It Is," a magnificent nine panel installation showing now at James Fuentes Gallery in collaboration with Mitchell Algus. A squatting skeleton, pinioned women with buckled knees and crows picking the flesh from a prone female body are all rendered with Beckmann's crashing color scheme and Expressionist urgency. But they don't come across as allegories they look like facts. In the central canvas, a hand holding glittering silver forceps reaches toward a woman's naked crotch under an oversize Donald Duck toy. Altogether it's a searing evocation of the fractured way we remember traumatic experiences and of the many bloody realities most people prefer not to look at. In 1985, after an accident put Ms. McNeely in a wheelchair, a doctor told her she'd never make another large painting. She responded with "Triskaidekaptych," which comprises 13 substantial canvases parading edge to edge around two full walls of the gallery. Contorted female figures are still here, along with torture, medical horror and a screaming baboon's face. But the introduction of softer blues and pinks, and of a cloudiness in the way those colors are applied, changes the tone, and these writhing figures could very well be dancing. Two faceless women on trapezes, swinging through banks of mirrors, add a heavy note of self consciousness: If "Is it real" is the moment of trauma, in all its kaleidoscopic brutality, "Triskaidekaptych" is the elaborate mental process a person goes through to make sense of it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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LONDON This year's Oscar nominations have generated little controversy, with one exception: "Detainment," named in the best live action short category, an accolade that has offended many in Britain. On Wednesday, The Daily Mirror called the film's nomination an "Oscars insult." "'Hang your head in shame, Hollywood ... this is off limits,'" read a headline in the tabloid newspaper. An online petition calling for "Detainment" to be removed from the nominations, had attracted over 150,000 signatures by Friday. Opinion pieces and radio programs have debated the film extensively. The 30 minute movie caused such a stir because it is about one of Britain's most notorious and troubling crimes. In 1993, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were convicted of murdering James Bulger. The killers were just 10 years old at the time; James was only 2. The images of Venables and Thompson leading James from a mall while his mother was distracted captured on security cameras and widely shown on TV news at the time are seared in many people's memory here. The pair walked James several miles before torturing and murdering him with, among other things, bricks and a metal bar, the police investigation and the boys' testimonies revealed. They left his body on a railway line. When they were released from prison in 2001, Venables and Thompson were granted lifelong anonymity. Still, the decades old case keeps being revisited: Venables, now 36, was jailed in 2010 for possession of child pornography, and was charged with the same offense last year, prompting the case to be revisited. There have also been attempts, both legal and amateur, to reveal the pair's new identities. A court order that applies worldwide prevents anyone publishing images that claim to identify them. The Bulger killing has already been the subject of a play, which also caused complaints in Britain's tabloids, as well as numerous books. But none have caused such an outcry as "Detainment," which has been accused of humanizing or being sympathetic to the killers, even though only its trailer and a few short clips can be seen online. "Detainment" has won awards, including a special jury prize at Cannes, but it started to attract criticism in Britain after it was nominated for an Oscar. This month, Denise Fergus, James Bulger's mother, called for the film to be pulled from the Oscars and complained that the family was not consulted about it. "It's one thing making a film like this without contacting or getting permission from James family, but another to have a child re enact the final hours of James's life before he was brutally murdered and making myself and my family have to relive this all over again," Fergus said in a statement posted on Twitter on Tuesday. Albert Kirby, the detective who led the investigation into the killing, told the BBC that the events shown in the film were accurate, but still called for its withdrawal from consideration. "It's causing so much unnecessary upset," he said. The 38 year old Irish director Vincent Lambe said in a telephone interview that in 2012 he started researching the murder, which also dominated the news in Dublin during his childhood. "I wanted to try and understand what could have led two 10 year old boys to have done this," he said. There has never been a proper debate about why the killing happened, despite its prominence, he added. He considered contacting the families involved, he said, but decided it could harm the film. "We wanted to make a film that was factual and impartial," he said. "I think if we did contact them there'd be pressure to tell it the way they wanted it to be told." "We never meant any disrespect," he added. "I hope people can see it with an open mind," he said, "but that might not be possible now." In a statement, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which organizes the Oscars, said in part: "The academy offers its deepest condolences to Ms. Fergus and her family. We are deeply moved and saddened by the loss that they have endured, and we take their concerns very seriously." Carter Pilcher, the president of ShortsTV, which distributes the nominated short films to theaters, is a voting member of the academy. In a telephone interview, he said that he did not expect the film to be dropped. "The academy can't be in the place of deciding which stories can be told," he said. There have been similar protests in the shorts category before, Pilcher added. Last year, with the MeToo movement at its height, pressure mounted to remove Kobe Bryant's short film "Dear Basketball" from the running, because he had been accused of rape in 2003. Bryant won best animated short. Pilcher added he had sympathy for the Bulger family, but felt "Detainment" was deserving of its nomination. "I think it's a very well made film," he said. "It certainly puts these questions in front of you," he added. "If you're 10, how can you do something like this?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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For some publishers unsettled by a fast changing online advertising business, sponsored content has provided much needed relief. In recent years, publications large and small have invested in teams to make sponsored content written stories, videos or podcasts that look and feel like journalistic content hoping to make up for declines in conventional advertising. To varying degrees, they have succeeded. Younger companies like Vice and BuzzFeed have built whole businesses around the concept. The Atlantic expects three quarters of its digital ad revenue to come from sponsored content this year. Slate, the web publisher, says that about half of its ad revenue comes from native ads, as sponsored content is also called, and the other half from traditional banner or display ads. Many major newspapers, including The New York Times, have declared sponsored content to be an important part of their strategies. But as the relationship between publishers and social platforms like Facebook grows closer and as more straightforward forms of advertising are devalued by ad blocking and industry automation, the role, and definition, of sponsored content has shifted. Now, publishers, social media companies and advertisers are negotiating new relationships. Audiences have migrated away from news websites and toward Facebook and other social media destinations, which for a competitive price can provide advertisers access to larger and more finely targeted groups of people, challenging the value of a publisher's own channels. With a weaker claim over audiences, publishers have been left to compete for advertising on different terms, leaning less on the size or demographics of their readerships, and more on the sorts of campaigns they can engineer for advertisers campaigns that are then used across the internet. "The differences between five years ago and now, in client expectations, are enormous," said Keith Hernandez, the president of Slate. The resulting arrangements are more client agency than advertiser publisher, and advertisers are looking to media companies for a full range of services, from the production of campaigns to the often paid for placement of the content across the internet and social media. "We have the basic building blocks of a full service agency," said Jon Slade, the chief commercial officer of The Financial Times. And The New York Times recently characterized the work of its T Brand Studio as "platform agnostic." As it has for traditional editorial content, Facebook has become a primary distributor for many publications' sponsored posts, even though outside sponsored content was not officially permitted until April, when the social network published formal guidelines. Facebook's welcome of sponsored posts was broadly seen as a promising and necessary development. But some publishers were troubled by the manner in which Facebook said it would display sponsored posts and by how much power it put in the hands of advertisers. Under Facebook's system, all advertisers must be disclosed and displayed as co authors under the post or video, a level of disclosure that is required by the Federal Trade Commission. In addition, these advertisers are now privy to a wide range of information about their sponsored content posted on Facebook something that once was visible only to the publisher. They also get a deeper and more profound layer of data: They can see how much money was spent on Facebook promotion to drive traffic to the post in order to meet targets, a common and sometimes lucrative practice for publishers, who have been able to significantly mark up the price on such distribution. What's more, Facebook invites the advertiser to pay to promote their sponsored content on their own, making them less reliant on the publisher for distribution. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. From Facebook's point of view, this transparency eliminates inefficiency why let middlemen charge extra for an audience that Facebook is selling? But for publishers who sold advertisers on their ability not just to create posts but to make sure they are seen, either through clever promotion or paid placement, such visibility can be deflating. This change poses a persistent and tantalizing question to increasingly savvy advertisers: Could we just attract eyes to our posts ourselves? And if not now, maybe soon? The change also discourages any illusions about how easy it could be for publishers to make money from native advertising. Sponsored content which, in 2016, often means video is expensive to produce and difficult to do well. Controlling distribution, albeit through Facebook, was for some a more profitable lever, and a way to pad deals that, while often growing in size, offered thin margins. This is, of course, a boon to advertisers. "Many native campaigns are quite expensive, and if you limit the work you're doing to the creation of content, and leave the distribution to the brand, then it can become more affordable," said Stephanie Losee, head of content for Visa. With less ability to charge for distribution, on their own channels or others, and a growing dependence on margin squeezing outside platforms, publishers may be left to compete with creative agencies on their turf. Publishers becoming ad agencies, in other words, means competing not just with one another, but with the agencies that already exist. In this nascent new order, competitors are defined largely by their limitations. While the terms and prices that publishers can accept from advertisers are set by the need to support a connected news or entertainment organization the reason they chose this controversial path in the first place conventional agencies are hampered by a dependence on lucrative TV work, from which they are accustomed to low volumes and high margins. Accordingly, publishers' pitches often focus on price: their ability to create more content for less. Such a situation, in which publishers join a broader competition for advertising production dollars, would be a testament to how much and how quickly media distribution has changed. Publishers may get back in the running for advertising deals lost in recent years, but much like the editorial content they produce, their ads will succeed or fail in contexts over which they have less and less control. Bryan Goldberg, founder of the women's website Bustle, views these changes with optimism, at least as far as they affect larger publishers. "Gross margins have slightly decreased, but not anywhere near enough to offset the upward movement in scale," he said. For smaller publishers, or those without backing from venture capital, the situation is less heartening. "Running a full scale sales, marketing and operations team requires tens of millions of dollars of annual expenses," Mr. Goldberg said. Facebook, for its part, has provided a preview of how such a system might mature. A program that the company calls Anthology is meant to help video publishers "lend brands their creativity, storytelling expertise and video production know how." It is being used by companies like Vox Media and Vice with advertising clients to produce videos that will then be promoted on Facebook.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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A California judge has ordered the ailing 92 year old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone to undergo a medical examination, a major development in the continuing legal battle over his mental competence. In a tentative ruling on Friday, Judge David J. Cowan of the Los Angeles County Superior Court granted permission for a doctor to examine Mr. Redstone's mental health. Mr. Redstone's nurses and speech therapists may attend the evaluation, which should last an hour, the judge said. The decision adds a new twist in the suit filed in November by Mr. Redstone's former companion, Manuela Herzer, that describes him as a "living ghost." Lawyers for Mr. Redstone have called the suit a "meritless action, riddled with lies" and have filed a motion to dismiss it. The medical examination is expected to occur in the next 10 days. A hearing on the motion to dismiss has been pushed to Feb. 29. Last month, Judge Cowan rejected a petition to have Mr. Redstone interviewed by a geriatric psychiatrist. But on Friday, the judge said that a medical examination was necessary so that both sides had access to all the facts.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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A woman with a roll of toilet paper around her neck. A man with lettuce on his head, bare chested in a sheet, delicately holding a large goblet of red wine. A child with small lilac angel wings posed atop a mound of again toilet paper, with siblings and parents looking on in the background. For weeks, people have been recreating works of fine art using household items and posting their tableaus on social media. At a time when museums are closed, galleries have shuttered and art education has largely moved online, these images have formed a living archive of creativity in isolation. Tens of thousands of recreations appear under the hashtags mettwinning, betweenartandquarantine and gettymuseumchallenge. Some have been made by arts professionals, but many of them are the skillful works of amateurs. Anneloes Officier believes that her household in Amsterdam started this spontaneous wave of imitative works. For a month, she has been collecting submissions and posting them on the Instagram account tussenkunstenquarantaine (a reference the Dutch television program "Tussen Kunst en Kitsch," whose title means "between art and kitsch"). "Over 24,000 contributions have come in through our hashtag," Ms. Officier, 31, said, adding that staff members from the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Getty and the Hermitage have taken part. The creators sometimes impose their own rules and restrictions, such as limiting the number of props or the time allotted to create a replica. These recreations recall the work of the artist Nina Katchadourian, whose series "Lavatory Self Portraits in the Flemish Style" was shot entirely in airplane bathrooms. They're part of a larger body of work, called "Seat Assignment," in which she creates art during commercial flights. "I was trying to make art under circumstances where art doesn't seem possible. It involves a kind of magic trick," Ms. Katchadourian said. "It's not unrelated to the constraints people are under now." She's "delighted and charmed" to see that others are taking to the form. Francesco De Grazia, a 25 year old classical guitarist from Sicily, said that almost every concert and artistic event he had been looking forward to has been canceled, leaving him with plenty of time on his hands to dress up like a Caravaggio painting. "The only possibility is to make use of the tools offered by the web while waiting for this nightmare to pass," he said. "I hope I was able to make someone laugh." Although not normally a big fan of social media, Crystal Filep, a 36 year old urban planner from Wellington, New Zealand, decided to join in after her mother encouraged her to try her hand at the challenge. "I was attracted to the bodily, tactile nature," she said. "I had been spending an unhealthy amount of time in front of screens for virtual meetings, emails, spreadsheets." Turning away from work to take part in a creative exercise "helped lighten things, and put things in perspective," Ms. Filep said. In interviews with more than a dozen participants in the challenge among them a Japanese actor living in London and a social worker from Azerbaijan every person mentioned the sense of lightness that came from pretending to be someone else for a moment. They also spoke about their love for art and museums. There are so many people who miss the quietly social act of looking at art with others. For now, they will have to make do with virtual gallery tours and riffs on famous paintings posted to Instagram. These embodiments of artworks have a historical precedent. Long before we were dabbing eye shadow on our lips and posing with toilet paper, people were donning makeup, holding props and posing rigidly in place for up to a full minute as part of a dramatic practice known as tableau vivant, or living picture. Historians have traced evidence of the phenomenon back to the 1700s, where it served as a form of entertainment and instruction. In 1760, a group of Italian comedic actors recreated Jean Baptiste Greuze's painting "The Village Betrothal in Les Noces d'Arlequin" as part of larger theatrical performance, and in 1781, children at the Royal Palace of Versailles supposedly participated in a series of tableaux vivants inspired by the paintings of Jacques Louis David and Eugene Isabey. The hobby picked up steam during the 1800s, and reached its peak around the turn of the 20th century. While the widespread use of photography and the availability of the cinema made the practice of tableau vivant seem less engaging, it never fully faded from sight. Every year, residents of Laguna Beach, Calif., dress up for the Pageant of the Masters, an event that has been referenced in popular culture (including on episodes of "Arrested Development" and "Gilmore Girls"). When restrictions on public life are lifted, participation in this social media challenge and several others that have emerged over the last month will surely wane. But some educators are hoping to keep the recreations going long after stay at home orders end. "I'm definitely going to keep assigning this project," said Stacy Antoville, who teaches art at the Clinton School, a 6 12 public school in Manhattan. Like the rest of the city's residents, her students are "dealing with a lot of trauma right now." Some are grieving losses; others are anxious about the future. They're having trouble focusing on schoolwork and art, but they rose to the tableau vivant challenge in a way Ms. Antoville didn't expect, gamely fashioning themselves as famous subjects like Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali. "I hope this can give them one good memory from this time," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Regulators on four continents are preparing for a long awaited showdown with Facebook, after years of disinterest and half steps. They largely have the same goal: changing the social media company's behavior. Figuring out how is the hard part. Members of the Federal Trade Commission in the United States are weighing what sorts of constraints they would put on Facebook's business practices. But there is not agreement on those terms within the F.T.C., according to two people familiar with the internal talks who were not allowed to discuss them publicly. Facebook said this week that it expected that the agency would impose a fine of 3 billion to 5 billion for violations of a privacy settlement from 2011. It would be the highest penalty in the United States against a tech company. The company and F.T.C. officials have discussed additional mandates that would constrain how Facebook's handles data, strengthens security and monitors its privacy practices, according to the two people familiar with the discussions. Joseph J. Simons, the F.T.C. chairman, has been determined to get consensus from the five member commission and is facing resistance on the proposed settlement from within the agency, according to the people. The potential settlement is seen as a landmark privacy decision and a referendum on the nation's ability to police the powers of Big Tech and protect consumers. The conditions on a deal with Facebook would have far reaching impact, setting standards for future privacy violations and influencing the creation of privacy regulations in the United States and other countries, legal experts say. "It will set the bar," said David C. Vladeck, former head of consumer protection at the F.T.C. "Once the F.T.C. creates a consent order, it levels the playing field so that any other party that engages in the same behavior will have every expectation that the prior order will apply to them." In Europe, officials in Britain, France, Germany and Ireland are scrutinizing the social media company's practices. Governments in Australia, India, New Zealand and Singapore have passed or are considering new restrictions on social media. Facebook has shown its willingness to fight charges of privacy violations. On Thursday, Facebook disputed findings by Canada's privacy commissioners in an investigation into how Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that worked for the Trump presidential campaign, gained access to information about Facebook users. The privacy commissioner of Canada and the information and privacy commissioner for British Columbia said Facebook violated national and local laws in allowing third parties access to private user information through "superficial and ineffective safeguards and consent mechanisms." The Canadian regulators, who have limited power to force Facebook's compliance, plan to take the company to a Canadian federal court. The court, which focuses on regulatory issues and lawsuits against the government, may impose fines. The revelations of data misuse by Cambridge Analytica also set off the investigation at the F.T.C. But regulators expanded it to include other privacy violations by Facebook that were reported, almost monthly, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Among conditions that are being discussed by the F.T.C. are stronger monitoring of Facebook's privacy practices and greater restraints on how the company shares data with third parties, according to the two people familiar with the discussions. But the conditions are not finalized and could change, as could the amount of the fine, which Facebook said was a projection. The agency and Facebook could decide to go to court over charges if an agreement is not reached. The two sides were close to concluding settlement talks earlier this month, according to a person familiar with the talks. The company's guidance to investors of the financial penalty also indicated a conclusion is near. But disagreements over final terms of a settlement have complicated the conclusion of the F.T.C.'s one year investigation. At least one member of the five person commission has called for direct punishment of Facebook's chief, Mark Zuckerberg, and believes the proposed fine would not change Facebook's behavior, the people said. In fact, the member would be willing to fight in court for stronger controls over the company, the two people said. Agency officials are determined to keep the discussions with Facebook private, and the F.T.C.'s inspector general has started an investigation into leaks of the talks, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Also on Thursday, the New York attorney general's office said it was investigating how Facebook gained access to the email address books of more than 1.5 million users without permission. Facebook is already fighting a lawsuit by the attorney general of Washington, D.C., Karl Racine, for the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica. Immediately after Facebook's announcement of the projected fine, Democratic lawmakers and privacy advocates said the punishment was too weak. Marc Rotenberg, president of the nonprofit privacy group EPIC, said a large fine was an insufficient solution to Facebook's repeated privacy violations. He and others have called for constraints on the structure of Facebook's business. Mr. Zuckerberg has come out in support of global privacy and content regulations, joining a growing chorus of tech chief executives who now hope to shape federal and global regulations for the internet. "The real challenge facing the F.T.C. right now is whether to allow Facebook to integrate WhatsApp and Instagram with Messenger," Mr. Rotenberg said. "The commission has the opportunity because of the pending enforcement action to stop that. If they don't, Facebook's dominance of the internet economy will only increase." Dipayan Ghosh, a former economic adviser on tech issues during the Obama administration, said the conditions laid out in the F.T.C. order would also guide federal legislation. "Enforcement actions have a broad impact on the entire industry. They can set norms," Mr. Ghosh said. The F.T.C. action foreshadows problems for Facebook across the Atlantic, where European regulators have sharply criticized the social media giant's handling of user data, harmful influence on elections and vulnerability to the spread of extremist ideologies. In Ireland, home to Facebook's European headquarters, the company is facing several investigations into whether it is complying with European data protection laws. Just this week, the Irish Data Protection Commission started a fresh inquiry into Facebook exposing user passwords. Under European privacy law, Facebook could be fined up to 4 percent of global revenue, or about 2.23 billion. British authorities last year gave Facebook the maximum possible fine of 500,000 pounds, worth about 645,000, for allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest the information of millions of users without their consent. The country is also considering naming a new internet regulator who could issue fines and hold individual executives legally liable for harmful content spread on their platforms. In France, where the government has passed laws to stop the spread of misinformation on social media close to elections, officials are investigating Facebook's content moderation policies. And in Germany, which adopted an anti hate speech law that requires Facebook to screen out posts considered harmful, antitrust authorities forced Facebook to adjust its data collection policies after determining the company was exploiting its market dominance to profile its users and sell advertising. The efforts are part of a broader effort to clamp down on social media around the world. Ben Scott, a former State Department official in the Obama administration, said the global scrutiny represented "a massive wave of outrage that will crash straight into the central premise of the company's business model."
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Technology
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The story of the striving, first generation kid made good is a familiar one; Alvarez makes his ache. He excels in honors classes and is aware from a young age of a yearning to free his mother from "the assault of the fruit industry." To do so, he knows he must outrun his geography a metaphor he comes to embrace literally when in high school he becomes a serious runner. "When the rhythms of working class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run," he writes. He wins a full scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, but is thwarted by his own high expectations and shame about his upbringing. The dining hall presents a challenge, as does going to class and staying on top of assignments. Only while running does he feel solid in his skin. At a conference, he learns about Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six month long quadrennial run through the whole of North America, in which "numerous and diverse Indigenous nations reunite and reclaim dignity for their families and communities." Pacquiao, the calm young man in charge of the journey, speaks of running as "connective tissue," "a form of prayer" that "renews our responsibility to community." Alvarez drops out of college to join the group, never more than a couple dozen runners, in one of its early stops in British Columbia, and the intricately threaded narrative about his family morphs into a journal of his travels on foot, and also, at times, in the vans the runners use to transport themselves and their supplies in their relay style race across the continent. As they go, they learn the different ways "the rain strikes, strums and plucks at our skins." They run through mountainsides, forests, small towns and large urban blocks. When they are dropped off for a shift, they receive few instructions. "When in doubt, turn left," is a motto. Food is scarce. Sometimes Alvarez's language seems vague and overly laden with the weight of his mission. ("People's paths are unique, beautiful," he notes to himself upon meeting a new recruit to the team.) At other times, it's not clear how this epic run, with its attendant difficulties, relates to Alvarez's desire to help his family. At one point, alone on the trail in Oregon, he meets a snarling mountain lion. At the last minute, recalling instructions from an older runner about surviving such encounters, he remembers to "thank the animal." Moreover, some of the marathon's leaders behave in ways that border on sadistic. The majority of the runners are recovering addicts or otherwise seeking redemption, and, like many of them, Alvarez believes in the transformative power of extreme sacrifice. "I run to follow as closely as I can the path of those who came before me," he insists. "I run to find fragments of my own parents sprinkled over the earth." When the group enters his home state of Washington after a month of running, he realizes he is "submerging myself in pain ... so that I may control the turmoil within me."
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Books
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Richard Easton, left, and Robert Sean Leonard in Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love" at the Lyceum Theater in New York in 2001. Mr. Easton, who won a Tony for his performance, played A.E. Housman as an old man; Mr. Leonard played the youthful version. Richard Easton, whose frequent appearances on Broadway across 50 years included a Tony winning turn as the poet A.E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love," died on Dec. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. Jonathan Walker, executor of his estate, said the cause was congestive heart failure. Mr. Easton also appeared on television and in films; his movie credits included "Henry V" (1989) and "Dead Again" (1991), both directed by Kenneth Branagh, with whom he had acted on the stage in England. But he was first and foremost a stage actor, turning in memorable performances in both classical and modern fare, aided by a vocal dexterity that might find him booming in one scene, comically sputtering in another. "He was a wonder," Ethan Hawke, who was cast with him in several plays, said by email, "and like many other young actors, I quickly became a disciple. His intelligence, wit, experience, honesty and his voice rendered him a commanding presence in our lives." One of Mr. Easton's most famous moments onstage, though, was of a kind no actor wants. During a preview performance of Part 1 of Mr. Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in October 2006, he collapsed in midperformance, the result of an arrhythmia. Mr. Hawke and Martha Plimpton were onstage, their characters having just received a tongue lashing from Mr. Easton, who was playing their father. "I said, 'This is my last word,' and I took two steps towards the wings, one, two, and crashed like a tree in the forest," Mr. Easton recalled in a 2010 video made for Lincoln Center Theater. "Ethan has always been grateful to me because he had the opportunity to say the immortal line 'Is there a doctor in the house?,'" Mr. Easton continued. "And I said to him afterwards: 'Are you kidding? On the Upper West Side of New York City, is there a doctor in the house? Of course there's a doctor in the house.'" Several audience members did indeed step forward, Mr. Hawke recalled, although he said it was a member of the stage crew who initially administered crucial CPR. The play's formal opening was delayed three weeks, until Nov. 27. The production was the first part of "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy. Parts 2 and 3 opened soon after, and the plays ran in repertory. Mr. Easton, newly fitted with a pacemaker, was in all three. Jack O'Brien, who directed Mr. Easton in "The Coast of Utopia" and many other productions, including "The Invention of Love" in 2001, shared a list of practical advice for young actors that Mr. Easton had drawn up years ago when they worked together at the Old Globe in San Diego and Mr. Easton taught at the University of San Diego. One Easton rule advised, "When it comes to a coin toss (which it does, most of the time!) to decide casting between one actor and another, 'Very good actor but rather difficult' will lose out, nine point six times out of ten, to 'Pretty good and really very, very nice!'" Mr. O'Brien, in a telephone interview, added, "There's a generation of young men and women indebted to Richard, not only for his friendship but for professional specifics." John Richard Easton was born on March 22, 1933, in Montreal. His father, Leonard, was an engineer, and his mother, Mary Louisa (Withington) Easton, was a homemaker. Mr. Easton began acting as a teenager, working with a children's theater and the semiprofessional Montreal Repertory Theater, commanding attention despite his youth. One play he was cast in was "The Rivals" by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in which he played the squire Bob Acres. (Christopher Plummer, another young actor working his way toward stardom, was also in that production.) Some 55 years later, in 2004, Mr. Easton would be in "The Rivals" again, in a different role, that of Sir Anthony Absolute; this time the production was on Broadway. "Mr. Easton's alternately blustery and delicate rendering of Sir Anthony's outraged dignity and wounded pride is priceless," Charles Isherwood wrote in his review in The New York Times. But Broadway was still a ways in the future. At 17 he moved to Ottawa to work in a repertory company that put on 33 plays in 35 weeks, a crash course in all things theatrical. In 1953 he performed with the company of the newly created Stratford Festival in Ontario, then won a scholarship to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He worked in England for two years, at one point playing opposite one of his heroes, John Gielgud, in "King Lear." He returned to Canada, then signed on with the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., where John Houseman was artistic director. (Mr. Easton was later able to say that he had worked at all three Stratfords: in Ontario and Connecticut and at Stratford upon Avon in England.) In 1957 Mr. Houseman took "Measure for Measure," "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Duchess of Malfi" to Broadway; Mr. Easton was in all three, his first Broadway credits. He appeared regularly on Broadway for the rest of the 1950s, throughout the '60s and into the early '70s, in plays that included "Pantagleize" (1967), "The Misanthrope" (1968) and "Hamlet" (1969). He spent much of the '70s back in England, where he was part of the cast of "The Brothers," a BBC drama that ran from 1972 to 1976. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid 1980s and stayed for four years before joining Mr. Branagh's breakaway theatrical troupe, Renaissance Theater. Then came a decade in San Diego, working with Mr. O'Brien.
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Theater
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Ryan Hunter Reay made a breathtaking pass of Helio Castroneves with one lap to go and held on to win Sunday in one of the closest and fastest Indianapolis 500 races ever. Hunter Reay's victory margin of 0.06 second denied Castroneves a fourth victory in the 500 mile race. The winner's average speed of 186.563 miles per hour was second only to the pace of the 2013 race. Most of the race was run at a furious pace, in excess of 220 m.p.h., including the caution free first 350 miles a record. Third went to Marco Andretti, followed by Carlos Munoz, Juan Pablo Montoya and Kurt Busch, the Nascar driver who raced not only at Indy on Sunday, but also in a 600 mile Nascar race later that day in North Carolina. Busch, who finished 2.2 seconds back, was the race's highest finishing rookie. A restart after a red flag stoppage of the race set up a wild six lap dash to the finish, with a record 20 cars still on the lead lap. The lead changed hands with each successive lap, until Hunter Reay made a shocking dive almost into the infield grass to take the lead. "It is a dream come true," said Hunter Reay, the first American born driver to win the Indy 500 since 2006. "It hasn't really sunk in yet. But the dream has finally come true here today." In other racing news from a busy weekend: Jimmie Johnson furthered his aspirations of winning a record tying seventh driving championship by taking the checkered flag Sunday night in the 600 mile Nascar Sprint Cup event at Concord, N.C. A new qualifying system for a season ending playoff places a premium on winning races during the first two thirds of the campaign. Johnson, who notched his sixth Nascar title last year, had been winless through the first third of the 2014 season. Johnson took the lead with eight laps left in the 400 lap event, then held on to beat Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards and Jamie McMurray, who rounded out the top five. The race ended in disappointment for Kurt Busch, who had to start last after missing a mandatory prerace drivers meeting because he had been competing earlier in the day in the Indianapolis 500. He had worked his way through the field to challenge the leaders, but his car's engine expired two thirds of the way into the race. Nico Rosberg, the pole qualifier, managed to hold onto his position throughout Sunday's running of the Monaco Grand Prix and score a victory over his Mercedes teammate, Lewis Hamilton, and Daniel Ricciardo of Red Bull. Hamilton was within a second of the lead for much of the race. But he slowed in the late going, complaining of having something in his eye. He just managed to hold off Ricciardo; Sebastian Vettel, the defending champion of the Formula One series, retired with a mechanical failure. Rounding out the top five were Fernando Alonso of Ferrari and Nico Hulkenberg of Force India. Rosberg, Monaco's defending champion, broke the four race winning streak that Hamilton had going, and took over the points lead in the battle for the 2014 driver's title. Courtney Force won Sunday's Funny Car duel at the Kansas Nationals drag races, and in the process scored what the National Hot Rod Association said was the 100th victory for women in series competition. The achievement capped a run that began in 1976 with the pioneering racer Shirley Muldowney. A total of 14 women have added their names to the roster of N.H.R.A. final round winners over the years. "This is for all the girls out there," Force said, "in any type of sport." In other pro categories at Kansas, Spencer Massey won Top Fuel and Allen Johnson was tops in Pro Stock. Liam Dwyer drove his Mazda to victory Saturday in an International Motor Sports Association sports car race at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut.
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Automobiles
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As tomato growers in Florida and some other states fight a 16 year old agreement that they contend allows farmers in Mexico to export tomatoes at a price below their costs, the Mexican farmers are finding allies in the United States. The trade dispute highlights the network of interlocking interests between the countries under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trade across the Mexican border is now worth more than 1 billion a day. American producers of corn, soybeans, apples, pork and chicken have increased sales to Mexico greatly over the years as trade barriers have been dismantled. But at the same time, Mexico has become a fast growing supplier of produce to American supermarkets and restaurants. Tomatoes lead the list: exports have doubled and their value has tripled since the mid 1990s, to almost 2 billion. That has been aided by a complex arrangement dating from 1996 that established a minimum price at which Mexican tomatoes are permitted to enter the American market. Florida farmers are leading a campaign to persuade the Commerce Department to scrap the accord. They won a victory in September when the department announced a preliminary decision to end it. Lawyers in the case say a final decision may be issued in the next few weeks. But other United States interests are lining up in support of continuing the agreement. For example, Richard Fimbres, a member of the Tucson City Council who is usually more concerned with improving city streets than with the minutiae of international trade law, recently sponsored a resolution asking the Commerce Department to continue the agreement. Then he wrote to President Obama last month, declaring that "we can't turn our back on the global economy now." The reason is that fresh Mexican tomatoes are big business in Arizona. Much of the 2 billion in business passes through the state, benefiting local importers and distributors. But the benefits go beyond them. More than 370 businesses and trade groups from small family run importers on the Mexico border to Wal Mart Stores have written or signed letters to the Commerce Department in favor of continuing the deal. "Yes, Mexico produces their tomatoes on average at a lower cost than Florida; that's what we call competitive advantage," Mr. Ahern said in an e mail. Without the agreement to provide "stability to a volatile market, Mexican tomato acreage destined for U.S. markets will decline," he said, and that would damage his business. While Florida tomato growers contend the accord is hurting their business, the broader trade dynamics are generating business for other companies in the United States. "A lot of what is produced and harvested in Mexico is put in the ground with U.S. money and intended for U.S. markets," said John McClung, the president and chief executive of the Texas International Produce Association. "The garden simply happens to be across the river." NatureSweet Ltd., which is based in San Antonio, grows cherry and grape tomatoes under 1,200 acres of greenhouses in Mexico for the American market. It employs 5,000 people, although all but about 100 of them work in Mexico. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. "We couldn't survive without Nafta," said Bryant Ambelang, the company's chief executive. Mr. Ambelang said that Mexican grown tomatoes were more competitive because of lower labor costs, good weather and more than a decade of investment in greenhouse technology. "Here we went and signed an agreement called Nafta, and now we're going to go and wave our finger in one industry where Mexico has superiority?" he said. Mr. McClung said that even though Texas lost much of its commercial fresh tomato industry years ago, "we can do quite nicely importing Mexican tomatoes." He acknowledged that growers in Florida and elsewhere were "going slowly under." But, he added, "my job is to protect Texas importers." The complex 1996 trade accord was struck after Florida farmers asked the Commerce Department to impose antidumping duties on Mexican tomatoes. Their complaint was suspended after Mexico's largest producers agreed to ship their tomatoes at a minimum price, ensuring they could not sell at prices that might undercut Florida production. But Edward Beckman, president of Certified Greenhouse Farmers, a trade group for American and Canadian growers, argues that conditions have changed since then. The "current playing field is tilted completely against domestic interests, and we need to quickly address the unfair trade that exists," he said in a recent statement. Consumers have come to expect year round tomatoes, said Bill Piper, the vice president and general manager of Grant County Foods in Dry Ridge, Ky., a large produce wholesaler and repacker that buys tomatoes from Florida and Mexico. If it becomes harder to import Mexican tomatoes, he said, "people will have to put up signs: 'We have tomatoes today' or 'We don't have tomatoes today.' " Scott DeFife, executive vice president at the National Restaurant Association, said that "people want tomato based dishes all the time." He added, "You plan over the course of the year where you are going to get your supply in the winter, the spring, the fall." Without tomatoes from Mexico, a winter freeze in Florida, for example, would send prices shooting up, he said. If the 1996 deal were canceled, importers, distributors and retailers said they suspect that American growers would file a new antidumping complaint against Mexican tomatoes. Under that process, the Commerce Department could impose tariffs on Mexican tomatoes if it determined that the Mexicans were selling below their costs. Even if the department eventually found that the Mexicans were not dumping, a complaint itself would have a chilling effect on trade.
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Global Business
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BOSTON "Matisse in the Studio." An exploration of this path blazing artist's creativity unites 36 paintings and 50 other artworks with the textiles, pitchers, masks and other objects he displayed as inspiration. April 9 through July 9. Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue; 617 267 9300, mfa.org. BOSTON "Dana Schutz." The dark humor, vibrant color and eccentricity that are hallmarks of Ms. Schutz's imaginative narrative paintings, which mix abstraction and figuration, will be fully on view in this show of her recent work. July 26 through Nov. 26. Institute of Contemporary Art, 25 Harbor Shore Drive; 617 478 3100, icaboston.org. BRUNSWICK, ME. "The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe." This exhibition of some 80 carved ivories, prints, jewelry and other items depicting death and decay sheds light on the centrality of the macabre in the culture of the 14th to 17th centuries. June 23 through Nov. 26. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 9400 College Station; 207 725 3275, bowdoin.edu/art museum. SALEM, MASS. "Ocean Liners: Glamour, Speed and Style." Nearly 200 paintings, sculptural works, models, furniture, textiles, photographs and other items will illustrate the design, engineering, personality and opulence of these ships during their heyday, the mid 19th century through the mid 20th century. May 20 through Oct. 9. Peabody Essex Museum, 161 Essex Street; 978 745 9500, pem.org. WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. "As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings." Large paintings from the 1950s through the 1990s illustrate Frankenthaler's inventive, poetic use of color in abstractions inspired by nature. July 2 through Oct. 9. A companion show, "No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts," showcases experiments that stretched the medium, resulting in painterly images. July 2 through Sept. 24. Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street; 413 458 2303, clarkart.edu. WORCESTER, MASS. "Renaissance Woman in Asia: Florance Waterbury and Her Gifts of Asian Art." Reflecting increased art historical interest by collectors, this exhibition reveals a woman who, in the first half of the 20th century, traveled the world, painting and collecting, eventually becoming a scholar of Chinese art who donated many works to this museum. May 13 through Aug. 20. Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street; 508 799 4406, worcesterart.org. MONTCLAIR, N.J. "Matisse and American Art." From Maurice Prendergast and Stuart Davis to Andy Warhol and Faith Ringgold, generations of artists have taken cues from Matisse to experiment with wild colors, fluid lines, strong structural components and varied subjects, as manifested in this exhibition of 19 works by Matisse and 44 by Americans. Through June 18. Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Avenue; 973 746 5555, montclairartmuseum.org. NEW YORK "Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends." Spanning six decades, this retrospective brings together more than 250 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and recordings that illustrate the ways Rauschenberg's use of everyday objects and his interdisciplinary approach broke ground and influenced many other artists. May 21 through Sept. 17. Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street; 212 708 9400, moma.org. NEW YORK "The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s." The bold, colorful designs that characterized the heady days of the Roaring Twenties are highlighted here in a show of 350 pieces of jewelry, fashion, furniture, textiles, paintings, posters and other items. (An article on the exhibition is on Page 8.) April 7 through Aug. 20. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street; 212 849 8400, cooperhewitt.org. PHILADELPHIA "American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent." With fragile works that are rarely on view, this exhibition shows how an enormously creative band of American watercolorists like Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent led to a new vision of art that was later adopted by Modernists like Charles Demuth and Edward Hopper. Through May 14. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway; 215 763 8100, philamuseum.org. WASHINGTON "Frederic Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism." In the first major American exhibition of Bazille's work in almost 25 years, he is shown as a central figure in the Impressionist era through the display of 75 works, including several by contemporaries such as Monet and Renoir and by predecessors like Courbet. April 9 through July 9. National Gallery of Art, Constitution Avenue NW, between Third and Ninth Streets; 202 737 4215, nga.gov. WASHINGTON "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors." This traveling exhibition features six of Ms. Kusama's immersive "Infinity Mirror Rooms," as well as many other key paintings, collages and works on paper from the early 1950s to the present, and several recent large scale paintings that have never been shown in the United States. Through May 14. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW; 202 633 1000, hirshhorn.si.edu. DALLAS "Mexico 1900 1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco and the Avant Garde." An attempt to broaden the perception of Modern Mexican art, this exhibition of more than 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings and films celebrates the work of lesser known pioneering artists, as well as the recognizable titans. Through July 16. Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood Street; 214 922 1200, dma.org. FORT WORTH "The Polaroid Project." This debut of an international touring exhibition demonstrating the cultural power of Polaroid showcases about 150 photographs by more than 100 artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, William Wegman and Barbara Kasten, along with cameras, prototypes and ephemera from Polaroid's corporate archive. June 3 through Sept. 3. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard; 817 738 1933, cartermuseum.org. FORT WORTH "Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture." Renowned as a master of light and space, Kahn celebrated here in drawings, models, photographs and films created many beautiful, important buildings, including the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as single family homes. Also on view are watercolors, pastels and charcoal drawings Kahn created on his travels. March 26 through June 25. Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard; 817 332 8451, kimbellart.org. HOUSTON "Between Land and Sea: Artists of the Coenties Slip." In the late 1950s and the '60s, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and other artists and writers congregated in spaces near the lower tip of Manhattan. Their views of the sea and the Brooklyn Bridge inspired experimentations with abstraction, as seen in the 27 works on view. April 14 through Aug. 6. The Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross Street; 713 525 9400, menil.org. HOUSTON "Adios Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950." More than 100 paintings, photographs, installations, videos and other works, created by more than 50 artists who remained in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, demonstrate the ways they dealt with their aspirations for social utopia and with their disappointment over the failure to attain it. Through May 29. Museum of Fine Arts, 1001 Bissonnet; 713 639 7300, mfah.org. MIAMI "John Dunkley: Neither Day Nor Night." An exhibition of 30 of his 50 extant paintings, along with 10 sculptures, introduces this self taught Jamaican artist, born in 1891, to American museumgoers. One of Jamaica's most important historical artists, Dunkley deployed a dark palette to create imaginative, highly detailed, psychologically tinged works. May 26 through Jan. 14, 2018. Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Boulevard; 305 375 3000, pamm.org. NEW ORLEANS "A Life of Seduction: Venice in the 1700s." Travelers flocked to Venice in the 18th century, enticed by its street life, festivals, gala balls and fashions. Here, paintings including several never seen in the United States costumes, furnishings, glass, masks, a puppet theater and ceremonial regalia celebrate the city that was home to Casanova, Vivaldi and Tiepolo. Through May 21. New Orleans Museum of Art, 1 Collins Diboll Circle; 504 658 4100, noma.org. CINCINNATI "A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America." With more than 60 works created by self taught or minimally trained artists between 1800 and 1925 including rare canvases by Ammi Phillips and John Brewster Jr. this display illustrates American ingenuity. June 10 through Sept. 3. Cincinnati Museum of Art, 953 Eden Park Drive; 513 721 2787, cincinnatiartmuseum.org. CLEVELAND "Brand New Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s." While other artists were creating abstractions, Mr. Katz insisted on making art with recognizable images, but pared them down to their most fundamental elements prefiguring the development of Pop Art, as seen in the 70 works in this exhibition. April 30 through Aug. 8. Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Boulevard; 216 421 7350, clevelandart.org. DETROIT "Art of Rebellion: Black Art of the Civil Rights Movement." Commemorating the 50th anniversary of this city's riots, this exhibition presents about 25 paintings, sculptures, installations and photographs made by African American artist collectives of the 1960s and '70s that were intent on stressing black identity and civil rights. July 23 through Oct. 22. Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Avenue; 313 833 7900, dia.org. MILWAUKEE "Frank Lloyd Wright: Buildings for the Prairie." Drawn from the famed Wasmuth Portfolio of lithographs, considered the most significant collection of Wright's early work, this show of his designs for furniture, stained glass, textiles and architecture celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth. July 28 through Oct. 15. Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 North Art Museum Drive; 414 224 3200, mam.org. MINNEAPOLIS "Merce Cunningham: Common Time." This exhibition chronicles the life and work of the renowned choreographer who expanded the boundaries of dance with collaborators in music and visual arts. It presents moving image presentations, stage sets, costumes and some 60 works by Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman and others. Through July 30. Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place; 612 375 7600, walkerart.org. A companion show of the same title runs through April 30 at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue; 312 280 2660, mcachicago.org. MUSKEGON, MICH. "Edward S. Curtis: The North American Indian." For 30 years, beginning in 1906, Curtis traveled the United States, photographing portraits, landscapes and the daily lives of 80 Native American tribes, images that were collated in a 20 volume history and 723 photogravure prints. All will be on view, along with his recordings of Native American music and artifacts, and objects from his life. May 11 through Sept. 10. Muskegon Museum of Art, 296 West Webster Avenue; 231 720 2570, muskegonartmuseum.org. ST. LOUIS "Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade." With paintings and drawings by not only Degas but also Manet, Renoir, Cassatt and others as well as a sampling of 19th century chapeaus this innovative show explores the period's artistic fascination with high fashion hats and the industry that made them. Through May 7. Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park; 314 721 0072, slam.org. DENVER "The Western: An Epic in Art and Film." How the mythology of the western was forged not just by cowboys and Indians but also by gun violence, gender roles and race relations is examined in this exhibition featuring 160 works, from paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington and Ed Ruscha to films by John Ford. May 21 through Sept. 10. Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway; 720 865 5000, denverartmuseum.org. LOS ANGELES "Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth Century Europe." In the 1700s, princes, popes and others of high rank commissioned large "view paintings" of ceremonies and important moments a regatta on the Grand Canal, an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Paris, Venice, London and other notable spots. Some 50 such works, many never seen before in the United States, are gathered here. May 9 through July 30. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive; 310 440 7300, getty.edu. LOS ANGELES "The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts." Celebrating artists as agents of insight and transformation, this exhibition of 100 masks, initiation objects, reliquary guardians, iconic sculptures and textiles explores the ways they enabled growth from one life stage to another. The subjects include spirit realms, esoteric wisdom and the afterlife. Through July 9. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard; 323 857 6000, lacma.org. PORTLAND, ORE. "Constructing Identity." Works by more than 80 artists, from Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden to Kara Walker and Mickalene Thomas, drawn from the Petrucci Family Foundation collection, focus on the identity and narratives of African Americans. Through June 18. Portland Art Museum, 1219 Southwest Park Avenue; 503 226 2811, portlandartmuseum.org. SAN FRANCISCO "Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed." Through the lens of Munch's own insight that despite early success, his breakthrough came late in life this exhibition of 45 key paintings re evaluates his career. June 24 through Sept. 24. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street; 415 357 4000, sfmoma.org. SAN JOSE "The Water Cycle." With California experiencing at least five years of drought, three related exhibitions examine issues surrounding water use. The shows are devoted to photographs by Ansel Adams, Ernest H. Brooks II and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly (through Aug. 6); to videos and installations by five young artists (through Aug. 27); and to a monumental sculpture by Diana al Hadid (through Sept. 24). San Jose Museum of Art, 110 South Market Street; 408 271 6840, sjmusart.org.
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Art & Design
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Two hours before the W.W.E. Live Road to WrestleMania took over Madison Square Garden last month, John Cena, its star wrestler, burst into a backstage room. Stopping only for a quick handshake and amiable greeting ("Grab a seat! Let's talk!"), he sat before a stack of self portraits, grabbed a Sharpie and began feverishly scribbling his autograph like a teenager rushing to finish his homework. Dressed in a neon green T shirt, matching wrist bands, denim shorts and black kneepads, Mr. Cena looked like an action figure version of himself, as he pumped himself up for a long night of engagements, both in and out of the ring. There was a fan meet and greet for Make a Wish, wrestling executives to confer with and a promotional video to shoot, not to mention a Mixed Tag Team Match before 13,000 fans with his fiancee, Nikki Bella. They would face off against the guitar strumming Elias and Bayley. Mr. Cena's schedule had been nonstop in recent days. After a 30 hour stay in London to promote the film "Blockers," a raunchy comedy about parents hellbent on saving their teenage daughters' virginities (he plays one of the overbearing fathers), he was in New York to reclaim his wrestling throne. For more than a decade, Mr. Cena has been one of the most bankable faces on the W.W.E. circus of oiled up pectorals. On a roster that leans heavily on burly windbags spewing sarcastic quips, he stands out as the squeaky clean, flag saluting role model devoid of divisive edge. His catchphrase is "Hustle, Loyalty, Respect." The do gooder shtick may explain his wide appeal to preteen boys and their parents alike. But now he is expanding his reach, starring in more adult minded comedies like "Blockers," in which he stuffs a pair of panties in his mouth in the opening scene. (The movie opens April 6.) "I'm a 40 year old man," he said with a brutish laugh, pausing to look up from signing autographs. "I have an adult sense of humor, O.K.?" After finishing up the autographs, he popped out of his seat and made his way deeper backstage, past giant forklifts that were prepping the Garden for the big wrestling night. A jittery talent wrangler in a dark suit finally appeared to escort him to the Make a Wish meeting on the other side of the arena. But he kept getting interrupted. Cesaro, a wrestler from Switzerland wearing a too small gray tank top and tight black shorts, stopped him outside the stage entrance to inquire about dinner plans. "No matter how hard pressed you are or how early your flight is, every time after the Garden we go out and get dinner," Mr. Cena said. "Come hungry and leave satisfied." A few minutes later, Michael Hayes, a W.W.E. executive in a white trench coat and black bowler hat with bleached blond hair spilling out, came up to discuss Mr. Cena's debut match that evening with Ms. Bella. They talked in hushed tones, as if conspiring on a top secret plan. "You're cool with that?" Mr. Hayes said, after they apparently reached an agreement. "Yessir! And there ya go!" Mr. Cena said. His own journey was not so neatly choreographed. Raised in the suburb of West Newbury, Mass., Mr. Cena began weight lifting at age 12. After graduating from Springfield College, he moved to Los Angeles, toyed with becoming a professional bodybuilder, but switched his focus to wrestling after striking up a friendship with the wrestler Mike Bell, who died in 2008. Mr. Cena briefly wrestled for Ultimate Pro Wrestling, an independent outfit based in California, before signing with W.W.E. in 2001. He made his television debut a year later when Vince McMahon, the chairman of W.W.E., agreed to let him replace a wrestler who had come down with the flu. He lost the fight but won over fans when he began trash talking opponents using freestyle rap. As his fame grew, Mr. Cena evolved his character and, in an effort to appeal to younger fans, became a brute with a bleeding heart. He was now one of the good guys. Back at the Garden, Mr. Cena finally made it to the Make a Wish meet up, which took place in a classroom outfitted with rows of chairs and a W.W.E. backdrop. He greeted Garrett Richardson, a 15 year old in a wheelchair who wore a baseball cap that read "Never Give Up," another one of Mr. Cena's catchphrases. Mr. Richardson and his family had flown in from Charlotte, N.C., to meet Mr. Cena and see the match. Mr. Cena has granted more than 500 Make a Wish requests over the years, so when Mr. Richardson was left speechless by the larger than life celebrity in the room, Mr. Cena knew just how to respond. "Ah, I see your strategy," Mr. Cena said with a wink. "You're saving all your energy for tonight's show. If you get too excited now, you'll have no voice by the third match."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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For the many feminist critics who have excoriated Ted Hughes's treatment of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, there was poetic justice of a sort in the auction of the poets' belongings by their daughter, Frieda Hughes, at Bonhams in London in March. Ms. Plath's lots, which included clothes, jewelry and childhood drawings, outsold Mr. Hughes's mostly literary remnants (which is to say, books) twice over and then some, earning 551,862. The pleated green tartan kilt Ms. Plath wore as a Smith College undergraduate, with blue lettered name tape affixed to the waistband, swished home with A.N. Devers, a writer and rare books dealer based in North London, for 3,012. (To Ms. Devers's surprise, it fits.) Peter K. Steinberg, an archivist in Boston and an editor of "The Letters of Sylvia Plath," paid 885 for her fishing rod. To Plath devotees, the necklace is a tantalizing totem of the pyrotechnics generated by her relationship with Mr. Hughes. A Maltese cross flanked by two dragons, the baroque design is completely unlike Ms. Plath's other accessories, a mostly feminine assortment of rhinestones, hearts and flowers. "The pendant has a Hughesian sensibility. It's a little edgy for the time, and even has a whiff of the occult," said Heather Clark, whose biography "Sylvia Plath: The Light of the Mind," is forthcoming from Knopf next year. "Maybe Hughes gave it to her. Or maybe she chose it with him in mind." Ms. Plath wears the pendant in several well known photographs taken after she was married, including two by Rollie McKenna at the National Portrait Gallery in London, in which she appears both knowing and impossibly young. Why would a daughter choose to part with such meaningful objects? Ms. Hughes, 58, a painter and poet herself, was a sleeping toddler when her mother committed suicide with a gas oven at age 30 in 1963, and in her 30s when her father died in 1998, of cancer. Her younger brother, Nicholas, a biologist, hanged himself in 2009. She declined to comment on the sale further than her introduction to the auction catalog, in which she writes movingly that it all began with the Victorian mahogany armchair her father bought for Ms. Plath, originally covered in "a coarse, shiny black fabric worn through at the front edge of the seat," which she remembers scratching the backs of her legs as a child. Once she was an adult, she had the chair reupholstered in pink, for her bedroom. "It recently occurred to me that this chair would vanish into the mass of other furniture I own, and become invisible, as would the jewelry, when one day I was in no position to explain their provenance," Ms. Hughes writes. "If I wished to sell some items, then others would have to go too, because presented together, they made up a snapshot of a mutual history." And so they went: Ms. Plath's heavily underlined thesaurus ( 19,491); her battered gray leather wallet stuffed with ID cards ( 12,403); her "Joy of Cooking," with "Ted likes this," scrawled next to a recipe for breaded veal slices ( 6,201); a yellow checked summer frock ( 1,417); the Victorian armchair ( 1,599). The top lot was Ms. Plath's signed prepublication copy of her autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar," which first appeared in Britain in 1963, a month before her death, and today is a staple of high school English classes. It sold to an anonymous buyer for 124,150. That a collegiate kilt was deemed valuable signals a possible paradigm shift in the rare books industry. When Ms. Devers entered the field last year, she immediately noted that the sexism pervading all other workplaces applied there as well, resulting in a gender imbalance of representation and sales. Her business, the Second Shelf (the title is borrowed from an essay by Meg Wolitzer), traffics exclusively in rare books by women, with the hope that paying attention to women's literature will increase its market price in all realms. Ms. Devers has also observed a gender difference in collection habits. "Broadly speaking, men want pristine copies without dedications or signatures, while women are moved by beautiful dedications and also the normal wear and tear that tells a story of a book being valued," she said. In the skirt, she saw not only Ms. Plath's background, but also the struggle of an era. "My mom had that skirt. It was worn by an entire generation of women who had to present as perfect all the time," Ms. Devers said. "Plath was miserable, but she created art, and the skirt is a representation of that struggle." For now, Ms. Devers is wearing it around the house, and in Instagram photos. Accustomed to studying papers in archives, Ms. Crowther appreciates how objects offer a visceral understanding of a subject. "You can see her physical dimensions in a dress in a way you can't get from a photograph," she said. "Clothing can almost reanimate someone." She noted that Ms. Plath's mother, Aurelia, kept everything of her daughter's, even crumpled bits of tracing paper that Sylvia scribbled on as a child, giving scholars unusual access to her material world. People outside the literary field were also drawn to the sale. Suzanne Demko, who lives in Silver Spring, Md., and leads clinical teams in rare tumor research at the Food and Drug Administration, paid 7,087 for three well worn wristwatches, their thin leather bands cracked and fraying. "I went bananas looking through the catalog, and when I saw the watches I thought, 'I have to have these,'" she said. "There's just something about them the juxtaposition of a day to day object marking time, and marking her time, until she died." She plans to display the watches at home in a vitrine, and eventually leave them to Smith College, Ms. Plath's alma mater. Among the Plath items the college already holds are her Girl Scout uniform and prom dress, acquired in 1985 and available for the public to see by appointment. Kiki Smith, a theater professor at Smith, has curated the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection since the mid 1970s, when it began with costumes salvaged from the theater department; today it contains 3,000 pieces. Of special interest are what she calls "women's uniforms" the everyday clothes that shape a woman's life, from maternity clothes and housedresses to waitress uniforms and the suits female lawyers wore when first appearing in court. "It's an archive of women's lives told through objects, offering a tangible connection to history," she said. Ms. Plath's prom dress is a novella about promise and defeat rendered in nylon net and silver lame. She bought it in downtown Northampton, Mass., on Feb. 28, 1953, marked down from 50 to 30, which we know because of a letter she wrote to her mother: "I am most elated today, for this morning I bought the most exquisite formal on sale." The next morning, she rhapsodized about it in her diary: "Sunlight raying ethereal through the white net of the new formal bought splurgingly yesterday in a burst of ecstatic rightness. Silver high heels are the next purchase symbolizing my emancipation from walking flat footed on the ground. Silver winged bodice of strapless floating net gown. it is unbelievable that it could be so right!" By the time it appears in "The Bell Jar," however, the dress is a symbol of dashed illusions, "a skimpy, imitation silver lame bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle." Ms. Plath's Girl Scout uniform also speaks volumes. Until May 20, it can be seen at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington as part of the eclectic "One Life: Sylvia Plath" exhibit. When asked why she chose the uniform over the prom dress, Dorothy Moss, a curator at the Smithsonian, noted the plethora of badges, which could be read as evidence that the poet was Type A from the start. To Ms. Moss, those badges reveal something more than mere ambition that Ms. Plath's curiosity and embrace of learning were also bottomless. "She threw herself into experience for experience's sake," she said. Presumably, a mind so voracious might approve of her clothing going to the highest bidder. After all, Ms. Plath was once a fan herself. When she lived in New York City during her infamous Mademoiselle internship, she haunted the West Village trying to meet Dylan Thomas. She was thrilled to later move into Yeats's former house. The narrator of her poem "Last Words" writes of not trusting the spirit, which "escapes like steam" and "won't come back." But They stay, their little particular lusters Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Brooklyn's real estate market continued its ascent in the fourth quarter of 2017, even as the markets in Manhattan and surrounding areas stumbled, according to recent industry reports. The median sales price in Brooklyn rose to 770,000, up 2.7 percent from a year earlier, the third highest price ever recorded in the borough, according to a report from Douglas Elliman. The record was set in the second quarter of 2017, when the median sales price reached 795,000. Jonathan J. Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, which prepared the report, said that while price growth has slowed, tight inventory suggests the upward trend will continue. There were 1,711 homes for sale in the fourth quarter, down 23 percent from the previous year, making it the 10th straight quarter of declining inventory. "Normally, when you go that low, sales taper off," Frank Percesepe, who oversees Brooklyn sales for the Corcoran Group, said about buyer tendencies. "But they're buying anything they can get their hands on."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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NASA has urged spectators to stay away from the Kennedy Space Center for Wednesday's SpaceX launch to limit the spread of the coronavirus. But officials from cities and counties around the launch site, an area known as Florida's Space Coast, are expecting large crowds to gather to watch the country's first astronaut launch in nine years. The size of the crowds could still be affected by the weather, local officials said. People would be less likely to make the trip if it looked like the forecast might delay the launch. But local news outlets reported launch viewers were already gathering along the beaches and roadways in prime viewing areas on Wednesday morning. Last month, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, asked people to watch the launch from their homes. "When we launch to space from the Kennedy Space Center, it draws huge, huge crowds and that is not right now what we're trying to do," he said at a news conference. The visitor center at Kennedy, usually a prime spot for spectators, will remain closed to the public. The launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, carrying two NASA astronauts, Douglas G. Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. But outside Kennedy Space Center, NASA has little control over crowds. Peter Cranis, executive director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism, said he expected a couple hundred thousand people to flock to the beaches and parks, noting that launches in NASA's glory days had drawn as many as half a million spectators. Mr. Cranis said he anticipated that the coronavirus might deter some, but that many would still come to witness the historic launch. More than a dozen beachside hotels each with several thousand rooms reported that they were fully booked before the launch, he said. "Judging from the crowds on Memorial Day weekend, I would say that people are ready to get out," Mr. Cranis said. "They seem to be very happy to be able to be out." Law enforcement officials did not provide their own projections of expected crowd sizes. Don Walker, the communications director of Brevard County Emergency Management, said that he was also anticipating big crowds on beaches and roadways, and that departmental staff would ask spectators to keep at least six feet of distance. Kennedy Space Center is in Brevard County. "Obviously, we cannot be everywhere at once," Mr. Walker said. "But where we can and where we see groups in proximity and in violation of C.D.C. recommendations, the plan is to simply remind people to take heed." At a May 1 news conference, Brevard County's sheriff, Wayne Ivey, encouraged people to come watch the launch in person. "We are not going to keep the great Americans that want to come watch that from coming here," Sheriff Ivey said. "If NASA is telling people to not come here and watch the launch, that's on them. I'm telling people what I believe as an American. And so NASA has got their guidelines, and I got mine." Officer Tod Goodyear, a spokesman for the Brevard County Sheriff's Office, said that concerns about the coronavirus prompted the department to seek law enforcement officers from several jurisdictions to be on the ground to help monitor crowds. Officer Goodyear said he expected some people would wear masks and most would be mindful of keeping distance. The sheriff's office will also be distributing up to 20,000 masks to those who request them. With around 400 recorded cases, Brevard County hasn't been hit hard by the virus. And since Gov. Ron DeSantis began reopening the state on May 4, Officer Goodyear said he had noticed more people out and about. Ben Malik, the mayor of Cocoa Beach, about a 40 minute drive south from the space center, said he was expecting several thousand people to visit its beach, which is about six miles long. "It's physically impossible to manage," Mr. Malik said. "We don't have the police resources to go out there and keep everyone apart. The best we can do is try to manage the traffic and crowd control." Lt. Kim Montes, a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol in Orlando, said the agency was focused on monitoring traffic and making sure people wouldn't stop their cars on bridges. In addition to the couple dozen officers normally on duty, an additional 30 troopers from other parts of the state will assist during the day, she said. "With the pandemic, we really don't know what kinds of crowds we are going to have," Lieutenant Montes said. "The weather is going to play a lot into it. Are people going to stay home? Is it going to rain?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The first thing a visitor to Suerte might notice after opening the menu is a section cheekily titled "Vitamin T" a collection of the restaurant's takes on a variety of regional Mexican classics: tacos, tostadas, tamales, tlacoyos. But those dishes have something in common that could have resulted in a "Vitamin M" section: masa, the corn based dough that is their central focus and, indeed, the restaurant's. The mission of Suerte, which opened in March in East Austin, said Fermin Nunez, its 30 year old executive chef, is "creating this beautiful thing called masa, which is the canvas for so much Mexican cooking." The masa is made in house, using corn sourced from two local producers: red corn from Richardson Farms, and heirloom white and green from Barton Springs Mill. "Every night and into the next morning," Mr. Nunez said, "we make masa." On a summer visit to Suerte, the various iterations of masa were indeed delicious, both earthy and sweet. Carnitas tlacoyo, shaped like elongated footballs, were pleasantly soft and refried beans and salsa verde added extra character. Less successful was the quesadilla del tule, a taste muddle of squash, Oaxacan cheese, peppers and a pumpkin seed and pistachio salsa. But the star of the T dishes was the suadero tacos, packed with meltingly soft confit brisket, an avocado salsa cruda and something the menu calls "black magic oil" (actually a combination of morita chile, fermented black beans, black sesame seeds and oil). It is also worth venturing beyond the Vitamin T section. From "Frio Raw," we tried the bright and spicy aguachile, with royal red prawns in a cascadel chile broth, topped with a dark, crunchy cracker (made from masa, of course). Out of "Specialties" we sampled a wildly flavorful barbacoa of goat ribs, served with two types of salsa, housemade queso fresco and a basket of tender tortillas. And the "Vegetables" section yielded a perfect stand in for dessert: peaches and mangos, which arrived prettily dressed in a Latin spin on green goddess dressing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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WASHINGTON When it comes to regulating Facebook, Congress is in over its head. But does that matter? This week's marathon testimony by Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's chief executive, revealed the limited understanding many lawmakers have of what Facebook is and how it works. Members of Congress came with a mixed bag of concerns for Mr. Zuckerberg, including a few incisive points about Facebook's privacy and data collection policies and a lot of off topic ramblings about how computers work, but these questions never amounted to a unified theory of Facebook's troubles, or suggestions of how they might be solved. It's tempting to claim that technological illiteracy is the problem that some older and tech phobic lawmakers are fundamentally incapable of regulating Facebook properly. But I want to suggest another takeaway. The biggest obstacle to regulating Facebook is not Congress's lack of computer literacy, which gave Mr. Zuckerberg the upper hand this week. It's a lack of political will, and an unwillingness to identify the problems they're trying to fix in the first place. After all, Congress typically does not require subject matter expertise of its members. Most politicians in Washington did not understand the complexities of mortgage backed securities in 2009, when Wall Street executives testified in the wake of the financial crisis. The lawmakers also are not pharmaceutical experts, or transportation policy wonks or deeply knowledgeable in many of the other complex issues that come before them. And yet, Congress with the help of staff experts and outside advisers has managed to pass sweeping legislation to prevent excesses and bad behavior in those sectors. "It's never an issue of the members being able to do it their staff is often incredibly dedicated and can dig into these issues," said Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission. The challenge, Mr. Soltani said, is that there's a "lost in translation" problem of trying to condense complex, multifaceted issues into easily digested sound bites that will play well with constituents. Members of the Energy and Commerce Committee pressed Facebook's chief executive on data privacy, security and political bias on the social media platform. "You and your co founders started a company in your dorm room that's grown to be one of the biggest and most successful businesses in the entire world. While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it may not have matured. I think it's time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things." "Who do you think owns an individual's presence online? Who owns their virtual you? Is it you or is it them?" "Congresswoman, I believe that everyone owns their own content online. And that's the first line of our terms of service, if you read it, says that." "After this new algorithm was implemented, that there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content and a favorable bias towards liberal content. Was there a directive to put a bias in and first are you aware of this bias that many people have looked at and analyzed and seen?" " Congressman, this is a really important question. There is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do." "Well, you have a long history of growth and success. But you also have a long list of apologies. In 2003, it started at Harvard. 'I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect.' 2006: 'We really messed this one up.' 2007: 'We simply did a bad job. I apologize for it.' This is proof to me that self regulation simply does not work." "Are you aware of other third party information mishandlings that have not been disclosed?" "Congresswoman, no, although we are currently going through the process of investigating every single app " "So you're not sure?" that had access to a large amount of data." "All right, but I only have four minutes. Was your data included in the data sold to the malicious third parties? Your personal data?" "Yes." "If you don't, you're not listening to us on the phone, who is, and do you have specific contracts with these companies that will provide data that is being acquired verbally through our phones or now through things like Alexa or other products?" "Congressman, we're not collecting any information verbally on the microphone, and we don't have contracts with anyone else who is." "Facebook has detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for Facebook. Yes or no?" "Congressman, in general, we collect data from people have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes to prevent the kind of scraping that you were just referring to." "As C.E.O., you didn't know some key facts. You didn't know about major court cases regarding your privacy policies against your company. You didn't know that the F.T.C. doesn't have fining authority and that Facebook could not that have received fines for the 2011 consent order. You didn't know what a shadow profile was." Members of the Energy and Commerce Committee pressed Facebook's chief executive on data privacy, security and political bias on the social media platform. "This isn't just about news," Mr. Soltani said of Facebook's issues. "It's not just about privacy and commercialization, it's not just about political speech. It's all of those things and more." If Congress wants to rein in Facebook's enormous power and the questions lawmakers asked left little doubt that it does then the first step is identifying what, specifically, they think is wrong with Facebook. Is it that Facebook is too cavalier about sharing user data with outside organizations? Is it that Facebook collects too much data about users in the first place? Is it that Facebook is promoting addictive messaging products to children? Is it that Facebook's news feed is polarizing society, pushing people to ideological fringes? Is it that Facebook is too easy for political operatives to exploit, or that it does not do enough to keep false news and hate speech off users' feeds? Is it that Facebook is simply too big, or a monopoly that needs to be broken up? All of these are concerns lawmakers brought up during this week's hearings, and they would all require different and narrowly tailored regulatory solutions. For example, Congress's goal may be to stop outside companies from getting access to people's Facebook data avoiding another scandal like the one involving Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that improperly obtained data on up to 87 million Facebook users. Lawmakers could propose a bill that would prevent large social media platforms from opening themselves up to outside developers. (They should note, though, that Facebook has already limited the data available to outside companies, so this would not necessarily have the intended effect.) Congress could address the issue of data collection by adopting European style data protection policies, requiring stronger user controls for personal information or requiring social networks to delete certain types of user data automatically after a given time. If it wanted to, Congress could address the issue of hateful content by adopting strict hate speech laws like the ones that exist in Germany, which make social platforms liable if they fail to remove hate speech in a timely manner. It could address the problem of transparency in political ads by passing the Honest Ads Act, a bill that would subject online political ads to similar disclosure standards as TV and radio political ads. (Mr. Zuckerberg has already indicated that he supports the measure, so this should be an easy one.) Or, if it decides that Facebook is just too darn big, Congress could spearhead an effort to break it up. All of these are theoretically possible outcomes, depending on which of Facebook's many issues lawmakers decide to address. Lawmakers do not need to be computer scientists, or to come up with an omnibus bill to address all of Facebook's flaws in one fell swoop. It could pick off one issue at a time, consult with the experts and take a piecemeal approach. But first, it needs to understand which pieces need fixing, and how to carry out fixes without creating unintended consequences. And it needs to demonstrate that it has the political resolve to push these changes through, even as the tech industry furiously lobbies against them, as it undoubtedly will. Perhaps the most dispiriting exchange all week was when Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, asked Mr. Zuckerberg about Facebook's market power, and the notion that it is too dominant for any other social network to compete with. "Is there an alternative to Facebook in the private sector?" Mr. Graham asked. Mr. Zuckerberg dodged the question, saying that people use lots of apps to communicate. "You don't feel like you have a monopoly?" Mr. Graham wondered. "It certainly doesn't feel that way to me," Mr. Zuckerberg said. By raising the issue of Facebook's lack of competition, Mr. Graham was circling around an important point. Facebook has, indeed, taken steps to acquire or crush multiple apps that have posed a competitive threat. It even runs a service called Onavo, which allows it to keep tabs on which other apps its users are using and functions as a kind of early warning system for possible competitors. But when it came time to draw the conclusion his questions had been leading to that Facebook's primary problem was its size, and that regulation should address its anticompetitive tendencies Mr. Graham pulled his punches, even asking Mr. Zuckerberg for advice about regulating his own company. "Would you work with us in terms of what regulations you think are necessary in your industry?" Mr. Graham asked. This week's hearings proved that a groundswell of support is building on Capitol Hill to regulate Facebook and other internet companies. But until Congress stops asking these companies how they want to be regulated and starts making its own decisions about what problems it wants to fix, its targets will continue to slip through its fingers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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THE FAVOURITE (2018) Stream on HBO Now and HBO Go; rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman star in this unsettling, darkly comedic drama set in 18th century Britain. Queen Anne (Colman) is neurotic, self pitying and in failing health, yet is wildly spirited. She finds a lover and adviser in her lifelong friend Sarah Churchill (Weisz). But when Sarah's cousin Abigail Hill (Stone) appears at the palace looking for work, it isn't long before Abigail rivals Sarah, politically and romantically, for her position with the queen. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the film "is a farce with teeth," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, "a costume drama with sharp political instincts and an aggressive sense of the absurd." WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1958) 8 p.m. on TCM. A DuPont Show of the Month in 1958, James Costigan's adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" has not been seen since the single date it aired: 61 years ago. Daniel Petrie directed this rendition of Emily Bronte's novel, in which Heathcliff played by none other than Richard Burton falls in love with his stepsister Cathy, played by Rosemary Harris . When Cathy instead marries a wealthy man, Heathcliff enacts revenge. Costigan has been "widely praised" for this adaptation, Margalit Fox wrote in The Times.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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PARIS European Aeronautic Defense and Space, the parent company of Airbus, said Friday that buyers of its A400M military transport plane had agreed to a 10 percent price increase, a measure that will help cover substantial cost overruns and allow the troubled project to continue. The company said the seven European governments that signed on as customers for the A400M announced in Berlin that they had agreed to the increase for the 180 planes on order. They will also provide 1.5 billion euros ( 2 billion) in loans in exchange for a share of the revenue from future exports. "EADS considers this a sound basis for a successful evolution of the A400M program," the company said. EADS said it would also absorb some of the cost overruns by taking a write off of 1.8 billion euros ( 2.5 billion) for the project, a provision that would cause it to post a loss for 2009. The A400M project is nearly four years behind schedule and more than 7 billion euros over budget, and the plane itself is several tons overweight. EADS has already written off 2.4 billion euros in costs. The project was expending cash at a rate of about 100 million euros a month.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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In the first bars of Webern's arrangement of "Tranenregen," a clarinet solo answered by an oboe vividly renders the two lovers sitting by a stream who become the subject of the song. In "Des Fischers Liebesgluck," in a 2015 arrangement by Alexander Schmalcz, a plaintive theme is picked up by different instruments. When it is finally played up by the flute, it seems to lift up, its inherent melancholy sublimated into a spiritual dimension. Mr. Goerne's singing amply complements the full orchestral palette. His baritone has an earthy solidity in its low range, but can lighten to a soft ribbon of sound. With his striking command of legato, melodies flow in a broad stream, embedded in but never overpowered by the ensemble. The Strauss selections have Wagnerian heft and churn built into them. "Ruhe, meine Seele" came across as stormy and claustrophobic at once in Mr. Goerne's powerful rendition. Mr. van Zweden drew beautifully nuanced playing from the Philharmonic musicians. In "Morgen," it was the orchestra's concertmaster, Frank Huang, who brought the song to a close with a solo of hushed mystery. The orchestra sounded less assured in Webern's cerebral arrangement of the Fugue from Bach's "Musical Offering," which opened the program. Here, Webern isolates musical molecules and distributes them across the ensemble in a way that is devilishly hard to balance. But the textures were evenly weighted in the unfussy, stylish reading of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 that ended the evening.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The pigs, all 14 of them, are doing fine. Considering they'd been retrofitted with bone grown in a laboratory, that came as a pleasant surprise. "The pigs woke up, and a half hour later they were eating," said Gordana Vunjak Novakovic, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University. "We thought they would be in pain. But no, they're doing great." Dr. Vunjak Novakovic and her colleagues have managed to create living bone from stem cells. First, they made a CT scan to create a 3 D image of each pig's jaw. From cow bone, they sculpted a "scaffold" a three dimensional copy of the pig bone. They put the scaffold in a nutrient solution along with stem cells extracted from the pigs. The cells attached to the scaffold, forming a new bone identical to the original. Then the researchers implanted the new bone in each pig. They reported their results in Science Translational Medicine.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The Coen Brothers film "Fargo" ends, touchingly, with Marge Gunderson, the small town police chief played by Frances McDormand, talking to a criminal sitting in the back of her squad car (Peter Stormare). She had never witnessed the kind of violence that he and other men have perpetuated, and the events have shaken her, even as her infallible instincts have led her to the right conclusions. She inventories the five people dead over a failed kidnapping scheme. "And for what?" she asks. "For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that?" The montage that opens the disappointing final episode of this season's "Fargo" has Johnny Cash asking the same questions. ("What is man? What has he done?") And we get a tribute to the dead, most of them men in fedoras, with the exception of Swanee Capps: Doctor Senator, Gaetano Fadda, Rabbi Milligan, Odis Weff and Deafy Wickware, just to name a few major players. The war between the Cannons and the Faddas has resulted in heavy losses on both sides, all over "a little bit of money," and there are still more losses to come, including the second Fadda brother, a local politician, the hospital administrator and the naughty nurse, Oraetta Mayflower. And for what? That's a question we might be asking of "Fargo" this season, but not in the way its creator, Noah Hawley, probably intended. From the start, this season posited itself as a story about American immigration and prejudice, about the alternative paths entire ethnic groups have had to take in order to gain legitimacy and how even those paths are limited for Black citizens. Ethelrida Smutny lays out those themes explicitly in the narration that opens and closes the season, every bit the good student with her thesis and concluding paragraphs. And yet, the body of the essay has been a bit of a mess. The missing element may be the lack of a Marge Gunderson, the sensible and relatable soul at the center of the chaos. There are some characters who might have qualified, like Ethelrida or Satchel or maybe even Milligan, but the action has been spread thinly across the ensemble, and a cartoonishness has ruled the day. Tonight's episode was the shortest of the season 39 minutes without commercials and felt the most deeply impoverished, with all the loose ends tied up hastily and a bow stuck on by Ethelrida in the final moments. Some of the plotting gets a little dodgy, too. Last week, Ethelrida gave Loy the pinkie ring that Oraetta lifted off Donatello Fadda, which relieved the Smutnys of their debt to the Cannons by providing Loy a much needed trump card. A lot of this strains credulity: Unless Ethelrida is a truly omniscient narrator, she knows nothing about the Faddas' business until her trip to the library, and even then she has an incomplete understanding of the situation. The fact that Oraetta kills patients as a matter of course makes it less outwardly likely, too, that she was in cahoots with Josto over his father's death. Nevertheless, it's plain that Ebal Violante should have been in charge of the family business all along, no matter his excuse for seizing power. After Loy spent a season gaining leverage by setting the Fadda brothers against each other and seizing on their weaknesses, Violante simply exercises the overwhelming power at his disposal. The way he frames it, the Cannons are like a ma and pa operation competing against one of the big chains: The Faddas are in every city and have the resources to crush the little guy. Kansas City is just a small piece of the business. He sees reneging on his deal with Loy as an act of mercy. ("We are not taking half. We are leaving half.") So much of the reckoning in this episode feels obligatory when it ought to be powerful. Josto gets a more muted version of a Bernie Bernbaum death march when he and Oraetta are marched to pit for execution, though it's funny, as a final act of perversity, for Oraetta to request watching him die before she takes her own bullet to the head. (We've been searching for motives for Oraetta all season, but the simplest explanation is that she was just a homicidal maniac.) Loy's death at Zelmare's hands seems like an egregious loss, too, after the ups and downs of watching him lose his business and regain his son. At best, the moment reads like another piece of Satchel's origin story, suggesting who he might become as an adult. (And the post credits scene, starring Bokeem Woodbine as the Season 2 character Mike Milligan, confirms it.) The season ends as Ethelrida puts the finishing touches on her "history report," asking questions about who gets to tell histories about Americans whose pasts are segregated from one another's. But maybe the truest lesson comes from the Coens' brilliant "Burn After Reading," which also ends as characters try to make sense of senseless violence. The question is, "What did we learn?" The answer: "I guess we learned not to do it again." None Though Josto's death has the flavor of Bernie Bernbaum's being taken to the woods, the exact words Josto uses to plead for his life, "You don't have to do this," is a callback to "No Country for Old Men." Before his final hit in the film, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) reflects on how all his victims "always say the same thing" before he kills them. Chigurh does not have the capacity for pity. None Plaintive renditions of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "God Bless America" on the same episode suggest the too muchness that has dogged the season over all. None "Why didn't you tell me you're a demented hag?" In Josto's world, where murder is business, it can't be easy to sort out the psychopaths from the garden variety murderous hoodlums.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Roseanne Barr has been a main attraction in ABC's annual presentations to advertisers the last two years. What It Was Like to Work on 'Roseanne' It was an incredibly exciting time to be a writer on "Roseanne." The revived ABC sitcom was the No. 1 new show in the country, delivering an audience that network television had not seen in years. The show was quickly renewed for another season, giving everyone a sense of accomplishment, not to mention job security. But for all the success, there was also a vague sense of foreboding. The writers' social media accounts were flooded with negative comments. Articles posted online criticized jokes and plots. Their friends in the liberal enclave of Los Angeles would occasionally tsk tsk that they worked on the show. And, of course, there was Roseanne Barr, the show's star and co creator, and her history of volatile public comments. "It was hard for us once we started airing and we started to see some of the stuff that came out," said Bruce Rasmussen, an executive producer of the series. "It was just brutal: 'How dare they give her a show? How dare they write for her?' "It was a certain amount of pressure," he continued. "You're the No. 1 show, and people are coming after you on the web and you're getting attacked by 50 percent of the press." "In the end, it came down to doing what's right and upholding our values of inclusion, tolerance and civility," Ben Sherwood, the head of ABC's television group, said in an email to employees on Wednesday. He added, "The last 24 hours have also been a powerful reminder of the importance of words in everything we do online and on the air." By late Tuesday, Ms. Barr had returned to Twitter and, over several hours, sent or retweeted more than 100 messages. In one, she apologized to her crew for costing its members their jobs, and in another she apologized to Ms. Jarrett, blaming the drug Ambien for her racist tweet. But she also responded to a message falsely claiming that the ABC entertainment president Channing Dungey consulted with Michelle Obama about the show's cancellation. "Is this true?" Ms. Barr asked. She also retweeted a message from President Trump that said the Disney chief executive Robert A. Iger had never apologized to him "for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC." And on Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Barr hinted that she might not leave ABC quietly. "You guys make me feel like fighting back," she wrote. "I will examine all of my options carefully and get back to U." One of the show's executive producers, Tom Werner, said in a statement that he hoped "Roseanne seeks the help she so clearly needs." Ms. Barr's often controversial Twitter presence she is an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump and has tweeted out messages espousing fringe conspiracy theories was nothing new to ABC. The network proudly promoted Ms. Barr as part of a broader strategy to appeal to more of the country after Mr. Trump's presidential election win. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The show's rebirth was the brainchild of Sara Gilbert, the actress who plays one of Roseanne Conner's daughters. Ms. Gilbert and other producers for the show felt that a comedy centered on a working class family would be perfectly timed to a moment when the country was so divided. But after the show premiered, there was growing frustration among ABC executives that Ms. Barr's Twitter controversies continued. Still, the network desperately needed a hit, perhaps a reason it was willing to let some of Ms. Barr's more outlandish statements go. "Roseanne," along with the rookie drama "The Good Doctor," has helped put the network on better footing, though it will finish the 2017 18 TV season in last place for the third straight year. Initially, the writers on "Roseanne" were able to work within a bit of a blissful vacuum. The entire season had been written and shot before the premiere episode aired in late March. Ms. Barr's on set presence had also mellowed significantly from what it was during the show's initial run in the 1990s, when she developed a reputation for being difficult to work with and treating her writers with little respect. Mr. Rasmussen, who was a supervising producer for one season on the old show before being fired, said there was a sense of purpose this time that the show could speak to a segment of the country that was often overlooked in prime time TV. "Everyone trusted each other, and we were all on the same team," he said. But by time the show aired, things had changed, and the show had become a lightning rod. Mr. Trump and conservative commentators praised the show for its depiction of a Trump supporter, while some on the left expressed reservations about even watching it. And then there was the nagging, relentless presence of Ms. Barr's Twitter feed. "We didn't know what was going to happen," Mr. Rasmussen said of her Twitter account. "She would tweet stuff, then apologize and get off Twitter, and then it would get better. And then it would blow up again. I followed her to just see what was coming. Some of the other writers couldn't do it, just because they couldn't handle the stress of it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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In interviews with The New York Times after Mr. Amato's resignation, five current or former Billboard employees described an environment in which corporate meddling in editorial decisions was not limited to the coverage of Mr. Walk. Now Ms. Karp has a chance to set things right at the leading trade music publication. "As a journalist, I'm really excited to lead a really amazing team of people and expand and deepen our coverage of the music business itself, which is going through such an exciting and fascinating transformation," Ms. Karp said. Deanna Brown, the managing director at Valence Media, said the company had consulted over several months with the Poynter Institute, which teaches journalistic ethics and practices, on how to reinstate a healthy relationship between Billboard's business and editorial divisions. "I think the culture has changed," Ms. Brown said. "We're going back to basics." By promoting Ms. Karp, Ms. Brown said, the company is reinforcing its commitment to disinterested news coverage. "I wouldn't do this without knowing that we would have full editorial independence," Ms. Karp said. "I feel confident that we will have that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Ever since the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine began last spring, upbeat announcements were stalked by ominous polls: No matter how encouraging the news, growing numbers of people said they would refuse to get the shot. The time frame was dangerously accelerated, many people warned. The vaccine was a scam from Big Pharma, others said. A political ploy by the Trump administration, many Democrats charged. The internet pulsed with apocalyptic predictions from longtime vaccine opponents, who decried the new shot as the epitome of every concern they'd ever put forth. But over the past few weeks, as the vaccine went from a hypothetical to a reality, something happened. Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated. In polls by Gallup, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Research Center, the portion of people saying they are now likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 percent this summer to more than 60 percent, and in one poll 73 percent a figure that approaches what some public health experts say would be sufficient for herd immunity. Resistance to the vaccine is certainly not vanishing. Misinformation and dire warnings are gathering force across social media. At a meeting on December 20, members of an advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited strong indications that vaccine denouncements as well as acceptance are growing, so they could not predict whether the public would gobble up limited supplies or take a pass. But the attitude improvement is striking. A similar shift on another heated pandemic issue was reflected in a different Kaiser poll this month. It found that nearly 75 percent of Americans are now wearing masks when they leave their homes. The change reflects a constellation of recent events: the uncoupling of the vaccine from Election Day; clinical trial results showing about 95 percent efficacy and relatively modest side effects for the vaccines made by Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna; and the alarming surge in new coronavirus infections and deaths. "The Biden administration, returning to listening to science and the fantastic stats associated with the vaccines," she replied. The lure of the vaccines' modest quantities also can't be underestimated as a driver of desire, somewhat like the must have frenzy generated by a limited edition Christmas gift, according to public opinion experts. That sentiment can also be seen in the shifting nature of some of the skepticism. Rather than just targeting the vaccine itself, eyebrows are being raised across the political spectrum over who will get it first which rich individuals and celebrities, demographic groups or industries? But the grim reality of the pandemic with more than 200,000 new cases and some 3,000 deaths daily and the wanness of this holiday season are perhaps among the biggest factors. "More people have either been affected or infected by Covid," said Rupali J. Limaye, an expert on vaccine behavior at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "They know someone who had a severe case or died." Dr. Limaye concluded: "They are fatigued and want to get back to their normal lives." A barrage of feel good media coverage, including rapt attention given to leading scientists and politicians when they get jabbed and joyous scrums surrounding local health care workers who become the first to be vaccinated, has amplified the excitement, public opinion experts say. There remain notable discrepancies among demographic groups. The divide between women and men has become pronounced, with women being more hesitant. Black people remain the most skeptical racial group, although their acceptance is inching up: In September, a Pew Research poll said that only 32 percent of Black people were willing to get the vaccine, while the latest poll shows a rise to 42 percent. And though people of all political persuasions are warming to the vaccine, more Republicans than Democrats view the shot suspiciously. A brighter indication, he said, is that two thirds of the public say they are at least somewhat confident that a coronavirus vaccine will be distributed in a way that is fair, up from 52 percent in September. The most pronounced pockets of resistance include rural residents and people between the ages of 30 and 49. Timothy H. Callaghan, a scholar at the Southwest Rural Health Research Center at Texas A M School of Public Health, said that rural residents tend to be conservative and Republican, characteristics that also show up among the vaccine hesitant. They also include immigrants and day laborers, many of whom do not have college degrees or even high school diplomas and so may be more dismissive of vaccine science. "They appear less likely to wear masks, less likely to work from home and there is an opposition to evidence based practices," Dr. Callaghan said. The resistance also springs from their hampered access to health care in remote areas. In addition, the need to take off several hours of work from the inflexible demands of farming for travel and recovery from vaccine side effects makes the shots seem even less compelling, he added. About 35 percent of adults between 30 and 49 over all expressed skepticism about the vaccine, according to the Kaiser poll. Dr. Scott C. Ratzan, whose vaccine surveys in New York with the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health echo findings similar to the national polls, noted that this group doesn't keep up on flu shots either. They are well out of the age range for routine vaccines. "There is no normalizing or habit for this age group to get vaccinated," he said. Black people have remained the most resistant to taking a coronavirus vaccine, largely because of the history of abusive research on them by white doctors. But their willingness to consider it is ticking up. In the Kaiser poll, the share of Black respondents who believe the vaccine will be distributed fairly has nearly doubled, to 62 percent from 32 percent. Mike Brown, who is Black, manages the Shop Spa, a large barbershop with a Black and Latino clientele in Hyattsville, Md. This summer he told The Times that he was happy to sit back and watch others get the vaccine, while he bided his time. "The news that it was 95 percent effective sold me," Mr. Brown said. "The side effects sound like what you get after a bad night of drinking and you hurt the next day. Well, I've had many of those and I can deal with that to get rid of the face masks." Still, he says, many customers remain skeptical. He tells them: "What questions do you have that you're leery about? Just do your investigation and follow the science! Because if you're just talking about what you won't do, you're becoming part of the problem." Another group that has been uncertain about taking the vaccine is health care workers, who typically have high rates of acceptance for established vaccines. In recent weeks, some hospital executives have said that many on their staffs were balking. ProPublica reported that a hospital in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas had to offer some allotted doses to other medical workers in the area, because an insufficient number of their own workers came forward. A sheriff's deputy and a state senator got in line. But other hospitals say that staff time slots for the vaccine are becoming a hot commodity. For months, Tina Kleinfeldt, a surgical recovery nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, a hospital in the Northwell Health network, had absolutely no intention of getting the vaccine until long after the science and side effects had been established. Last week, she was randomly offered a rare vaccination slot. Still she refused, despite the admonitions of envious colleagues. Then she began thinking of all the Covid 19 patients she had cared for and the new ones she would inevitably encounter. She thought about her husband and three children. She thought: Well, I can always cancel the appointment at the last minute, right? Then she realized that doses were still so scarce that she might not get another opportunity soon. So she said yes. She became the first nurse on her unit to get the shot. Afterwards , she felt some muscle soreness at the site of injection. But she also felt elated, excited and relieved.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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At the Dance for George in Harlem on Sunday the mood alternated between euphoric and somber. As protesters streamed through the streets of New York on Sunday afternoon, one group's chants of "Black lives matter!" and "No justice, no peace!" gave way to a sound more often heard at weddings and block parties. On 125th Street in Harlem, hundreds of people, many of them professional dancers, had congregated for a peaceful march across town and a collective performance of the Electric Slide. The sea of grapevining, step touching demonstrators, who filled a plaza near Malcolm X Boulevard, had been called together by two New York dancers, Sheen Jamaal, 27, and Alison Bedell, 24 (also known as Buttons). The event, Dance for George, paid tribute to George Floyd and called attention to the work of black artists at the heart of the dance and entertainment industries. Every so often the jostling line dance would reshape itself into a circle, with dancers freestyling at the center as the packed crowd cheered them on. (A mix of "Electric Boogie" spliced with hip hop and R B classics had been prepared for the occasion.) The alternately euphoric and somber gathering after the dancing came a silent, nine minute kneel is just one instance of dance intersecting with protest over the past two weeks of global demonstrations against racism and police brutality. Widely shared videos have shown a rendition of the Cupid Shuffle on the streets of Newark; an offering of bomba, an Afro Puerto Rican tradition, from a young protester in Loiza, Puerto Rico; and a jingle dress dance, a healing practice rooted in Ojibwe culture, performed in Minneapolis as a prayer for Mr. Floyd's family Scroll through social media, and you might also find twerking in New Orleans, Senegalese Sabar in Los Angeles and the Haka (an ancient Maori war dance) in New Zealand, all proclaiming through the body that black lives matter. The examples are so abundant that one hip hop dancer and scholar, MiRi Park, has created a public Google document listing occurrences of dance as protest since May 26, together with further reading on the subject. It expands every day. At the center of many of these videos are dancers expressing pain and joy affirming that they are alive. Some came to the streets with the purpose of dancing. Others were moved to dance more spontaneously, and surprised to find themselves seen by millions online. Dancers from three cities, featured in three videos, spoke about what it has meant to them to dance in protest. At a march in Lower Manhattan last week, three men who had never met were drawn to the same drumbeat. Fabricio Seraphin, Nathan Bunce and Areis Evans had gathered around a group of musicians, and during a pause in the procession, they broke into dance. A video of their exuberant, unplanned dance circle recorded and shared on Instagram by another protester, Antoinette Henry has now been viewed well over two million times. In phone interviews, Mr. Seraphin, Mr. Bunce and Mr. Evans said they were not dancing with cameras in mind. "It all came together naturally," said Mr. Bunce, 47, an artist and teacher who lives in Brooklyn. "It was a big release for me." Each dancer brought a distinctive style to the circle. Mr. Bunce said he was paying homage to New York's underground house scene, while invoking Haitian, South African and West African traditions of honoring ancestors through dance or as he put it, "speaking to those that were here before me." Mr. Seraphin, 25, a contemporary dancer and circus artist living in Brooklyn, added ballet to the mix, with an ecstatic grand jete that translated the words on his T shirt "black boy joy" into movement. For him, joy is a form of resistance. "You can take from us, but you cannot take our joy," he said. "That is ours to give, ours to do with what we please." Mr. Evans, 33, a fitness and hip hop instructor who lives in Harlem, described expressing joy and pain at once. In his emphatic solo, he did not hold back. "I was in tears," he said. "The way my style is, I really want people to see the hurt." He tapped into these feelings with the support of strangers. "I saw three black men actually come together; we didn't judge each other," he said. "It was a brotherly moment, and I loved that." One night last week, Karma Munez, a dancer in Chicago's vogueing ballroom scene, proposed an idea to two of her best friends: to dress up, find a protest and vogue in the streets. The next day, the three put on their thigh high black boots, grabbed their speakers and joined a march in the city's Bronzeville neighborhood. The results have circulated in numerous videos online, in which the dancers fearlessly strut, spin, kick and dip, letting their bodies crash to the pavement, as other protesters cheer them on. In one moment, Ms. Munez (who also goes by Gorgeous Mother Karma Gucci, her ballroom name), dances in front of a row of police cars, flipping her hair in front of their flashing lights. "I thought it was the best way to make a stand with the talent that we have," said Dhee Lacy (a.k.a. Adonte Prodigy), when the trio got together for a FaceTime interview a few days later. "I didn't want to have to riot, and I think that ultimately people have different ways of speaking out." With its origins in black and Latino, gay and transgender communities, vogueing has always been a mode of resisting oppression. The dancers said that through their street performance, they were advocating for black L.G.B.T.Q. people, who are sometimes pushed to the margins of the Black Lives Matter movement. "We wanted to stand up for ourselves, as well," said Amya Jackson (a.k.a. Amya Mugler), pointing to the brutal attack of a transgender woman, Iyonna Dior, by a group of black men during a recent Minneapolis protest. "What about us?" Ms. Munez noted that some online viewers mistook the performance to be celebratory. "I feel like people misunderstand dancing, and they automatically assume that if I'm dancing, I'm happy," she said. "Dance is not a celebration; it's an expression." The group known as Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, which practices Mexican Nahua dance, song and drumming, is a frequent presence at Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Its dancers first took to the streets in solidarity with the movement after the death of Jamar Clark, who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police in 2015. "An injustice to one of us is an injustice to all," said Sergio Cenoch, who directs the group with his wife, Mary Anne Quiroz, when the two spoke by phone just before a vigil for Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis. "That's the message we want to convey when we're out there supporting." A recent video posted on Instagram by a Kalpulli member, Samuel B. Torres, shows the dancers in bright regalia, kneeling outside the Fifth Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department. After leading protesters in a chant of "George Floyd! Say his name!" they leap to their feet to an accelerating drum beat. "One of the dances that we do a lot is called Tletl, which is fire," Mr. Cenoch said. "We do that to spark fire and have it be felt across everybody that is watching, to try to get them connected to what is going on, and get that fire within their soul lit." Ms. Quiroz added that the dances they bring to protests "have survived colonization, have survived over 500 years." To keep them alive "is a symbol of resistance," she said, noting the connections between the struggles of black and Indigenous people. "It's a symbol of resilience."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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If, between now and Sunday, you're crossing one of the plazas at Lincoln Center exiting a matinee of "My Fair Lady," say, or a Dance Theater of Harlem show and you notice some especially bold public displays of affection, don't be shocked. You've likely happened upon a performance of "Pop Up Duets (fragments of love)." This, too, is a show: an acclaimed, internationally touring work by Janis Claxton Dance from Edinburgh. It's a sequence of five minute love duets six in this version for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, as many as nine in previous ones. The performances are timed around the starts and stops of other events at Lincoln Center, ensuring a crowd from which Ms. Claxton's vivid dancers can emerge. There are four of them, two men and two women. And the duets form a chain, with a dancer from the first duet joined by another for the second, and so on, cycling through all six possible pairings. The location of the duets shifts around the plaza, unannounced, but you can follow the dancers, or, more reliably, the music: purpose composed songs by Pippa Murphy (some with Bjork like vocals by Kathryn Joseph) coming out of a portable speaker shaped like a suitcase.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The irony is not lost on Ian Wardropper, the director of the Frick Collection: The very gated garden that upended the museum's previous attempt to renovate its 1914 Gilded Age mansion is now the centerpiece of its revised design. In 2015, preservationists, designers, critics and architects successfully opposed the Frick's plans to remove the garden on East 70th Street, designed by the British landscape architect Russell Page, to make way for a six story addition, by Davis Brody Bond. The new plan, by the architect Annabelle Selldorf which the Frick board approved Wednesday has situated several new elements precisely so that each provides a tranquil view of the garden: a renovated lobby; a newly created second level above the reception hall; and a new education center, cafe and expanded museum shop. In addition, the garden will be restored by Lynden B. Miller, a garden designer and preservationist, in keeping with Page's original vision. And rather than build over the garden, as previously planned, the Frick will now build beneath it, creating a 220 seat underground auditorium to better accommodate educational and public programs. "The garden becomes the new center of the campus," Mr. Wardropper said in a recent interview at the museum. "It's a beautiful garden always was. Now we're going to make the most of it." The Frick ended the last design process feeling battered by and somewhat bitter about critics, including the Times's own, who raised concerns about protecting the museum's intimate scale and preserving the garden. "Gardens are works of art," Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, said in an interview at the time. "This one is in perfect condition by Russell Page, one of the pre eminent garden designers of the 20th century, and it should be respected as such. It's as important as a tapestry or even a painting, and I think the museum is obliged to recognize its importance." Had the museum been able to build its addition in the garden, Mr. Wardropper said last week, the Frick would have gained "a proper loading dock" and "we wouldn't have to close" for an estimated two years during construction. (The museum is talking to other institutions about continuing its activities in borrowed spaces during that hiatus.) But he said he doesn't feel as if the museum is settling for less. Instead, he said, the Frick has had to be more resourceful in repurposing 60,000 square feet of existing space and surgically adding 27,000 square feet, in part by building in the rear yard of the museum's art reference library on East 71st Street. "We're able to achieve everything we need," Mr. Wardropper said. "I think we've come up with a more elegant plan and a more rational one." Construction, which is expected to cost 160 million, is to begin in 2020 and take about two years to complete. Mr. Wardropper said he still firmly believes in the reasons behind the effort: to increase exhibition space and to improve circulation, amenities, infrastructure and wheelchair accessibility trying to meet the needs of modern audiences while honoring the building's jewel box quality. For the first time in its history, the Frick family's private living quarters on the second floor will be open to the public, helping to create 30 percent more exhibition space including a permanent gallery for the new Scher Collection of portrait medals and highlighting the experience of seeing art in an elegant home. "The Frick has always been one of my favorite museums because you get up close to the art and you can respond to the domestic spaces in your own way," Ms. Selldorf said. "You'll be able to come to the museum and do the exact same thing you do today, except that you'll be able to go up the stairs and see these rooms." The new design seems less likely to prompt outrage, given that the garden will be preserved, the new second level will raise the height of the lobby by less than five feet, and the museum is adding just two more floors above the mansion's music room. Moreover, both of these additions will be set back from the street. "You will only see it if you're all the way back at the corner," said Ms. Selldorf, who is working with Beyer Blinder Belle, the executive architecture firm on the project. "The closer you get, the less you see of it." The building addition behind the library will be the same height as the library: seven stories. The renovation's aesthetic will also be understated and honor the original building's aesthetic, using materials like Indiana limestone. "You want it to be part of the existing volume, but have its own identity," Ms. Selldorf said. "It's not apologetic, but at the same time it's not about style." The renovation will open the reception area, which currently becomes congested, by removing the existing circular stair to the lower level and relocating the gift shop to the second floor. A new staircase will lead down to the new coat check, bathrooms and auditorium. (The current 147 seat music room is acoustically challenged and so small that the museum must constantly turn people away.) The newly configured underground spaces will eliminate the low ceilinged galleries that could not accommodate certain works. The current show of life size portraits by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbaran, for example, had to be displayed on the main floor, displacing a portion of the permanent collection. The Frick will also get its first dedicated space for the 100 school groups that visit every year. (They will enter the new education center through the library's 71st Street entrance.) Mr. Wardropper said the Frick's 30 million operating budget is expected to increase by 1 million or 2 million after the renovation, and its 22 admission fee is likely to go up by an undetermined amount. Given its three previous attempts to expand in recent years in 2001, 2005 and 2008 the Frick is hoping to get it right this time. "This is the one," Mr. Wardropper said. Over the next few months, the Frick plans to meet with some 75 community organizations and others to present the project. Museum officials have already had initial informal discussions with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has to approve the project since the Frick is in a landmark mansion, designed by Carrere and Hastings for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Three former members of that commission opposed the previous plan, along with a coalition, Unite to Save the Frick, that included architects and designers. Facing what the museum called "protracted legal battles" in pushing its plan forward, the Frick decided to go back to the drawing board.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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I'm a Doctor in Italy. We Have Never Seen Anything Like This. MILAN None of us have ever experienced a tragedy like it. We know how to respond to road accidents, train derailments, even earthquakes. But a virus that has killed so many, which gets worse with each passing day and for which a cure or even containment seems distant? No. We always think of calamity as something that will happen far from us, to others far away, in another part of the world. It's a kind of superstition. But not this time. This time it happened here, to us to our loved ones, our neighbors, our colleagues. I'm an anesthesiologist at the Policlinico San Donato here in Milan, which is part of the Lombardy region, the heart of the Italian coronavirus outbreak. On Feb. 21, the day on which the first case was recorded, our hospital, which specializes in cardiac surgery, offered to help with the care of patients with Covid 19. Along with other hospitals, we created a task force of intensive care doctors to be sent to hospitals in the "red zone." All planned surgeries were postponed. Intensive care beds were given over to the treatment of coronavirus patients. Within 24 hours, the hospital created new intensive care places by converting operating theaters and anesthetic rooms. And 40 more beds were dedicated to patients suspected or proven to have the virus, though not in a serious condition. The patients who arrive remain for many days, straining medical resources. Already across northern Italy in Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna and Marche health care systems are under enormous stress. Medical workers are exhausted. As the virus spreads, other regions will soon find themselves in the same situation. Fortunately, Lombardy and the national government adopted aggressive containment measures 10 days ago. By the end of this week after 15 days, the incubation period of the infection we will see whether such measures have been effective. Only then might we see a slowing down in the spread of the virus. It cannot come too soon. There has been speculation that doctors may be forced to decide whom to treat, leaving some without immediate care. That's not my experience: All patients at my hospital have received the treatment they require. But that may not last. If the number of patients infected does not start to drop, our resources won't stretch to cover them. At that point, triaging patients to give priority to those with more chances of survival may become standard practice. My colleagues, at the Policlinico and throughout the country, are showing a great spirit of sacrifice. We know how much we are needed right now; that gives us strength to withstand fatigue and stress. How long such resistance will last, I cannot say. Some colleagues have tested positive for the coronavirus, and a few have needed intensive care. For us all, the dangers are great. As an anesthesiologist devoted to surgical emergencies, I haven't had many direct dealings with coronavirus patients. But there was one. An elderly man in a fragile condition, he was set to have tumor removed. The surgery proceeded as normal: I put him to sleep, and he awoke four hours later, without pain. That was in mid February. A week later, the telltale symptoms began to show: a high fever, a cough. Before long, pneumonia. Now he's in intensive care, intubated and in a critical condition. He is one of many who have become a number without a name, one of those that represent the worsening of the situation. I hope the beginning of the end of this outbreak will be soon. But we will know that it's coming only if and when the infections begin to decline. The population's calm response to the restrictive rules imposed by the government, the experience gained in the management of critically ill patients and the rumors of new treatments for the infection are grounds for hope. Perhaps the containment measures will work, and the news at the end of the week will be good. But for now, we are in the thick of tragedy. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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WASHINGTON Move over, millennials. The centenarians are coming. The number of Americans age 100 and older those born during Woodrow Wilson's administration and earlier is up by 44 percent since 2000, federal health officials reported Thursday. There were 72,197 of them in 2014, up from 50,281 in 2000, according to the report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1980, they numbered about 15,000. Even demographers seemed impressed. "There is certainly a wow factor here, that there are this many people in the United States over 100 years old," said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution. "Not so long ago in our society, this was somewhat rare." Not only are there more centenarians, but they are living even longer. Death rates declined for all demographic groups of centenarians white, black, Hispanic, female, male in the six years ending in 2014, the report said. Women, who typically live longer than men, accounted for the overwhelming majority of centenarians in 2014: more than 80 percent. Centenarians are an elite group. Most people born in 1900 did not live past 50. But chances of survival to such ripe ages have improved with the rise of vaccines and antibiotics, and improvements in hygiene, medical treatments and technology. There are exceptions: The explosion of opioid overdose deaths in recent years has erased progress for some groups, particularly young and middle age whites. Malvina Hunt, a resident of central New York, who turned 100 in October, said her secret was vigorous exercise. Every morning, she does leg lifts and rapid arm raises to get the blood flowing. Now that it is winter, she does not venture out very much, except to the mailbox. But in summer, she spends a lot of time outside, gardening and mowing the lawn. And she still works as a greeter in a winery. She also helps build cartons used to ship wine. "My motto was always, 'If I could do it today, I'll be able to do it tomorrow,' " she said. She said she knew two other centenarians, a friend from high school and a friend from college, both women. Whites are driving the aging of America. In the last full census in 2010, the median age for whites was 42, far older than the Hispanic population, whose median age was 27. Baby boomers, a large bulge in the population, have started to enter retirement and will soon be bumping up the numbers of the elderly to record levels. Experts are warning that the United States is unprepared to handle such large numbers of seniors, especially as the life expectancy of older people continues to rise. "We are moving into a very different country this century," Mr. Frey said. "It's the very tip of the iceberg." Even for centenarians, life spans are growing longer. Death rates for centenarian women dropped 14 percent in the six years ending in 2014, to 36.5 per 100 women, and by 20 percent to 33.2 per 100 men. Among racial and ethnic groups, Hispanic centenarians had the lowest death rate, 22.3 per 100 people, compared with 39.3 per 100 whites and 28.6 per 100 blacks. Death rates from Alzheimer's disease increased the most over the period of the report, up 119 percent from 2000 to 2014. Death rates from hypertension also jumped 88 percent over the period. Death rates for influenza and pneumonia fell by 48 percent, for stroke by 31 percent and for heart disease by 24 percent. Even so, heart disease remained the leading cause of death for centenarians in 2014.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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In "Healing Wars," which draws parallels between the American Civil War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she incorporates movement, storytelling, music, digital projections even flying hospital beds above the stage. Behind is an area that theatergoers will visit en route to their seats and where they will come into contact with characters played by, among others, the actor Bill Pullman; the dancer Tamara Hurwitz Pullman, his wife; and Mr. Hurley, one of several veterans who have contributed their stories in the project's development. "This has always been part of Liz's thing, that it matters who's doing the performing," said Mr. Pullman, whose wife has a long association with Ms. Lerman. "Whoever is doing the movement brings their own personal richness to it all." They've brought their own research, too: Mr. Pullman's father was a Navy surgeon in World War II, and he also based his "Healing Wars" character on Dr. Richard Jadick, a Navy surgeon in Iraq. Ms. Lerman's father, too, was a World War II veteran. Like many of their generation, neither man talked about his combat experiences. Which is a point of the show. "When my father was on his deathbed he said, 'Bury me in my uniform,' " Ms. Lerman said. "We'd never heard anything about the war, but this was obviously huge to him. And what we find with the vets we've talked to is that once they start talking, they can't stop." This includes Mr. Hurley, who has tended to run long during rehearsals with the story of his injury the result of an attack in Bahrain in 2006, in which a close friend died. "I kind of get in the moment," Mr. Hurley said, "and watching Bill, I feel he kind of elevates everyone's level. There's a lot of creativity flowing back and forth. He might do something that makes me think of something, and I'll drift off and remember details and have to pull myself back in. But I think we've rehearsed enough where I'm pretty comfortable." He may be, but "Healing Wars," whose official opening is next Thursday, was in a semi amorphous state during a tech rehearsal last week. Across the mostly bare stage on which spoken narratives will move back and forth between the Civil War and the present, and alternate with dance Keith A. Thompson performed a pas de deux with Mr. Hurley. Ms. Pullman interpreted Clara Barton, the Civil War nurse who went on to found the American Red Cross. The entire company, led by Ted Johnson, danced to Lady Gaga's "Telephone," closely following a projection of a viral 2010 "Telephone" video by Aaron Melcher danced by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Music was being finalized. So was movement.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Revolution has come to Bucharest, and a society has exploded into shards. A multitude of writhing, flailing, falling bodies fills the screen during the climax of the second act of Ashley Tata's fervently inventive new streaming version of Caryl Churchill's "Mad Forest," a coproduction of Theater for a New Audience and the Fisher Center at Bard College. This is not, however, your average mob scene. Each of the participants in this upheaval and there are a dozen, to be exact, though they feel like many more is isolated in one of those separate, self contained frames many of us now identify with Zoom conferences. They all seem to share an astonishment, mixed with elation and terror, at the chaos that has descended upon what had been a rigidly regimented world. One is locked in a self stranglehold; another appears to be wiping the window of the lens that separates us, trying to get a clear view; others claw the air and scream silently, while yet another would seem to be vogueing. While these achingly young looking people are all responding to the same cataclysmic events, their reactions are so isolatingly different. It has seldom felt lonelier in a crowd. The cast of this streamlined, Zoom formatted version of Churchill's 1990 play a portrait of Romania before and after the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship in December 1989 is made up of college students in the Bard Theater and Performance Program. (The production will be streamed again on Sunday at 5 p.m. and Wednesday at 3 p.m., via tfana.org.) And as they deploy their varied, idiosyncratic gestures, you can imagine the workshop improvisation from which they sprang. It's a style of performance that might come across as embarrassingly earnest on a stage. But in this context, all that quirky, mismatched intensity felt deeply moving. The cast members were portraying witnesses to and participants in the Bucharest uprising who had been interviewed by Churchill, the director Mark Wing Davey and a team of 10 acting students shortly after those events occurred. The part of "Mad Forest" shaped from those interviews evolved from Churchill, her team and their subjects trying to make sense of something that seemed to make no sense at all. Now, some 30 years later, a group of students roughly the same age as many of the scene's characters is trying to make personal, individual sense of the same material. "Mad Forest" seen in Manhattan in a New York Theater Workshop production in 1991 has always been about the difficulties of translation, in several ways. And be warned, this mixture of documentary, domestic and surreal drama can feel bewildering even in conventional stagings. Each of the scenes in the first and third acts portraying the fictional stories of two Romanian families of different classes is preceded by a guidebook like sentence spoken in Romanian and then in English. So you are always aware of "Mad Forest" occurring through various filters of interpretation, as it confronts an elusive, very tangled reality. (The title comes from a description of the woodland where Bucharest was built that "was impenetrable to the foreigner who did not know its paths.") Tata's version which achieved its present form when the stage production in rehearsal had to be canceled because of the pandemic adds still another layer of interpretive tools and filters. Each of the performances, by actors sheltering in place in different locations, is occurring separately. It's only the inspired work of the technical team that creates the illusion of their inhabiting the same space. The conjured landscapes include both urban streetscapes and countryside idylls; claustrophobically cozy apartments and hospital corridors. They have been summoned via green screens and projections under the supervision of Afsoon Pajoufar (sets), Abigail Hoke Brady (lighting) and Eamonn Farrell (video). Just as startling is the meticulous choreography of the ensemble (by Daniel Safer, with nerve scraping music and sound by Paul Pinto). Money seems to change hands between an abortion provider and his client in adjacent frames, a vampire bites a dog, a ghost visits a nurse in a hospital, and a wedding erupts into a body slamming free for all.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
NLP-ADBench: NLP Anomaly Detection Benchmark
Links
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04784
Repository: https://github.com/USC-FORTIS/NLP-ADBench
Citation
If you use NLP-ADBench in your research, please cite our paper:
@misc{li2025nlpadbenchnlpanomalydetection,
title={NLP-ADBench: NLP Anomaly Detection Benchmark},
author={Yuangang Li and Jiaqi Li and Zhuo Xiao and Tiankai Yang and Yi Nian and Xiyang Hu and Yue Zhao},
year={2025},
eprint={2412.04784},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04784},
}
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