--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Friday, June 18th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tomorrow is Juneteenth. Some Americans have been celebrating this day, which marks the end of slavery in the U.S. for more than a century. But this week, President Biden signed a bill into law making June 19th a federal holiday.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: On June 19th in 1865, people who were enslaved in Texas received the message that they were free. This was more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth is considered the longest-running African-American holiday. And one of the many ways people will be celebrating tomorrow is with food.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I had a chance to talk with Nicole A. Taylor. She's a food writer and producer who's been making an alfresco Juneteenth meal for her friends and family for about a decade now. She wrote a piece for Food & Wine that features some delicious-looking fruit dishes, and they're all inspired by the holiday.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She also shares the backstory behind these recipes. We started off by talking about what makes food such an important part of Juneteenth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, I think for any Black celebration, food is always going to be the centerpiece. The potato salad on the table, the ribs, the pork chops, and of course, the red drink. Food is always going to be at the center. That's where we all come together.
--:-- Nicole A. Taylor: When you go back to some of the first Juneteenth celebrations in Texas, it is a regional Texas holiday. All the different types of foods that you see at the earliest Juneteenth celebrations, in my opinion, symbolize something way bigger than just that moment of eating. It would be a goat, you know, putting a whole goat in the ground and cooking it. And it was a symbol of abundance, a symbol of freedom. It was a symbol of togetherness.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All that food, it was just making my mouth water. And even just now, you're speaking about meat, meat, meat. But you use fruit as a centerpiece. What does fruit symbolize for you in this series of recipes?
--:-- Nicole A. Taylor: I think that most people automatically go to barbecue and they think about hot links and brisket and all the luscious, delicious meats we put on the grill during the summer months. But for me, I feel like fruit is almost like an indulgence. It is an indulgence where you know your parents would tell you could only get one only one peach or only one plum. And so writing about fruit summer fruit to me felt really special.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What made you select pound cake and grape glaze as the recipe for this year's celebration?
--:-- Nicole A. Taylor: Oh, my gosh. Pound cake. Like, you cannot have a black celebration without a pound cake. I mean, it is a quintessential African-American dessert. And that pound cake recipe is a variation of my very traditional pound cake recipe that I got from my aunt a million gazillion years ago. And I wanted to add a little pop culture to the story. And Moscato, you know, you see Moscato being talked about in, you know, hip hop and rap lyrics all over Twitter. And so I'm like, you know what, I want to make a cake using that dessert wine as a sweetener. And let me play around with some dried grapes to glaze it. So that's how that came to be.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Would you say that the goal of your article, your work, is to celebrate the achievements rather than mourning the losses? Or do you do both?
--:-- Nicole A. Taylor: As a person who is writing about the foods of Juneteenth and how to prepare them in a very traditional way and a non-traditional way, I want my work to be about joy. I want my recipes and storytelling to reflect togetherness, to reflect and celebrate the Black experience, the Black family.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm super happy that things are moving forward with Juneteenth becoming a national holiday, as it should be. And I'm very confident that the spirit of Juneteenth will forever be rooted in Texas and regional Texas barbecue and regional Texas flair. But I also know that Black people across the country, we are connected. We are tied together by an unspoken bond. And Juneteenth is a part of that for sure.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can see all of Nicole A. Taylor's Juneteenth recipes and stories in the full Food & Wine article. Oh, and the photos are so beautiful in this spread. One thing I don't think she mentioned, that pound cake has this vibrant pink icing to it. The link is on our show notes page.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A powerful heat wave is causing all kinds of problems in the West Around 40 million Americans are seeing the thermometer hit triple temperatures this week Death Valley National Park got close to 130 degrees. That's just a few degrees off from the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The weather in parts of America is so intense that it's a public health problem, with older Americans in particular danger. And the extreme heat could lead to blackouts and raging wildfires.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNBC looks at the big picture here. Recently, more than three-fourths of the American West has had severe drought conditions. The combination of dry land and the heat wave is increasing risk of fire. Firefighters report hundreds of thousands of acres burning across 10 states right now.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Power authorities are worried that the grids won't be able to handle things as more and more people are turning on their ACs to stay cool.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The San Francisco Chronicle reports on concerns in California. The state's power grid manager sent out an alert asking people to set thermostats to 78 degrees to turn off major appliances and to keep lights off as much as possible.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Houston Chronicle looks at the situation in Texas. The state's power grid operator put out a similar alert. It urged residents to cut power use.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For many Texans, this is bringing up bad memories. Blackouts in February left millions of people without power for days during a winter storm. Some people died in the freezing cold. And many are now worried about another catastrophic grid failure. This one in the heat.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The days ahead could be very dangerous. As one meteorologist puts it, heat waves are even more intense now because of climate change. And he's bracing for this pumped up heat to set some painfully high records.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, the United States passed 600,000 deaths from COVID-19. It's a reminder that even though the situation has improved, it's still a threat. And COVID will be with us for a long time.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That future is going to look different depending on where you are. The Wall Street Journal is reporting right now about 44% of the U.S. is fully vaccinated. But when you compare states, you begin to see big differences.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vermont, for example, is about 63% vaccinated, but Mississippi is only about 28%. Dr. Anthony Fauci says many areas may experience something like local herd immunity, but the virus could spread in under-vaccinated pockets in America.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This means we need to be prepared for the possibility that COVID-19 could come and go in waves, maybe in seasonal patterns, sort of like the flu.
--:-- Shamita Basu: States are going to need to be ready to contact trace for new infections, keep stock of PPE and other tools to fight new outbreaks and monitor new variants.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Bloomberg News is pointing to the measles as an example of how COVID could persist In 2000 the World Health Organization declared measles had been eliminated in the U.S. But since then, an anti-vaccination movement took hold, and we've seen measles come back several times, including a major outbreak in 2019.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Public health researchers tell Bloomberg it's important to understand what's driving low vaccination rates in some areas. It's not always hesitancy. Sometimes it's a question of access, needing to drive a long distance or get time off work.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People in different places have different reasons they haven't gotten their shot. As one professor who studies vaccinations puts it, a one-size-fits-all approach isn't going to work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Did you see that headline the other day? Man swallowed by a whale survives?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A lobster diver off the coast of Cape Cod was apparently trapped in a humpback whale's mouth, and he lived to tell the story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, National Geographic is on the scene with a fact check of one key detail. It explains how it's physically impossible for most whales to swallow a human.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yeah, this is one of those really specific animal facts that I promise you won't forget once you've learned it. Ready? A humpback whale's throat is roughly the size of a human fist.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, there's only one species of whale that has a big enough throat to theoretically swallow a human, and that's the sperm whale, and it rarely comes across people.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And if you listen to the diver describe the incident, he doesn't say he was swallowed, but he does sound scared.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Everything just went dark and I could just feel just hard stuff all around me. And I just thought, did I just get eaten by a white shark? And I said, no, I don't feel any teeth. And I said, oh, my God, I'm in the mouth of a whale.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, he says he was in there for about 30 seconds before it just spit him out. No major injuries, mostly just bruises.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So there you have it. The Bible said it. Pinocchio told you so. But National Geographic says swallowed by a whale? Probably not going to happen.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. Plus, stop by over the weekend to hear our new interview show, In Conversation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Each episode, we go behind the scenes with the writers of the best stories out there. This week, I speak with Ari Berman from Mother Jones. He's got a deep dive on the history of how the right to vote has been taken away from Black people in this country and how difficult it is to get it back.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Enjoy the weekend. Listen, we'll be back with the news again on Monday.
