--:-- Shamita Bassero: Good morning. It's Thursday, April 8th. I'm Shamita Bassero. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You ever heard someone talking about people living on the wrong side of the tracks? There is so much behind that phrase. It is loaded and has a lot to do with the racist and classist legacy of infrastructure projects in this country. Projects that intentionally cut off certain communities.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: This week, President Biden is talking a lot about that history and telling Texas to pause a highway expansion project. Local activists are saying this particular proposed road would displace more than a thousand homes and businesses in majority black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Politico says the move took government insiders by surprise, especially considering how the challenge was made. The administration is invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: NPR points out that for decades, the government has used highways and roads to isolate, displace and marginalize communities of color. Around the time that the interstate highway system was created in 1956, courts were striking down racial zoning policies. So white power brokers at the time saw highway planning as an opportunity to maintain segregation and box in minorities.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Non-white communities across the country were destroyed. They were razed to the ground. The government took homes by eminent domain or cut them off from city centers. And now the Biden administration says it wants to spend $20 billion to reconnect communities that were torn apart by past projects.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: Centuries ago having money literally meant chests full of heavy gold coins. Paper currency changed all that. And it was China that invented folding money. And today, China is on the cutting edge again, as the first major economy with its own digital currency.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Wall Street Journal explains what this means and how it could impact American security. China's digital yuan is different from other digital currencies like Bitcoin in that it's controlled by the central bank. And that makes it a threat to a bedrock of American power, the dollar.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: For decades, the greenback has been the world's most powerful currency. It's used in the vast majority of foreign exchange trades. And let's be real. If you can't deal in dollars, you're pretty much on the sidelines of the global economy.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is why when the U.S. punishes another country by imposing sanctions, you know, restricting its ability to conduct business in U.S. dollars, it hurts so much. Just ask North Korea and Iran. So if another currency gains power, U.S. sanctions might not sting as much.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: Beijing's digital currency is small and new, but the government is developing and marketing it hard. U.S. policymakers are concerned that it might grow into a threat to American interests around the world.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Back in his February Senate testimony, Fed Chair Jerome Powell was asked whether America should make its own digital currency. We are the world's reserve currency, and we have a responsibility to get this right. We don't need to be the first.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: And remember early in the pandemic we were all predicting this would officially be the end of caring about our looks. All the jokes about never wearing hard pants again. Well it turns out now that people are making vaccine appointments they're also starting to book time at the nail salon, at the barber.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We are ready to be seen again, and we want to look good. We sure do. Amanda Mull is a reporter at The Atlantic. She noticed she's also been feeling this pull towards beauty services herself. So she started looking into it and found out that the beauty industry is bracing for business to boom this summer.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: Maul spoke with the CEO of a digital platform for salons and spas. And she said, as businesses started opening up last year, the platform saw a surge in bookings. And once the vaccines arrived, everything just really exploded.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And here's the thing. A lot of the uptick is people who are booking appointments for services they've never had done before. First time eyelash extensions or microblading, Botox even. So Mull asks, why exactly is this happening? She points to research that suggests difficult times can push people to make significant changes to their appearance.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: You know, like getting bangs after a breakup. Mull says, while beauty services may seem a bit trivial, they represent a small step toward normalcy. Being able to be in a room with a stranger who's taking care of you in some small way. And after a year of doing so much on your own, and after months of uncertainty, beauty services are also offering a bit of control over how you present yourself to the world.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So it's the end of a simpler time. After 15 years, Yahoo Answers announced it's shutting down on May 4th. The Verge takes a look back at how the website evolved over the years.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: When the site was first created the premise was straightforward You can ask a question and anyone can answer And for years, Yahoo Answers was a collection of confusing and sometimes ridiculous, but mostly sincere questions that were often met with snarky and hilarious replies.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But Yahoo Answers was slowly infected by so many of the problems ruining other corners of the internet, like hyper-partisanship and misinformation. And The Verge says, this is the real tragedy of Yahoo Answers closing. Even this quirky patch of the internet got poisoned with polarization and conspiracy theories.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: So to celebrate its more wholesome past, BuzzFeed offers a list of some of the best questions posed on Yahoo Answers. And there's some really good ones here. One of them was, how do you get YouTube to come film you? Just a failure to understand what YouTube is.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One of my favorites was how do I turn off caps lock? And it was, of course, written all in caps lock. One of my favorites, the one I really loved, was the question, will my laptop get heavier if I put more files on it? Or how do I unbake a cake? You know, you can't make this stuff up.
--:-- Shamita Bassero: Right now, the most popular questions on the site are very meta, very self-referential. People are just shocked, you know. Can you believe Yahoo Answers is getting shut down?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you're on the sad end of the scale, don't worry. You can still submit a question until April 20th. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
