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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, March 25th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giroldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: 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: Democrats and Republicans are in a political battle to reshape voting rights. On the left, you have Democrats trying to pass a major voting rights bill that would make voter registration automatic, loosen state ID laws, expand access to mail-in ballots, and a lot more.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: On the right, you have Republicans launching a multi-state effort to tighten voting rules. Now, at the core of the Republican argument is this idea that after the 2020 election, Americans lost faith in the voting system and that that faith needs to be restored.
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--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Here's Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. We can't afford to go further down this road. We should be finding ways to rebuild trust, not destroy it further.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But as The Guardian points out, let's not lose sight of why so many Americans lost faith in the process. It's because of former President Trump's repeated lies that the election was stolen, lies that many Republicans echoed.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Here's how Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer describes the situation. Republican-led state legislatures have seized on the former president's big lie that the election was stolen and introduced more than 250 bills in 43 states aimed at tightening voting rules under the guise of election integrity.
--:-- Shamita Basu: By the way, it's pretty unusual for Schumer and McConnell to show up at a committee hearing. So this is a sign that both sides see voting reform as a big deal.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: The Guardian also looks at what's happening at the state level. For example, you know how people often stand in line outside of a polling station to vote? Well, there's a bill in Georgia that would make it illegal to hand out water or snacks to them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And another proposal would allow anyone to bring unlimited challenges against a person's ballot. Critics are saying these proposals specifically target black voters, who were a key part of turning Georgia blue during the past election cycle.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: The Guardian also points out Republicans nationwide already have an electoral advantage heading into 2022. The power to redraw congressional districts Republican control of state legislatures gives them the ability to map out districts across 18 states to change district lines in ways that favor Republican candidates.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The voting rights bill that Democrats are backing would put redistricting into the hands of independent commissions.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Courts are another key force to consider here. The Guardian notes, under Trump, courts grew even more conservative and increasingly sided with states.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Supreme Court declined to stop partisan gerrymandering as recently as 2019. And in 2020, they shut down multiple challenges to Republican state laws aimed at restricting access to the polls.
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--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Virginia once executed more people than any other state, But now that's over. Yesterday, Governor Ralph Northam signed a bill that outlaws the death penalty. Virginia's history. We have much to be proud of, but not the history of capital punishment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The legal news site The Appeal explains what this development means for Virginia and for the rest of the country.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: The death penalty has become less popular over the years in Virginia. Public officials who defended capital punishment in the past are now speaking out against it. And for the past 10 years, there have been no death sentences in the state.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Numbers from the Death Penalty Information Center show 22 states already abolished capital punishment, and an additional 12 have not executed anyone in at least a decade.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: But what this means is the death penalty is still legal in a majority of states. Now, at the federal level, there were no executions for close to 20 years. That is until the last few months of Trump's presidency. His administration executed 13 people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Virginia is the first southern state to get rid of the death penalty. The Appeal spoke with several Virginians who see a clear connection between abolishing capital punishment and protests for racial justice after the death of George Floyd last year.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, nearly half of the people executed in Virginia were Black. When it comes to capital punishment, this state has a long history of racial inequality.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Appeal explains, before the Civil War, enslaved Black people could be legally executed for more types of crimes than white people who only face the death penalty in first murder cases.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Right now in Virginia there are only two people on death row Anthony Juniper and Thomas Porter Both are Black men. But now that this bill has been signed into law, their sentences will be changed to life in prison.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Mike Pence dressed as a gladiator, a decapitated Pikachu, an ocean spray cranberry juice bottle the size of a skyscraper. These are just some of the scenes depicted in digital art pieces by a man known as Beeple.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: And these pieces are rocking the art world right now. The New Yorker spoke with Beeple. The guy's real name, by the way, is Mike Winkleman.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And recently, a mosaic of his work sold for more than $69 million at Christie's auction. It was the third most expensive piece of artwork ever sold by a living artist.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: And it's not even something you can hang on your wall. This piece exists only as a digital file. That's right. People sold this art as an NFT, a non-fungible token.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you aren't familiar with NFTs, I'll just give you a very short explainer. They use the same technology that's behind digital currency like Bitcoin.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: So when you buy an NFT, you get proof of ownership of a digital thing. And that can be rights to a digital image or an MP3 file, or even the first ever tweet by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which sold for $2.9 million this week.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's exactly what Beeple is doing. He's selling his digital art for sky high prices. And the traditional gatekeepers of the art world, they aren't happy about this.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: First, they don't really consider what he does to be art. They're calling his work garish or even gruesome.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some critics compare Beeple to the Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp or the contemporary artist Damien Hirst, but others are not fans of his.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: An art critic for the New York Times denounced his art for, quote, violent erasure of human values and its reliance on childish humor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A critic at Artnet said work like Beeple's will have the shelf life of Taco Bell leftovers, which is pretty brutal.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: But a Christie specialist in contemporary art tells The New Yorker that Beeple's early NFT sales put him on the map, and Christie decided it had more to gain than lose by dabbling in the NFT market.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As for Beeple himself, he doesn't really identify as an artist at least not until recently. But he says he has a newfound interest in art history.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: A few years ago, Dan Pashman, who hosts the food podcast The Sporkful, was getting bored of eating the same old pasta shapes. Spaghetti, penne, it just wasn't really cutting it for him anymore.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So Pashman decided he wanted to create something new. So this man spent three years researching, tasting, designing, and cataloging pasta.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: He was trying to come up with the perfect new pasta shape. If you were to ask me which has kept me up at night more over the past three years, my actual children are this pasta shape, it would be a tough call.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He talked with Rachel Martin on NPR's Morning Edition about his criteria for creating the ideal shape.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: I have these three metrics that I've come up with by which I judge all pasta shapes. So there's forkability, like how well does it stay on the fork? Right. Sauceability, how well does sauce stick to it?
--:-- Shamita Basu: And tooth sinkability, like how satisfying is it to sink your teeth into it?
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: I love it when people are able to make a fake science out of something. Forkability is a metric. That's great.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, he finally settled on a pasta shape that he's decided to call cascatelle, which means little waterfalls.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Okay, it's like a short, flat strip, and it's curled on one end. And all along the edges, it's got these ruffles, sort of like lasagna does.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he says that the key to it is the right angle that's formed where the ruffles meet the main strip of the pasta, which is really uncommon in most other pastas.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: Okay, I just did such a bad job of that. You really have to just go look at a picture.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can see it on the Apple News app. I'm looking at it right now. To me, it looks like a little wrinkled tongue.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: If you're interested if you're interested in learning more about how Cascatelli came to be, Pashman has a five-part series about inventing this new pasta on his podcast, The Sporkful.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's already getting so much buzz that the wait to get this pasta is up to 10 weeks.
--:-- Duarte Giroldino: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow. Thank you.
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