--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Friday, October 15th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Shemitah Basu is off. 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: So right now, tens of billions of dollars are set aside to help renters. All the way back in December, congressional lawmakers said repeatedly, help is on the way. But words are not actions. There's been a lot of trouble getting the money out the door, right?
--:-- Chris Arnold: That's right. I'm Chris Arnold, a correspondent with NPR. And I told Duarte about Akira Johnson. She's a mom with three kids living in South Carolina. Before COVID, she was making about $60,000 a year as a cosmetologist. That income dried up during the pandemic when she was forced to close her salon.
--:-- Akira Johnson: They filed an eviction on me. They knocked on my door with the eviction paper.
--:-- Chris Arnold: Akira did everything she could to pay her rent. She downsized to a cheaper apartment, applied for unemployment, and emptied her savings. And for a while, that was enough until the bills became impossible to pay.
--:-- Akira Johnson: I feel like if we did lose the place, I would probably have to send them to their grandmothers. That's like separating from them.
--:-- Chris Arnold: Congress approved all that money to help people exactly like Akira, but she and many people in the same situation kept struggling to get help. I explain, a big reason for this holdup is that the Treasury Department sent money to states to distribute.
--:-- Chris Arnold: The thinking was, local officials would have a better idea of where this aid should go, but a lot of states didn't have the systems in place to figure out how to give out this money. They were largely built from scratch these systems. And that meant some of these programs were pretty confusing and certainly not user-friendly.
--:-- Chris Arnold: If you're a single parent, without a lot of technology, and they're asking for all this different information, you don't have a printer, you know, you got a phone maybe, but if the portal you got to upload stuff to is not mobile-friendly.
--:-- Chris Arnold: Eventually, the federal government asked states to do what they could to get the money out faster. South Carolina made some changes, and Akira finally got the money. And just in the nick of time, too.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But there's still so many other families waiting. Only something like 28% of these 500 programs around the country are sending checks directly to people like Akira who are applying. They've reached about 1.5 million people, but there's still 8 million people behind on rent.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some Netflix workers are planning to walk off the job next week to protest Dave Chappelle's special. The controversy over his jokes about transgender people is hitting a critical point. This is that rare kind of story that involves so many things all at once. Identity, culture, business, and it's making waves in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and on Wall Street.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are many opinions about Chappelle right now, and you could see some major developments in the days ahead on this story. So now is a good time to catch you up on the facts. Bloomberg has been reporting on this controversy and managed to get some data from within Netflix.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some of the critics of the streaming company and Chappelle are internal, and even before the show came out, many Netflix employees raised concerns about Chappelle's humor. Chappelle is largely dismissing critics, and Netflix keeps defending the special.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In an email to staff the CEO said Chappelle does make what he called harsh jokes about many different groups but the company doesn't believe the special intends to incite hatred or violence against anyone.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, Netflix keeps a lot of its numbers private, but Bloomberg's reporting reveals around 10 million people have streamed the special since it debuted earlier this month. More than 1,000 people contacted Netflix to complain, though. Now, that's more than Chappelle's previous special, but in the past, other Netflix shows have gotten more complaints.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The public response, the internal debate at Netflix, and the business realities, these are all key factors that will determine how things play out in the days ahead.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Everybody's talking about the car shortage, but if you pass by a dealership, you still likely see a lot of cars. So what gives? Well, here's the secret. Some of these cars may basically be fakes. Yes, they're missing parts. The vehicle shortage is so bad, dealers can't get enough cars to sell, so they're putting unfinished cars on the lot just to fill space.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's one of the revelations from a new piece in Car and Driver. It looks at just how crazy the market has gotten and what it means if you want to buy a car. The auto industry is in this predicament for several reasons. A microchip shortage, slowdowns at ports, and not enough workers at plants.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One dealer who normally has 4,000 cars in stock right now, he's lucky to get a few hundred. And most cars, even before they arrive, they've already been sold. All this means, if you want a car right now, you're on the wrong side of the law of supply and demand.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People are buying cars they haven't tested yet. Cars they haven't even seen. And just forget about using your bargaining skills to save money. You pay the sticker price or they just sell the car to the next person in line. The old seller's attitude of "let's make a deal" is now "take it or leave it."
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A half-shredded piece of art is now worth more than ever before. There's a shredded Banksy painting that just sold at auction for more than $25 million. That's a new record for this mysterious artist. Quartz looks at the bizarre history of this work. It goes back to 2018.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The framed picture of a girl with a balloon sold for $1.4 million back then. But then Banksy revealed he had a trick up his sleeve. Just after it sold at auction, the painting started to destroy itself. What most people didn't know was that Banksy hid a paper shredder inside the frame.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The auction house said it didn't know about the self-destruct feature. Art experts predicted the stunt would make the work even more valuable. And they were right. The new price for the shredded work is 18 times what it cost when it was all together.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And check out our interview show In Conversation. Saturday, Josh Chessa joins us. He's got a New York Magazine cover story on the difficult, hidden lives of food delivery workers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You never really know whether you're going to work tomorrow, how much you're going to make, and you spend your day chasing orders around. And then you have the constant danger from accidents. Enjoy that week and listen. We'll be back with the news on Monday.
