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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Tuesday, October 4th. I'm Shumita 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.
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Basu: We're exactly five weeks away from the midterm elections. And starting today, we're hosting a series of interviews with thought leaders and journalists about what's at stake in November. My colleague, Gideon Resnick, is here with me. Hey, Gideon.
Gideon Resnick: Hey Shumita. How's it going?
Basu: Good, good. So Gideon, help our listeners understand what they're gonna get out of this series of conversations and why you wanted to speak to the people you spoke with.
Resnick: Yeah, I guess I was trying to answer some of the fundamental questions that it feels like we've all been asking ourselves about this midterm cycle. You know, there are races themselves, every house race, 36 Senate races, lots and lots of important down-the-ballot races, but it really does feel like something bigger is going on, right? It really feels as though it's almost a referendum on our democracy itself.
Resnick: You know, for example, there's still a pretty widespread belief among a lot of Republican voters that the 2020 election was stolen. One of the guests in the series is Amy Gardner from "The Washington Post," and we talked a lot about the rise of these so-called election deniers in the Republican party. Those are people who have won their primaries and still refuse to publicly accept the results of the 2020 election. And some of them are even kind of preemptively talking about questioning the results of elections they are going to be in in a month, should they lose.
Resnick: And then in today's episode I spoke with Princeton historian Julian Zelizer about just how our country got here and whether he thinks our democracy and our institutions are strong enough to go through another election cycle where we may see a lot of the population just not accept the results.
Basu: Yeah, so Zelizer being able to put this into context. What does he say about whether he thinks our democracy is strong enough to withstand the bumps in this election cycle?
Resnick: I think he would characterize it as a loaded question at this point. I get the sense that he does want to say "Yes, it can survive." You know, historians like him tend to lean on historical fact, like the fact that the United States survived the Civil War, but Zelizer really said he's not sure because we've never truly had a moment where half the country's version of reality is really just so different than the other half's.
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Julian Zelizer: This danger is we don't even really know what's happening, or a lot of people are fundamentally disagreeing over the basic facts. That makes democracy hard because you have no common foundation.
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Resnick: You know, he had one example where he was talking about speaking to students at Princeton about the Vietnam War, and during that time there was, of course, really robust debate about whether we should be there in the first place, what we were even doing. And he says that he can't really imagine that debate taking place in that way in today's times.
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Julian Zelizer: Today, I would imagine, like, you'd have the debate being "Are we even in Vietnam?" With some people saying "Well, we're not there. Nothing's actually happening." Even as body bags come back right in front of our eyes. And if you're in that space, how can a political leader lead the country in a direction?
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Basu: So, what does Zelizer say that the signs are pointing us toward? Like, what does our future look like? How hopeful is he?
Resnick: So Zelizer was trying to offer some amount of hope. He said, reflecting on the last couple administrations, that he was surprised at how quickly institutions we take for granted can get eroded, but also surprised at how quickly they can return to some extent. He also said that the fact that there was really high voter turnout in the 2020 election was a good sign. But even with all of that, Zelizer's message really was that he was quite concerned.
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Julian Zelizer: I think if we move in a direction where many election deniers win office and the outcome is read as legitimating January 6th, rather than negating what January 6th was about, that means we're in a worse place.
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Thank you so much, Gideon. If you're interested in hearing Gideon's full interview with Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, we'll put it out in our feed today as a special episode. You can find that in both the News app and the Podcast app. And if you're listening in the News app, we'll queue it up to play right after this episode of "Apple News Today."
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Earlier this year, American military veterans Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Huynh traveled to Ukraine to fight Russian forces. On their first mission, they say they were ambushed and separated from their group. They tried to make their way back to their base on foot, but along the way, they were captured by Russian forces. They spent more than 100 days in captivity.
In their first extensive interview since they were released, Andy and Alex sat down with "Washington Post" reporter Dan Lamothe. They described how they were taken to a detention center in Russia, interrogated, physically and psychologically abused. Here's Lamothe.
Dan Lamothe: They were regularly beaten, punched, hit. They were forced into stress positions. One of them that they described was staying on their hands and knees for hours and basically holding that position until their feet went numb, so that there was really no way around the beating. It was really a matter of how and when.
They said their captors also questioned what they were doing fighting for Ukraine.
Lamothe: They were asked repeatedly if they were members of the CIA, if they were affiliated with the CIA, and basically trying to trip them up into saying that they were. They seemed to have a hard time believing that Americans without support of the U.S. government would be finding themselves in the situation as a rank-and-file soldier in a Ukrainian unit.
They told the "Post" they each spent time in solitary confinement and were coerced into doing propaganda videos. In total, they were held for more than 104 days before they were freed last month as part of a prisoner swap between Ukraine and Russia.
Lamothe: When I saw them, they were actually physically still healing. Alex had facial injuries that were still healing from where he had been bound with packing tape over his eyes. Andy had a series of bed bug bites all over his arms and back that were still healing. Both of them had wounds around their wrists where they had been bound.
They told "The Washington Post" they have no regrets about joining the war and they're grateful to be alive. Now, they say they want to raise awareness about the help that Ukraine still needs from the west and call attention to another American veteran who's still being held by Russia. His name is Suedi Murekezi. He shared a cell with Andy and Alex for weeks, but was not included in the prisoner swap. The Russian Embassy in DC did not return the "Post's" requests for comment.
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A new report says the women's professional soccer league has normalized abuse and misconduct, and it says the roots go all the way back to youth leagues with verbally and sexually abusive coaches.
ESPN reports on this investigation, which was conducted by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on behalf of the United States Soccer Federation. The report starts with this allegation, and a warning here that some listeners may find these details disturbing.
In April of 2021, a head coach in the National Women's Soccer League requested that a player, Erin Simon, watch game tape alone together. The coach told Simon that for every pass that she messed up, he would touch her. Simon reported that the coach then put his hands down her pants and up her shirt, despite her trying to stop him.
That incident came just a few months before "The Athletic" published a series of articles about sexual abuse, this time about a different coach, a man named Paul Riley, who was considered one of the most successful managers in the league. Two former Portland players, Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly, accused him of misconduct. Here's Shim talking with NBC last year.
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Mana Shim: He's a predator. He sexually harassed me, he sexually coerced Sinead, and he took away our careers.
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Riley told "The Athletic" that the majority of the allegations against him were untrue. But following these articles, things got ugly inside the league.
Riley was fired, players refused to take to the field, which led to a bunch of cancelled games, the commissioner of the league and her general counsel stepped down, and more players started speaking up. By the end of the season, half of the head coaches in the league were gone.
Today, ESPN has a new documentary out about this history of abuse and just how severely its rocking the world of major league women's soccer. Here is star player Alex Morgan in the trailer…
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Alex Morgan: She went through all the right steps to report someone who was sexually harassing her, and she was failed. She was failed by the system, and I think that was the hardest thing at the time was "What do we do now?"
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In a statement, USSF president Cindy Parlow Cone called the findings of this most recent report "heartbreaking and deeply troubling." She said the federation is taking immediate action to make soccer safer for all the athletes involved.
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It's officially pumpkin spice season, a time of year when Starbucks rolls out its fall drinks and seemingly everyone else in food and retail follows suit. You can get pumpkin spice cereal, pumpkin spice beer, ramen, SPAM, even dog shampoo. Recently, I was on a trip to India and I brought some pumpkin spice for my aunts to try. They had heard of it, they were curious. And let's just say, for people who cook with way more spices on any given day, it did not live up to the hype.
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Aunt: Cinnamon, cloves. I'm sorry, this is not a spice.
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Maybe you agree with my aunt that pumpkin spice is nothing special. But you can't deny that it is a business force, and it is growing. The "Guardian" points out that Americans recently spent nearly a quarter billion dollars on pumpkin spice-flavored groceries in a year. That's a 24% jump from the previous year.
The "Guardian" talks about the history of how Starbucks came up with the pumpkin spice latte. This was 2003, they were feeling inspired by the success of gingerbread and peppermint drinks for the winter, so they wanted to come up with the perfect fall flavor. And one of the company higher-ups got his whole team in a room decorated with pumpkins and other fall-y stuff and had them alternate between drinking coffee and eating pumpkin pie to try to pinpoint where the flavors could overlap.
Now, ultimately, this article tries to get at what's behind the wild success of pumpkin spice. Now, the most important ingredient isn't the cinnamon, it's not the ginger or nutmeg, it's marketing. Namely, making pumpkin spice a strictly seasonal offering. After all, there's nothing stopping Starbucks from putting out the same exact drink in June and calling it an "iced summer drink." But would consumers be willing to spend up to 9% more on all things pumpkin spiced if it was available year-round? In this economy? Probably not.
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You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And remember, if you're listening in the app, stick around to hear the first episode of our midterm special. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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