On today’s show: TikTok faces a U.S. ban in one month, and the Supreme Court just decided to hear its case. Lauren Feiner of the Verge talks about what is next. More colleges are offering free tuition to middle-class families. Danielle Douglas-Gabriel of the Washington Post explains how that could open the door to more diverse applicants. The New Yorker’s Jennifer Wilson took a personal journey through the new business of breakups. Plus, Dominque Pelicot sentenced to 20 years in landmark French rape case, Trump upended a bipartisan spending bill, a House panel voted to release its ethics report on former Congressman Matt Gaetz, and researchers corrected an alarming study on the toxicity of black plastic. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: Why are colleges offering free tuition?
Chapter 2: What are the implications of TikTok's potential ban?
Good morning. It's Thursday, December 19th. I'm Shmeeta Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, why some colleges are offering free tuition to a broader swath of students, Trump comes out strongly against a bipartisan bill to prevent a government shutdown at the end of the week, and the messy, lucrative business of breakups.
But first, TikTok has just one month left to respond to an ultimatum from Congress. Either sell to an approved buyer and divest from its China-based parent company ByteDance, or be banned in the U.S. For the tens of millions of American users, it could be the end of an era for the app, which has built a reputation for curating seemingly tailor-made content just for you.
Here's how Lauren Feiner at The Verge put it.
A lot of people feel like the algorithm knows what they want to see, has like just the right amount of randomness to keep them interested. And that's really powerful.
Lawmakers have warned for a long time that the app poses national security risks, citing policies in China that allow the government to secretly request data from companies and citizens, which TikTok claims has never happened to them.
Forbes says they experienced TikTok's far-reaching ability to spy on users firsthand when the app improperly gained access to some of their journalists' IP addresses and user data. Those reporters were tracked as part of a covert surveillance campaign. ByteDance confirmed that it happened and fired the employees responsible. It was a real-life example of what lawmakers have warned against.
But Feiner told us despite that, a lot of TikTok users are confused about why a law banning the app is necessary, in part because U.S. officials never publicly provided evidence to support their concerns.
Lawmakers got to see all of this classified information, but the general public really hasn't seen the same information. And I think that's really made a lot of people question, well, you know, how dangerous is this app and why can't the government explain to us why this bill needs to be in place to protect us?
TikTok's battle to defend itself hasn't gone well so far. An appellate court earlier this month upheld the law, basically saying national security trumps all other issues. But they were thrown a lifeline yesterday by the Supreme Court, which announced it will hear arguments over the constitutionality of the law next month.
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Chapter 3: How are colleges trying to attract middle-class students?
Keep in mind, a lot of these schools admit small numbers of people. So I think the big question is how much impact will these decisions have? Or will they just be at the margins? Or will we see like a total sea change in how the average American is able to afford and pay for college?
When a romantic relationship ends, it can be pretty earth-shattering. For New Yorker reporter Jennifer Wilson, it was a blindside via text, followed soon after by a question from a friend who wanted to know, do you have a breakup plan? What's that, Wilson wondered. She'd just gotten back into the dating pool after her marriage ended, and she told us that question sent her down a rabbit hole.
One click leads to another. And the next thing I knew, I saw this whole universe of resources that did not exist 10 years ago. Last time I was single back then, if you were going through a breakup, you just sat on the couch, watched sad movies, ate a pint of ice cream.
For centuries, since the days of Aristotle, experts have tried to understand what exactly heartache is, how it manifests in the mind and body, and how to best help people going through it. In 1610, the recommendation from a physician in France was to give people enemas for heartbreak.
Today, Wilson says it looks like... Every manner of breakup coach, lots of breakup retreats, breakup getaways. I found this hotel in Mexico that would... that offered a kind of exfoliating treatment where you could scrub away the past.
If you're wondering what a breakup coach does or what happens on a breakup retreat, Wilson says it can vary pretty widely.
When I traveled to Berlin, I met with a woman named Elena Son, who runs something called the Heartbreak Agency. And she had to go through 18 months of training to become certified as kind of an alternative psychological practitioner. And then she passed a test through the German health department.
The breakup mitigation industry, which is a phrase I just made up, is, as you can imagine, full of people who are just making things up. Some claim to be coaches, but really just paid for a certificate. Others come from a vaguely self-helpy background, which is why Wilson says it can be hard to know the quality of a program.
People who are going through breakups are looking for anything that is going to alleviate the pain. And there are lots of people out there willing to offer that kind of quote unquote help, but not all of them are actually helping.
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