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Indignity Vol. 5, No. 77

Tom Scocca JOE MACLEOD

Tom Scocca, JOE MACLEOD

— 4 min read
When I woke up this morning, my feed was broken. The Bluesky app on my phone just...

ANALOG BLOG DEP'T

Update Your Expectations

Photo of a notebook page with writing in pencil: When I woke up this morning, my feed was broken. The Bluesky app on my phone just rendered a blank template with a loading icon that wouldn't resolve. I swiped at it automatically \=for probably an embarrassing number at times, then downloaded the app update I'd been ignoring, then—still confronting a blank screen—went to the mobile browser. When Slack goes down, you can go to Bluesky to confirm it, but when Bluesky goes down outside working hours, where do you go. Not to X dot Com. A Google search mostly told me that there'd been a Bluesky outage four days before, but I did find a seemingly robot-generated post about a new outage that had started around 6 a.m. Not exactly reliable
Photograph of notebook page with writing in pencil, with a pencil resting on the lower right corner of the page: as news, but acceptable as confirmation. No feed! The mind was too stunned to even reel. Just the morning light outside the blinds. The obnoxious cat. Instagram? Please. Had—something happened to it? Had They done something? It's not natural or relaxing, the way things are, to be unplugged, even though everything coming through the plug is going to be bad. The plug isn't even a plug: that's an archaism for people left over from the 20th century. I remembered at bedtime, for some reason, that we
Photo of notebook page with writing in pencil: used to have to put our contact lenses into little baskets inside a sort of miniature hard-operated washing machine, where you' spin a ring on the cap and the baskets with the lenses would twirl around in the cleaning fluid. From memory I think it looked about like this. [Pencil sketch of contact-lens washing device.] I find it hard to remember when the little washing machines went away, because once something stops being a necessary chore I put it out of my mind. Things don't have to be that way anymore, so why dwell on it?
Photo of notebook page with writing in pencil: The feed came back later on. or I got to my computer and the web version was working—that was how I got the Canadian election results—and sometime after when I consulted the phone again, the feed had repaired itself. One of the things people were sharing on the feed was a video segment Mehdi Hasan made where he tried to narrate the first 100 days of the new Trump administration in 100 seconds. He's very good at talking fast, but the project didn't work for me. It's true that the past three months have been an overwhelming barrage; hearing the events
Photo of notebook page with writing in pencil: rattled off crisply at high speed, though, made them sound like exactly the sort of dynamic, bullet-pointed list of aggressive action and accomplishment that Stephen Miller would want Trump's public to hear. Deportations! Arrests! Bans! The horror is in the surrounding facts, the broken laws, the inconvenience and waste and cruelty and malice. How many seconds does it take to fill in the details of how they deported a U.S. citizen child with cancer while willfully ignoring the efforts as the child's custodial parent to keep them? How many more seconds to explain that they've deported children with cancer—in mid-treatment! —more than once?
Photo of notebook page with writing in pencil: The other thing people were sharing was all details: ICE stormed a family's home in Oklahoma, with a warrant than had other people's names on it; smashed the place up; made a woman and her three daughters stand around outside in their underwear in the rain; stole the household's cash savings; and left without providing any contact information. "What makes you so much worthier of your peace?" the mother asked of the feds in absentia, afterwards, in a local TV interview. The famkly members were all United States citizens, which both matters and doesn't matter, as a measure at where
Photo of notebook page with writing in pencil: people stand right now in relation to the government. There was more on the feed after that but I needed to get outside for a while.
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WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, April 28, 2025

★★★★★ The first step out into the shade made it feel like skipping a jacket was a mistake, but the first step onto the sun-warmed open pavement dispelled the doubts. A helicopter chattered unmoving on the deep and flawless blue. The sun passed its midpoint and the leaves stood out even shinier and sharper than they had before, against a sky that had infinity in it. A cock sparrow fluttered around a hen, striking poses and flashing plumage, while she lunged at him dismissively and a twittering arose like bursts of machine-gun fire. The length of the daylight brought on a pang of anxiety, an unspendable fortune in gold raising a twinge in a miser's heart.

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EASY LISTENING DEP'T.

HERE IS TODAY'S  Indignity Morning Podcast!

Indignity Morning Podcast No. 472: Something unambiguously much worse.
THE PURSUIT OF PODCASTING ADEQUACY™
INDIGNITYTom Scocca

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INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST
Tom Scocca reads you the newspaper.
INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTTOM SCOCCA

ADVICE DEP'T.

GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.

SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Prague Chapter Book Of Recipes, compiled by Marie Paidar and Blanche Kammerer, published in 1922, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

SANDWICHES
Wheat, rye or Boston brown bread may be used.

Bread for sandwiches cuts better when a day old. Wrap them in paraffine paper to keep moist, or place in a tin box. Cream or wash the butter before spreading. Cut bread the shape as desired before spreading.

ROLLED BREAD — Cut fresh bread, while still warm, in as thin slices as possible, using a very sharp knife. Spread evenly with butter which has been washed and creamed. Roll slices separately, and tie each with baby ribbon.
BERYL CISLER.

If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net. 

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