Good morning. It is July 21st. It is a clear morning in New York City. Yesterday's suffocating heat seems to have backed off without any violence in the process, and we are back at the desk with the windows of the Indignity Morning Podcast Studio open to the fresh air and ambient sounds of the city for your Indignity Morning Podcast, I'm your host, Tom Scocca taking a look at the day and the news. 

Once again, time is going to be tight this morning, owing to competing professional obligations. But maybe this time I won't go on for 12 more minutes after I say that. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story on the right, one column accompanied by a four column picture, is a recurring sort of news story that the Times has advanced to that lead position, to its credit. “ISRAELIS SHOOT DOZENS RUSHING FOR AID IN GAZA / ATTACK NEAR CROSSING Crowds by U.N. Convoy—Over 60 Killed, Palestinians Say.” The picture next to it is of women mourning over a body at Al Shifa Hospital. “Israeli forces,” the Times writes, “killed and wounded dozens of Palestinians on Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip as crowds gathered near a border crossing where United Nations trucks were entering the enclave with humanitarian aid, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and local health workers. A convoy of 25 trucks from the World Food Program, a United Nations agency, was crossing into Gaza and ‘encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies,’ the agency wrote in a statement on Sunday. It said, ‘as the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks snipers and other gunfire.’ And here is the point at which events do or don't become news. The Times continues, “the episode was the latest in a string of episodes in which Gazans lost their lives as they gathered to get food. Hunger and desperation have gripped Palestinians in Gaza during Israel's nearly two-year military campaign against Hamas.” 

“Gazans lost their lives” is a bit of a backward construction there, but overall, the story makes its point and sticks to it. After the jump, the story amplifies the point. “According to witnesses and the Israeli military, Israeli soldiers have repeatedly opened fire near large crowds of desperate Palestinians heading to sites run by American contractors for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a controversial private organization conceived by Israelis and backed by Israel in the United States. A day before the shooting near the border Sunday, at least 32 people were killed when Israeli soldiers began opening fire near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in southern Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The shooting on Sunday,” the Times writes, “took place not near a Foundation site, but at a location where supplies were expected to enter from Israel.” 

There are two basic things that a news organization can do with the fact that the Israeli government is intentionally starving the people of Gaza and the Israeli military is regularly massacring them by the dozens as they try to get food. You can decide that these incidents have now become routine and start sticking each one of them inside the paper, or you can recognize the pattern for the atrocity that it is and cover it accordingly. 

On the left-hand side of the page the headline is “Firing Powell Could Backfire For President / If Investors Lose Faith,
Rates May Spike.” 

“President Trump,” the Times writes, “wants the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Firing Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, could have precisely the opposite effect, pushing up costs for home buyers, businesses, and other borrowers.” They're trying to stuff a batch of news in there while also accommodating the evasiveness and unreliability of the President of the United States.

The story continues, “Mr. Trump in recent days has intensified his long running attacks on Mr. Powell, whom he has criticized for holding interest rates at a relatively high level. Even as inflation has cooled and economic growth has slowed. On Tuesday, the president asked a group of House Republicans whether he should fire Mr. Powell and showed off a draft of a letter that would do so.” Again, news writing is just struggling to encompass the fundamental unreality of the Trump experience there. Would a letter written by Trump saying that he was firing Jerome Powell “do so?” After mentioning Trump's denial the next day that he that he was moving soon to fire Powell. The Times then notes, “if he took such a step, it is unclear whether he would succeed. Mr. Powell has indicated his intention to serve out his term as chair, and many legal experts say the law is on his side.” Those legal experts would include the president's own majority on the Supreme Court, which granted him the power to violate law and precedent by firing independent agency heads, in a decision earlier this year, but included a Bush v. Gore-style arbitrary carveout, stipulating, despite the lack of any basis in the law for such a distinction, that this new grant of presidential power did not extend to the Federal Reserve. But nowhere in this article about the president's expressed desire to unlawfully fire the Fed chair and politicize the country's central banking policy to serve his own interests, and the concern among economists about whether that could, as the Times puts it, “make investors lose faith in the government's ability to make good on its obligations,” nowhere in this whole exploration of whether the United States government and its economic policy are in sound and reliable hands does the Times mention the other thing that Trump said about Powell last week? Namely that he was surprised by Powell's original appointment, which he blamed on Joe Biden. Even though Jerome Powell was appointed by Donald Trump. 

Below the big picture on page one and above the fold, “Next on the List
For Mamdani: Woo His Party,” a look at the ongoing relationship between the people who consider themselves to be New York's Democratic Party, and the person whom an overwhelming majority of Democratic primary voters citywide decided they wanted to be the mayor. On one level, it's a story about insiders dealing with an outsider. “Zoran Mamdani,” the Times writes, “is unleashing a full-scale charm offensive of private meetings, phone calls, and public promises aimed at wooing top party leaders, donors, and activists,” and runs through a list of the meetings that he's taken with influence groups and elected officials. But underneath that, it's a story about the lack of sophistication on the side that considers itself more sophisticated. “In his meetings,” the Times writes, “Mr. Mamdani has surprised some Democrats with his affability and ability to listen to their concerns, perhaps hinting at his willingness to make some concessions.” If you're expressing surprise in July of 2025, that Zoran Mamdani is friendly and a good listener, what you're saying is that your understanding of New York City politics lags considerably behind that of the 573,000 people who voted for him. 

Meanwhile, facing the jump of that story, on the next page, A15, is the headline, “Settlement Poses Setback for Cuomo in Mayor Run, $450,000 to Ex-Aid and Harassment Suit.”

“New York State,” the Times writes, “has agreed to pay $450,000 to settle claims from a woman who accused Andrew Cuomo of groping her in 2020 when he was the governor and she was an executive aide, according to a settlement document reviewed by the New York Times.” Seems like the New York Democratic political establishment could have saved itself a lot of stress and grief if it could have simply learned to perceive people for what the available public record says they are.

Back on page one, there's an investigation of how the Assad regime buried bodies of tens of thousands of civilians that it murdered in what the sub headline calls a “Cemetery Transformed Into Industrial-Scale Mass Grave.” 

Down in the bottom right of the page is a very bizarrely constructed feature story about the man who is charged with murdering and attempting to murder Minnesota lawmakers in their homes, full of writerly flourishes and organized mainly around the idea that there's some deep contradiction between a guy following a sense of social withdrawal and moral superiority into extreme Christian missionary work and that same guy going in for brutal, apparently politically motivated murder when it really portrays Vance Belter in a straightforward way, as a chronically maladjusted and unsuccessful guy, who found a new structure for his maladjustment through Infowars. But it insists on containing sentences like, “in the first dark hours of June 14th, prosecutors say the pious Mr. Belter, who turns 58 this week, set out to commit a crime that would break a commandment.” If you're pretending that the 10 Commandments have any sway over the nexus of violence and religion in the United States, you've really lost the thread, but then, even further after the Trump, the story gets weird. “In correspondence with the New York Times through the jail's electronic messaging service,” the Times writes, “Mr. Belter suggested that the bloodshed was partly rooted in the Christian commandment to love one's neighbor. “Because I love my neighbors prior to June 14th, I conducted a two-year-long undercover investigation,’ he wrote.” Right, the Ten Commandments are not the text that matters here. “His cryptic messages to the Times,” the story continues, “which also referred to a mysterious military apparition, seemed disconnected from reality and in keeping with handwritten notes of his recovered by law enforcement. They suggest a man in the throes of grandiose delusion, one who saw himself as somehow chosen to save the country by taking extreme action.” Okay, so the story is Vance Belter talks to the Times, but instead, the Times just interlaces his demented messages with the text of a standard form narrative profile complete with a You Are Not There account of his murders at the home of Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the Minnesota House, in which the phrase, “Mr. Belter fired rounds that flashed like lightning,” was allowed to make it into print. 

And it looks like once again, this really didn't go so quick, but down at the bottom left of the page, the final headline is, “Genetic Scores Could Estimate Risk of Obesity,” as Gina Kolata, purveyor of unreliable science news, writes about polygenic risk scores the form of genetic analysis done by people who don't know how genes work. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod The theme song is composed and performed by Max Scocca-Ho You the listeners keep us going through your paid subscriptions to indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you can, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.