Escalator action
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 170
CURRENT EVENTS DEP'T.
Well, the President's Legs Seem to Work
THE PRESIDENT HAD some trouble with an escalator at the United Nations yesterday. He got on it, following the First Lady, and the escalator stopped, so they had to walk up it. The president complained about this in his speech to the General Assembly, speaking to the representatives of the 192 other member countries, as the leader of the world's preeminent military power. "All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle," the president said.
The president also complained about his teleprompter not working and disparaged the flooring in the building, telling the assembled representatives of the 192 other member countries that they would have gotten a better product if they had given his real estate development company the renovation contract, years ago. He said he had promised to put in marble floors. "You walk on terrazzo," the president said. "Do you notice that?"
The United Nations announced afterward that its investigation of the escalator incident found that a White House videographer had tripped a safety mechanism, bringing it to a halt. It also announced that the teleprompter had been the responsibility of the White House.
The president is known for exaggerating his complaints, but in the case of the escalator, he undersold the failure. The escalator stopped almost immediately, maybe two steps into the ride. Possibly the president thought "stopped right in the middle" sounded like a more dramatic way for the escalator to have failed, but this way, he was left with the whole escalator to climb.
The First Lady briskly walked up the frozen escalator, and the president followed, somewhat less briskly but steadily.
It was a startling thing to see, honestly. The president is 79 years old and does not appear to be especially healthy or mobile. His movement is erratic and he tends to grab onto his lectern and angle his torso in the manner of someone trying to cheat around failing core strength. He's been photographed with swollen ankles and floridly bruised hands. Given his long history of making unbelievable claims about his health—and the misrepresentations that the previous presidential administration made about the vigor and acuity of the previous, likewise elderly president—the public is on the lookout for signs of slippage. People have convinced themselves, from this or that image, that they see one side of his face drooping or that he's sometimes dragging a leg.
All of this adds up to a particular belief about the likelihood of a particular event coming to pass. It is even possible to place a bet, indirectly, on whether that event will happen. It is considered bad manners to speculate publicly about whether or not the event would be desirable, even if utilitarian ethics suggests a straightforward answer.
Yet whatever else anyone may want to say about the president, he gathered himself and walked right up that escalator. The video switches cameras in a way that makes it hard to get a precise count of how many steps he took, but it looks like it was about 18; the conventional stairway alongside the escalators seemed to have 22 or 23 steps. A flight and a half's worth, say. And each escalator step is taller and harder to climb than a stair step.
That's more or less how far he has to climb on his way up into Air Force One, but those steps come with a real grippable handrail, and he has time to prepare for them. And he doesn't always make it smoothly, though he hasn't resorted to the shorter steps leading into the belly of the plane, the way his predecessor did.
There's a lot of appetite for negative material about the president. When I searched for "escalator" on Bluesky, trying to find a video of the escalator incident that hadn't been truncated and intercut with the president's General Assembly speech, among the top results was a still photo of the president and First Lady, in the brief moment they spent looking around in surprise after the elevator stopped. The accompanying post read, "Are these two idiots still standing on that escalator at the UN? They're both too stupid to realize that an escalator that isn't moving is also known a staircase." The insult, completely bogus in substance, had 686 reposts and 3,500 likes, considerably more engagement than the top video actually capturing the event. Nevertheless, no matter what the audience may have wanted to see, no matter what tomorrow may bring, the video shows what it shows. The president climbed the escalator.
CANST THOU DRAW OUT LEVIATHAN DEP'T.
A DIVER TAKING pictures and videos of whales and posting them to Instagram appears to have captured footage of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) swimming toward the surface with the mangled remains of a giant squid (Architeuthis dux) in its jaws. Scars on sperm whales and squid beaks in their guts have long attested to the fact that the whales dive a quarter- or half-mile down, into the lightless ocean depths where the giant squids live, to hunt them. Before this, though, the spectacle of one behemoth feeding on the other belonged to the impenetrable blackness of the aphotic zone. Now—via the Bluesky account of the marine ecologist Rebecca Helm, who posted that her expert sources told her the video looks genuine—here is the whale in wave-refracted sunlight, pale tentacles trailing from its long mouth, darkening the water with the now-useless ink of its prey.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 22, 2025
★★ Reversing the pattern of the day before, the sunny morning of the forecast was lost under a pall of cloud, and the already improbable-seeming movement from the chilly 60s to the mid 70s seemed less and less likely. But right as the equinox arrived, bringing with it thoughts of trading in shorts for a pair of corduroys, the sun came through for a while. The clouds recovered, especially on the sun's side of the sky; even so, the shorts held on into autumn: the mild chill that crept indoors was offset, outside, by the thickness of the air.
New York City, September 23, 2025
★★ The booming and grinding of trimmed tree branches going into a wood chipper filled Central Park West. The late morning air was damp and heavy though not yet hot, with thin cloud scattering the sun into glare. A remote-controlled airplane dipped and turned over the North Meadow, its landing gear showing its shape against the bright sky. Sprinklers shh-clacked over a stretch of lawn that was conspicuously brighter green than the rest. By late afternoon the clouds were thicker and grayer but they left room for the low sun to come strobing through the mesh of a baseball backstop, the flicker of the shadow on the passing eye joined by the pulsing crescendo of some calling insect.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but 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 sandwiches selected from British Everyday Cookery, published by Whitcombe and Tombs in 1910 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
TASTY COLD MEAT SANDWICHES.
Half lb. cold veal, beef or mutton, 1 tablespoon chutney , 2 small shallots, 2 oz. butter, mustard, and cress.
Remove skin and fat from the meat, and mince or pound it well with 1 oz. of butter. Add a teaspoon of mustard, the chutney, and the shallot chopped small and fried a pale brown in the other ounce of butter. Season all and rub through a sieve. Spread the mixture over thin slices of buttered bread (brown bread is best), and sprinkle some mustard and cress over. Put slices of bread on top, press down, and cut into neat shapes.
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 .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
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