Flood the zone
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 105
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT DEP'T.
Once Again It Seems It's Time to Hit the Streets
IT'S ALL GOING on at once and it's not stopping. There's video of an unmarked truck and SUV full of feds ramming a car on purpose in normal traffic on a normal city street to pin it and grab one of the people inside. There's coverage of how, when the president gave a speech at the re-renamed Fort Bragg on Tuesday, the troops in the audience were screened for loyalty to him, and were also told "No fat soldiers." There's the news about how, in that speech, the president told his politically friendly and photogenically trim audience that he is planning to re-rename six more military facilities to restore Confederate names to them, including the former Fort Robert E. Lee, only actually the law prevents that, so the Army put out a statement saying that the fort would be renamed Fort Lee after a different person named Lee. There are the tanks waiting to pulverize the streets of Washington D.C. as a birthday present to the president.
Not for the first time, it's all too much to sit through. I closed the computer and went outside to stop seeing the bad news accumulate, and in the foot traffic on Broadway I saw two different people carrying blank sheets of posterboard or foamcore. One of them had dowel rods. The tanks are due to roll on Saturday, but also on Saturday people are planning on heading out to demonstrate against it all, more or less everywhere, if you're looking for somewhere to go.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
MONTHS AGO, NEW YORK Magazine asked me if I would be interested in wearing a sleep-tracking device and writing about it, so I got an Oura ring and started letting it gather data on what was going on while I was unconscious—or trying to be unconscious, anyway:
My timeline also has white spikes representing the moments in the night when I woke up. When I look at these, interruptions that I’d barely registered at the time snap into focus: my neighbor on the other side of our bedroom wall having a loud, ripping coughing fit; my cat scratching at our leather bedside bench; my firstborn rattling around the apartment, procrastinating on college-application essays; an almost inaudibly low-pitched mechanical roar throbbing from somewhere nearby, strong enough to make a heavy painting add its own chattering sound as it shakes against the wall. What should have been fleeting, forgotten mysteries became things I feel like I am responsible for.
Thanks to the absurdly prolonged writing process my editor let me get away with, I ended up logging much more sleep data than the story really needed. As special bonus material, here's the sleep-tracking timeline looked like when I carelessly left a glass on the kitchen counter on my way to bed and the cat got bored and smashed it on the floor in the middle of the night:
And here's a deeper dive into one nighttime interruption that didn't fit into the final version of the piece:
Other puzzles were answerable but not through biometrics. One winter night I woke up in a state of agitation, the bedroom sweltering, my skin itching from dryness. None of it was uncomfortable enough to be keeping me awake. I cracked the window and lay back in bed, still fitful, my mind drifting back to the chocolate custard we'd gotten from Veselka for dessert...the fantastically rich chocolate custard, with its complex and delightful touch of bitterness... In the morning, with a sleep score of 70, I Googled what claimed to be recipes for Veselka's custard and saw only chocolate. I dug deeper, into the preview pages of the official Veselka cookbook on Amazon: 2 tablespoons coffee extract.
And here's what that night looked like:
LIFE IN MUSIC DEP'T.
Brian Wilson, 1942–2025
EVERYONE IS WRITING today about the musical innovations of Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys, whose family announced that he had died at the age of 82. But rather than dwelling on the formal and technical breakthroughs of "Good Vibrations," which honestly always sounded like a regular Beach Boys song to our ears, we mark the end of Wilson's singular journey on this planet by presenting what he would have most wanted to hear: in no particular order (except for the last two) a whole lot of versions of "Shortnin' Bread":
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, June 10, 2025
★★ The definite sound of overnight rain led into a morning of people walking by with hoods and umbrellas unpredictably up or down against ambiguous showers. A downpour returned for certain, then yielded to another round of fragmented drips and drizzle. Midtown men were out jacketless in light blue dress shirts, in a dampness that registered as raw and stuffy at the same time. Gradually the sogginess eased and then quickly it was gone: clear sun, blue skies, air cooler than the morning's forecast had predicted. Three hours of ideal conditions went by, too fast, as dampness lingered on the pavement and ranks of pale-edged clouds formed in the west. Cool air came in at the window and trickled over bare shins. To the east, a line of white cloud too puffy to be a contrail and too straight to be anything else, with a hook hanging down from it, passed behind the brightened brick top of an apartment tower. The rim of the western clouds went from merely burnished to gleaming, and a peach glow swelled from the inner recesses. After dinner, in the dark, a noisy shower abruptly arrived and abruptly departed again.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find 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 The new Annie Dennis Cook Book , by Annie E. Dennis, published in 1921, and now available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Cucumber Sandwiches
Slice thin large cucumbers. Place slices between bread, cut in round slices that have been spread with mayonnaise.
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.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
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