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Indignity Vol. 5, No. 195
BUSINESS DEP'T.
A New Form of Indignity
HELLO, READERS OF Indignity! This is Tom, your editor in chief. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to be leaving my daily writing for Indignity to work full-time as an executive editor at CNN's features department.
As many of you know, the publication you're reading has been through multiple formats, platforms, revenue models, and names since Joe and I launched the website Hmm Daily in 2019. Sometimes it's been fully funded; sometimes it's only been partially funded. Sometimes it's been a full-time job for one or both of us; sometimes we've juggled it along with other full-time employment; most of the time we've juggled it along with other part-time and freelance work.
Over the summer, I did four weeks of full-time contract work for CNN, while we also kept putting out Indignity on more or less our regular daily schedule. Becoming a regular CNN employee, though, comes with much heavier practical and professional limits.
Essentially, starting the job means that I'm going to need to shut down more or less all of my journalistic work outside the job. This includes most of the things I've been writing for Indignity, and the Indignity Morning Podcast.
TOM SCOCCA
There are certainly arguments The Sophist could make about whether continuing to publish Ask the Sophist, or The Machines, would really overlap with CNN's ambit. But part of why I'm going there is to try to help expand CNN's ambit.
I've spent decades now variously blending or toggling between the roles of writer and of editor. I have a whole spiel about this that I've delivered into the Zoom camera a lot, usually as I try to explain to someone that the person they believe they know through my bylined work—who they tend to picture as some sort of blood-smeared werewolf howling from one act of journalistic violence to the next—has an entire other record as a polite, fastidious behind-the-scenes editorial engineer and technician.
For a long time, I thought of writing my own things as a sort of self-indulgence and of editing as the sensible set of real job skills that would always keep me employable. In practice, through the years, which one is actually the more useful way to make a living in the industry and which one is the quixotic option has flipped dramatically back and forth and back again.
CNN offered me a chance to do real heavy-duty editing at a major news organization that reaches a vast number of people. Fewer and fewer places have jobs like that anymore, and I am eager to see what I can accomplish at one, especially since it means working with my old colleague and collaborator Choire Sicha.
However! What the CNN rules specifically discourage is publishing outside nonfiction. For a long time now, I've been keeping a fiction manuscript—specifically, an adventure novel for young readers—sitting on my desk, waiting for myself to summon the time and the willpower to revise it end to end and submit it to publishers, or else to back myself into some corner that would give me an excuse to serialize it.
So here is the plan: tomorrow, you will receive one final Thursday edition of Indignity, featuring the award-winning MR WRONG column, a weather review, and the other departments you have come to expect and possibly enjoy. After that, Joe, your creative director, will take over from me as the editor of Indignity. Starting on November 15, he will publish it in a weekly edition, bringing you the serialized fiction, more of the award-winning MR WRONG column, our signature public-domain ancient sandwich recipes, and whatever other nonfiction writing Joe may come up with, augmented by whatever other non-nonfiction materials I might generate.
Elastic though the Indignity and Hmm Weekly lines of publications may have been, this will clearly be a different publication than what most of you signed up for. Accordingly, we are going to suspend our existing subscription billing. The new, weekly version of Indignity will come with a big ol' UNSUBSCRIBE button right up top, for anyone who doesn't want to come along on this particular side quest, but also with a SUBSCRIBE button for those who want to support the work in this form.
I apologize for not giving you more advance notice about the new job and for any raggedness of the publishing over the last few weeks. The vagaries of large-organization hiring meant that making it official was a very slow process that then abruptly became a fast one. Readers who purchased an annual subscription to Indignity in the past three months may receive a prorated refund, or can simply hold on to their subscription in the event Indignity returns in something more like its current form. The only real certainty about the future in journalism, or in general, is that it will be full of unanticipated changes.
It has been a pleasure and an honor to send you Indignity multiple times a week. I hope you enjoy its next incarnation, too.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, November 3, 2025
★★ The lackluster daylight briefly brightened into sun and then faltered again. The reek of pavement-marking work came in the open window. The illumination stayed bleak, and a dampness crept in. In the last hour of endangered daytime, the light looked just as bleak as before, but the clouds overhead had pulled apart into an arrangement, on deep blue, of dabs of silver and gray and another gray that looked like a smoky cobalt. Off to the east and the west, the sky was as grim as ever. A saxophonist sat playing on a bench on the Broadway median. The clouds above turned back toward dullness, but downtown, low above the avenues, the sky was in strange smooth wrinkles of pink and gray. Emerging sun put such a gaudy glow on the top of an unremarkable brick apartment building that its reflection. glancing off glass down in the cross street, made it briefly look as if the new, unsellable speculator's townhouse were occupied.
New York City, November 4, 2025
★★★★ Bright spots cast off by windows lay in the middle of the avenue. Light and color crowded the view from the couch; the honeylocust, gone swiftly over from green, pushed a yellow glow into the living room, painting a yellow streak on the floorboards. On Broadway, the view facing away from the sun was saturated, and the view the other way was blinding monochrome. The dampness was gone and the dry leaves scraped along audibly in the breeze or the wake of a passing vehicle. The sun was still able to feel warm even as the day decidedly did not. After the sun had mostly left the streets, a few stray beams still caught a few red and golden sprigs of the trees, hanging like lit paper lanterns.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from C.L.C. Tombola Cook Book, by the Ladies of Cornwall and Friends of the Cornwall Lacrosse Club, published in 1909 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
NUT AND FIG SANDWICHES.
Chop English walnuts fine and add to a fig paste filling made by chopping figs fine, adding enough water to make a smooth paste and cooking slowly until of a consistency to spread. Flavor with a little orange juice, grated candied orange peel or any other fruit juice preferred, and spread between very thin slices of brown bread cut in fanciful shape.
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!
