SUMMER FRIDAYS DEP'T.: If we were a fast-food joint on the Turnpike we wouldn't take the day off like this
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 135
Previously, on INDIGNITY
ANDY ROONEY 2.0
Tom Scocca
The Lord may have rested on the seventh day of His creation, but the New Jersey Turnpike is open seven days a week. If your fast-food restaurant can't be open seven days a week, it doesn't belong in a rest stop.
OUTSIDE READINGS DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
Rusty Foster, at Today in Tabs, wrote a straightforward headline package and backed it up even more straightforwardly: Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply what happened.
The Verge published a piece providing some grim context about the hacker who stole millions of people's personal information from Columbia and, with a racist blogger as his intermediary, laundered his stolen material into a collaboration with the New York Times to attack the city's Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, about Mamdani's ethnic self-identification on the college application he submitted, unsuccessfully, when he was a teenager. The hacker, it turns out, is even more exuberantly racist than his go-between; where the go-between's pseudonym was an allusion to anti-Muslim policies in French colonial Algeria, for instance, the hacker's online handle is an outright racial slur, so the Verge settled for referring to them as "the Anime Nazi."
In Liberal Currents, Toby Buckle wrote about the politics of humiliation, working from the definition that "[h]umiliation is the forced recognition of domination."
CURRENT EVENTS DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
This can't go on. This isn't a normative claim. It's just an observation about the structure of things. For six months, day after day, the Trump administration has been breaking various parts of the federal government out of both ideological malice and equally ideological ignorance, until nobody can even keep track of what's still supposed to be operational. The government is essentially a collection of phantom limbs: people think things are there—it feels as if they're still there—and when they need them they're just gone. Dozens of little children were swept away in a flood, and in principle the government still had elite search-and-rescue teams but in fact when people called the government (if the government even answered the phone) the mechanism to send out those teams was broken.
COLUMN DEP'T.
JOE MACLEOD
I don’t have time for a puzzle! Right, yeah, I know, it means my brain is feeble, or I am contributing to the erosion of my already-dim brain power because I’m not sitting there doing the crossword, I am not sharpening my brain. With puzzles! Har! You know what’s a puzzle? Life! Earning a goddamn living in this economy! Putting together the stupid fucking storage shed I bought for the back yard under the deck! Well, the storage shed thing mighta been more of a challenge/activity than a puzzle, since they give you the instructions.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
FOR FLAMING HYDRA, Tom filed an obituary two characters long.
WEATHER REVIEW
New York City, July 24, 2025
★★★ Humidity pressed into the apartment so that getting dressed after a shower started a whole new round of sweat, but the shade outdoors was still reasonably cool. Where the sun reached the balcony, this time it was the computer that got too hot. Once it had passed, though, the conditions were so fine it was hard to keep track of how much of the afternoon had gone by. Dominoes banged against a table on the sidewalk on Amsterdam, where people sitting by or standing craning to watch outnumbered the players. The sun made the fresh white lane divisions and the lingering white guide marks for placing them stand out on the new pavement of 106th Street. A white-brick facade was as lustrous as morning dew. A terrible sound coming from somewhere unseen around a corner turned out to be a tiny dog wheezing and screaming at the end of its leash at a bigger and unconcerned dog that was yards away and leaving.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
POD JOB DEP'T.
Vacation season is upon us and the Indignity Morning Podcast Studio anticipates a two week shutdown unless some un-ignorable piece of news breaks, and I find myself with unstructured time and a connection to the Internet, but, assuming nothing unexpected happens in either direction, we will talk again on August 11th.
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 a sandwich selected from The White House Cook Book : A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Hugo Ziemann and Mrs. Fanny Lemira Gillette, published in 1919, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CHICKEN SANDWICHES.
Mince up fine any cold boiled or roasted chicken; put it into a saucepan with gravy, water or cream enough to soften it; add a good piece of butter, a pinch of pepper; work it very smooth while it is heating until it looks almost like a paste. Then spread it on a plate to cool. Spread it between slices of buttered bread.
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!
