Ghosting Substack

BUSINESS DEP'T.

GOOD AFTERNOON! YOUR Indignity newsletter will soon be leaving the Substack platform, as many more assertively principled and/or better organized publications before us have already done. After weeks and then months of saying, "Yeah, we should figure out how to do that, too," we have exited the Planning to Plan stage and are in the Accomplishing the Plan stage. 

The plan, specifically, is that we will publish on Ghost instead of Substack. This should—should!—make very little difference to you and your reading experience, although when the first issues come out on Ghost, you may need to check and see if they've been sent to your Promotions mailbox or your spam filter, and to rescue them if so.

At this late date there's not much point in issuing a whole long manifesto about why we're bailing out of Substack. It's long been clear that the people running the place are actively sympathetic toward retrograde views, propping up worn-out and poisonous ideas in the name of supporting freewheeling discourse. We already said so, back when the faster-moving newsletters were doing something about it. 

But on top of the preexisting problems with transphobes or racists, it was a new kind of depressing last month to see Substack proudly promoting its first-ever documentary film presentation, an adaptation of the book The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Lukianoff and Haidt are not only standard-issue anti-woke pundits, they are incredibly well-exposed mainstream voices. Haidt is basically inescapable; when Lukianoff's advocacy group puts out a press release, it gets written up as news. The book was a best-seller! Who's coddling whom here, exactly?

Anyway, the point here is, we're now far enough along in the changeover that each new edition of Indignity we send out from Substack is going to need to be manually re-posted on Ghost. So rather than keep adding more new items to the to-do list, we're going to shut down for maintenance the rest of this week. Barring catastrophe, we should be back next week, ideally on Monday. Thank you for your patience and for your continued support and readership. 

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, March 19, 2024

★★★★ Daybreak arrived through a lurid rift in the eastern clouds. What followed, in the last hours of winter, was bright and clear. Knit hats and puffy coats were still out, but inside the Park gate, yellow and white-and-yellow daffodils were fully up and out, and the robin-dotted lawn was a strong and lively green. Some small bird with a charcoal-colored head flitted from branch to branch to branch to branch by the Pool, flicking its tail, a pattern of movement arrestingly new after months of only winter birds. In the time it took the bird-identifying app to hear its song and declare it an Eastern phoebe, the fingers holding the phone began burning with the cold. Purple and white crocuses were up on the other bank, and the first green curtains of fine, tiny leaves were swinging from the weeping willow there. A mosquito landed on the notebook, so torpid it could be obliterated with the second or third flick of a finger after the first one missed. Somewhere in the bare thickets, the app claimed to be hearing a golden-crowned kinglet. Definitely and obviously a cardinal and a red-winged blackbird were singing, near the ground and in plain view. A pigeon flew over the water at treetop level, in the sun, flashing field marks of white and shimmering green, like something sensational.