It is September 25th. It is another gray morning in New York City. This time with some rain supposedly on the way. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The lead story in the New York Times is Israel's continued bombardment of Lebanon. On Tuesday, the Times reports one of the airstrikes apparently killed a Hezbollah commander. Inside the paper, a news analysis story. gives the ongoing death toll as 558 people, including 94 women and 50 children. The attacks have now reportedly displaced half a million people in Lebanon. 

Next column over is about Joe Biden giving a speech to the UN. Using the speech, the Times writes “to celebrate his defense of Ukraine against Russia's invasion and his work to restore the United States' global alliances, but he also warned that the advances of his administration could easily fall apart. America returned to isolationism.” It's not clear isolationism is really on the table, with Donald Trump and the Republican Party promising a fentanyl war against Mexico, but if isolationism means hanging Ukraine and NATO out to dry, then it's true there's a real prospect of that. As usual with anything involving Trump, though, the mere threat of the thing operates like the thing itself would. If the US has to account for the possibility of completely reversing course, in three months time, and it's already seated a position of international leadership. There's no maintaining or enforcing an international consensus in the absence of internal consensus. 

On the other side of the front page, “Schools chief to step down and make inquiries. As the New York schools chancellor, David Banks, added his name to the list of officials leaving the crumbling Eric Adams administration. The announcement,” the Times writes, “came just weeks after federal agents seized Mr. Banks' phone as part of a bribery investigation involving his brothers and fiancé. And it promised to roil not just the nation's largest school system, but also a mayoral administration already reeling from at least four separate federal corruption inquiries. The school's chancellor's resignation is the fourth in less than two weeks among top officials in Mayor Eric Adams' administration,” the times continued, “following the resignations of the police commissioner and the city's top lawyer and a statement from the health commissioner saying he would leave office at the end of the year.” And that doesn't even get into the fact that the interim police commissioner said he was raided by the feds over the weekend. Maybe for the next chancellor, they should save time and fuss and just appoint somebody who's already in prison. 

Down below the jump on the chancellor's story on page 17, more high quality New York politics. “As a proud son of Nassau County's vaunted Republican machine,” the Times writes, “Representative Anthony D’Esposito of New York knows well the power of political patronage. Every member of his immediate family has held a town or county job, and as a local official, he routinely helped friends find spots on the government payroll.” And so he reportedly kept that approach when he was elected to Congress. “Shortly after taking the oath of office,” the Times writes, “the first -term congressman hired his longtime fiancé's daughter to work as a special assistant in his district office, eventually bumping her salary to about $3,800 a month, payroll records show.” Hey, the man values family. Or does he? “In April,” The Times continues, Mr. D’Esposito added someone even closer to him to his payroll, a woman with whom he was having an affair, according to four people familiar with the relationship. The woman, Devin Foss, collected $2 ,000 a month for a part -time job in the same district office.” Okay, paying your mistress to work for you is pretty bad, but what if you're paying your mistress not to work for you? “Four former house employees familiar with the office,” the Times writes, “said they never encountered Ms. Foss working for the congressman.” Hey, if you're going to represent Long Island, why not represent Long Island? The story also features a nice little bit of reporting epistemology. “The people familiar with their relationship with Mr. D’Esposito described it as romantic and said they believed it to be sexual in nature, but the Times could not independently verify that claim. Mr. D’Esposito, through his spokesman, did not dispute that the relationship was sexual in nature.” But how can you really ever know? 

Back on page one, down the bottom. “Is the secret to a longer life hidden in a transplant drug?” No. No it isn't. This is a piece that cites that ubiquitous, publicity-crazed anorexic millionaire, the one who injects himself with his own teenage son's blood before it even gets to the jump, identifying him as a longevity influencer. The drug in question seems to make mice live longer, if you want to live as a mouse, but it can't seem to scrape up any human beings who really enthusiastically believe in it. , beyond adding it to the cocktail of other crap they take. “The research in humans is thin and long-term side effects are uncertain,” the Times writes, “in the few studies in which it's been compared to a placebo, tangible benefits are hard to come by.” So why is this on page one? It reads like an editor saw some online chatter about this drug and told a writer to look into it, and the writer came back with a memo explaining why it wasn't worth writing about, and that somehow got published. 

Meanwhile, the update on whether the federal government is going to shut down is down below the jump on the fake drug story on page A16. “Speaker Mike Johnson,” the Times writes, “is preparing to steer around a block of conservative opposition to a bipartisan short-term agreement to fund the government by relying yet again on Democrats to provide the bulk of votes to pass the legislation.” Seems like this chronicle of the total dysfunction of the ruling majority of the House of Representatives might be worth covering a little more prominently as the public prepares to vote on the composition of the next House of Representatives, you know, if you wanted to have an informed populace. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.