Good morning. It is April 24th. It is another sunny morning in New York City and another day where the forecast high temperature just keeps creeping up. The weather box on the front page of the morning New York Times says 72. The weather app on the phone now says 77. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Russia launched a major attack today against civilian targets in Ukraine, killing at least eight people in Kiev and injuring more than 60 others, according to The Times. “One missile hit a two-story building with 12 apartments where emergency workers hunted for survivors Thursday morning,” The Times writes. “A five-story building next door lost all of its windows. People stood outside staring at the damage and talking on their phones, telling loved ones that they were alive. No military target was visible nearby.” 

Donald Trump, the president of the United States went on his truth social account to post "I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!” 

“Stop” in all caps with exclamation point, “5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!" No apostrophe on let’s, capital P capital D on “peace deal,” all caps on “done” exclamation point.

That peace deal is in the lead news column on the front of the Times. “U.S. PRESSES KYIV TO ACCEPT A DEAL FAVORING MOSCOW / ‘FREEZE’ OF TERRITORY / Zelensky Rejects the Plan — Trump Calls Him ‘Inflammatory’” 

“President Trump and his top aides,” the Times writes, “demanded on Wednesday that Ukraine accede to an American design proposal that would essentially grant Russia all the territory it has gained in the war, while offering Kiev only vague security assurances. The American plan,” the Times writes, “which would also explicitly block Ukraine from ever joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was rejected by President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine, whose long-running dispute with Mr. Trump broke into the open two months ago in the Oval Office. The proposal also appears to call for the United States to recognize Russia's 2014 takeover of Crimea, a region of Ukraine.” 

Trump and JD Vance both then blamed any intransigence on Zelensky, repeating the essential conceit of that Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, which is to pretend that the administration's pro-Russia position, which was preordained from the moment Donald Trump hit the campaign trail, is somehow still being determined, and that Zelensky could somehow move it in his direction if he could only find the right approach. And Putin's response to the administration's willingness to carry out this charade on his behalf was to attack Kiev to make sure to make a mockery of it. The death toll on that has now been raised to 10, with 90 injured. 

In other coverage of the fictitious activities of the Trump administration, on the left side of the front page, just above the fold, the headline is, “11 Short Weeks
To Meet Pledge On Trade Deals,” in which the Times embraces, for purposes of analysis, the premise that Donald Trump's imposing and then pausing, a complicated, arbitrary, and disastrously large schedule of tariffs on almost the entire world was simply an opening maneuver in a plan to come to new trade negotiations with everyone. 

“For a president who advertises himself as a paramount dealmaker,” the Times writes, “the next 11 weeks will be a pivotal test as his advisors race to accomplish what no other administration has done before and reach dozens of individual trade deals with other governments. President Trump,” the Times writes, “has promised big gains for American trade, and officials from Japan, South Korea, India, and elsewhere have been pushing for agreements as they look to forestall punishing tariffs. But trade experts say the administration has set up a seemingly impossible task, given that traditional trade deals typically take months or years to negotiate.” By what “no administration has accomplished before” and “seemingly impossible task,” what the Times means is that Trump has no plans on trade, nor even any coherent goals toward which those nonexistent plans would be supposed to bring him. He has some fixation on the idea that tariffs will make the country strong and rich, which is basically pitted against, that self-branding that the Times identifies as advertising himself as a paramount dealmaker, which would require him to bargain away the trade barriers that he maintains have an inherent value. Meanwhile, all the people who have to deal with tangible realities are just not sending cargo.

And on the subject of our glorious manufacturing future, the top of the page is taken up with four pictures of the development and factory implementation of Chinese robotics with below the photos the preposterously George Lucas-esque headline, “Army of Robots Gives China Edge in Trade War,” paging Jar Jar Binks. “Advanced Automation in Factories Keeps Exports Cheap” is the sub headline. The dateline is Ningbo, a metropolitan area of about nine and a half million souls, if you're keeping count. “China's secret weapon in the trade war,” the story begins, “is an army of factory robots powered by artificial intelligence that have revolutionized manufacturing.” As the four photographs credited to New York Times photographers on the front page suggest, the secret weapon is not any sort of a secret. “Factories are being automated across China at a breakneck pace,” the story says, “with engineers and electricians tending to fleets of robots These operations are bringing down the cost of manufacturing while improving quality.” This is bad news, or rather a bad easily knowable fact for the Trump administration's fantasy that a trade war with China will spur the United States to develop the world's best automated factories, in which the labor currently supposedly being done by armies of faceless Chinese peasants in JD Vance's formulation, will be done more cheaply by all-American state-of-the-art robots, overseen by a technically specialized and well-paid American workforce that will nevertheless also somehow still be imbued with the mythical masculine virtues brought on by a tangible physical factory labor. 

Alas, at the factory of Zeeker, an electric carmaker, where the robot portion of the workforce has expanded from 500 robots to 820 robots in the last four years, a worker tells the Times, “most of our colleagues' jobs involve sitting in front of a computer monitor.” The robots are so fully the product of 21st century China that the story describes robot carts cheerfully trilling Kenny G tunes to warn any people of their approach. In the near to mid future, if the United States wants to invest in more robot-powered factories to build things, those manufacturing robots will probably be manufactured in China. “Most of the world's car assembly plants built in the past 20 years were in China,” the Times writes, “and an automation industry grew up around them. Chinese companies also bought overseas suppliers of advanced robotics like KUKA of Germany and moved much of their operations to China When Volkswagen opened an electric car factory a year ago in Hefei, it had only one robot from Germany and 1,074 robots made in Shanghai.” 

In other fantasies of denying obsolescence, in the last spot above the fold, the headline is “Cuomo’s Tactic For Comeback: Try to Lie Low.” A story describing how Andrew Cuomo is trying to run for mayor without running for mayor. “Questions?” The Times writes, “he'll take a few perhaps, but only after the event. Typically a Sunday visit to a black church in New York City. Will he attend the next Democratic mayoral forum? Probably not, especially if the other candidates, who trail him in the polls, might be on stage with him.” The Times explains that he is basically trying to run as if he's the incumbent, despite in fact being someone who doesn't live here, who resigned as governor in disgrace. The story picks up on Politico's reporting that for a candidate forum last night, the organizers changed the format to have one candidate appear on stage at a time, rather than multiple candidates at once, to help protect Cuomo from being challenged. 

And next to the jump of that story, on page A17, the headline is, “Four endorsements deliver a jolt to the mayor's race,” about how Adrian Adams, the city council speaker, picked up endorsements from “District Council 37, the city’s largest municipal union” the Times writes, “Unite Here Local 100, which represents hospitality workers; and Communications Workers of America Local 1180, which represents social service workers.” 

And Adams also got an endorsement from New York Attorney General Letitia James. “The endorsements,” the Times writes, “were a signal that not all of New York's institutional support will fall to the front runner, former governor Andrew Cuomo, and they could prompt others to reconsider his error of inevitability.” Ah, the error of inevitability, the mysterious disembodied force that puts the story about Cuomo, trying to coast as a front runner on page one, and the story about the endorsements of his opponent, deep inside the paper. 

On page A13, there's another look at the war between the Trump administration and Harvard. “Harvard's legal strategy rests on a mundane law / plan to deploy Trump's haste against him.” The invocation here of a mundane law makes it sound as if Harvard has found some narrow technical provision of the law that might give it leverage against the Trump administration, but in fact, what the story is talking about is the Administrative Procedure Act, which is to say, the law governing all the ways in which the president cannot simply yank away money or otherwise punish institutions without justification, notification, relevance, and all the other things that the basic rule of law would require. But, more important than any of that, the story comes with a picture, taken by Sophie Park for the New York Times, which is basically a frame full of brick, photographed at night. There's a big brick fence post with an ornamental top in front of the corner of a brick building with a drainpipe running down it, and an American flag hanging in one illuminated window. The brickwork threw me for a minute, because it's sort of old looking now, with irregularities in the mortar and weathering on the brick. But then I looked closer and the windows do not have the mullions and multiple panes of the Georgian or Georgian revival architecture that dominates Harvard and even more dominates pictures of Harvard. There's simple rectangles of various sizes in a modernist idiom and there's a distinctive double row of vertical brick running along the face of the building, which is otherwise short on ornamentation. And friends, through that camera, we are standing on the north edge of Harvard Yard, facing Southeast, looking directly at the corner of Canaday Hall. They did it. They did Canaday. The photo desk came through, as prophesized right here. 

[FLASHBACK TO TUESDAY’S PODCAST: “Anyway, in a marker of how long the battle between Harvard and the administration has already stretched out, the photo on the story is not the picturesque domed spires of Elliott or Dunster houses, nor the majestic steps and pillars of Widener Library, but the low-slung, utilitarian modern glass front of Lamont Library. They're going to be shooting pictures of Canaday before this is all over.”]

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. You, the listeners, keep us going, through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. So keep sending those in if you are able, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.