Good morning. It's September 12th. It's a humid morning in New York City, although that's supposed to thin out as the day heats up. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Some billionaire just took a space walk from one of Elon Musk's rocket ships on an extremely expensive amusement park ride to three times the altitude of the International Space Station.

The talking point that's supposed to make this exciting is that this is the furthest anyone's been from Earth since the moon missions. The more depressing way of saying this is this is the furthest anyone's been from Earth since the moon missions. There's nothing in the realm of human endeavor, whether on Earth or out in space, that billionaires and government incapacity, which is the political agenda of billionaires, can't manage to make boring and embarrassing.

The front of this morning's New York Times has a dispatch from Utah about a wealthy software executive whose new hobby is stringing a cable between bulldozers and knocking down swaths of forest, originally to open sight lines for a luxury hunting retreat, but now because the Republican supermajority in Utah is paying him millions of dollars to do it, on the theory that clear -cutting mature conifer forests is going to be good for the environment. Among the rationalizations for this, the Times writes is that it “serves to prevent wildfires, to fight drought by reducing water guzzling conifers, and to improve the habitat for trophy animals that draw hunters whose licenses generate state income.” Water guzzling conifers is a real good one. That'll definitely stop your great salt lake from inexorably drying up into a plane full of toxic dust. 

The tree story has room to spread out because the front page of today's New York Times is its own kind of empty wasteland, left by the flood of debate news as it passed in between two paper editions. In testimony to the haplessness and pointlessness in covering a day and a half old event as news, what landed in the two lead news columns is a piece of news analysis by none other than Peter Baker. And here's Peter Baker's analysis of the news. “To Trump, US is failing. To Harris, there's hope. Debate lays out rivals clashing visions. Donald J. Trump's America,” Baker writes, “is a grim place, a nation awash in marauding immigrants, stealing American jobs, and eating American cats and dogs, a country devastated economically, humiliated internationally, and perched on the cliff's edge of an apocalyptic World War III. Kamala Harris's America,” he continues, “is a weary but hopeful place, a nation fed up with the chaos of the Trump years, and sick of all the drama and divisiveness, a country embarrassed by a crooked, stuck -in -the -past former president facing prison time, and eager for a new generation of leadership.” That's not analysis. That's just the text of the campaigns. It's like saying that after studying the campaign carefully, you concluded that Dwight Eisenhower was banking on the idea that Americans would like Ike. The Coca -Cola Company's vision of beverages is that Coca -Cola represents the real thing. Two columns of this.

The other four columns at the top of the page are taken up with pictures of the 9 -11 memorials yesterday, which are less than a day old at least, but are exactly what you would expect them to be. Further down the page, the Times has discovered the existence of sleep maxers, people who are try -hards about getting enough sleep. 

Anemona Hartocollis is back on the Harvard beat, writing about how the Supreme Court is outlawed considering race in college admissions. Harvard's incoming class is 14 % black, down from 18 % the year before. Other schools have had bigger drop -offs, but they're not Harvard, so you don't find out about them until after the jump. 

And squeezed down to the lower left, next to the Utah tree murder story, is a four-bylined investigation into the Telegram app, which the headline calls, “A Playground for Criminals and Extremists. The social media platform Telegram,” the Times writes, “has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism, and racist incitement, according to a four month investigation by the New York Times that analyzed more than 3 .2 million Telegram messages from over 16 ,000 channels.” When they put this story up online a few days ago, somebody pointed out that this seems like rather a bigger deal than everything TikTok was accused of.

And as Max Reed noted in his excellent ReadMax newsletter, all this stuff suggests that free speech is not necessarily the right framework for thinking about why France arrested Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, last month. 

On page A8, Typhoon Yugi has killed at least 143 people in Vietnam. The Israeli military killed at least 18 people, including six United Nations aid workers, at a school in Gaza that was being used as a shelter. This is not the same incident as the Israeli attack on a humanitarian zone a few days earlier. Once again, Israeli officials say it was necessary to blow up the civilians in order to get at Hamas. 

On page A21, California is still on fire. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced. Police have charged someone with arson in one of the fires. 

And next to that, the Times takes the occasion of the FBI having seized the devices of various members of the overlapping categories of Mayor Eric Adams and his cronies, friends, and high administration officials to look back at the case where one of them, senior mayoral advisor Timothy Pearson, stormed into a migrant shelter and attacked the security guards there. After the original incident, the Times reports, the guards say he showed up at the Midtown South precinct house to threaten their jobs and demand they apologize. The Times says the lawsuit is pending, just as whatever federal investigators may or may not do could be pending, as the wait for any of Adam's as apparent troubles to resolve themselves into actual troubles continues. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe McacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. And our work is sustained by the subscription dollars of You, the Listeners, please click the button if you haven't already. And thank you if you already have. And, if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.