Welcome to INDIGNITY
Or to the place where Indignity will be when we start publishing it, on August 3, 2021.
INDIGNITY is the revived, revised, and expanded successor publication to the Hmm Weekly newsletter, which was the successor to the Hmm Daily blog, which was deemed "essential" in the New York Times before its funding model collapsed and we had to go get regular jobs. I'm Tom Scocca, the editor of Indignity, and I am quitting my regular job to start writing again full-time, for you, the future readers of Indignity—who are also, under Substack, the funding model for Indignity.
Our aim is to take the best parts of the previous Hmm publications and do more of them, more often. Existing subscribers of Hmm Weekly will be automatically subscribed to the more extensive offerings of Indignity when it launches.
What are we offering you, in exchange for your readership and support? Two professionally written emails a week, containing journalistic and/or essayistic nonfiction, thoughts, advice, observations, and arguments. One of those emails will also contain archaic recipes for sandwiches, which we may experimentally make and eat. The other one of those emails will be behind a paywall. We will post additional articles directly to the internet, so as not to make your email inboxes too untidy.
What else will the emails and articles contain? If I could tell you specifically, in advance, I'd be too bored by myself to write them. Here are some things I've written in the past that I didn't necessarily expect I was going to write until I decided to do it:
Your Real Biological Clock Is You're Going to Die
Why do recipe writers lie and lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?
Asshole Gorilla Humps Robin Williams' Corpse for Publicity
Who Wants to Remember Bill Cosby's Multiple Sex-Assault Accusations?
Charlie Brown Is Bigger Than Jesus
So: like those, but something else. Unavoidably I'm sure I'll be writing more about what went wrong in our internet culture and beyond, and the distortions of fame and identity, and the hopelessness of telling a joke. Probably I will be writing about nature and the weather. We will keep delivering the advice of The Sophist and the Thought of the Week, and will be reviving and restoring some of our dormant or infrequent departments, including the media/political criticism of The Worst Thing We Read and the unbridled futurism of T_H_E__M_A_C_H_I_N_E_S.
We will also, as our launch date grows closer, have a guaranteed excellent logo, from the preeminent logo artist in the business. Stay tuned!
Why do I keep going back and forth between the first person singular and plural? As with the Hmm family of publications, Indignity will also feature the vision and enterprise of our Creative Director, Joe MacLeod—game-show contestant, popular historian, personal essayist, and food enthusiast. ("Tell 'em it'll be way less me and way more SCOCCA™!” MacLeod says.) Please read and enjoy, and share with your friends so that they too may read and enjoy! Thank you very much.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
