Podcasts about indignity

Lea Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, grew up in Albania under communism, when it was the last Stalinist outpost in Europe.She was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall fell, and a year later she saw the collapse of communism in Albania. Statues of Stalin and Enver Hoxha, the country's leader for 40 years, were toppled. Democratic elections followed - but so did civil unrest.Lea wrote about these turbulent years in her book Free, which won prizes and widespread acclaim: 'essential - just as much for Britons as Albanians' according to one critic.She has delved further into her family history, looking into the past of her grandmother, in her book Indignity.Lea's musical choices include Beethoven, Wagner, Dizdari and Bach.

Gabriel Hetland, author of a [recent article](https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-democracy-socialism) for Jacobin, looks to Venezuela for a model of municipal socialism. Lea Ypi, author of [Indignity](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374614096/indignity/), looks into her grandmother's story and unfolds a rich history of Albania and its environment. Read “Mamdani Can Learn From Latin American Municipal Socialism” here: [https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-democracy-socialism](https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-democracy-socialism) [Behind the News](https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/radio.html), hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.

Gabriel Hetland, author of this article, looks to Venezuela for a model of municipal socialism • Lea Ypi, author of Indignity, looks into her grandmother's story and unfolds a rich history of Albania and its environment The post Models of municipal socialism • Albania, a personal view of history appeared first on KPFA.

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: It's always been a pleasure to talk to you in the mornings about what's going on and how the press is covering it. But honestly, ever since the first Tuesday of last November, getting up in the morning and immediately surveying the state of current events has been pretty discouraging. Pretty much every day, the news has been that things are bad and they just got worse. Yesterday, however, people perceived that they had the opportunity to do something about that, and they went out and did it in genuinely astonishing numbers. More than a million people in New York City voted to make Zohran Mamdani the next mayor. With 91 % of the vote tabulated, there's a chance that he could end up collecting more votes than all the candidates put together did in the previous mayoral election. And the voters did this after Donald Trump threatened to punish the city if people elected Mamdani. In his victory speech, Mamdani told Donald Trump to turn up the volume and listen, and declared, “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

Lea Ypi's new book about her Greek-Albanian grandmother is a philosophical meditation on dignity, a history of Ottoman collapse and Balkan nationalism, and a warning about our own indignant age of manufactured identities and resurgent tribalism.Back in January 2022, Lea Ypi came on the show to discuss Free, her brilliant account of growing up in communist Albania. Now Ypi, who teaches political philosophy at LSE, is back with her follow-up, Indignity, an equally compelling biography of Leman Ypi, her maternal grandmother. “A Life Reimagined” is its subtitle, but it's not just her grandmother whose life Ypi is reimagining. The book is a retelling of the modern stories of Greece, Turkey and Albania as well as a sly backwards glance on the court politics of the late Ottomans. Indignity is a Balkan story, in the grand tradition of Rebecca West. And like West, Ypi shows us that Balkan history is never quite dead - instead, it's prophecy for our own age of resurgent nationalism and manufactured identities. Things don't die in South Eastern Europe, Ypi suggests, they just fester, creating more and more indignity. No wonder the Dracula myth is a Balkan creation. 1. Dignity is what we chase, indignity is what we photograph. Bob Dylan wrote that “dignity never been photographed,” and Ypi iterates an entire philosophical framework around this insight. A 1941 photo of her glamorous grandmother in the Italian Alps sparked the book—but also online accusations that she was a spy. For Ypi, following Kant, dignity is an immaterial ideal we pursue; indignity is the empirical reality we live in. The book oscillates between the two, asking: how do we think about the dignity of the dead when all we have left are degraded facts and hostile interpretations?2. Salonique the Magnificent died in 1912—and took cosmopolitan possibility with it. Leman Ypi was born in 1917 in Salonica, an Ottoman melting pot that was, for a time, considered a potential homeland for European Jews. When it became Greek in 1912, the Hellenization project began dismantling centuries of multicultural coexistence. By the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI, rising nationalism had replaced cosmopolitan possibility. Leman, an “Albanian” who'd never been to Albania, was told her identity must align with the new nation-state project. The book is a lament for this lost time—not a lost place, but a lost way of being.3. Nationalism is a zero-sum game for dignity. In the world of nation-states that emerged from Ottoman collapse, individual dignity became inseparable from collective identity. To be Albanian meant dignity only as part of the Albanian nation-state project. This homogenizing, exclusionary logic forced people into boxes they'd never inhabited before. Ypi shows how this nationalist manipulation of dignity—promising it while destroying it—ran from the 1920s through fascism and communism. And it's back now, in our age of deportations, border walls, and politicians demanding: “What are you? Where do you really belong?”4. The stoic suicide versus the Kantian fighter—two philosophies of dignity. Leman's aunt Selma, forced into marriage with a German businessman, killed herself on her wedding day—the ultimate stoic assertion of control. “If you see a room full of smoke, do you wait for help or just leave?” Throughout her life, especially during her husband's 15-year imprisonment under Albanian communism, Leman wrestled with this question. Her answer was Kantian: suicide is a betrayal of our moral responsibilities to others. Dignity means staying and fighting, even when the struggle seems futile. But Ypi doesn't romanticize this—Leman's principled decisions often brought tragic consequences.5. Identity is always more complicated than politics pretends. Writing the book forced Ypi to confront how constructed and contingent identity really is. Her “Albanian” grandmother was born in Greece, had never been to Albania, grew up in an Ottoman cosmopolitan elite, and only became Albanian through the accidents of collapsing empires and rising nationalisms. This complexity matters now, Ypi argues, when contemporary politics—from migration to deportation to calls for deglobalization—depends on simplistic, homogeneous notions of identity and belonging. The archive lies; borders shift; people contain multitudes. Any politics built on forcing people to “belong in one place and nowhere else” is both a scam and historically illiterate.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: [THE WASHINGTON POST] "Mr. Cheney supported tax cuts and defense spending increases, like nearly all Republicans, but he joined the rightmost wing in voting against a federal holiday honoring the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa. He likewise opposed Head Start for preschool children, the Superfund Program for Toxic Waste Cleanup, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The one exception to his otherwise blanket endorsement of hard-right culture war positions was his support, eventually, of gay marriage, apparently brought on strictly because one of his own daughters was a lesbian." Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: [THE NEW YORK TIMES] "Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview, ‘Utah will end a harmful culture of permissiveness,' he said, ‘and guide homeless people towards human thriving.'” An accountability center. Because if there's one lesson that homeless people with drug addiction problems need drummed into them, it's that the things they do can have negative consequences. No more culture of permissiveness toward people not having a place to live. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Just doing a funny accent, gobbling up his ketchup treats, grooving to YMCA. Extremely normal things for the leader of a superpower on the world stage. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Inside the paper on page A20, the Times reports on a breakdown in solidarity fighting the shutdown. “Top Federal Workers Union breaks with Democrats over the shutdown. AFGE chief calls on Congress to open now and negotiate later. The largest union of federal workers called on Monday for Congress to pass a spending bill to immediately end the government shutdown,” the Times writes, “effectively siding with President Trump and Republicans who have opposed Democratic efforts to restore health care spending. ‘Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,' Everett Kelly, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in the statement. He added, ‘It's time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures and no gamesmanship.' The statement,” the Times writes, “was a remarkable shift for the Union. Before the shutdown began on October 1st, Mr. Kelly called on Republicans to negotiate with Democrats who are seeking concessions, including the extension of subsidies for plans under the Affordable Care Act that would stave off premium increases and the loss of coverage for millions of Americans. The union has also worked closely with Democratic lawmakers on efforts this year to oppose Mr. Trump's policies, particularly his wide-reaching campaign to slash the federal workforce and fire career civil servants. But,” the story continues, “amid the punishing effects of the shutdown on federal workers, Some 730,000 are working without pay and another 670,000 are furloughed entirely. Senate Democrats have blocked legislation that would pay the civil servants who have been working without pay, a move that would provide relief to the union's members but would weaken the bargaining position of democratic lawmakers. The Republicans, in turn, blocked a pair of Democratic bills that would have paid both those federal workers who are still working and those who have been furloughed.” “Provide relief to the union's members” there, then, would mean provide relief to a bit more than half of the union's members, while the others remain out of work and unpaid. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Bloomberg is reporting that Trump Media, the social media company owned by President Trump, the single person with the greatest power to personally cause events to happen in the world is going to start selling gambling contracts on prediction markets. “Trump Media and Technology Group Corp.” Bloomberg writes “plans to make prediction contracts available on its truth social network, allowing users to bet on events ranging from political elections to inflation rate changes, according to a statement on Tuesday.” Not sure that range of two different aggregates of public behavior is a real range. But with Donald Trump making drastic policy changes that affect consumer prices, while also exerting pressure on the people who report economic data, the opportunities for trading on insider information seem abundant. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: “With no end in sight to the nearly month-long federal government shutdown,” the Times writes, “funding for the nation's largest food assistance program, known as SNAP, will disappear at the start of November, according to the Department of Agriculture. On Friday, the Trump administration said in a memo that it would not tap into contingency funds to keep payments flowing to states.” The last part of that paragraph and the first part of that paragraph are sitting in pretty glaring tension with each other. Despite the Times's use of the evasive newswriter's “with,” it's true that the government shutdown is ongoing, but it is not true that it in any way necessitates cutting 42 million people off from their ability to buy food at the end of this week. The Trump administration is choosing not to spend the money to keep the assistance going. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: On the website, the Times this morning published a piece that really digs into and emphasizes the point that its reporters keep making, down inside the incremental coverage of Donald Trump's ongoing campaign of slaughter at sea. It's a NEWS ANALYSIS piece by Charlie Savage, “The peril of a White House that flaunts its indifference to the law. The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.” It's gonna take some restraint for me not to just read the whole story into the microphone. “Since he returned to office nine months ago,” Savage writes, “President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts, but his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.” That's really well-tuned. It avoids even the slight misstep of the subheadline by describing the targets of the president's attacks as people “accused” of smuggling drugs, not people “suspected,” since “suspected” is an internal state with a degree of imputed sincerity behind it that Donald Trump has absolutely not earned. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The process of tearing down the East Wing,” the story continues, “was expected to be completed as soon as this weekend, two senior administration officials said, as Mr. Trump moved rapidly to carry out a passion project that he said was necessary to host state dinners and other events. But,” the story then says, “the previously unannounced decision to demolish the East Wing was at odds with Mr. Trump's previous statements about the project.” What the Times means here is that the president just set about tearing down a huge chunk of the White House all on his own with no public consultation after having explicitly said that he was not going to do that, which is a self-evidently shocking scandal as long as you are not part of the New York Times' political coverage operation. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Donald Trump's demolition of the East Wing of the White House continued yesterday, advancing well past the facade to smash the main structure. The New York Times belatedly realized that this was, in fact, front page news, and put the picture on the front page at the top, four columns wide. But, being the Times, decided that the way to deal with the president unilaterally choosing to demolish a major section of the White House and replace it with an immense new structure designed to suit his own personal whims and taste, as if he were dispatching contractors to his own private property—though for that he would have been required to get permits—was to assign the strenuously clever Sean McCreesh to write yet another of his dispatches in which Trump's excesses and abuses of his office are archly treated as amusing expressions of his indomitable will. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Protesters showing up to wave Israeli flags outside the building does not mean that the "tension was spilling out of the synagogue." It's like when anti semitic protesters showed up on Broadway outside the fence of Columbia University, and their behavior was incorporated into the brief against the Columbia campus protesters, the people who are on the outside are on the outside for a reason, and if they were representative of the situation inside, they would probably be inside. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The headline is "Trump Weighs Transforming Refugee Policy / White People Would Be Given Preference." Here again, the bigotry is so blatant that the headline writers couldn't even sustain neutral euphemism long enough to get through the subhead. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: President Donald Trump announced that the United States had murdered six more people on the high seas yesterday, in its fifth unprovoked attack on unarmed boats in the Caribbean, "asserting," as the New York Times puts it, "without evidence that they had been transporting drugs." Along with the social media post announcing the killing, the Times writes, "the President also posted a 33 second aerial surveillance video showing a small boat floating and then being struck by a missile and exploding. Unlike some previous announcements, the President did not identify the nationality of the people who were killed, or name a specific drug cartel or criminal gang with which they were supposedly associated." The Times goes on to once again run through the ways in which these killings are entirely illegal and unjustified under every legal analysis, and how the Trump administration has produced no substantive arguments otherwise, and how Congress has not identifiably authorized any such use of military force. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: There's not much point in quibbling about a prize that already went to Henry Kissinger, but US-backed regime change and peace don't usually end up on the same side of the ledger. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The final story above the fold has the headline “Far Outside the U.S., Kirk's Memory Has Become a Political Tool / Public Tribute in Peru by a Mayor Seeking Trump's Help.” The story pretty heavily contradicts the headline, in that it documents that in Lima there really isn't any such thing as the memory of Charlie Kirk. Even more so than in the United States, people have little to no idea of who the guy was, or why politicians would make a fuss over him. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The Times's designated campus scold Anemona Hartocollis has a new headline to scandalize the readers. “Harvard Finds Skipping Class Part of Culture. Harvard University is one of the most difficult schools to gain admission to” she writes, “with the school turning away some 97% of applicants every year. But, once they get in, many of its students skip class and fail to do the reading. According to the classroom social compact committee, a group of seven faculty members that produced a report on Harvard's classroom culture that has been fueling debate since it was released in January.” January. It was released in January. It is now October. Here are some stories that are not on page A1 today, while the Times was staking out A1 for news of a 10 month old report on campus culture at Harvard. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Weiss's probably underrated advantage, and the thing that really got her to where she is now, is that her callow reactionary prejudices and politics largely overlap with those of the people who really call the shots in the purportedly liberal news business, but those attitudinal advantages are offset by the fact that she also shares their weird insularity toward the world and the people who work for them, but without any meaningful professional or executive experience to offset it. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: This just all seems like extremely strange framing for a CONGRESSIONAL MEMO in 2025. Are the House and Senate really blasé about the shutdown exactly or or have they just ceded all their power to a president who can't be made to care? There isn't really much point in working late into the night or even performing the role of working late into the night, when the only person who has any control over the process is sundowning. After the jump, which arrives accompanied by a sly little postage stamp photo of the Capitol dome with an out of focus, DON'T WALK sign in the foreground. The story delivers a revealingly garbled analogy. "Former representative Patrick McHenry, The Times writes, The North Carolina Republican who helped steer the house away from a shutdown in 2023 predicted that the gridlock would continue until lawmakers felt more consequences from their voters for doing nothing. He compared it to a professional wrestling match, where both sides need to force the opposition to submit. 'It's not goodwill that brings policymakers together,' Mr. McHenry said 'it's pain. There's no urgency until the political pain increases.'" Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: There is no job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning. The numbers were reportedly compiled but are not being released, due to the government shutdown. Surely this is a neutral logistical decision on the bureau's part, and the numbers would stay in a file drawer even if they were positive for the Trump administration's economic performance, which most forecasters expected they would not be, or are not. Not sure what tense to use for data that exists but can't be seen. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: There we have one of the basic problems with writing about the Trump administration and what its officials said, in that pretty much every part of that paraphrase is false. The review was not in response to Donald Trump's executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. It was quite obviously in response to the government shutdown. Likewise, the specific transportation department rule that Duffy was citing was hastily issued to create a pretextual mechanism for taking away the funds. Duffy announced that the funding had been put under review, and that that review was unfortunately on hold because the lawyers who would do it were unavailable under the shutdown, in a single integrated action. The story also does not mention that the particular contracting requirements the Duffy claims may violate the rule that he just issued are congressionally mandated and longstanding contracting rules. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Back on page one, at the top left of the page, the headline is, “Comey Is Stuck In Long Feud With President / A Bad Start Escalated Into an Indictment.” The bad start was James Comey as FBI director telling Donald Trump in their first meeting when Trump was president-elect that there were allegations circulating about Trump and Russia. And so after that meeting, the Times writes, “the two men would be set on a path of escalating conflict and mutual loathing that led last week to a prosecutor handpicked for the task by Mr. Trump, securing an indictment of Mr. Comey.” Sorry, but no, this ain't a feud. This is the president of the United States using all of his available powers and then some to persecute somebody. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: This is how Peter Baker decided to respond to the spectacle of the complete collapse of the rule of law, by somehow simultaneously assuming the posture of a kindergarten teacher and of a child sucking its thumb on a sleepy mat. Boy, those Republicans sure wouldn't like it if someone treated them the way that they're treating their opponents right now. Yeah, right. That's why they're trying to fix it so that political power never changes hands again. That's the heart of their entire approach. What even is the use of exploring the dumb hypothetical that the Democrats might prove equally lawless in the future? The real question that demands NEWS ANALYSIS right now is whether if the Democrats do manage to take power again, they will shed their own chronic inhibitions and ignore the hand-wringing of people like Baker, and take swift and decisive action not to emulate crimes of the Trump administration but to punish those crimes decisively, abandoning the presumption going all the way back to Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, if not to the violent unwinding of Reconstruction after the Civil War, that the proper way to deal with lawlessness corruption and misrule is to grant the wrongdoers impunity so as not to stir up a fuss and provoke future bad behavior. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Marjorie Taylor Green, whose entire politics is built around not being able to get along with people, is not getting along with people. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Speaking of declining literacy, in the international news on page A6, there's the headline, “Some Poo-Poo an Italian City Tax Designed to Combat Dog Waste.” That's P-O-O hyphen P-O-O. Completely amateur attempted wordplay. The term “pooh-pooh” for disparaging something is spelled with H's, so it's not a clever piece of wordplay. It's just the wrong-ass word. Real dogshit effort there. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Below the jump for that story on page A15, the headline is “SEC dropped a civil complaint against a former client of its Trump-picked chairman. In 2018,” the Times writes, “Paul Atkins was paid $1,450 an hour to be an expert witness by Devin Archer's lawyers as they tried to undermine accusations that their client defrauded a Native American tribal entity and others out of $60 million. While Mr. Archer was convicted anyway, he was pardoned by President Trump in March.” You could write a story about how Republicans would feel if the same fact pattern had unfolded under Joe Biden's SEC. But why bother? The question isn't how they feel about conflicts of interest. It's how they feel about Donald Trump. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The great difficulty in trying to convey what happens with this president and this presidency is that Donald Trump is a profoundly addled and frivolous person who doesn't care or understand the things he says or does, but he is also the president of the United States, so that the things that he says and does are real and serious. Trying to start from the fact that he is the president and impose a kind of sanity and meaning on his behavior that isn't there while addressing his absurdity and irrationality as supplemental detail to be euphemized or paraphrased creates a perniciously false picture. What the Times did in today's paper is to frankly start with the incoherent rambling and then to assemble a sort of collage around the serious things it means. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: In the abstract, in principle, this isn't a terrible way for a mainstream publication to express skepticism toward official claims, but to politely and firmly rebut the claims put forward yesterday, to rationalize them into a new step toward reframing autism, is to miss the entire tenor of the thing. The story then tries to dig in. “The briefing at the White House,” the Times continues, “featured often unsubstantiated medical advice from Mr. reminiscent of his first term when he encouraged Americans to try unproven treatments for COVID. The president on Monday repeatedly issued strong warnings that flew in the face of the recommendations of leading medical groups. ‘Don't take Tylenol. Don't take it. Fight like hell not to take it.' He urged pregnant women to ‘tough it out' when in pain, except in rare instances such as a dangerously high fever.” After the jump, the story also says “Mr. Trump mentioned that he and Mr. Kennedy had long discussed the possibility of a vaccine link to autism. He also amplified Mr. Kennedy's views, saying that the childhood immunization schedule loads up children with too many vaccines. The president said without evidence that babies are given as many as 80 shots at once.” Writing “the president said without evidence that babies are being given as many as 80 shots at once,” sounds like you are really holding the president's feet to the fire. But the words that came out of the mouth of the president of the United States on this subject, or at least some of the words, were actually, “it's too much liquid. Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing when you look at it. It's like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines. 80. You give that to a little kid.” Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Jeremy W. Peters' nonsense, flattering as it does the sensibilities and sensitivities of the people who run the paper, gets page one, and again, a straight news story package, whereas Adam Liptak, writing about how the actual removal of Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves, as the Trump administration threatened to use its regulatory powers against ABC, was intentioned with the conventional understanding of what the constitution allows, lands on page A18 with a NEWS ANALYSIS tag on it. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Knowing that the Senate went ahead and jammed through Kimberly Guilfoyle's appointment to be an ambassador at the expense of longstanding procedural rules just affirms the already established situation of the Senate. Framing it as a steady erosion of John Thune's values as an institutionalist is kind of funny, but likewise not super revealing about what it means to be a Republican at the moment. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Before we get to the larger news, we're going to start with something very small, or at least something petty, that turns out astonishingly and yet obviously, to be of world historic import. It's in a passage by Ben Smith writing for Semafor. “The Trump administration,” Smith writes, “from the president down to the middle levels of obscure cabinet departments is populated by people whose defining experiences in public life involved being silenced by social platforms. This predates the social media wars of the late 2010s.” Smith continues. “One Trump appointee told me that a radicalizing experience was being booted out of the Gawker comments section way back in the day.” Of course it was. Of course the vicious dullards and bigots who are running the country into ruin are the same people who were being dullards and bigots in the comment section back in the day. From Trump on down, and laterally out through the titans of Silicon Valley and their fascist enthusiasms, this is a political movement built on profoundly unpleasant and unlikable people being furious that they can't make other people like them or respect them. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Hamstringing the FBI's ability to investigate financial fraud doesn't seem like things backfiring for the Trump administration exactly. Seems more like one of their more successful integrated policy initiatives. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The administration may have accused Venezuelan cartels of bringing fentanyl into the United States, but the New York Times has reported that Venezuela plays essentially no role in the fentanyl trade. The story does return to the fact that there is no legal basis for these killings, but it mostly slides past the fact that the extralegal basis doesn't hold up either. Mostly though, the question is when an unrepentant killer racks up new victims, does that make the overall story smaller or bigger? Is the Times here to tell us the story of an out-of-control killing spree or the story of business as usual? Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: It's one thing to ruin the lives of civil servants, it's quite another to inconvenience Bayer. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The Times writes, “Mr. Kirk would arrive at colleges ready for rhetorical combat, willing to engage on the thorniest topics from abortion rights to race. the topic of race.” Ah, that “topic” of race. Right. His opinion on the "topic" of race was that black people were inherently mentally inferior to white people and only owed their current position in society to organized efforts to disadvantage white people. The Times writes, “his campus visits regularly provoked impassioned protests from students who disagreed with Mr. Kirk's stances, like his criticism of transgender rights and endorsement of the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which claims that non-white immigrants will displace white Americans.” Yes, that would be the Great Replacement Theory that has inspired multiple massacres. But you know, the important thing is the healthy exchange of opinions. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Shooting a retreating unarmed vessel and then making sure to massacre any survivors, would be absolutely illegal in a war, which again, is not what this was. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

David talks to Lea Ypi about her new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, which tells the story of her grandmother's extraordinary life and in doing so uncovers the hidden history of mid-twentieth-century Europe. But it is also a book about the different philosophies of dignity and how those ideas can shape, make and break individual human lives. A conversation about death and displacement, identity and betrayal, secrecy and salvation.  Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi is out now – get it wherever you get your books. ⁠https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458930/indignity-by-ypi-lea/9780241661925⁠ The 2nd film in our autumn season of Films of Ideas at the Regent Street cinema is coming up on Thursday 25th September: a screening of My Dinner with Andre, followed by a live recording of PPF with playwright and screenwriter Lee Hall, creator of Billy Elliot. Tickets are available now ⁠https://bit.ly/4fWDa7V⁠ Next up, the start of a new series: Fixing Democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Donald Trump's participation in Jeffrey Epstein's sleazy birthday book makes its way onto the front page in a NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Epstein Revelations Hindering Trump's Attempts to Turn Page.” It's illustrated with an infographic, “Signature With a Characteristic Flourish. The president has denied signing a birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein, but his signatures from that time are close matches.” It features six annotated copies of the name Donald, one from the Epstein birthday book and five others from authenticated Trump signatures. They're completely identical. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Way inside the paper, on page A16, down at the bottom, the headline is “Drawing for Epstein, apparently signed by Trump, is released.” “Key congressional committee on Monday,” the Times writes, “obtained a note and sexually suggestive drawing, apparently signed by Donald J. Trump, and included in a book for the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. A drawing that Mr. Trump has insisted is fake.” The story includes a picture of the document, a center-justified poem or imaginary dialogue between Trump and Epstein, with the torso and remarkably small breasts of a female figure drawn around the words and with Trump's signature, "Donald," in his familiar spiky style, centered at the bottom right around the pubic area. The drawing seems to be in line with other pages from Epstein's birthday book that were released, which were characterized reasonably accurately by the Bluesky user and state level democratic organizer going by the handle “Bobby Big Wheel” who posted "For decades everyone on the list argued they only knew Epstein in a professional capacity while all the notes to him are "I sure love being pedophiles together with you, my friend Jeffrey Epstein" Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

Today's episode is the first in a three-part conversation with philosopher and writer Lea Ypi about the idea of dignity and its role in the history of ideas and in the story of our lives. What is the difference between dignity and dignitas? How does our conception of dignity shape the ways that we think about death? And why is Kant so important for showing what the idea of dignity is capable of? Out tomorrow on PPF+: Part 2 of this conversation, in which David and Lea explore the role of dignity in human rights and in identity politics and ask how much it matters that our politics has become so undignified. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus Lea Ypi's new book is Indignity: A Life Reimagined – get it wherever you get your books. ⁠https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458930/indignity-by-ypi-lea/9780241661925⁠ Tickets are available now for a special recording of PPF Live at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Wednesday 15th October: Who Rules The World? Trump, Tech and the Fight for the Future. David will be talking to writer, philosopher and ex-politician Bruno Macaes plus a special guest to be announced about where the power really lies. Get your tickets now ⁠https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.org/events/who-rules-the-world-trump-tech-and-the-fight-for-the-future⁠ Next time: Lea Ypi talks about her remarkable new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lesley and John discuss Arendt's belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough. Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion. Mentioned in the episode: Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 one of the last great historical events in Arendt's lifetime. Lesley praises “reading while walking” and the unpacking of the totalitarian in Anna Burns's marvelous Norther Ireland novel, Milkman. Hannah Pitkin's wonderful 1998 The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social, emphasizes Arendt's idea that although we are free, we can forfeit that freedom by assuming we are rule-bound. Arendt on the challenge of identity: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” The Holocaust is a crime agains humanity a crime against the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people".” Various books by Hannah Arendt come up: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on teh Banality of Evil. (1963). Judgement in Arendt is crucial from earliest days studying Kant and in her final works (among The Life of the Mind) she speaks of the moments when "the mind goes visiting.” Her earliest ideas about love and natality are in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, not published in English until 1996). Hannah Arendt is buried at Bard, near her husband Heinrich Blucher and opposite Philip Roth, who reportedly wanted to capture some of the spillover Arendt traffic. James Baldwin's essay “The Fire Next Time” (1963) caused Arendt to write Baldwin about the difference between pariah love and the love of those in power, who think that love can justify lashing out with power. Recallable Books Lyndsey praises Leah Ypi's (Free) forthcoming memoir about her Albanian family, Indignity. John recalls E. M Forster, Howard's End a novel that thinks philosophically (in a novelistic vein) about how to continue being an individual in a new Imperial Britain. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Gideon talks to Albanian academic Lea Ypi about her book Indignity. In the book, she describes how living first under the Ottoman empire, then as part of fascist Italy and later in a post-war communist state affected the lives of her grandparents. They discuss possible parallels between the first half of the 20th century and the times we are living in today and ask what lessons can be drawn from this history to avoid making the same mistakes. Clip: AQSHFFree links to read more on this topic:Kant and the case for peaceAlbania's ‘old sheriff' on course to win fourth term as prime ministerWhy the EU's migration dilemma is pushing the bloc further rightSubscribe to The Rachman Review wherever you get your podcasts - please listen, rate and subscribe.Presented by Gideon Rachman. Produced by Fiona Symon. Sound design is by Breen Turner and the executive producer is Flo Phillips.Follow Gideon on Bluesky or X @gideonrachman.bsky.social, @gideonrachmanRead a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lesley and John discuss Arendt's belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough. Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion. Mentioned in the episode: Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 one of the last great historical events in Arendt's lifetime. Lesley praises “reading while walking” and the unpacking of the totalitarian in Anna Burns's marvelous Norther Ireland novel, Milkman. Hannah Pitkin's wonderful 1998 The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social, emphasizes Arendt's idea that although we are free, we can forfeit that freedom by assuming we are rule-bound. Arendt on the challenge of identity: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” The Holocaust is a crime agains humanity a crime against the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people".” Various books by Hannah Arendt come up: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on teh Banality of Evil. (1963). Judgement in Arendt is crucial from earliest days studying Kant and in her final works (among The Life of the Mind) she speaks of the moments when "the mind goes visiting.” Her earliest ideas about love and natality are in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, not published in English until 1996). Hannah Arendt is buried at Bard, near her husband Heinrich Blucher and opposite Philip Roth, who reportedly wanted to capture some of the spillover Arendt traffic. James Baldwin's essay “The Fire Next Time” (1963) caused Arendt to write Baldwin about the difference between pariah love and the love of those in power, who think that love can justify lashing out with power. Recallable Books Lyndsey praises Leah Ypi's (Free) forthcoming memoir about her Albanian family, Indignity. John recalls E. M Forster, Howard's End a novel that thinks philosophically (in a novelistic vein) about how to continue being an individual in a new Imperial Britain. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices