I’m trying a new thing. Well, it’s really an old thing, but it’s new for me. About six billion years ago, people used blogs to share links they thought were cool. Then social media killed blogs and people started sharing links on Twitter. Now, social media is unbearable so I’m sharing them here.

New links most days.

Houston hotel workers are on strike:

The Labor Day action marked the latest move in a labor dispute with management at one of Houston’s largest hotels. Among their demands is a $23-an-hour minimum wage. Some workers make as little as $16.50 an hour, which is more than double the state minimum wage of $7.25 but well below some estimates for the area’s living wage.

AI slop on YouTube is drowning out actual history videos:

As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched.

A fellow AI hater (h/t, Welcome to Hell World):

Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it.

The New Yorker discovers manga in the year of our lord 2025:

The word “manga” can be translated as “whimsical drawing,” but there is little whimsy in Hokazono’s work.

Okay so that sentence is very silly but the piece is actually interesting (if unoriginal) and does an okay job of pointing out the horrific pressures that manga artists work under:

Whether at the top of the rankings or the bottom, the pressure on artists is relentless. Hokazono takes just one evening off each week, after his meeting with Imamura to plan out the next episode’s story line. “I watch YouTube,” Hokazono told me. “That’s my ‘input.’ I watch movies, listen to music, and sleep like the dead. But then I start working on the storyboards. As the deadline approaches, I really start to feel the weight.”

From last year: The idea of putting zines in a museum will never not hurt my soul:

Displaying stapled photocopies meant to be subterranean and anti-institutional behind glass, in a museum, will always feel a bit strange, particularly when the original appeal of zines was both their tactility and their disposability. The exhibit ends up feeling like a startling collection of covers, with only a teasing sense of what was written inside.