I Can't Escape The Feeling That We're All Just Working For Free

The most popular link last week was this Tokyo hotel, with Cal Newport's thoughts on internet joy second.

1. Extremely spectacular and incredibly sylvan: essentially a five-star review of Switzerland.
2. "I feel neither younger nor older than 94, but 94 now feels younger than I’d expected." An interview with 94-year-old author Judith Viorst.
3. I loved the new Lorde single and am eagerly anticipating the album. But I'm also so interested in how she is belatedly embracing "the new pop star marketing machine". This is an astute analysis, but I think the writer is a little harsh on Lorde for simply wanting to try hard to have her work appreciated.

4. Via Web Curios, I enjoyed this song "idk i just work here" and its video — a sad-but-funny satire of every terrible minimum wage job you ever had.
5. Did you know that cabbage was only introduced to Japan in the 18C? Learn this, alongside many other similar facts, in this brief history of cabbage.
6. If you were also a "there's someone under the bed" child, I hope you find this vindicating as well as incredibly terrifying and creepy. You're not silly for checking!!

7. 13 Animals made from 13 circles by Dori the Giant.
8. This is a fantastic but sobering read from Carla Lalli Music on what it takes — financially and emotionally — to maintain a successful presence on YouTube. You might remember Carla from the pre-2020 Bon Appetit channel, and after that all fell apart she struck out own her own. Over three years of producing weekly videos on the platform, she spent $14,000 a month on production costs, not including her own time. And even though she racked up 18 million views and over 230,000 subscribers, the ad money YouTube paid her never came close to covering her costs. She sometimes fell short in a month by as much as $10,000. Which meant a choice between taking whatever sponsors she could to try and break even, or reducing her production costs. Make it an ad or make it worse, or both. I would like to write more about this mad dichotomy at a future point, but for now I'll just say that I can't escape the feeling that we're all just working for free for these corporations, even when it looks from the outside like we're individually successful. Plenty of people would love to have the numbers Carla pulled in and yet... she couldn't afford to keep doing it.
9. Mary H.K. Choi on quitting therapy.

10. An incredible online gallery of artists' calling cards.
11. Something new to feel depressed and furious about: what's happening to the deep ocean.
12. Shall we conjugate some nouns?

"I tear the hair; I tore the whore; I have torn the horn.
I see the sea; I saw the saw; I have seen the scene.
I draw the law; I drew the loo; I have drawn the lawn.
I throw the bow; I threw the boo; I have thrown the bone."

13. The Useless Web is never not a good click.