Arotrios

Nearly five months after thousands of film and TV writers went on strike over more equitable pay and working conditions in the streaming era, effectively shutting down the entertainment industry, Hollywood studio and streaming executives at long last have reached a tentative deal with the Writers Guild of America, East and West.

In an email to members late Sunday, the union said it had reached “an agreement in principle on all deal points, subject to drafting final contract language.”

The union said it will share details about what the union negotiators and studio executives agreed to once union leadership reviews the final language in the agreement.

“What we have won in this contract—most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2nd—is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days. It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal,” the email to members continued. “We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional—with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.”

Once ratified by the union members, the agreement could have huge effects, setting historic precedents on major industry-wide issues. Throughout the strike, writers have framed the fight as an existential one, showing the ways longstanding inequities in the industry have jeopardized the future of writing as a profession and restricted the types of people who can make a living as a writer in Hollywood. The issues that led them to strike include dwindling pay while corporate executives reap profits from writers’ work and the need for guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence. (HuffPost’s unionized staff are also members of the WGA East, but are not involved in the strike.)

The resolution to the strike means writers can soon resume work on film and TV shows, putting an end to a monthslong standstill on virtually all film and TV production. Looming deadlines likely motivated the studio executives, represented by the trade group Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, to finally reach a deal with the writers. Had the strike stretched further into the fall, network shows would not have enough time to put together a partial season of programming.

In the email to members, the union said that the writers are technically still on strike, since the agreement is subject to votes from the union’s negotiating committee and then from leaders of the WGA West and East. Those votes are tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, the WGA said.

Following those votes, union leaders would then authorize a full membership ratification vote on the agreement. During the ratification vote, members would then be allowed to return to work, the union said.

Throughout the strike, writers have had the upper hand in terms of public perception, picketing nearly daily in front of major studios and corporate headquarters in New York and Los Angeles. In addition to laying out the stakes of the strike in no uncertain terms, they were also able to point to the massive corporate greed of Hollywood executives, showing the huge gap between executive salaries and most writers’ relatively meager wages.

It did not help that studio executives continually dug a deeper hole for themselves and added to the public perception of them as cartoon villains — including giving anonymous quotes to Hollywood trade publications asserting the strike was meant to bleed writers dry. For instance, in July, a studio executive anonymously told Deadline: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

The writers’ ability to wield the power of public protest also got results. Earlier this week, Drew Barrymore reversed plans to resume her talk show without her striking writers, after she faced a week of massive public backlash. Her announcement set off a domino effect: Several more talk shows that had been slated to return while their writers are on strike also reversed their plans.

Since July, actors represented by the Screen Actors Guild have also been on strike over similar issues as the writers. While studio executives will need to reach a separate agreement with SAG-AFTRA, the resolution of the writers strike is an optimistic sign for a similar deal with the actors.

The twin strikes have marked a historic moment for Hollywood labor unions. They also come amid a turning point for the labor movement across the country. Just last week, workers represented by the United Auto Workers launched a series of historic strikes, the first time the union has conducted a simultaneous work stoppage at all three major U.S. automakers. In recent years, accelerated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers across many industries have unionized, drawing attention to corporate greed, exploitation and inequality between corporations and workers.

Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that victory was forcibly removing moderators for dozens of communities. In fact, according to Reddit users, the protests have caused a major brain drain on the site. The question is: can you prove it? And the answer is: well, sort of, yes.

For the last six months, we've been tracking the top Reddit posts every month. When we first started, the subreddit with the most posts in the top 20 was r/OddlySatisfying, with three posts. As of last month, however, 10 of the top 20 posts all came from r/MadeMeSmile.

The fact that all of the top posts on Reddit are coming from the same subreddit, as far as we're concerned, means either people aren’t browsing as much or there just aren’t as many people on Reddit. But it was hard to tell which was which, since the actual number of upvotes on the most popular posts are pretty identical to where they were six months ago. But investigating that, I found that Reddit has always had certain caps on how many upvotes a post can get, which suggests that isn’t a good way to measure. Over on Subreddit Stats, however, we found a much better way of working this out.

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.

This chart from SubredditStats show the daily comments and posts for 5 major subreddits: r/news, r/facepalm, r/mademesmile, r/oddlysatisfying, r/mildlyinfuriating.

And that’s how we've now ended up with a Reddit full of r/MadeMeSmile. And, just in case you're curious about what that looks like — four of the top five Reddit posts were reposted TikToks.

Reddit was one of the last major spots online where you could expect to interact with people who aren’t making money off you. Which also why Reddit was able to completely replace its existing moderators since they were virtually all unpaid.

We’ve talked a lot about Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, but he was only talking about individual platforms. Larger trends like AI and crypto (or even pivoting to video) have a cascading effect on the process. One big platform trying something is enough to legitimize it, and soon everywhere you can go has a noticeably worse user experience. If people stay off Reddit, then the site definitely didn’t “win” the protests, but neither did anyone else.

When Reddit announced the API pricing that kicked all this off, they justified it by talking about lucrative AI tools trained on Reddit data, saying, “we don’t need to give all that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free”. Ironically, that’s exactly what you do every time you go online, and it looks like a lot of people have decided to choose the same thing for themselves by staying off Reddit.

Any citizen of the social internet knows the feeling: that irritable contentiousness, that desire to get into it that seems almost impossible to resist, even though you know you’ve already squandered too many hours and too much emotional energy on pointless internet disputes. If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that at least half the posts seemed intent on making someone—especially you—mad. In his new book, Outrage Machine, the technology researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell explains that the underlying architecture of the biggest social media platforms is essentially (although, he argues, unintentionally) designed to get under your skin in just this way. The results, unsurprisingly, have been bad for our sanity, our culture, and our politics.

On this topic, an increasingly popular one as the social media economy convulses in response to Twitter’s Elonification, the preferred tone is either stern jeremiad or, for the well and truly addicted commentator (usually a journalist), a sort of punch-drunk nihilism much like that of someone who declares he’ll never quit smoking even though it’s going to kill him. Rose-Stockwell, by contrast, keeps his cool, pointing out that social media is full of “angry, terrible content” that makes our lives worse, while carefully avoiding any sign of partisanship or panic.

Any citizen of the social internet knows the feeling: that irritable contentiousness, that desire to get into it that seems almost impossible to resist, even though you know you’ve already squandered too many hours and too much emotional energy on pointless internet disputes. If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that at least half the posts seemed intent on making someone—especially you—mad. In his new book, Outrage Machine, the technology researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell explains that the underlying architecture of the biggest social media platforms is essentially (although, he argues, unintentionally) designed to get under your skin in just this way. The results, unsurprisingly, have been bad for our sanity, our culture, and our politics.

On this topic, an increasingly popular one as the social media economy convulses in response to Twitter’s Elonification, the preferred tone is either stern jeremiad or, for the well and truly addicted commentator (usually a journalist), a sort of punch-drunk nihilism much like that of someone who declares he’ll never quit smoking even though it’s going to kill him. Rose-Stockwell, by contrast, keeps his cool, pointing out that social media is full of “angry, terrible content” that makes our lives worse, while carefully avoiding any sign of partisanship or panic.

Gabriel Trujillo was unstoppable when it came to studying nature. Botany, his passion, led him to explore lots of places while cataloging plants and their behaviors. In June 2023, that research took him from California to the mountains of Sonora in northeastern Mexico in hopes of finding Cephalanthus occidentalis, a shrub that was crucial to his work. That trip would also end with his violent death.

Trujillo’s body was found with several bullet wounds on Thursday, June 22, on the side of a road connecting San Nicolás to Tepoca, in the municipality of Yécora. The 31-year-old scientist had been killed three days prior, on June 19, the same day his family had reported him missing.

After losing communication with Trujillo, other biologists in Sonora and California started to look for him. They called around, organized a WhatsApp group, traveled to the area where he was last seen, and interviewed people who knew about his stay in Sonora. Even though they started receiving death threats, they didn’t stop until he was found.

Probably the best source of non-copyrighted literature on the planet, imho, and a necessary bookmark for any lit addict

Johnny Cash became interested in Folsom State Prison, California, while serving in the United States Air Force Security Service. In 1953, his unit watched Crane Wilbur's 1951 film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. The film inspired Cash to write a song that reflected his perception of prison life.

The result was "Folsom Prison Blues", Cash's second single on Sun Records. The song became popular among inmates, who would write to Cash, requesting him to perform at their prisons. Cash's first prison performance was at Huntsville State Prison in 1957. Satisfied by the favorable reception, he performed at several other prisons in the years leading up to the Folsom performance in 1968.

Sauce

Scientists have discovered an anomalous blob of heat on the far side of the moon.

This mysterious hotspot has a strange origin: It's likely caused by the natural radiation emanating from a huge buried mass of granite, which is rarely found in large quantities outside of Earth, according to new research. On the moon, a dead volcano that hasn't erupted for 3.5 billion years is likely the source of this unusual hunk of granite.