THIS WEEK ONLINE – Scientists: '90 seconds 'til the End'

You’re reading This Week Online, VICE Australia’s runsheet of shit you probably missed, or should have seen, this week. Subscribe here to get it straight in your inbox, every week.

"Ari" here, welcoming you back to This Week Online. 

This week, things were duly and wonderfully strange and odd and disconcerting.

ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licences and Business Degrees

Future Asteroid That Threatens Earth May Be Near-Indestructible, Scientists Warn

Weed Makes People Cum Harder, Study Says

You can unsubscribe here if you want.

If not, then welcome to This Week Online.

• Lifting the lid on Australian fine dining: fuck all gets done without [illegal] free labour
• 26 things to do do instead of being a colony bootlicker
• Of course there is a doomsday clock. Of course it just ticked 10 seconds closer to the Reckoning.
• M&M’s retires increasingly woke ‘Spokescandies’ amid culture war
• How to win the Hottest 100
• Twiittttr

Could fine dining exist without free labour? Ah yes… It’s a good question. When René Redzepi, owner of Noma, the three Michelin star restaurant in Copenhagen known as the world’s best restaurant, announced he would be closing next year, it set the food world on fire. Not really, but it did get us talking about fine dining and the widespread culture of unpaid labour that supports it. 

Free labour is illegal in Australia, but internships or traineeships, or, to use industry jargon, stages, are a common practice, where young chefs volunteer their time and labour in exchange for experience working at renowned restaurants, under established chefs, with new ingredients and techniques. But the reality is pretty grim. Stagiaires often just do the shit work: menial, tedious and repetitive, for hours, often not even getting to work under the star chefs they’re there to supposedly learn from.  

As one chef told VICE Australia’s Aleks Bliszczyk: “Society and the industry think that you're meant to do it because that's the way it's always been. But you can't make someone work 17 to 18 hours a day. That's just plain stupid.”

[ here ]

Yes, January 26 was yesterday. But every day is a good day to learn something, and remind yourself how to not be a dickhead. No worries!

 [ here ]

When you read headlines like “Earth’s Core Has Stopped and May Be Reversing Direction, Study Says” every day for a living, an article titled “The Doomsday Clock Is Now the Closest It's Ever Been to Armageddon” hits like a prosaic springtime breeze. Of course there is a literal doomsday clock, somewhere in Europe, kept by a group of experts who call themselves The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And of course they just moved the clock, for the first time in two years, ten seconds closer to midnight [read: apocalypse]. 

 The move was due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, heralding the sure threat of nuclear cataclysm. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time [Revelation 12:12].

Yes. We are now officially closer than ever in the Doomsday Clock’s 76-year-history to meeting our maker.

[ here ]

Be a dude from Sydney or Melbourne. Yes… this week in shockingly unsurprising factoids: the SMH crunched the numbers on Triple J’s Hottest 100 and found the likelihood of winning increases as your existence in this world being a man from Sydney or Melbourne goes up. Simple mathematics! The report, by Billie Eder and Lachlan Abbott, contains quite a lot of interesting information, and plenty of data. So far in the countdown’s 30-year-history, only one girl has taken out the top spot, Billie Eilish in 2019, for Bad Guy. Isn’t that fucking insane?  

[ here ]

This week in unreal controversies you wish you’d never had to think about: M&M’s have retired their anthropomorphic candies due to a culture war sparked by their lack of fuckability. Following?

Yes, the M&M's Spokescandies got too woke. Their wokeness caused unforeseen polarity, and now they must be euthanised. 

Of course, as is with all hellish, inconceivable and terrible things, Tucker Carlson started it. The vengeful ghost of an eighteenth century 12-year-old chimney sweeper-turned far right outrage jockey lost his mind over an early 2021 rebrand that saw the sexy brown and green M&M’s trade in their stiletto heels for trainers. Tucker leapt on air to drop this hot load of wonder on the world: “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous…. Until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”

To summarise: Tucker Carlson was cockblocked by the green M&M’s woke trainers and he no longer wants to take it out for a drink. And now none shall live.

[ here ]

You’ve been reading This Week Online, VICE Australia’s runsheet of shit you probably missed, or should have seen, this week. Subscribe here to get it straight in your inbox, every week.

Follow Arielle on Instagram and Twitter.

Read more from VICE Australia and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, This Week Online.