No one’s getting hired by sending a PDF into the void anymore.

The math on job searching in 2026 helps explain why. The average corporate job posting attracts 242 applications, and according to data from The Interview Guys, 75% of resumes never reach a human being at all, filtered out in under a second by AI before anyone with a pulse sees them. Only 2-3% of applications lead to interviews. So now, people are posting their resumes on TikTok.

What started as a Gen Z workaround is now an actual job search strategy across generations. TikTok has officially overtaken LinkedIn as the top job search tool among Gen Z, with 22.1% using it compared to 20.8% on LinkedIn. And 46% of Gen Z workers say they’ve landed a job or internship by using the platform, according to Zety’s 2025 Gen Z Career Trends Report. One in five scored an interview because of a post.

Gen Z Is Using TikTok to Find Jobs Because Regular Applications Feel Broken

Times are-a-changin’ and how people look for jobs is no exception. “The application process seems kind of broken, and applying to jobs on LinkedIn feels like a wild black hole where your resume gets screened out by AI filters before you get seen by a person,” creative strategist Josh Katz told the New York Post. Katz posted a 60-second video resume and invited his comments section to serve as his reference letter. It pulled hundreds of thousands of views, produced multiple interviews, and kept pulling in freelance work months after posting.

TikTok is just the most visible example. 73% of millennials say they found their last job through a social media platform, and Instagram portfolios, LinkedIn video posts, and YouTube channels are all new platforms of choice, especially in creative fields. Employers are already looking at your social media profiles anyway: 91% of U.S. companies now use social media in their hiring process, with 82% using it to find candidates who aren’t actively applying anywhere. People sourced through social media are eight times more likely to get hired than those coming through traditional job boards.

The one real caution is how public this all is. A post that comes across as sloppy or desperate can circulate just as fast as one that was done well. Before you post, ask yourself if this is how you would really present yourself at an interview. Just because the platform changed doesn’t mean the job standards did. 

The post Gen Z Started Using TikTok to Find Jobs Out of Desperation, and It’s Actually Working appeared first on VICE.

China’s short drama industry is worth nearly $18 billion globally. And some of that money is going toward very personalized passion projects

Actor Zhong Yufei, 23, recently went public on social media about a production that was supposed to be his big break in the Chinese short drama world. The unnamed investor behind the 50-episode series had two non-negotiable conditions for putting up the money: she would play the lead female role, and she would have final say on the script. No one on set was in a position to argue, because she could pull the plug at any time, and everyone knew it.

What she did with that power was commission over 60 kissing scenes.

According to Zhong and producer Meng Xing, who later came forward to explain what happened, the crew pushed back. The director reportedly told the investor repeatedly that the volume of intimate scenes would disrupt the plot and lose audiences. The investor’s alleged response: “I’ve seen more short dramas than you’ve ever made.” The kissing scenes stayed.

A Short Drama Investor Allegedly Gave Herself the Lead Role and 60 Kissing Scenes

Zhong says his co-star took things further on set. During their first romantic scene, he claims she French-kissed him without warning. When he instinctively pulled back, she allegedly grabbed the back of his head and held him there. He was new to lead roles, and he felt like speaking up could cost him the project, so he didn’t. He also says the rest of the crew looked the other way.

The production ended in commercial failure. After filming wrapped, the streaming platform rejected over 20 scenes for being too explicit, gutting chunks of the plot. The investor then allegedly refused to pay the remaining 30,000 yuan (roughly $4,100) of the production fee, reportedly because she was unhappy that so many of her kissing scenes got cut.

The story blew up on Chinese social media, and the numbers behind the industry make it more unsurprising than it sounds. China’s short drama market hit $6.9 billion domestically in 2024, and the flood of outside investment has come with almost no creative gatekeeping. Whoever controls the budget controls everything, including the script, the casting, and how many times the male lead has to kiss them.

Producer Meng Xing said he and his team had almost no say throughout the entire production. The director clarified publicly that all decisions ran through the investor. The production company stated it would do a better job protecting actors’ rights in future contracts. Whether that actually changes anything remains to be seen.

The post A Wealthy Woman Funded a Drama Series Just So She Could Kiss the Male Lead 60 Times appeared first on VICE.

There’s a fluffy Yorkie in the produce section, and its owner cannot understand why anyone has a problem with this.

Pet humanization has been building to this for years. Sixty-nine percent of millennials and Gen Z now describe their pets as family members. The American Pet Products Association projects the US pet industry will hit $165.6 billion in 2026. When the average annual cost of dog ownership hits $2,500, the grocery store ban feels almost arbitrary.

Reddit has been arguing about it for weeks. On r/AskUK, shoppers complained about dogs urinating in aisles, owners touching produce while carrying their pets, and staff allegedly affording animals “superior rights.” One commenter described the habit as “unsanitary and inconsiderate.” Not everyone agreed.

“Do you really think having a dog in a grocer is that unhygienic compared to the average person? They’re hardly going to be licking the fruit,” one commenter wrote on Reddit. “If anything, letting kids run amok would be less hygienic.”

Why Are People Bringing Dogs Into Grocery Stores?

People act surprised by the rules, but the rules aren’t new. The FDA Food Code bans live animals from food establishments across the board. Trained service animals get an exception under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Emotional support animals do not. Publix felt compelled to post signs about this at its store entrances in 2023—”not permitted in Publix, even with a doctor’s note”—and the signs went viral.

The fact that a grocery chain had to put up a sign explaining federal law tells you where things stood. AKA—entitled owners. The UK draws a similar line, with pet dogs holding no legal right of access to food shops and only assistance dogs protected—though enforcement gets complicated when handlers aren’t required to show proof.

Dogs carry pathogens on their paws and coats, and a grocery store has no shortage of open surfaces for those to land on. Fresh produce bins, deli counters, and bakery displays were not designed with a dog in the aisle in mind. A calm, leashed dog poses minimal risk. What’s harder to manage is the dog that isn’t calm or leashed, the one sniffing shelves and making contact with surfaces that don’t get wiped down between shoppers.

That dog exists; it shows up in grocery stores, and most stores have no infrastructure to address it before something has already gone wrong.

The pet industry got to $165 billion by following the dog wherever it wanted to go. Federal food safety law draws the line at the grocery store. One of those forces is winning, and it isn’t the FDA.

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When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California in August 2023, the first of its kind to make direct landfall this century, most people were focused on the flooding. They weren’t paying attention to what the sharks were doing.

When Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall in August 2023, researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Shark Lab at CSU, Long Beach were already tracking 22 juvenile great white sharks off the San Diego coast with acoustic tags. The resulting study is the first to document storm-response behavior in white sharks, and the behavior was much more coordinated than anyone expected.

As the storm closed in, more than half the sharks bailed on their nursery off Torrey Pines and Del Mar, retreating to the calmer waters of La Jolla Cove, which sits next to a submarine canyon with quick access to depth. One individual dove 433 feet, probably trying to escape the chop near the surface. Most came back within days.

“We think that some were seeking shelter from the storm,” said co-author Chris Lowe of the CSULB Shark Lab. “It makes sense that not all sharks did the same things, in much the same way people respond differently. It’s a key survival characteristic that humans seem to share, too.”

Great White Sharks May Know When It’s Time to Flee a Storm, and That Could Help Humans

The likely trigger was temperature. Sea-surface temps at the nursery dropped from 68°F to 57°F in under 24 hours as the storm hit. Juvenile great whites are more sensitive to cold than adults, and researchers believe that drop was the cue. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to document storm-response behavior in white sharks,” said lead author and Scripps PhD student Jack Elstner.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, researchers at the University of Delaware are running a different experiment with a similar cast of characters. They’re attaching electronic tags to shortfin makos, blue sharks, smooth hammerheads, and juvenile great whites to pull ocean temperature and salinity data from the Atlantic. The data feeds into hurricane intensity forecasting, specifically around the Mid-Atlantic’s “cold pool,” a layer of bottom water under 50°F that affects how fast storms strengthen before hitting shore.

“For hurricanes, warm water is the gas, and cold water is the brakes,” doctoral candidate Caroline Wiernicki told the University of Delaware. “Depending on where that cold pool is relative to the shore, that will impact how strong a hurricane is when it makes landfall.”

Sharks are clearing out ahead of storms and simultaneously serving as floating weather stations for the scientists trying to forecast them. That’s a pretty good week for shark research.

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