Newley Purnell

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Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

🔌 My most recent story: a piece with my colleague Parmy Olson that went online Wednesday and was in Thursday’s print WSJ.

The headline: AI Startup Boom Raises Questions of Exaggerated Tech Savvy. And the lede:

Startup Engineer.ai says it uses artificial-intelligence technology to largely automate the development of mobile apps, but several current and former employees say the company exaggerates its AI capabilities to attract customers and investors.

The story was picked up by tech news sites such as The Information, The Verge, Slashdot and more.

Click through to give it a read.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

💰 1) WeWork files for long-awaited IPO [Axios]

“WeWork will be the most polarizing IPO of 2019, and that’s saying something in a year that already saw Uber and Lyft.”

Bonus link: Shira Ovide, writing for Bloomberg: “Let’s be clear, though: This company is profoundly shocking, and odd. It is at once perhaps the most controversial member of the last decade’s ‘unicorn’ era of richly valued startups, and the one that perfectly encapsulates this moment in financial history. WeWork is so unicorn, it hurts.”

🎧 2) Facebook Paid Contractors to Transcribe Users’ Audio Chats [Bloomberg]

“The company said the users who were affected chose the option in Facebook’s Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. The contractors were checking whether Facebook’s artificial intelligence correctly interpreted the messages, which were anonymized.”

🧐 3) Bill Hader channels Tom Cruise – Deepfake [Ctrl Shift Face on Youtube]

Bonus link, the NYT’s Kevin Roose, writing last year: “Deepfakes are one of the newest forms of digital media manipulation, and one of the most obviously mischief-prone.”

🥵 4) Shot: Scientists confirm July set new global heat record [AP]

“July was the hottest month measured on Earth since records began in 1880, the latest in a long line of peaks that scientists say backs up predictions for man-made climate change.”

🏗️ 5) Chaser: The dawn of the age of geoengineering [Eli Dourado]

“Let’s be honest. The world’s governments might not coordinate to stop climate change…Here are four of my favorite large-scale projects to improve Earth’s environment.”

🕹️ 6) The US Navy says no to touchscreens – maybe automakers should, too [ArsTechnica]

“Starting next summer the Navy will refit its DDG–51 destroyer fleet with a physical throttle and helm control system. The effort is a response to feedback the Navy solicited in the wake of a pair of fatal crashes involving that class of ship during 2017.”

🧹 7) Clean City Law: Secrets of São Paulo Uncovered by Outdoor Advertising Ban [99% Invisible]

“As it turned out, advertisements were quite literally covering up problems with the city that needed to be addressed. Removing billboards revealed, for instance, the presence of certain smaller shanty towns (known as favelas) that few knew existed, hidden as they were behind a vertical landscape of giant signs.”

😂 8) Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s or Your Ph.D. Program? [McSweeney’s]

“A powerful elder, known to you as The Director, explains that you and your friends must take part in a time-honored rite to appease the Ancient Ones.”

📚 9) A Novel Concept: Silent Book Clubs Offer Introverts A Space To Socialize [NPR]

“The concept is simple yet revolutionary: Members meet up at a bar, a library, a bookstore or any venue that will host them. Once the bell rings, silent reading time commences. After an hour, the bell rings again. Other than that, there are no rules.”

🐶 10) Carry me hooman [Reddit]

💡 Quote of the week:

“The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.” – Vladimir Nabokov

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,

Newley

The latest edition of my email newsletter has gone out to subscribers. It’s pasted in below.

To get these weekly dispatches delivered to your inbox, sign up here. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief – and few people unsubscribe!

Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

😢 1) Two remarkable artists passed away this week. The first: Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison Dies at 88 [WSJ]

“Toni Morrison, a literary lion whose narrative voice soared from deep tenderness to searing power in ‘Beloved,’ ‘Song of Solomon’ and other novels, died Monday night in New York, her publisher Alfred A. Knopf said. She was 88 years old.”

✒️ Bonus link: An Appreciation: Toni Morrison and the Need for Tomorrows [WSJ]

“Toni Morrison liked to note, when importunate interviewers wondered when she was going to write about something other than the African-American experience, that Tolstoy didn’t intend his books to be read by black girls from Ohio. Her point was that notion of universalism is fraudulent. To be a writer of any worth one must be a regionalist.”

😔 2) And the second: David Berman, Silver Jews Leader and Indie-Rock Poet, Dies at 52 [New York Times]

“With wry songs full of black humor, his band became an underground favorite in the 1990s, and a new group, Purple Mountains, was set to tour.”

🎵 Bonus link: “By sharing his stories of characters at the margins who laugh into the void,” The WSJ’s Mark Richardson wrote in a review of Berman’s newest album, released just last month, “he makes life’s absurdities seem less menacing, and existential loneliness becomes a setup for a punchline.”

🖥️ 3) The Techlash Has Come to Stanford [Slate]

“Even in the famed computer science program, students are no longer sure they’d go to work for Facebook or Google (and definitely not Palantir).”

👂 4) Revealed: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls [Vice/Motherboard]

“Contractors working for Microsoft are listening to personal conversations of Skype users conducted through the app’s translation service, according to a cache of internal documents, screenshots, and audio recordings obtained by Motherboard. ”

⌨️ 5) The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News [New Yorker]

“Can a human touch make Silicon Valley’s biggest discussion forum a more thoughtful place?”

🏠 6) This startup wants to put a free tiny house in your backyard [Fast Company]

“Rent the Backyard will get a tiny house into your backyard in a matter of weeks – and hopes it can add some cheaper apartments in cities to help alleviate the housing crisis. ”

🥩 7) The Vegetarians Who Turned Into Butchers [New York Times]

“Referring to themselves as ethical butchers, they have opened shops that offer meat from animals bred on grassland and pasture, with animal well-being, environmental conservation and less wasteful whole-animal butchery as their primary goals.”"

🎉 8) Dazzling Color Photos of the Legendary Romanov Costume Ball of 1903 [The Vintage News]

“Outside the Winter Palace, the social pressures that would hurl the country into revolution were intensifying, but 14 years before the forced abdication of Czar Nicolas II, the society of St. Petersburg put on quite a show, dubbed by many Europe’s ‘last great royal ball’.”

🛎️ 9) You Can Actually Stay In These Giant Animal-Themed Hotels [The Dodo]

“While many animal lovers will try to find activities that are centered around animals, there’s actually a way to take your obsession to the next level…”

🐶 10) “Oh this is precious.. bomb squad dog got a break from work for a min.” [Twitter: @TheSolutionBaba]

💡 Quote of the week:

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” – Toni Morrison.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,

Newley

Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

🇮🇹 Anasuya and I are back in Delhi after an exceptional ten-day-long family holiday in Italy.

I’ve been posting some photos on my Instagram feed (@Newley), with more to come. We were in Rome for a few days, then spent a week in Cernobbio, next to Lake Como.

The food.
The mountains.
The water.
The colors.
The people.
The history.
The art.

💯 One word: wow.

On to this week’s NN…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🚀 1) The Nation Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 [WSJ]

“In a hundred different ways this week, people nationwide celebrated the moon voyage that climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on another world.”

🌕 Bonus explanatory video: Apollo 11: The Complete Descent.

📉 2) Netflix stock sinks after U.S. subscriber loss [Axios]

“Analysts weren’t expecting the streaming giant to lose subscribers, especially since rival streaming services, like HBO Max, Disney + and NBCUniversal’s new service, aren’t expected to launch for another year or so. ”

🥵 3) As FaceApp Goes Viral, So Do Concerns About Privacy, Russia Ties [WSJ]

“FaceApp is raising alarms in particular because it is encouraging people to share information that companies or individuals typically find difficult to obtain quickly on a large scale, said Micah Hoffman, principal investigator at Spotlight Infosec LLC, a cybersecurity and open-source intelligence firm in Rockville, Md.”

🗣 4) Have We Hit Peak Podcast? [NY Times]

“There are now upward of 700,000 podcasts, according to the podcast production and hosting service Blubrry, with between 2,000 and 3,000 new shows launching each month.”

📡 5) Disneyland Makes Surveillance Palatable – and Profitable [Bloomberg]

“At a time when Facebook Inc., Google and myriad other technology companies are getting hammered over consumer privacy issues, Disney is running the happiest police state on earth.”

🎤 6) Fired Over Too Much Tupac? A Rap-Loving Bureaucrat From Iowa Says He Hopes Not [NPR]

“I’m a 66-year-old white guy from the Midwest who likes rap music, who likes Tupac!” he says.

☢️ 7) Toxic lake in Russia’s Siberia becomes selfie sensation [AP]

“The lake is blue…due to a chemical reaction between toxic waste elements from a local power station. Environmentalists are warning people against coming into contact with the water.”

👏 8) Apple Teases 230 New Emoji in Celebration of World Emoji Day [TIME]

“This upcoming collection will have a large focus on inclusion and accessibility. Some of the upcoming emoji will include people who use hearing aids, wheelchairs, guide dogs and people with prosthetic limbs.”

🐦 9) The 2019 Audubon Photography Awards: Winners [Audubon]

“Birds make fascinating subjects, as the winners and honorable mentions of this year’s contest, our 10th, make clear.”

❄️ 10) Ladies and gents, I present to you a Shiba Inu wearing a sweater tracking through snow [Reddit]

💡 Quote of the week:

"Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.” – Joan Didion

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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi – and happy summer!

Newley