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Hi friends,
Thanks for reading Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter where I share my WSJ stories, posts from my blog, and various interesting links.
What I wrote in The Wall Street Journal
– “Indian Ministries Divide on Apple’s Retail Vision” – India’s minister for commerce and industry said today she supports waiving rules that could block Apple Inc.’s retail stores. Apple wants its own shops in India for brand visibility; it’s still unclear if that will happen.
What I wrote at Newley.com
– Book Notes — ‘The One Thing,’ by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. For a while now, I’ve kept, on index cards, notes about many of the books I’ve read. I’ve decided to start sharing these notes as blog posts. Stay tuned for more.
5 items that are worth your time this week:
1) “How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Love with Subaru.” Fascinating. From the piece:
“When we did the research, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person—and often a women,” says Bennett. When Subaru marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.
And:
Many of them even felt an affinity with the name.
‘Subaru’ is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, a six-star constellation. When Kenji Kita, the CEO of Subaru’s parent company, Fuji Heavy Industries, chose the name in 1954, he chose it to represent how six Japanese companies had merged to form Fuji Heavy Industries. But in English, the constellation is also known as the Seven Sisters—the same name as a group of American women’s colleges.
2) Great idea for an app: You can consult Flyover Country while in the air to learn about interesting geologic formations below your plane. More info here. (Note: It’s unclear to me if this works just in the U.S., or elsewhere, as well.)
3) This is an incredible. A Swiss graphic designer spent some 1,000 hours recreating all of 1977’s “Star Wars Episodie IV – A New Hope” – in a single, 123-meter-long, scrollable infographic. #Dedication
4) It appears that Neanderthals built constructions out of stalagmites deep inside a cave in France some 176,000 years ago. But no one knows what they were for. For more, here’s the original paper.
5) I was researching capybaras – yes, you read that right; they’ve been in the news – and came across this amazing video of two people who have made pets of the huge rodents. Here’s a video of the pair, Romeo and Tuff’n, going shopping.
Have a great week!
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