Here’s a photo of a poster I recently spotted for sale by a sidewalk vendor here in New Delhi’s Connaught Place.
Yes, it has the billionaire Microsoft founder and now famed philanthropist Bill Gates saying:
“If you born poor it’s not your mistake, but if you die poor it’s your mistake.”
Hmm…
Edition 139 of my email newsletter went out last Sunday.
If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.
Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.
It’s been a fantastic World Cup opening weekend! Can’t decide which I’ve enjoyed most: Ronaldo’s hat trick in the scintillating Spain-Portugal game or the Iceland goalkeeper’s penalty save on Messi! And there’s still so much more to come!
On to this week’s NN…
🚘 1) A story by my colleague Sean McLain and me: Toyota Plans Billion-Dollar Investment in Ride-Hailing Startup Grab [WSJ] — Toytota is trying to expand beyond its core cars business, and is now pouring funds into Singapore-based grab, which as you’ll recall has chased Uber out of Southeast Asia.
💲 2) A huge legal and business story this week: AT&T Beats U.S. in Antitrust Fight Over Time Warner [WSJ] — The federal judge’s decision is a “historic defeat for the Justice Department that could rewrite the media landscape and set the stage for other deals,” write my colleagues Brent Kendall and Drew FitzGerald. The New York Times‘s Jim Stewart, in a column surveying the state of antitrust law, writes that “The most immediate impacts of the ruling on Tuesday are the removal of an obstacle to a megamerger and the likely bursting of a dam of mergers that were waiting the decision.”
⏏️ 3) Apple Tries to Stop Developers From Sharing Data on Users’ Friends [Bloomberg] — “Sharing of friends’ data without their consent is what got Facebook Inc. into so much trouble when one of its outside developers gave information on millions of people to Cambridge Analytica,” write Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier and Mark Gurman, and now Apple’s “quietly closing” a related loophole.
🎬 4) And speaking of Apple: Oprah strikes deal with Apple as new Hollywood content wars heat up [CNN] — Apple joins Amazon and Netflix in building up stables of original content.
⛔ 5) Smart speaker story of the week: Senators Demand Answers From Amazon on Echo’s Snooping Habits [Wired] — Remember the woman in Portland, Oregon who said an Alexa-powered gadget, without her permission, recorded and sent to a contact a conversation she had with her husband? Two senators are asking Jeff Bezos to explain how it happened.
🚁 6) Take a First Look at Larry Page’s Latest Flying Car [Bloomberg] — “The Kitty Hawk Flyer sports 10 battery-powered propellors and two control sticks,” Brad Stone writes, “and looks like a human-sized drone.” Click through for photos.
🏫 7) Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey! ‘Saved by the Bell’ Now a Restaurant [New York Times] — It looks amazing. Pics on Instagram are here.
🆒 8) How Soccer Players’ Hair Became So Influential [Racked] — TLDR: stars’ haircuts have become are clearly on display (no hats or helmets); a diversity of cultures means a lot of variation; players can pioneer cool coiffures to stand out.
😎 9) Chilled out video of the week: Open Ocean: 10 Hours of Relaxing Oceanscapes [YouTube/BBC Earth]. “Be wowed by the brilliant hues of our blue planet and the incredible animals that live therewith…”
⚾ 10) Fun dog video of the week: Bark In The Park Event Goes Sideways [Twitter video] — It was dog night at a double A baseball game in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an enthusiastic German Shepherd became entranced by a ball…
✌️Quote of the week:
“All they could do was put enough stinky food up there to encourage him to go up the last two floors…We were all kind of worried he might be too tired to do so but thankfully the little guy kept going.”
That’s from a New York Times story headlined Daredevil Raccoon Climbs Minnesota Skyscraper and Becomes a Sensation.
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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley
Edition 138 of my email newsletter went out on Sunday.
If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.
Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.
So, can you believe the World Cup begins on Thursday? I am nearly giddy with excitement, as I always am when the world’s most popular sporting event rolls around every four years.
Passion! Bravery! Physical skill! Cheating! Subterfuge! National pride! Abject disappointment!
The month-long tournament has all of these, and more. The world today feels increasingly fragmented, destabilized and disjointed; the competition, though, is one of the few truly global events anymore that the vast majority of the world watches and cares about.
Sadly, as you probably know, the U.S. won’t be participating, having failed to qualify for the first time in more than three decades, however. For a post-mortem on this disaster, I suggest this longread from Andrew Helms and Matt Pentz in The Ringer: Own Goal: The Inside Story of How the USMNT Missed the 2018 World Cup.
On a happier note, here’s something decidedly up-beat to consume: a “mixtape” video on YouTube by Beats (yes, Beats) featuring Brazil’s Neymar, Germany’s Mesut Ozil, England’s Harry Kane and more. My favorite part: the cameo by France’s Patrice “I Love This Game” Evra.
With no U.S. to root for, I will be cheering on Egypt. Not just because of their supremely gifted and lovable striker Mohamed Salah, but for their veteran goalkeeper Essam El-Hadary, who at age 45 will be the World Cup’s oldest-ever player. More on goalkeeping below…
Meanwhile, a World Cup-related hobby of mine: Watching from afar as the British media and pundits talk up up England’s chances of victory, then subsequently blame factors supposedly beyond England’s control when the team inevitably crashes out. (I’m betting that this year’s excuse will be that the players are inordinately consumumed with, and have been derailed by, criticism on social media.)
For more on this, see my 2016 blog post, Why You Shouldn’t be Surprised When England Lose. I penned that just hours before England took the field against Iceland in the Euros. Looking back, my only regret in the piece is that I said I expected them to win that game. They lost, of course.
And finally, a new blog post at Newley.com: Loris Karius and the Existential Pain of Goalkeeping. Contains a requisite Albert Camus quote. A subject so close to my heart it has taken me something like two weeks to hit the publish button on this.
🖥️ 1) Microsoft Is Buying GitHub for $7.5 Billion in Stock [WSJ] — Satya Nadella wants to expand beyond Micrsosft’s older products and focus on new tech like cloud computing. GitHub, which allows developers to post and collaborate on code, fits the bill. In a similar deal, you’ll recall Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2016. (Among the winners in the GitHub deal: prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is getting $1 billion back on its $100 million investment in the startup in 2012.)
🔍 2) Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends [New York Times] — Facebook permitted makers like Apple and Samsung “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders,” the Times reports.
🔫 3) Google Renounces AI Weapons; Will Still Work With Military [Bloomberg] — After unrest among staff, Google “pledged not to use its powerful artificial intelligence for weapons, illegal surveillance and technologies that cause ‘overall harm,'” but will keep working with the military, Mark Bergen reports.
📱4) Apple iOS 12: the biggest new features coming to the iPhone [The Verge] — Among the tweaks to Apple’s newest mobile operating system, writes Chris Welch, are Screen Time (reveals how much time you’re spending on your device); grouped notifications (to try to tame alert chaos); Group FaceTime (for video-calling with friends); and Memoji (a Bitmoji-like feature that lets you craft an emoji that looks like you).
📺 5) Amazon Scores Rights Deal for English Premier League Soccer [WSJ] — The deal allows the Seattle giant to stream in the UK 20 matches a season on Amazon Prime. “But the move represents a significant boost to Amazon’s so-far modest foray into live sporting events,” my WSJ colleagues write.
🍴 6) Anthony Bourdain loved Asia without fetishizing it. And Asia loved him back [Quartz] — “Anthony Bourdain was, in many ways, the US’s top ambassador to Asia,” Anne Quito writes. RIP.
🍔 7) The Ultimate Guide to Regional Beach Food in America [Eater] — Sadly, the shrimpburgers at Beaufort, S.C.’s Shrimp Shack appear not to have made this otherwise fine list.
🔑 8) Web surfing #ProTips of the week: 27 Incredibly Useful Things You Didn’t Know Chrome Could Do Shift-Control-T to re-open a recently closed tab, which I discovered a few months back, is a game changer. (Thanks, Mech!)
🌿 9) Gorgeous Japanese thing of the week: The Japanese Mini Truck Garden Contest is a Whole New Genre in Landscaping [Spoon & Tamago] — Every year the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors puts on a contest in which landscapers build (super cool) mini-gardens in the backs of pickup trucks. Click through for pics; more images here and here.
🍉 10) Silly dog of the week: This very good boy eats watermelon in a spectacularly gentle fashion [Twitter video].
🔥 Quote of the week:
“Maybe you’ve seen people doing this in public and thought, what is that person doing with those bonded sheets of paper. FYI, it’s called reading a goddamned book.”
That’s from an excellent video by The Onion called Increase Your Cognitive Ability By Reading A Fucking Book For Once.
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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley
When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
— Albert Camus, goalkeeper and philosopher
When I was eighteen years old, during the fall of my freshman year, I started in goal as my college soccer team faced off at home against a particularly difficult opponent.
I can’t remember the scoreline. We lost either 3-1. Maybe it was 4-1. Or 5-2.
But I certainly remember the two disastrous goals I allowed.
On the first, a teammate played a back pass to me on the left side of the goal, from close range. I was being closed down by an attacker.
Rather than use my stronger right foot to simply play it out of touch, I struck it with my left foot and played a poor, low clearance not far into the midfield.
It went straight to one of their players, who passed it to another, who then scored into the empty goal.
On the second, later in the game — probably still rattled from the first error — I let a well-hit shot slightly to my left squirm under me and over the goal line. I should have saved it.
Near the end of the match I also saved a penalty, diving to my left and steering the shot around the post, but by then it was too late.
The game was lost.
And it was because of me.
Today, more than two decades later, those two errors are still fresh in my mind. They’re right there on the surface of my memory, as if I’d committed them only last week. The many other saves I made over the years, rescuing points for my teammates or winning matches in penalty shootouts, and buried deep down below.
For perspective: I made those howlers my freshman year in front of 21 other players, our coaches and subs, and the students, parents and other members of public sitting in small grandstands.
A few weekends ago Loris Karius, Liverpool’s 24-year-old German goalkeeper, made two mistakes that were technically worse than mine.
And he committed them on the biggest stage in club football and in front of an audience of millions, in the Champions League final against Real Madrid. (To be clear, Karius is approximately 1000% better than I ever was. I am in no way comparing myself to him in terms of skill!)
On the first, he was too casual in rolling a ball out of the back, allowing Karim Benzema to stick out a leg and redirect it into the goal.
I think Liverpool wanted to play it quickly out of the back, Karius got the ball and looked to distribute it quickly, and just didn’t expect Benzema to get to him as rapidly as he did.
But rule number one when you have the ball in your hands is safety first; never relinquish possession in the back. He could have just waited a few moments for Benzema to drift away, or he could have faked the throw first to see what Benzema did.
On the second error, Karius let a long-range Gareth Bale shot that was basically coming right at him squirm through his hands and into the goal.
On this one, Karius was attempting to catch it, and the swerve on the ball deceived him. But he could easily have patted it down or just pushed it away rather than trying to hold it. Perhaps he was (understandably) shaken from the first goal, and this shot from distance gave him too much time to think. Hence the mental error.
Liverpool lost 3-1, with the difference being the two poor goals Karius allowed.
(It has since emerged that Karius may have suffered a concussion earlier in the game, which could have affected his performance. At first I dismissed the idea that a head injury may have affected him, because it didn’t seem like an earlier collision with Real’s Sergio Ramos was especially severe, and didn’t seem outwardly wobbly. But I’ve since read that concussions can manifest themselves in various ways.)
I really feel for Karius.
Such were the magnitude of his errors that the final will be remembered more for his mistakes than for Real’s second goal — an overhead Bale kick — that may go down as the best ever scored in the competition.
(It was, truly, an excellent game. There were injuries, fouls, play acting, everything.)
I bet that Karius has played his last game for Liverpool. He obviously has all the physical tools to play at the very highest level, and I’m sure he’ll have a productive career (perhaps outside of England).
But unless he goes on to win the Champions League with another side, or lifts the World Cup with Germany — both of which are extreme long shots — he will be known the rest of his life for his meltdown in Kiev.
If nothing else, goalkeeping builds character. It teaches you, often at a young age, to deal with failure and humiliation in front of your peers and the public, whether it’s a few dozen people at a college game or a global audience of millions.
Edition 137 of my email newsletter went out on Sunday.
If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.
Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.
🇬🇧 1) Must-read of the week, despite having nothing to do with tech: British Expert on the Royal Family Is Actually Tommy From Upstate New York [Wall Street Journal] — In this masterful A-hed, my colleague Bradley Hope reveals that purported royal commentator Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills, Esq. — who has appeared on the BBC and in the Economist, speaking in a posh British accent — is Thomas “Tommy” Muscatello.
He grew up in upstate New York, went to college at Coastal Carolina in Myrtle Beach, S.C., then apparently moved to the U.K. — and reinvented himself. So fascinating.
📹 2) Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018 [PewInternet.org] — When it comes to internet platforms, forget Facebook. Teens today are into YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey.
🇨🇳 3) Mary Meeker’s 2018 internet trends report: All the slides, plus analysis [Recode] — Famed Silicon Valley VC Meeker released this week her annual report on big picture tech topics. Of particular interest, writes Rani Molla:
China is catching up as a hub to the world’s biggest internet companies. Currently, China is home to nine of the world’s 20 biggest internet companies by market cap while the U.S. has 11. Five years ago, China had two and the U.S. had nine.
🏻 4) 82-Year-Old Proves You’re Never Too Old to Code [AARP] — Japan’s Masako Wakamiya, a retired bank clerk, learned Apple’s Swift programming language and created a free iOS game. You can find it here.
🕵️ 5) The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account [The Ringer] — Does the president of basketball operations for the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers take to the platform anonymously?
🥂 6) Long-read of the week: Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It [NY Mag/The Cut] — The story of how Anna Delvey, a young and seemingly moneyed German socialite, played a long con on a handful of rich folks in New York.
🦈 7) Great White Sharks Have A Secret ‘Cafe,’ And They Led Scientists Right To It [NPR] — Why do these creatures head to a remote part of the ocean one thousand miles off the Baja Coast? Turns out they’re after a “a complete food chain” built on plant life that exits deep underwater.
🕉️ 8) The one “fascinating” mind-training exercise Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella practices every day [Quartz] — TLDR: Before you get out of bed, take a deep breath, identify something for which you’re grateful, set your intention for the day, then feel your feet.
🎧 9) Hurry, Boy, It’s Waiting There for You: Weezer Covers “Africa” [NewYorker.com] — It came, Amanda Petrusich writes, after “nearly six months of devoted needling from a Twitter account dedicated expressly to the cause.” You can listen here.
🐾 10) Silly dog of the week: The Singing Bulldog [Neatorama/YouTube] — Walter the French bulldog doesn’t bark. He sings.
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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley
Edition 136 of my email newsletter went out a couple weeks back.
If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.
Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.
🛵 1) By me, with a colleague, in The WSJ: Hot on the Wheels of Grab, Go-Jek Rides Further Into Southeast Asia. The story begins:
Motorcycle-taxi service PT Go-Jek Indonesia will invest $500 million to expand its operations in Southeast Asia, revving up competition in a fast-growing consumer market just two months after Uber Technologies Inc. reached a landmark deal to exit from the region.
The Indonesian company said in a statement Thursday it plans to enter Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines in the next few months and is currently working with regulators and stakeholders across the region.
Go-Jek will initially offer motorcycle-hailing services in Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, and provide traditional taxi services in Singapore, where motorcycle taxis aren’t permitted, a company spokesman said. The move, in effect, puts Go-Jek in direct competition with regional market leader Grab Inc.
🚫 2) Cautionary tale of the week: Amazon Alexa-Powered Device Recorded and Shared User’s Conversation Without Permission [WSJ] — /Begin rant/ Not to beat a dead horse, but Newley’s Notes readers have been warned about these devices on several occasions. Think long and hard about installing one in your house, if you’re privacy-conscious. Consider Amazon’s business model — selling you stuff — and how that might inform their product strategy. Same with Google Home. The Big G is an advertising company fueled by personal data. And it should come as no surprise that Facebook is also said to be considering getting into the connected speaker business. /End rant/
🤑 3) Tech longread of the week: How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men [The New Yorker] — “Once, Mad Men ruled advertising,” Ken Auletta writes. “They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men — the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence.”
💉 4) Tech video of the week: The Theranos deception — “60 Minutes” sums up the Theranos scandal — uncovered by The WSJ‘s John Carreyrou — in this 14-minute piece. Carreyrou’s new book, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” is just out.
🃏 5) How Trump changed everything for The Onion — [Politico] — How do you make jokes about a president who “often defies satire“? Politico’s Andrew Restuccia interviews The Onion‘s editor in chief, Chad Nackers.
🎹 6) The Songs of the Years, 1925-2018 [Kottke.org] — A simple, cool idea: a playlist featuring one song from each year, running through the decades. On Spotify here; on Apple Music here; on Google Play Music here.
⚽ 7) Soccer trend piece of the week: A New Atlanta, United by Soccer [New York Times] — “For 10 years, I didn’t look at Atlanta as my home,” one fan of the new MLS side Atlanta United says in this story about how team has built its fan base. “Now, Atlanta United is the glue to the community for me.”
💯 8) Soccer goal of the week/year/decade/in Champion’s League history? A must-see from Gareth Bale in Real Madrid’s 3-1 win over Liverpool yesterday. On YouTube (for now at least) here. And here’s a fan’s view on Twitter.
😂 9) One silly thing: Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas “Outtakes.” [YouTube] — Fantastic.
📚10) A quote I’ve been pondering:
If you want to think long-term, you can’t spend all day reading things that train your brain to twitch.
That’s from Wall Street Journal investing columnist Jason Zweig — one of the sharpest minds out there on behavior and money — describing what he reads and why.
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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley
Edition 135 of my email newsletter went out a few weeks back.
If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.
Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.
💬 1) By me in The WSJ: Think American Elections Are Bad? Indian Voters Get 1,000 Texts a Day [WSJ] — A story with my colleagues about how political parties in India are turning WhatsApp into a potent communications weapon. The opening few grafs:
For Gurupad Kolli, a 40-year-old lawyer who lives in a remote Indian village, the torrent of WhatsApp messages surging to his phone a few weeks ago meant one thing: election day was near.
They’re at turns strident, angry, buoyant, informative, misleading, gripping and confusing, he says. Some days he received as many as 1,000 of them through the popular messaging service. Pleased to no longer “depend on the mass media like newspapers,” the resident of Ramapur village in the southern state of Karnataka nonetheless also conceded “there’s so much false and fake news going around.”
He isn’t alone in his bewilderment. The rapidly falling cost of smartphones and mobile data in the world’s second-most-populous nation has turbocharged the spread of WhatsApp, where it is growing far faster than other social media and messaging platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
🥚 2) By me on my blog: Delhi Snapshot: Transporting Eggs [Newley.com] — Delhi traffic is no joke. I snapped a pic of perhaps the coolest customer in all of this teeming metropolis.
✏️ 3) You Can Draw, and Probably Better Than I Can [RogerEbert.com] — Not new, but new to me: an inspiring 2011 post from the late film critic Roger Ebert on the pleasures of drawing and the risks of perfectionism. Just doing the sketching, and not worrying about getting every little detail right, is crucial — and something I always struggle with as I continue by own drawing and watercolor painting, since accuracy is so central to my day job. (Via Austin Kleon.)
🎮 4) Tech longread of the week: How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds [New Yorker] — Nick Paumgarten has the crazy stats:
Released last September, it is right now by many measures the most popular video game in the world. At times, there have been more than three million people playing it at once. It has been downloaded an estimated sixty million times.
And the wider significance:
Game fads come and go: Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What people seem to agree on, whether they’re seasoned gamers or dorky dads, is that there’s something new emerging around Fortnite, a kind of mass social gathering, open to a much wider array of people than the games that came before.
👂 5) We Made a Tool So You Can Hear Both Yanny and Laurel [NY Times] — Obligatory entry about this week’s internet “controversy.” TLDR: Your interpretation depends on the frequencies you hear.
💊 6) My Adventures with the Trip Doctors [NY Times Magazine] — Last week I pointed to Michael Pollan’s WSJ essay adapted from his new book about promising new research into psychedelics. He’s back with another piece, this one looking at the therapists working underground to treat patients.
🗣️ 7) What Google isn’t telling us about its AI demo [Axios] — Remember that bit I mentioned last week about Google showcasing new tech in which an artificial intelligence system carried on a real-life conversation with unwitting participants? Google won’t say if the audio was edited, Axios’s Dan Primack reports.
⛵ 8) This Armada of Saildrones Could Conquer the Ocean [Bloomberg Businessweek] — A fascinating profile (with cool visuals) by Ashlee Vance of Richard Jenkins, whose vision is to launch 1,000 seafaring robots for tasks like collecting scientific data and prospecting for oil and gas.
⚡ 9) Headline of the week: Motorised shed hits 100mph to break speed record at Pendine Sands [BBC News] — Hats off to 53-year-old Kevin Nicks, from England, for this spectacularly silly feat.
🤭 10) Fail of the week: Hilarious video as man tumbles down set of steps into Thames [YouTube] — I love a good fail video. And this one is excellent, from the narration to the blooper itself to the fact that they guy wasn’t hurt. I only hope it wasn’t staged. It’s an instant classic for me, right up there with 2012’s “Catch the Ice Dude.”
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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley
Spotted this here in New Delhi a while back and meant to share here.
Yes, this appears to be a dad driving a motorbike, with his son in front and his daughter behind him.
Then on the back is the mom. With a goat on her lap.
Fun for the whole family (including pet and/or working animal and/or dinner).