Categories
Newley's Notes

NN326: Great Dainties

HK license plate: "Work Hard"

Sent as a newsletter on November 30, 2023. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of Newley's Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.

Image of the week, above:

💪 Keep on hustling, Hong Kong! (Thanks, Kinan T!)

My WSJ latest:

I had an exclusive out Thursday with my colleague Neil Western. The headline: A British Businessman Worked in China for Decades. Then, He Vanished.<– 🎁 Gift link

It began:

HONG KONG—Ian J. Stones, a British business executive, worked in China for four decades, including with big U.S. firms such as General Motors and Pfizer before setting up his own consulting firm. Then, in 2018, he disappeared from public view.

Stones has been detained in China since then with no public mention of the case from Chinese or U.K. authorities.

The quiet detention of a foreign businessman who is well known within China’s business community underscores the risks of operating in the country, which has an opaque legal system that is controlled by the ruling Communist Party.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal that Stones had been sentenced to five years in prison for illegally selling intelligence to overseas parties. The ministry said he appealed his conviction but the appeal was rejected in September last year.

Informed of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s response, Stones’s daughter, Laura Stones, said neither the family nor British embassy staff had been permitted to see any of the legal documents related to the case, and therefore she couldn’t comment on the details.

“There has been no confession to the alleged crime, however my father has stoically accepted and respects that under Chinese law he must serve out the remainder of his sentence,” she said.

The story was picked up by BBC News, various UK tabloids, the AP, the Financial Times, and the New York Times, among others.

My latest at Newley.com:

📸 Earlier this month I posted My 12 Favorite Photos of 2023. They feature images I captured in Bangkok, Washington, D.C., Macau and, of course, Hong Kong.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🍿 The Oscar nominations are out and include all of the year's best-known films, though “Barbie” director director Greta Gerwig and actress Margot Robbie missed out.

2) 🤖 Japanese author Rie Kudan says she used ChatGPT to write her recently released, award-winning sci-fi novel.

3) 🧠 Members of Gen Z around the world appear to splitting along ideological lines, with women much more liberal than men.

4) ✈️ Has a Charleston, S.C. real-estate investor located Amelia Earhart's long-lost plane deep in the Pacific Ocean? 🎁 <– WSJ gift link

5) 🇪🇨 Archaeologists have uncovered details about a huge settlement that existed in Ecuador's Amazon some 2,500 years ago.

6) 🚀 Trailer of the week: “Spaceman,” an apparently trippy, very serious sci-fi film from the director of “Chernobyl” – and starring Adam Sandler.

7) 🌋 Here are some surreal photos of lava flowing into a town in Iceland.

8) 🏀 There is now a full-length basketball court in a terminal at the Indianapolis International Airport.

9) 🐶 Was Bobbi, the Rafeiro do Alentejo dog who died in October in Portugal, really 31 years old?

10) 🐀 Two words: rat selfies.

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“If I fits, I sits”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.” –Nadine Gordimer

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Categories
Journalism

A British Businessman Worked in China for Decades. Then, He Vanished.

A British Businessman Worked in China for Decades. Then, He Vanished.

That’s the headline on my newest story, an exclusive with my colleague Neil Western out Thurs.

It begins: <– Gift link

HONG KONG—Ian J. Stones, a British business executive, worked in China for four decades, including with big U.S. firms such as General Motors and Pfizer before setting up his own consulting firm. Then, in 2018, he disappeared from public view.

Stones has been detained in China since then with no public mention of the case from Chinese or U.K. authorities.

The quiet detention of a foreign businessman who is well known within China’s business community underscores the risks of operating in the country, which has an opaque legal system that is controlled by the ruling Communist Party.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal that Stones had been sentenced to five years in prison for illegally selling intelligence to overseas parties. The ministry said he appealed his conviction but the appeal was rejected in September last year.

Informed of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s response, Stones’s daughter, Laura Stones, said neither the family nor British embassy staff had been permitted to see any of the legal documents related to the case, and therefore she couldn’t comment on the details.

“There has been no confession to the alleged crime, however my father has stoically accepted and respects that under Chinese law he must serve out the remainder of his sentence,” she said.

Click through to read the rest.

Categories
Photos

My 12 Favorite Photos of 2023

📸 Here are my 12 favorite photos from 2023, ranging from images I snapped here in Hong Kong to others in Macau, Bangkok, and Washington, D.C.

I took most with my iPhone 12, and a few with my Fujifilm X100V — a camera I love but am still learning to make the most of.

May your 2024 be full of memorable scenes!

Bangkok morning

HK many with umbrella

Rainy HK

HK MTR

DC National Mall

Macau

Macau at night

HK building

HK street scene

Bangkok

HK skyline at night

Categories
Journalism Tech

Steamy Romances and Vampires: The Chinese-Backed App Appealing to American Moms

WSJ article on ReelShort

That’s the headline on my newest story, which I wrote with my colleague Rachel Liang. It was out Tuesday.

It begins: <– 🎁 Gift link

Joey Jia witnessed the 2020 implosion of short-form video app Quibi and thought: I can do better.

Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s high-profile but short-lived startup charged users $4.99 a month for slick content meant to appeal to a wide user base. Jia, a veteran of Chinese tech companies, says he saw a market in the U.S. for a cheaper streaming app with a narrower target audience.

Last year, Jia launched ReelShort targeting women, especially stay-at-home moms between the ages of 18 and 45, who he says love romance and fantasy stories. It draws on the success of similar apps in his native China, featuring dramas with episodes that last about a minute, compared with Quibi’s five to 10 minutes.

ReelShort specializes in bingeable, steamy romances, tangled family dramas, handsome billionaires, beautiful women—and vampires and werewolves. The actors are mostly Western, and the dialogue is in English.

The formula is gaining traction with American consumers. The app briefly surpassed ByteDance’s TikTok as the most downloaded entertainment app in Apple’s App Store last month. Of the 16 million global downloads the app has garnered so far, some 4.8 million are in the U.S., making it the company’s biggest market, according to mobile data and analytics provider Data.ai. More than 60% of the firm’s revenue comes from the U.S., according to Jia.

Click through to read the rest.

Categories
Life Movies TV

My favorite TV shows, movies, and music* of 2023

Hong Kong sunset
My favorite sunset of 2023

*Also: favorite goal and save! Read on…

Following my post on the standout books I read this year, here’s the best of what I watched and listened to in 2023:

📺 TV

— “Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street” (Netflix) This documentary series reinforced for me not just how shocking his crimes were, but how much his victims suffered.

— “Wham!” (Netflix) George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley, 80s pop music. What more do you need to know?

— “Beckham” (Netflix) An entertaining recap of David Beckham’s career, including the meme-spawning scene (YouTube link) with wife Victoria in which he presses her to admit that she enjoyed an advantaged upbringing.

— “Better Call Saul.” (AMC/Netflix) Though this series ended in 2022, I’m including it here since I finished it this year. A superb show that rivals even the great “Breaking Bad,” from which it was spun off.

🎥 Movies

“Oppenheimer.” Of course. Sprawling, ambitious, polished. Incredible soundscapes. Moves along crisply despite its three-hour length.

🎸 Music

The Hold Steady, “The Price of Progress.” Soaring rock anthems. (YouTube link)

Runner up: Buck Meek, “Haunted Mountain.” I’m in love with the title track (YouTube link).

⚽️ BONUS 1: Best Goal of the Year

As an Arsenal fan, I have to pick Bukayo Saka’s long-range stunner in a 3-2 win against Manchester United in January. (YouTube link)

🧤BONUS 2: And as a (gracefully aging) goalkeeper, I admired Aaron Ramsdale’s dive high to his right to save a deflected Mohamed Salah shot in a 2-2 Arsenal draw against Liverpool. (YouTube link) (Amazingly, Ramsdale’s now out of the side, but that’s a story for another time. Did I mention I’m an Arsenal fan?)

Categories
Books

The Best Books I Read in 2023

Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

Here's my annual rundown of the standout books I read this year.

Like in previous roundups, I’m not confining myself to books published in the last 12 months.

My nonfiction picks span the global semiconductor industry, equitable parenting, and – thanks to Netflix – the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

For fiction, I completed a trilogy by my new favorite spy thriller author and took in a sprawling Jonathan Franzen family saga.

As ever, I prefer physical books over e-books. I like the sensory experience of holding books in my hands. I like gazing at the cover art. I like tracking my progress through the pages and flipping forward and backward. And most of all, I like the ability to mark up the pages for future reference.

My reading wasn't as focused on particular topics as it's been in previous years. But I've tried to keep in mind what the great Charlie Munger once said: “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.”

Here goes:

Nonfiction

  • Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology – This acclaimed 2022 book provides a timely, accessible introduction to the global semiconductor industry. Miller, a history professor at Tufts University, describes how scientists developed the staggeringly complex technology over the decades.

    He also shows why semiconductors are crucial for everything from missiles to smartphones and kitchen appliances. And the book hammers home just how vulnerable global semiconductor supply chains are to geopolitical tensions, and makes clear why Beijing is pouring resources into bolstering China's domestic chip-making capabilities.

  • Russell King, Rajneeshpuram: Inside the Cult of Baghwan and Its Failed American Utopia – Like many others, I enjoyed the 2018 Netflix documentary series “Wild, Wild Country.” I found the series fascinating given my roots in Eastern Oregon and our time in India, so I decided to do some reading on the movement.

    In this book, out last year, Russell King puts his skill as an attorney to work in reconstructing a timeline of Baghwan's life in India. King documents the growth of Baghwan's ashram in Pune, and then his migration to rural Oregon in the early 1980s, where the documentary picks up.

    While the Netflix series is sympathetic to many members of the group interviewed, including the memorable Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneeshpuram includes a fuller account of the group's many alleged crimes and misdeeds in Oregon. They include the poisoning of more than 700 people in a town near the Rajneeshees' ranch that still ranks as the U.S.'s largest biological terror attack, plans to assassinate public officials, the disregard for homeless people brought to the ranch, and the forced isolation of Rajneeshees who contracted HIV.

  • Subhuti Anand Waight, Wild Wild Guru: An insider's account of his life with Bhagwan, the world's most controversial guru – Next up was this 2019 account by a Bhagwan devotee who left a job in journalism in the UK to live in the guru's Pune ashram, then later traveled westward to the U.S.

    The book provides a sense of Baghwan's appeal to hippies at the time: You can strive to reach enlightenment, he preached, but rather than sacrifice earthly delights as an ascetic would, you can still indulge in all manner of corporeal pleasures.

    Perhaps most instructive for me was to see how a devotee can, after all these years, appear to gloss over the great damage the Rajneeshees inflicted on neighbors and various vulnerable people. The author's message seems to be: We were a religious movement persecuted for being different; sure, there were a few bad apples, but no one knew about their shenanigans; ultimately those uptight Americans just couldn't accept us for being different.

  • George Friedman, The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond. Geopolitical forecaster Friedman in his well-known The Next 100 Years looked at global trends. In this 2020 book he projects what's in store for the U.S.

    Friedman says this decade will continue to prove tumultuous because a historical cycle that governs institutional change is converging with a similar socio-economical cycle. He's bullish on the U.S. over the long term, though, because the country is blessed with a favorable geography, a powerful economy, and an inherent dynamism. We'll weather the storm, he argues.

  • Eve Rodsky, Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). My wife, who is brilliant and well-read, suggested this 2019 book. I'm glad she did.

    Rodsky, trained as a lawyer, provides a template for couples that encourages men to own their share of work that goes into running a household and raising kids. That way, “shefault” parents — women — can do less of the cognitive, invisible labor that make homes function.

Fiction

  • Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads: a Novel I didn't expect to find a nearly 600-page-long family saga set in 1970s Illinois and focusing on a minister and his family to be so absorbing, but I did.

    Perhaps that's a testament to Franzen's storytelling skills, or simply my tastes, as I've read nearly everything he's written. In this 2021 work, I loved the characters (particularly the memorable Marion Hildebrandt), I loved the dialogue, I loved the vivid scenes. Apparently the first in a trilogy. I'll be reading the titles that follow.

  • Jason Matthews, The Palace of Treason and The Kremlin's Candidate. Thanks to my friend Stuart H. for suggesting, since I love spy fiction, that I check out 2013's Red Sparrow trilogy.

    The first in the series, called Red Sparrow: a Novel, introduces us to Russian spy Dominika Egorova and her handler, Nathanial Nash. This year I enjoyed the final two books, which came out in 2015 and 2018.

    Matthews spent more than three decades as a CIA officer, mostly stationed abroad and involved in clandestine work, before trying his hand at fiction. The books contain detailed depictions of modern spy-craft, are well-paced, and are imbued with Matthews's take on modern-day Russia. Among the characters, for example, is one Vladimir Putin.

    Matthews also no doubt drew upon his years of experience to portray idealistic but imperfect CIA staff who fight for America's interests. Sadly, he died a few years ago at the age of 69, leaving just the three books behind.

  • Ernest Cline, Ready Player One Some works of fiction are so frequently discussed that you have to read them to know what everyone's talking about. This 2011 book is one.

    Set in a dystopian 2045, it is popular for its focus on 1980s pop culture, such as video games and music, which are of course ancient history for the book's characters. Viewed today, with Mark Zuckerberg and other believers touting the metaverse it's interesting to see how Cline viewed the possibility of future virtual realms taking shape.

My previous annual best books lists: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016.

Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas. Antwerp, Belgium: Interior of Museum Plantin-Moretus, via Wikimedia Commons

Categories
Newley's Notes

NN324: Pink’s Pacy Performance

Food in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Sent as a newsletter on November 30, 2023. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of Newley's Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.

Image of the week, above:

🇹🇭 Work recently took me to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I caught up with an old buddy. And we ate some deliciously spicy food. Is there anything better in this world?

My WSJ latest:

🤖 I helped last week with a story about OpenAI's new board. (More on the OpenAI saga below.) The headline: Larry Summers Is OpenAI’s Surprise Pick to Mend Fences <– 🎁 Gift link

🇨🇳 And earlier this month I had a page one story with my colleagues Stella Yifan Xie and Rachel Liang. The headline: Big Western Brands Are Getting Squeezed by Chinese Belt-Tightening <– 🎁 Gift link

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🌎 Henry Kissinger died at the age of 100, “bringing to a close one of the most polarizing and influential diplomatic lives in U.S. history,” reads his WSJ obituary by Alan Cullison.

2) 📈 Also passing away in recent days: investing billionaire Charlie Munger. “Few people have ever been wealthier, in all the senses of the word, than Munger was,” writes WSJ Intelligent Investor columnist Jason Zweig.

3) 🤖 Elsewhere, WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims on the recent turmoil that shook the AI world: “Sam Altman’s triumph in remaining OpenAI’s CEO was also a win for those seeking the swift development of artificial intelligence.”

4) 💻 Related longread of the week, by Stephen Witt in the New Yorker: “How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution.”

5) 🚂 Trains.fyi is a “live, real-time map of passenger train locations in North America.”

6) 🇧🇹 Is Bhutan secretly mining Bitcoin?

7) 🩳 Comedian Matt Ruby: “We’re still coming to terms with all the different ways pandemic broke us. Perhaps the most unsightly: It normalized employed men dressing like trash.”

8) 🐕 A new drug that could help large dogs live longer is moving toward FDA approval.

9) 🎧 Podcast of the week: Harvard professor and author Arthur Brooks speaks with Peter Attia about happiness and building a life of meaning.

10) 📚 One hundred notable books of 2023, from the New York Times.

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

🐶 “Don't blink or you'll miss it.”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” – William Butler Yeats

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Categories
Newley's Notes

NN322: WFH Wonderdogs

Run for Evan

Sent as a newsletter on October 30, 2023. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.

Image of the week, above:

🏃‍♂️ Members of our WSJ Hong Kong bureau participated in #IRunForEvan on Thursday – a jog to mark our colleague Evan Gershkovich’s 32nd birthday. It’s now been more than 30 weeks since he was wrongly detained in Russia for doing his job.

My WSJ latest:

🗞 My latest, an Oct. 21 scoop with my colleagues Sam Schechner and Jeff Horwitz.

The headline: Inside Meta, Debate Over What’s Fair in Suppressing Comments in the Palestinian Territories. <– 🎁 Gift link

It began:

After Hamas stormed Israel and murdered civilians on Oct. 7, hateful comments from the region surged through Instagram. Meta Platforms managers cranked up automatic filters meant to slow the flood of violent and harassing content.

But still the comments kept appearing—especially from the Palestinian territories, according to a Meta manager. So Meta turned up its filters again, but only there.

In an internal forum for Muslim employees, objections poured in.

“What we’re saying and what we’re doing seem completely opposed at the moment,” one employee posted internally, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta has publicly pledged to apply its policies equally around the world.

The social media giant has been wrestling with how best to enforce its content rules in the midst of the brutal and chaotic war. Meta relies heavily on automation to police Instagram and Facebook, but those tools can stumble: They have struggled to parse the Palestinian Arabic dialect and in some cases they don’t have enough Hebrew-language data to work effectively.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🇨🇳 Longread of the week: The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos on “China’s age of malaise.”

2) 📹 A new component of war and terrorist attacks in 2023: ubiquitous videos of violence.

3) 🔥 Charlottesville, Virginia’s divisive statue of Robert E. Lee has been melted down and will be made into a new piece of public art.

4) 🐦 One year after Elon Musk took over Twitter, daily active users, downloads, and ad revenues are all down – though engagement with his account is at all time high. <– 🎁 WSJ gift link

5) 🔨 Shot: While slick influencers dominate Instagram, some of TikTok’s biggest global stars are blue collar workers…

6) 🏍 Chaser: …And gig workers in Latin America are creating viral pop hits.

7) 🧠 The 12 problems that influence author Ted Gioia’s work and thinking.

8) 🎧 Vinyl fans are revolting after the popular Discogs website raised fees.

9) ⚽ Lionel Messi’s pink Inter Miami jersey cannot be made fast enough to keep up with demand (Thanks, Anasuya!).

10) 🐕 Canine-related music story of the week: the Danish Chamber Orchestra brought in three dogs to participate in a recent symphony. (Thanks, Beth D-B!)

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“I work from home so they’re with me all day. This is still the reaction I get when I finish for the day.”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

•••

🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of pups that are so stoked their owners have clocked off.

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Categories
Journalism Tech

Inside Meta, Debate Over What’s Fair in Suppressing Comments in the Palestinian Territories

Meta Israel Hamas

That’s the headline on my latest story, an October 21 exclusive with my colleagues Sam Schechner and Jeff Horwitz.

It begins <– free link 🎁

After Hamas stormed Israel and murdered civilians on Oct. 7, hateful comments from the region surged through Instagram. Meta Platforms managers cranked up automatic filters meant to slow the flood of violent and harassing content.

But still the comments kept appearing—especially from the Palestinian territories, according to a Meta manager. So Meta turned up its filters again, but only there.

In an internal forum for Muslim employees, objections poured in.

“What we’re saying and what we’re doing seem completely opposed at the moment,” one employee posted internally, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta has publicly pledged to apply its policies equally around the world.

The social media giant has been wrestling with how best to enforce its content rules in the midst of the brutal and chaotic war. Meta relies heavily on automation to police Instagram and Facebook META 2.91%increase; green up pointing triangle, but those tools can stumble: They have struggled to parse the Palestinian Arabic dialect and in some cases they don’t have enough Hebrew-language data to work effectively.

In one recent glitch, Instagram’s automatic translations of users’ profiles started rendering the word “Palestinian” along with an emoji and an innocuous Arabic phrase as “Palestinian terrorists.”

And when Meta turns to human employees to fill the gaps, some teams have different views on how the rules should be applied, and to whom.

Click through to read the rest.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

Billionaire Bets That a $12 Mobile Phone Can Get More of the World’s Most Populous Country Online

Jio phone 4G

That’s the title of my latest story, out Thursday. It begins: 🎁 <-- free link

Even as 5G mobile networks begin to expand in India, about half of the country’s 1.4 billion people remain disconnected from the Internet.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani is betting a new web-enabled mobile phone that costs about $12 can change that and win yet more customers for his dominant wireless-network provider.

The device, launched in July by Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm, resembles the simple, durable Nokia phones from decades past. It has a physical keyboard, a small screen and a camera, and comes in basic colors like blue, black, gray and red.

While the device isn’t 5G-capable, it offers 4G speeds, meaning it can stream music and video via pre-installed apps from Reliance Jio’s services, which include content such as Bollywood films, cricket matches and pop music. The phone can also be used to make digital payments, a practice that has boomed in India in recent years.

Many Indians who are online access the Internet via smartphones. But a smartphone in India typically costs more than $250, far out of reach for millions of people who make just a few dollars a day.

“There are still 250 million mobile-phone users in India who remain trapped in the 2G era, unable to tap into basic features of the internet,” Akash Ambani, Mukesh Ambani’s son and the chairman of Reliance Jio, said when launching the phone. He was referring to people using basic mobile devices, which often lack web connections.

Click through to read the rest.