📸 Here are my 12 favorite snaps from the year.
I’ve become more and more interested in street photography of late.
Happily, I live in Hong Kong, one of the world’s most photographically rich cities!
I took some of these with my iPhone 15 and the others with my Fujifilm X100V, a camera I really love.
Click on the images for bigger versions.
Here’s to a 2025 full of great captures!
Previously: My 12 Favorite Photos of 2023.
“Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.”
– Khaled Hosseini
It’s time again for my annual recap of the best books I read during the year.
As ever, I’m not restricting myself to works published during the past twelve months. (Though one of my picks came out in 2024.)
And, as I’ve noted in previous roundups, I remain committed to reading in print whenever possible.
In a world awash in the digital, holding a book in one’s hands almost feels like a small act of rebellion. There are no notifications. You don’t scroll. There are no batteries to deplete or screens to crack.
I also relish the tactile experience: turning the pages, looking at the book’s cover, getting a sense of how far I have to go until the end, and being able to mark up passages for future reference.
Of course, e-readers like the Kindle, and the Kindle app, are convenient. Many people have recommended to me Libby, which lets you borrow e-books from your library. I’ll give it a shot.
And then there are audiobooks. Many people love them. I’m ambivalent, mostly because I fear listening to text will cheat of me of having read it, lessening its impact. But I probably need to loosen up on that.
Apparently there’s a debate raging online about whether or not listening to a book counts as having read it. What do you think?
Anyway, on to my picks.
This year was an outlier because I read almost entirely fiction. Which is a good thing! I’ve read mostly nonfiction in many years past, and wanted to change that.
In previous, nonfiction-dominated years I’d sometimes read around a theme, picking titles to learn more about a particular topic. That may have provided some kind of retrospective coherence to what I’d ingested.
In addition to the selections below, I’m about three quarters of the way through an 800-page work of classical Russian fiction that I’ll share more about when I’ve finished.
Here goes:
Told in direct, crisp prose, it’s the story of protagonist William Stoner. He was born on a Missouri farm in the late 19th century, appeared destined for a life of agrarian toil, but then was lucky enough to attend college.
There, he falls in love with literature. He builds a career as an English professor – and suffers decades of professional and personal disappointments. But he is sustained by his academic work and his belief in the power of literature, providing his life with deep meaning.
The book’s evocative closing scene will remain with me for a long time.
This western, which came out five years before “Stoner,” takes place in 19th century Kansas. The main character is a Harvard dropout who journeys west in search of adventure. He finds it by joining a (very eventful) buffalo hunt.
It’s a classic hero’s journey, all about ambition, self-knowledge, and mankind’s destruction of the natural world. Like “Stoner,” it’s beautifully written. (I plan to turn to more of Williams’s work in 2025.)
Multi-generational, with memorable characters, focused on themes of love, pain, loss, belonging, permanence. Set in one of the world’s greatest cities, Bangkok. Reads like a series of short stories that are woven together, with a dose of science-fiction.
Ignatius is always highly readable, and I love his books’ technical details. I find his novels a good place to start if you’d like to get a (fictionalized) sense of tech trends such as quantum computing (“The Quantum Spy”), cybersecurity and digital disinformation (“The Paladin”), etc. This one does that for security and space.
I loved the premise and many of the plot twists, though I felt lost during some portions. And perhaps because it’s translated from Chinese, I found some of the language strained. Still, it’s highly inventive and thought provoking, and the pacing accelerates in the second half of the book.
May your 2025 bring you hours of enjoyable reading.
My previous annual best books lists: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016.
That’s the headline on my latest exclusive, out a few weeks ago.
It generated a lot of reader interest, and was picked up by several news outlets in India and the U.S.
It began: <-- 🎁 Gift link
A U.S. visa program for skilled foreign workers has long stoked concerns over American workers losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. Now a group of experienced American professionals is accusing an Indian outsourcing giant of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas.
The American workers say that India’s Tata Consultancy Services illegally discriminated against them based on their race and age, firing them and shifting some of their work to lower-paid Indian immigrants on temporary work visas.
Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest companies.
The American former TCS employees are Caucasians, Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s and living in more than a dozen U.S. states. Many have master’s of business administration or other advanced degrees, according to the complaints, which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
While companies often conduct layoffs that affect workers with more seniority, the American professionals say TCS broke the law by targeting them based on protected characteristics of age and race. They say the company’s move demonstrated preferential treatment to Indian workers in the U.S. on the coveted visas.
A TCS spokeswoman said allegations that the company engages in unlawful discrimination are meritless and misleading. TCS has a strong record of being an equal opportunity employer in the U.S., acting with integrity in its operations, she said.
Click through to read the rest.
I’m late in posting this, but that was the headline on a story my colleague Vibhuti Agarwal wrote last month.
It began: <-- 🎁 Gift link
NEW DELHI—Gayatari Mohanty always wanted to be a dancer. But her father, who washes cars for a living, and her mother, a domestic helper, didn’t have enough money for lessons. So the 19-year-old New Delhi native taught herself.
One day in 2019, Mohanty discovered TikTok. She and a friend were drawn to the platform’s lighthearted videos. They often rushed home from school to upload clips of Mohanty’s spirited dancing to retro Bollywood songs from the 1960s and 70s.
Soon Mohanty had gained some 5,000 followers. That didn’t make her a star or earn her any money, but it was enough to boost her confidence.
“My skill gave me my biggest achievement in life,” she said. “TikTok became my stage where I could show my dancing skills and get appreciated for it.”
That all ended suddenly the next year, when India’s government banned the Chinese short video-sharing titan, citing cybersecurity concerns.
“It felt like a personal loss, like someone close to me was no more,” she said.
The South Asian nation provides a case study in what happens when the wildly popular service goes away, as it might in the U.S. A bipartisan bill that sailed through the House this month would force parent company ByteDance to sell the platform’s U.S. operations or face a ban. President Biden has said he supports such legislation, which will now go to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain.
Click through to read the rest.
Sent as a newsletter on April 18, 2024. 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.
☔️ Rainy Hong Kong. Snapped today.
1) 👉 Good news: Homicides in many American cities are falling, bringing them back to pre-Covid levels. 🎁 <– WSJ gift link
2) 🚨 An eye-opening look at how cheap and easy it is to build a ChatGPT-powered propaganda “news” website. 🎁 <– WSJ gift link
3) 🖼️ Archaeologists undertaking a new excavation at Pompeii have uncovered some dazzling frescoes.
4) 🦷 And another archeological item of note, from Reddit: “Found a mandible in the travertin floor at my parents house.” Bonus link: an archaeology professor weighs in on the post.
5) 🇭🇰 Finish photographer Mikko Takkunen has released a gorgeous Hong Kong street photography book.
6) 🧭 Is sense of direction a product of our upbringing, rather than being innate?
7) 🌌 Here’s a video demonstrating just how enormous the universe is.
8) 🥊 Brazilian MMA fighter Renato Moicano, after winning a recent contest, praised Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (NSFW: profanity).
9) 🌳 Mental health break: this website immerses you in one-minute videos of parks around the world.
10) 🐀 Please enjoy these rats driving little cars.
•••
“His name is Ares. He runs like a cartoon character.”
•••
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” — Voltaire
•••
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley
Sent as a newsletter on April 8, 2024. 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.
Friday March 29th marked one year since our WSJ colleague Evan Gershkovich was wrongly detained in Russia. This was our powerful page one to mark the anniversary. He should be released immediately.
I had a couple stories out recently that relate to India.
🤳 The first, with my excellent colleague Vibhuti Agarwal: India’s TikTok Ban Is a Cautionary Tale for the U.S. 🎁 <– Gift link
The lede:
NEW DELHI—Gayatari Mohanty always wanted to be a dancer. But her father, who washes cars for a living, and her mother, a domestic helper, didn’t have enough money for lessons. So the 19-year-old New Delhi native taught herself.
One day in 2019, Mohanty discovered TikTok. She and a friend were drawn to the platform’s lighthearted videos. They often rushed home from school to upload clips of Mohanty’s spirited dancing to retro Bollywood songs from the 1960s and 70s.
Soon Mohanty had gained some 5,000 followers. That didn’t make her a star or earn her any money, but it was enough to boost her confidence.
“My skill gave me my biggest achievement in life,” she said. “TikTok became my stage where I could show my dancing skills and get appreciated for it.”
That all ended suddenly the next year, when India’s government banned the Chinese short video-sharing titan, citing cybersecurity concerns.
“It felt like a personal loss, like someone close to me was no more,” she said.
The South Asian nation provides a case study in what happens when the wildly popular service goes away, as it might in the U.S.
👉 And the second, a scoop out March 29 that was widely read, commented on, and picked by other news outlets: Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B Visa Holders 🎁 <– Gift link
It begins:
A U.S. visa program for skilled foreign workers has long stoked concerns over American workers losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. Now a group of experienced American professionals is accusing an Indian outsourcing giant of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas.
The American workers say that India’s Tata Consultancy Services illegally discriminated against them based on their race and age, firing them and shifting some of their work to lower-paid Indian immigrants on temporary work visas.
Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest companies.
1) ☀️ It’s solar eclipse day! If you’re watching from North America, here’s a real time map from NASA.
2) 🔎 Has alleged organized crime boss Christopher Kinahan been inadvertently revealing his whereabouts in Google reviews?
3) 🗣️ Author Paul Tough on his son’s unexpected obsession with learning Russian.
4) 🥾 On the rise of hiking app AllTrails.
5) 🪐 Interactive graphic: how a space elevator would work.
6) 🐐 I love these family portraits of farm animals.
7) 🐻 Also: here are photos of bears riding in a swan boat.
8) 🇧🇪 Belgium’s football association created a special version of its national team kit dedicated to cartoonist Hergé’s Tintin character.
9) 🎶 Three words: Boston Typewriter Orchestra.
10) 🎼 And four more: “The Sound of Knitting.”
•••
“this golden retriever is a professional at swimming”
•••
“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.” — Greg Mckeown
•••
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley
Sent as a newsletter on March 5, 2024. 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.
🇨🇳 I was delighted to participate in a Schwarzman Scholars alumni seminar panel here in Hong Kong on Friday.
📚 The program sponsors recent college graduates from around the world to get a master’s in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Alumni met here in HK over a few days.
📱On the panel, Jen Zhu Scott, Angela Huyue Zhang and I discussed AI and venture capital in China, tech regulations, and more. Lujain Ibrahim moderated.
I talked about some of our recent WSJ stories on the challenges U.S. companies are facing in the country. And we answered some interesting questions from the audience.
1) 🍔 What the rising cost of cheeseburgers says about economic pressures on U.S. restaurants. 🎁 <– WSJ gift link
2) 🫀 Why low-intensity Zone 2 cardio is suddenly all the rage. 🎁 <– WSJ gift link
3) 🤑 How a financial advice columnist fell for a complex scam that cost her $50,000 in cash.
4) 🧠 A first-hand account of living life as a sociopath.
5) 💾 Even cooler than music on vinyl: music on floppy disk.
6) 📺 A guide to choosing video streaming services.
7) 🤳 Selfies are bad for museums.
8) 🧐 “Things Unexpectedly Named After People.”
9) 🌌 For those keen to get their celestial bearings, Galactic Compass is a new app that points to the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
10) 📕 BookPecker: “14509 books summarized in 5 bullet points.”
•••
I’m late in mentioning that earlier this year I read, and absolutely loved, the novel “Bangkok Wakes to Rain,” by Pitchaya Sudbanthad.
It takes place over hundreds of years, spanning multiple generations of Bangkok inhabitants, and touches on themes of love, loss, permanence and meaning.
I wrote a bit more about the book on LinkedIn here.
🇸🇪 If you’re understandably caught up in the “Love is Blind” series on Netflix, don’t miss “Love is Blind: Sweden“! Still plenty of interesting twists and turns, but the drama is handled more…maturely?
Herding the statues (_Thanks, Dad!__)
•••
“Patience is not passive, on the contrary, it is concentrated strength.” — Bruce Lee
•••
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley
Sent as a newsletter on February 15, 2024. 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.
☀️ Sun, tree, shadows. Snapped recently here in Hong Kong.
1) 🇸🇦 Longread of the week, by Bradley Hope in Vanity Fair: “Inside Johnny Depp’s Epic Bromance With Saudi Crown Prince MBS.”
2) 🥽 Also excellent: The great Jaron Lanier in the New Yorker on Apple’s Vision Pro headset and the future of virtual reality.
3) 📻 RIP Bob Edwards, longtime host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
4) 🐅 The London Natural History Museum’s wildlife photographer of the year images are out.
5) 🙇 “How to Study: a Brief Guide.”
6) 🚗 Remarkable video of a Waymo self-driving car in San Francisco that a crowd set on fire.
7) ✍️ Neal Stephenson has a new novel coming out in October, the first in a trilogy.
8) 📍NearbyWiki matches Wikipedia entries to locations on a map.
9) 🐗 Passage of the week: “Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack. But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.”
10) 🐶 Dog-related, belated Valentine’s Day photo: “We snapped this photo at our doggy daycare today. 🥰”
•••
I recently read, and loved, Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s excellent 2019 novel, “Bangkok Wakes to Rain.” I shared a few thoughts on LinkedIn:
The story spans decades and centuries. Many characters are Thais from various social backgrounds. Others are foreigners.
They are all searching for love, meaning, permanence, connection with families and friends, self knowledge.
Pitchaya includes the Thai capital as a character as well: its riverine nature, its complex history, its religious currents, and its timelessness.
The multigenerational tale jumps forward and backward in time.
There’s even a smartly done sci-fi element.
Much of the story is anchored in one specific location in Bangkok, which I won’t elaborate on so you can discover it for yourself.
How different breeds of dogs would dress if they were human.
•••
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami
•••
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley
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.
Sent as a newsletter on January 29, 2024. 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.
💪 Keep on hustling, Hong Kong! (Thanks, Kinan T!)
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.
📸 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.
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.
•••
•••
“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.” –Nadine Gordimer
•••
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley