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Hi friends,
Happy Year of the Monkey! The Chinese New Year (also known as the Lunar New Year) is officially upon us here in Singapore.
It’s a public holiday and everything’s shut down; offices and schools are closed today and tomorrow. All around our neighborhood in central Singapore, red and gold decorations are hung from buildings, and the occasional sounds of lion dances can be heard.
On to the update.
What I wrote at Newley.com:
+ The 10 Must-Have Apps I Install on Every New Mac — The item begins:
Following my recent post about what’s on my iPhone home screen at the beginning of 2016, I decided to do the same for my must-have Mac apps.
I consider these apps requirements when setting up any new machine — essentially, I feel that I need them to use the computer effectively.
Hopefully this will give others who are looking for new or useful apps some ideas.
What am I missing here? Let me know via email (n@newley.com) or Twitter (@newley).
Five items that are worth your time this week:
1. Remember the story not long ago about Amazon’s first-ever physical book shop in Seattle? It looks like the online retailing titan might be planning to open as many as 400 in the U.S.
2. “What We Do in the Shadows” is a very silly mockumentary about vampires.
3. Here are some portraits of dogs and cats purporting to show a little bit of their souls. I’m not a big believer in souls (period), but these images do seem to suggest there’s something going on in the minds of dogs. Cats? Maybe not so much. Here’s more about the images, by photographer Robert Bahou.
4. This amazing website allows you to enter a search term and find screencaps using subtitles from “Simpsons” episodes.
5. Quote of the week, from a fascinating New York Times story on “professional imposter” Jeremy Wilson:
“He has portrayed himself as a Scottish-born D.J., a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer and a professor at M.I.T. He has posed as executives from Microsoft, British Airways and Apple, always with a military background. He pretended to be a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States. He once maintained an Irish accent so well and for so long that his cellmate in an Indiana jail was convinced that he was an Irish mobster.”
Thanks for reading Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter where I share my WSJ stories, posts from my blog, and various interesting links.
* Administrative note: I mistakenly labeled last week’s dispatch number 44, when it should have been 43. So this is one is rightly called number 44.
Have a great week!
P.S. If someone forwarded you this email, you can subscribe here. And here’s the archive of past dispatches.