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Newley’s Notes 137: Tommy Talks Royals; China’s Tech Titans; Singing Bulldogs

Edition 137 of my email newsletter went out on Sunday.

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Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🇬🇧 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

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