Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.
Here are ten items worth your time this week:
🖥️ 1) By me at Newley.com: Book Notes: ‘The Master Switch,’ by Tim Wu. The book’s subtitle: “The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” An archive of my Book Notes posts is here.
🚫 2) Apple Kicked Alex Jones Off Its Platform, Then YouTube And Facebook Rushed To Do The Same [Buzzfeed News] — “In all, the actions will currently seriously limit Jones’s ability to reach his massive audience,” John Paczkowski and Charlie Warzel wrote. “Twitter and Periscope remain one of the sole major platforms to still host Jones.”
↘️ 3) Snapchat’s Users Slide in Latest Setback for Social Media [WSJ]– After it appears that user growth is slowing at Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat “reported its first quarterly decline in daily users, sending its stock price gyrating,” my colleague Marc Vartabedian reported. The number of daily users fell 2% to about 188 million, the first such decline in seven years.
🤖 4) Robotics-related link of the week: All Is Full of Björk Bots [Slate] — “I couldn’t escape the feeling I’d seen this sort of robot design before, and in a strikingly similar context,” Benjamin Frisch writes. “Then I realized where I recognized it from: the seminal video for Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love.’”
📹 5) This week in surveillance/fashion-related news: Camouflage from face detection [CV Dazzle] — Click through to read how “avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs” can be used to “break apart the continuity of a face.”
📚 6) Shot: Gutenberg’s Revenge [Strategy+Business] — Why “the consumer market for physical, printed books is holding its own in an increasingly digital world.”
💯 7) Chaser: 17 Places Book Lovers Need to Visit [Conde Nast Traveler] — Gorgeous pics, ranging from a trippy bookshop in Yangzhou, China to a three-story library in Rio de Janeiro and a monstary in Prague.
🔥 8) No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man [Smithsonian American Art Museum] — In the first exhibit of its kind, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. is showing artwork from the legendary desert party.
🗣️ 9) 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English) [The Guardian] — My favorite: “sisu.” Runner up: tiáo (条).
🦈 10) Crazy-ass shark-related video of the week: White shark surprise breach off Wellfleet, MA. [YouTube/Atlantic White Shark Conservancy] — Title says it all. (Thanks, Milo!)
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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley