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Newley's Notes

NN212: Coronavirus News, Slowed Down; Chihuahuas Doing Yoga in Italian

Photo by Nicolas Prieto on Unsplash

Sent as an email newsletter Monday, March 30.

👋 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.

📬 Not a subscriber yet? Get it here.

In last week’s NN I shared some basic steps to lessen coronavirus-related risk, along with some perspective on what life is like here in Hong Kong.

🗞️ This week I want to share a helpful method for staying on top of coronavirus-related news – in a way that preserves your sanity.

It’s decidedly low-tech.

It’s not a social media platform or a messaging app.

📧 It’s email. One per day. From the newspaper (or newspapers) of your choosing.

First off: if you already subscribe to a newspaper, thanks for supporting quality journalism. If you get it in print, just keep reading it every day, like always. You can skip below to this week’s links.

If you’re a digital subscriber, or don’t subscribe to any papers, read on…

🔑 Remember how, even though we had round-the-clock TV news coverage after September 11th, daily newspapers helped sort out the most important events of the previous 24 hours? You could ignore TV news. There was no social media. The paper was pretty much all you needed.

It’s the same today, really.

Just get papers’ daily headlines deliverd to your inbox. Here are a few I consume every day. And yes, I am employed by the first one on this list, and read dozens and dozens of WSJ stories every day, but I always look to see what made it into the day’s paper.

(Even if you’re not a paying subscriber, all three are offering core coronavirus-related coverage for free.)

I bet your local newspaper has a newsletter, too. Sign up for it.

I’m not saying you should stay away from cable TV, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube during these fraught times. (Though it probably wouldn’t hurt.) But if you’re finding the incessant streams and feeds and alerts from those platforms just too much, turn to newspapers – delivered to your inbox – instead.

I promise: they won’t miss any of the big stories. And the news will be delivered to you in a much more measured way.

🆕 Meanwhile: my newest story, out Thursday (and only somewhat related to the pandemic) with a colleague: Hotel Giant Oyo Looks to Rewrite Contracts That Fueled Its Rise. It begins:

Oyo Hotels and Homes, which built itself into the world’s second-biggest hotel chain by total number of rooms, is phasing out an important tool that fueled its rise.

That unusual tool is guaranteed revenue for hotel owners who sign up to Oyo’s platform. And there’s friction in Japan, China, India, and the U.S. Click through to read on.

Here are ten items (mostly big-picture coronavirus-related reads) worth your time this week:

🌎 1) Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus [Financial Times]

“In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.”

🦠 2) What Social Distancing Looked Like in 1666 [New York Times]

“For those of us living through these stay-at-home days of Covid–19, it’s useful to look back and see how much has changed – and how much hasn’t. Humanity has been guarding against plagues and surviving them for thousands of years, and we have managed to learn a lot along the way.”

🔚 3) How the Pandemic Will End [The Atlantic]

“The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID–19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.”

😷 4) Shot: More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection [New York Times]

“In many Asian countries, everyone is encouraged to wear masks, and the approach is about crowd psychology and protection. If everyone wears a mask, individuals protect each other, reducing overall community transmission. The sick automatically have one on and are also more likely to adhere to keeping their mask on because the stigma of wearing one is removed.”

Chaser: Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve. We should all wear them in public. [Washington Post]

😮 5) The Great Empty [New York Times interactive]

“The photographs here all tell a similar story: a temple in Indonesia; Haneda Airport in Tokyo; the Americana Diner in New Jersey. Emptiness proliferates like the virus.”

🇮🇳 6) Hand Stamps, Bandannas and Sidewalk Chalk: India Looks to Low-Tech Coronavirus Solutions [Wall Street Journal]

“As coronavirus infections have rapidly climbed over the past week, doctors and citizens are turning to low-cost methods to try to protect its 1.3 billion-strong populace.”

🧲 7) Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device [The Guardian]

“‘After scrapping that idea, I was still a bit bored, playing with the magnets. It’s the same logic as clipping pegs to your ears – I clipped them to my earlobes and then clipped them to my nostril and things went downhill pretty quickly when I clipped the magnets to my other nostril.’”

❤️ 8) We Asked Scientists If Our Pets Love Us Being Home All the Time [Vice]

“‘I think dogs are thrilled to have their humans around more often,’ said psychologist Laurie Santos, director of the Canine Cognition Center at Yale University, in an email (though she cautioned that there are no direct studies to confirm that claim at the moment).”

👏 9) Some Good News with John Krasinski [YouTube]

“John Krasinski highlights some good news from around the world, including an interview with Steve Carell to mark the 15thanniversary of THE OFFICE, as well as John’s newest hero Coco. ”

🐕 10) Just in case you need it, here’s a dog doing yoga in Italian. You’re welcome. [@ATLnewsgirl]

💡 Quote of the week:

“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.” — Winston Churchill

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

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