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Newley's Notes

NN224: Golden Retriever Zoomies

Sent as an email newsletter (sign up here) Sunday, June 21.

👋 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.

📸 Image of the week: ↑ Anasuya and I recently took the tram up to Victoria Peak, which offers this majestic view of Victoria Harbor and the city’s skyscrapers below.

💯 I’ve been to the place a couple times before over the years. Some tourist sites get old after a while. This one never does.

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Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🦠 1) Six months after the coronavirus began spreading around the world, it’s becoming clear how Covid–19 is transmitted. Infections don’t seem to happen via surfaces or from quick encounters outside. Instead, they appear to be caused by close, prolonged interactions with infected people, my WSJ colleagues report.

⚡ 2) “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.” That’s just one of many memorable passages in an essay adapted from former U.S. ambassador to the U.N John Bolton’s new book.

⭐ 3) PespiCo is retiring the Aunt Jemima brand, while Mars is changing Uncle Ben’s, examples of companies confronting systemic racism, my WSJ colleagues report.

📆 4) Jelani Cobb, writing in the New Yorker, on the lesson of Juneteenth: “In honoring that moment, we should recognize a moral at the heart of that day in Galveston and in the entirety of American life: there is a vast chasm between the concept of freedom inscribed on paper and the reality of freedom in our lives.”

👉 5) The Washington Post has a map showing where Confederate monuments have been taken down in recent years, and where they remain.

🔮 6) What if, instead of using Google – which is free, but makes money by selling ads based on data about you – you could pay for access to a search engine that runs no ads and collects no information about you? A Google veteran has started just that kind of company, a search service called Neeva.

🚌 7) In 1992, as readers of Jon Krakauer’s excellent book “Into The Wild” will recall, a young man named Chris McCandless died inside an abandoned bus in rural Alaska. This week authorities removed it, using a helicopter. The reason: Tourists trying to reach it kept dying, or requiring rescues.

🏠 8) Covid–19 shows why suburbs make good places to live, Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic. “There was always comfort to be found in a big house on a plot of land that’s your own.”

🎼 9) Barcelona’s Liceu opera house can’t open for humans yet, so it’s playing a concert tomorrow (Monday) – for 2,292 plants. People won’t be allowed inside, but the event will be livestreamed.

🐕 10) Dog-related video of the week – Question: What do you call a Golden Retriever doing a zoomie followed by a back-scratching slide down a grassy hill? Answer: awesome.

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💡 Quote of the week:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman

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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of silly Goldens.

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

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