Sent as an email newsletter (sign up here) Thurs., July 9.
👋 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.
This week’s NN is late. I’d meant to send it Monday evening, but then this happened. See image above.
🚨 I got the exclusive that WhatsApp – quickly followed by Facebook, then Twitter and Google – was suspending its processing of requests for user data from Hong Kong.
WhatsApp and its tech peers were prompted to do so by China’s imposition here in the city of a wide-ranging new national security law.
I’m proud to say we had the news for our subscribers before anyone else, and it was followed by outlets around the world.
🗞 The story also ran on the front page of Tuesday’s WSJ:
🎧 I was on our The Journal podcast to talk about the story (listen here), and I was also on our Tech News Briefing show (listen here).
For more on China, Hong Kong, and the new law, read on…
Here are ten items worth your time this week:
🇨🇳 1) What’s Hong Kong’s new national security law all about? “Experts say its provisions fundamentally alter the legal landscape in Hong Kong, carving out space within the city’s Western-style rule-of-law system for mainland Chinese methods of enforcing Communist Party control,” my colleague Chun Han Wong reports.
⏲️ 2) Things are happening fast here in HK, my colleague Dan Strumpf wrote in a story out Wednesday about the inauguration of a new home for China’s security agents:
“First the construction signs went up, then a flagpole appeared and police officers started to swarm the streets. Within hours, a skyscraper hotel in a cozy neighborhood of bars, apartments and boutiques was transformed into something new: the headquarters of Beijing’s powerful new security agency for the city.”
🧙♂️ 3) And in non-China/Hong Kong news: “How J. K. Rowling Became Voldemort”:
“Younger Millennials – those born around 1990, the same time as Harry Potter’s lead actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson – feel just as strongly about transgender rights. To many of them, it is the social-justice cause, their generation’s revolutionary idea.”
✍️ 4) “In an era that fetishizes form,” Joyce Carol Oates “has become America’s preëminent fiction writer by doing everything you’re not supposed to do.”
🚷 5) A Japanese city has passed a draft ordinance aimed at stopping people from using their smartphones while walking.
💬 6) Social media first brought about “context collapse” (people talk to everyone all at once, rather than distinct people or groups), and now, writes Nicolas Carr, it has created something more serious: “content collapse.” “A presidential candidate’s policy announcement is given equal weight to a snapshot of your niece’s hamster and a video of the latest Kardashian contouring,” he says.
⏳ 7) Shot: “Back to the Future” was released 35 years ago last week. Here are 30 facts about the great film, one of which – you’re telling me they started filming with Eric Stoltz instead of Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly?! – I find mind-blowing.
🎹 8) Chaser: The Nostalgia Machine is a website where you enter a year, click a button, and jam to some sweet tunes from yesteryear.
✏️ 9) Gary Larson, creator of “The Far Side,” has started cartooning again (this time on a tablet).
🐶 10) Dog-related video of the week: You rang? (Thanks, Anasuya!)
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💡 Quote of the week:
“If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” – Epictetus
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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of adorably attentive pups.
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley