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👋 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.
Photo of the week, above: a watercolor I painted during a recent trip to the beach here in Hong Kong.
Here are ten items worth your time this week:
🛸 1) A secretive Pentagon program studying UFOs will in the next six months apparently make some of its findings public.
🚨 2) The Fairfax (Va.) County School Board voted to rename Springfield’s Robert E. Lee High School after John Lewis.
🦇 3) Covid–19-related story of the week: Has Southeast Asia largely been spared because similar viruses have been circulating for years, providing some innate immunity? (Thanks, Suzy!)
☀️ 4) Health-related story of the week: A new study shows that chemical ingredients used in many sunscreens show up in the blood “at concentrations far greater than the Food and Drug Administration’s safety threshold,” my WSJ colleague Jo Craven McGinty reports.
🎧 5) The New York Times is acquiring Serial Productions, the podcasting company that created “Serial,” aiming to “further the newspaper’s podcasting ambitions,” according to my WSJ colleague Benjamin Mullin.
🤑 6) Twitter is going to test some kind of subscription service.
🇫🇷 7) The city of Paris created a “cinema on the water,” a floating movie theater where viewers took in a film from boats on the Sein.
🛋 8) How “Gunsmoke” paved the way for ubiquitous grandma couches – you know, those velour sofas with repeating pastoral scenes. (Thanks, Anasuya!)
🌍 9) Zoom dot earth provides “near real-time satellite images” from around the world. Just search for a location or spin the globe and zoom in.
😂 10) Dog-related video of the week: “All offices should come with one of these.”
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📕 What I’m Reading
I finished Jan Morris’s “Hong Kong” and have moved on to “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China,” Evan Osnos’s 2014 book.
💡 Quote of the week:
“He who fears death will never do anything worth of a man who is alive.” – Seneca
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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of dogs boosting workers’ morale.
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley