Sent as an email newsletter December 6, 2020. Not a Newley’s Notes subscriber yet? Get it here.
👋 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: spotted yesterday in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong.
On to this week’s NN.
Here are ten items worth your time this week:
1) 💉 Covid–19 vaccine news: Moderna, you may have seen, has asked regulators in Europe and the U.S. to okay its shot. “The timing keeps the vaccine on track to become possibly the second to go into use in the U.S. by year’s end – after one already under regulatory review from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE – with inoculation available to the general public likely in spring or summer,” my colleague Peter Loftus reported Monday.
👏 There will undoubtedly be roadblocks ahead, but let’s remember: this is good news!
2) 💻 Big news in the world of artificial intelligence: Prominent AI Researcher Says Google Fired Her After Dispute Over Her Work, Impolitic Email. My colleague Rob Copeland has the story. And from MIT Technology Review: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.
3) 😔 In last week’s NN I pointed to an article about the death of Zappos co-founder Tony Hsieh. Now, Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans, writing in Forbes, have the apparent back story: “…while he directly (by the tens of thousands) and indirectly (by the millions) delivered on making other people smile, Hsieh was privately coping with issues of mental health and addiction.”
4) 🎙 The Philadelphia Inquirer talks to Marie Siravo, owner of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, about how Rudy Giuliani’s press conference thrust her small business into the global limelight.
5) 📖 Book publishing news: The new chief executive of Barnes & Noble is employing a new tactic to try to boost sales in an age of Amazon: giving local B&N managers more power to select titles they sell, rather than New York book buyers making the decisions, my colleague Jeffrey Trachtenberg reports.
6) 📰 Irish photographer Noel Bowler has been photographing newspaper newsrooms around the world, from The WSJ (New York) to The Sun (London) to Le Monde (Paris) and more. More info is available on his Kickstarter page, where he says he is documenting the “physical space and the structural layers that have formed the foundation of our modern press.”
7) 📸 And another powerful photo essay: “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ghosts of Segregation,” by Richard Frishman in the New York Times. More info is available on his website.
8) 🎨 Wow, wow, wow: “Hailed as ‘the Sistine Chapel of the ancients’, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia.” Click through for photos.
9) 📱 “On Wednesday, EU lawmakers passed a non-binding resolution arguing that individuals have a fundamental ‘right to disconnect.’”
10) ʕ·͡ᴥ·ʔ Headline of the week: “Adelaide family returns home to find koala perched on Christmas tree in lounge room.” Yes, there are photos, and even a video.
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🐶 Dog related video of the week: Boy meets his dog after it was lost for 2 weeks.
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📕 What I’m Reading
I’ve almost finished “The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet,” by James Griffiths. And in the meantime (as I often read a few books at a time), I’ve been racing through a classic Thomas Harris thriller I can’t believe I’d never read, despite seeing the film: “The Silence of the Lambs.” It is so, so good.
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💡 Quote of the week:
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” – Robert Frost
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,