Sent as an email newsletter January 31, 2021. Sign up to receive future dispatches in your inbox.
👋 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, above: GameStop’s stock price over the last year. Say what? Read on…
Here are ten items worth your time this week:
1) 🤑 The big markets-related story of the week: Day traders on Reddit’s Wall Street Bets subreddit (tagline: “Like 4chan found a bloomberg terminal”) have been piling into GameStop – yes, the videogame retailer – sending its stock up skyward, and putting hedge funds that have shorted it in a pickle. “The power dynamics are shifting on Wall Street,” my WSJ colleagues write. “Individual investors are winning big – at least for now – and relishing it.”
👉 For more, check out this WSJ interview with Keith Gill, aka “DeepF—ing Value,” a prominent member of the group on Reddit. And for an explanation of what’s going on, listen to this episode of our The Journal podcast with my colleague Gunjan Banerji, who’s been covering the phenomenon.
2) 💻 John Seabrook, writing in The New Yorker: “Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?”
3) ✈️ ICYMI: China flew a bunch of warplanes off southwestern Taiwan last weekend, “its largest show of aerial force toward the island democracy in four months,” my colleague Chun-Han Wong reports.
4) 👃 Longread of the week, in the New York Times Magazine: “What Can Covid–19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?,” by Brooke Jarvis.
5) 🎳 The Ringer has a list of the 50 best cult movies. (Number one is absolutely correct.)
6) 🗺 Fascinating: “Inuit cartography.”
7) 🔥 A thing that now exists, that I absolutely want to eat: Hot Tamales flavored Peeps. (Thanks, Colin R.!)
8) 🍞 Absurd slideshow of the week, courtesy of The Onion: “Watch What Happens When You Zoom In On This Bread”.
9) 🐼 Absurd(ly awesome) panda-related content of the week: “This is the most important video I’ve ever seen.” (Thanks, Anasuya!)
10) 👏 Photo gallery of the week: a global roundup of sniffer dogs being trained to detect Covid–19.
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🐕 Dog-related video of the week: “Border Collies, often cited as the most intelligent of all domestic dogs.”
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📕 What I’m Reading
I’m almost finished with Steven Levy’s excellent “Facebook: The Inside Story." For fiction, I’ve been dipping into Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed climate change-themed sci-fi novel “The Ministry for the Future,” which I’m enjoying.
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💡 Quote of the week:
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” – Dolly Parton.
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley