Sent as an email newsletter March 7, 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: a recent weekend watercolor. As my dad always says: “Just let go and paint!”
My latest in The WSJ:
👉 I had an exclusive, out Friday, with my colleague Jeff Horwitz.
The headline: India Threatens Jail for Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter Employees.
The story begins:
“India’s government has threatened to jail employees of Facebook Inc., its WhatsApp unit and Twitter Inc. as it seeks to quash political protests and gain far-reaching powers over discourse on foreign-owned tech platforms, people familiar with the warnings say.”
Click through to read the rest.
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 🔍 “Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites,” my colleagues Sam Schechner and Keach Hagey, reported, “a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.”
2) 🚀 Nasa’s Perseverance rover has been sending back some incredible images from Mars.
3) 🍎 In Covid-hit New York, residents are showing their pride in the city, helping out the local economy, and making a fashion statement by purchasing merchandise from local businesses. Here’s a gallery.
4) 🎬 Golden Globes roundup: “Nomadland” and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” won for best drama and best comedy, respectively. “The Crown” was a big winner of TV prizes.
5) ✉️ Tech-related longread of the week, from Cal Newport (whose books “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism” I recommend) in The New Yorker: “E-mail Is Making Us Miserable.” (Note: But not Newley’s Notes, right?!)
6) 💻 Zoom meetings wearing you out? Stanford researchers explain four reasons for the fatigue, and offer four ways to beat it.
7) 🤖 “The future is already here,” William Gibson once wrote. “It’s just not evenly distributed.” Case in point: Some U.S. states are passing laws that allow robots to be legal “pedestrians” on sidewalks.
8) File under: life in 2021. The $24.99 Fisher-Price My Home Office set comes with “a pretend laptop, 4 fabric apps to attach to the computer screen, a wood smartphone and headset for all those important business calls, and a to-go cup for kids to sip their favorite beverage.”
9) 🌏 Pretty cool: Disney’s newest animated film, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” just out, features Disney’s “first Southeast Asian heroine.” (Watch the trailer here.)
10) 🐀 Capybara-related video of the week: “When you try to eat the chillest animal on earth.” Best comment: “He’s so chill because he knows he’s too chunky to get eaten by that bird.”
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🐶 Dog-related video of the week: “i know a snack when i hear one.”
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📕 What I’m Reading
Having enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s 2014 book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (my book notes here), I’ve turned to his subsequent book, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.” – Michelangelo
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley