Sent as an email newsletter March 21, 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: Yes, that is a gin and tonic-flavored Easter egg I spotted in a Marks and Spencer grocery store here in Hong Kong. It’s a new product, apparently. The Easter confection 2021 demands!
My latest at Newley.com
🐦 I mentioned, in NN249 last month, that we’d recently been on a birding trip here in Hong Kong. I have more details in a just-published blog post: Birdwatching in Hong Kong’s Mai Po Nature Reserve.
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 👉 A man killed eight people in three spas in the Atlanta area Tuesday, including six women of Asian descent. The shootings have mobilized “Asian-Americans who have seen their communities victimized by hate crimes over the past year, even if police haven’t determined whether the shooting belongs in that category,” my colleagues Valerie Bauerlein, Esther Fung and Cameron McWhirter report.
2) 🎬 Oscar nominations are out. “Mank” – a black and white Netflix film, starring Gary Oldman, about Herman J. Mankiewicz and the filming of “Citizen Kane” (trailer here) – got ten. Last year was, as the AP put it, “a pandemic year that shuttered movie theaters and upended the movie business.”
3) 🌁 RIP Silicon Valley? Tim O’Reilly points out four challenges the region faces, beyond Covid–19: the life sciences revolution, looming tech regulation, climate change, and the “end of the betting economy.”
4) 🌏 Excellent piece by Anna Rasshivkina, Cengiz Yar and Devi Lockwood at Rest of World: “From a florist in Tehran to a chef in Bangkok, meet nine workers who turned their homes into makeshift offices during the pandemic.”
5) 📱 Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, reporting for Buzzfeed News: “Facebook Is Building An Instagram For Kids Under The Age Of 13.”
6) 🤯 Astounding: Watch a TikToker make an elaborate video in mere seconds.
7) 🎵 What’s going on with musical genres? “As record stores close and streaming algorithms dominate, the identities that music fandom supplies are in flux,” Amanda Petrusich writes in the New Yorker.
8) 💻 Tool of the week: Zoom Escaper, which lets you “escape Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing scenarios” by allowing you to “self-sabotage your audio stream, making your presence unbearable to others.”
9) 👏 The award for walrus impression of the week goes to the guy interviewed at the beginning of this RTE News report.
10) 👩🎨 Museo is a “visual search engine that connects you with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Harvard Art Museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the New York Public Library Digital Collection.” All images are in the public domain.
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “This is Minnie. She’s the Executive Pen Transporter for this office. As you can see, she takes her job very seriously. 13/10”
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📕 What I’m Reading
I’m still working my way through Yuval Noah Harari’s thought-provoking “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.” – Coco Chanel
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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of dogs helping with office tasks.
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley