Sent as an email newsletter March 29, 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 delectable Sichuan soup we had with a friend on Saturday. I’d never had it before. It’s called suan cai yu and it is fantastic: poached fish, pickled greens, and chilis. More on the dish is here.
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 🚢 A massive, 1,300-foot container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, snarling global shipping traffic. Here’s a high-res image taken from space.
👉 The incident has spawned many, many jokes. There’s IsTheShipStillStuck dot com, for all the latest news. There’s a parody dating app (“Meet other singles stuck in the Suez Canal”). And there’s even a website that lets you drag the ship to different locations on a global map.
🚨 Oh, and the very latest: The ship now appears to be nearly free.
2) 🦠 Good news on the vaccine front from the U.S.: more doses are on the way. Manufacturers have been boosting production; one estimate says they’ll hit 132 million doses in March, up from fewer than 50 million last month, my colleague Peter Loftus reports.
3) 💉 Speaking of vaccines: Hong Kong in recent weeks began offering shots to people over the age of 30 – and also suffered a new cluster of infections, requiring some people to quarantine in government facilities. For a description of what it’s all been like, read this essay by Ben Kostrzewa, a trade attorney here in the city, featuring some striking images of his lodgings: “From Quarantine to Vaccine in a Week.”
4) 💻 File under “effects of the pandemic”: overwork. “Employees say work-life boundaries blurred, then vanished,” my colleague Chip Cutter reports, “as waking life came to mean ‘always on’ at work.”
5) 🇨🇳 In geopolitical takes: When it comes to Taiwan, historian and author Niall Ferguson sees only trouble ahead for the U.S. and China. “While America’s multitasking foxes have been adding to their laundry list of grievances, the Chinese hedgehog has steadily been building its capacity to take over Taiwan,” he writes.
6) 🏀 Longread of the week: “Kobe Bryant’s Tragic Flight,” by Jeff Wise in Vanity Fair.
7) 🎨 You can now search more than 480,000 of the Louvre’s works via the museum’s website.
8) 🐳 Sign of the apocalypse, 2021 edition: “Humpback whales are organizing in huge numbers, and no one knows why.”
9) 🦐 Sentence of the week, continuing the maritime theme: “This is not General Mills’ first shrimp rodeo.”
10) 🦄 Feel-good dog-related story of the week, from Kenansville, North Carolina: Sisu (who kind of looks like our Ginger) finally got his purple unicorn toy. (Thanks, PB!)
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “Two strong independent Doggos who don’t need no Hooman for backrubs.”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“The secret of happiness is something to do. — John Burroughs
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley