Sent as an email newsletter November 16, 2021. Want in? Join my email list.
👋 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 Hong Kong alleyway on a recent evening.
🆕 My latest story, an exclusive out Friday, is headlined:
Facebook Is Stifling Independent Report on Its Impact in India, Human Rights Groups Say
It begins:
Human rights groups say Facebook is stifling an independent report it commissioned to investigate hate speech on its services in India, the company’s largest market by customers and where scrutiny of its operations is increasing.
Representatives for the organizations say they have provided extensive input to a U.S. law firm that Facebook commissioned in mid–2020 to undertake the report. The groups say they supplied hundreds of examples of inflammatory content and suggested ways Facebook could better police its services in India.
Facebook executives from the company’s human rights team, which is overseeing the law firm’s effort, have since narrowed the draft report’s scope and are delaying a process that has already taken more than a year, the groups say.
“They are trying to kill it,” said Ratik Asokan of India Civil Watch International…
Click through to read the rest.
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 🇨🇳 Evan Osnos on Xi Jinping and China’s past, present and future.
2) 🔫 Longread of the week: “My Father, the Hitman.”
3) 🥾 “Nimblewill Nomad” just hiked the more than 2,000-mile-long Appalachian Trail. He is 83 years old.
4) 🐅 “Tiger King” season two is out on Netflix Wednesday. Here’s the trailer.
5) 🇺🇸 🇰🇷 “Sesame Street” is getting its first Asian-American muppet: Ji-Young, a seven-year-old Korean American who loves skateboarding and the electric guitar.
6) 🎧 Airpods are no longer cool. It’s all about wired headphones these days.
7) 🗞 “Storm Lake” is a new PBS documentary about the future of local news, centered on Northern Iowa’s Storm Lake Times. The trailer is here.
8) 🌍 Enjoy this “Timeline of the human condition.”
9) 🚢 MarineTraffic provides an amazingly detailed, clickable ship tracking map.
10) 🏠 McMansionHell is a blog that “roasts the world’s ugliest houses from top to bottom, all while teaching about architecture and design.” (Thanks, Anasuya!)
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:
“How dogs react when kissed… 🤗🤗”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” – Kurt Vonnegut
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley