Sent as a newsletter Oct. 30, 2022. Not on my list? Sign up here.
👋 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:
🇭🇰 I can’t put my finger on what it is I like about this photo I snapped near Causeway Bay here in Hong Kong recently – the light, the movement of the pedestrians, the canyon of buildings in the background – but it captures the mid-day, lunchtime feeling of the city, with hundreds or thousands of people in any given area heading in all manner of directions, all for various reasons.
My WSJ latest:
🇮🇳 My latest story, out last weekend, is headlined: Meta-Backed Meesho Is Beating Amazon, Walmart in Race for Indian Shoppers. It begins:
An upstart e-commerce service is winning more new shoppers in India than Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart, posing a challenge to the U.S. retailing titans, which have plowed billions of dollars into the world’s biggest untapped digital market.
That service: Meesho, which an app analytics firm said was the world’s most-downloaded shopping app during the first half of the year, with some 127 million downloads. It’s growing quickly especially in India’s smaller cities and towns.
“Meesho is my Zara,” an 18-year-old shopper told us.
Click through to read the rest.
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 🦠 A story that’s been getting a lot of attention online since it came out Friday: a deep investigation by Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao into the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the potential origins of Covid.
2) 🐦 Now that Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, here’s a look at what might come next (un-banning accounts, such as Donald Trump’s? Combating bots? Allowing more kinds of speech? New business model?)
3) ✈️ A fascinating tale from my WSJ colleagues: Inside the Secret Prisoner Swap That Splintered the U.S. and China.
4) 🛸 The Pentagon and intelligence agencies are set to update a report on UFOs, concluding that many phenomena spotted by U.S. pilots have been surveillance operations by countries such as China, optical illusions or aerial debris – that is, not aliens.
5) 🤑 The always excellent Matt Levine has written a 40,000-word long cover story – “The Crypto Story” – that comprises the entire issue of the latest Bloomberg Businessweek.
6) 🚌 A sad result of Covid-inspired disruptions to U.S. schools: a massive decline in math and reading scores, a new test shows.
7) 🗣 A video journey through Ireland and the U.K, by accents.
8) 🤭 The 2022 finalists for the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are out.
9) 📺 HBO Max will release a three-part documentary series on the South Carolina Murdaugh murders on November 3.
10) 🌲 Go to Tree.fm to hear the sounds of forests around the world.
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:
🐕 “this man built a racetrack in his backyard for his dogs”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley