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👋 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 Hong Kong streetscape.
My WSJ latest:
🔎 My latest story, out Wednesday: Musk’s Twitter Reinstates Hindu Nationalist Accounts That Disparage Muslims
It began:
Twitter Inc. under Elon Musk has reinstated several previously suspended Hindu nationalist accounts that were popular in India, one of its largest markets by users, with human-rights groups saying the move has spurred a resurgence of divisive religious material on the platform.
Some of the accounts that were suspended had been reported for posting hate speech aimed at religious minorities in India, according to groups that reported them. Upon their return in recent weeks, some have tweeted material denigrating Muslims and others.
The tweets include a debunked video that the person who posted it claimed showed a Muslim cleric spitting on rice before serving it to others, another calling Pakistani Muslims “rectums,” and a retweet of a user who called the Quran “the source of all evil.”
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) ⚖️ I’ve mentioned in NN a few times the Murdaugh saga in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, which I find transfixing given, among other reasons, the time I spent growing up in the region. As you may have seen, the trial of Alex Murdaugh, accused of killing his wife and son, began last week in the small town of Walterboro. My WSJ colleague Valerie Bauerlein has been all over the case – indeed, she’s writing a book about it – and had a story out last week about jury selection and opening arguments. Follow her on Twitter here and find her WSJ dispatches here.
2) ✍️ For a fresh longread, there’s “The Corrupt World Behind the Murdaugh Murders,” by James Lasdun, in last week’s New Yorker.
3) 🎧 There are also several podcasts about the saga, including the Charleston Post and Courier’s “Understand Murdaugh,” journalist Mandy Matney’s “Murdaugh Murders,” and “The Murdaugh Murders, Money & Mystery,” from WCIV ABC News 4 in Charleston.
4) 📺 And for the truly obsessed: ABC News, among others, is live-streaming the court proceedings on YouTube. (And for the truly, truly obsessed, there’s even a Reddit subreddit, r/MurdaughFamilyMurders.)
5) 🧬 In other news: here’s an eye-opening Bloomberg Businessweek story by Ashlee Vance about a wealthy, 45-year-old software entreprenuer who spends $2 million a year to try to reverse the aging process. It includes this amazing sentence: “He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.”
6) 🤖 “Decoding the Hype About AI”: Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton, speaks with The Markup’s Julia Angwin.
7) 🎵 Dana Gioia – music critic, author, all around brilliant guy – outlines his eight top techniques for judging someone’s character.
8) 📝 Procrastinating scribes in Tokyo, take note: Manuscript Writing Cafe, made for working writers, features an owner who checks in on your progress a couple times an hour.
9) 📍 Wonders of Street View: click the “random” button in the upper right to see one remarkable scene caught on Google after another.
10) 📸 Think you’re a good judge of when a photo was taken? Try your hand with the Chronophoto game.
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:
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💡 Quote of the week:
“I always work at the edge of what I understand.” – Brian Eno
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley