Author: Newley

Sent as an email newsletter April 11, 2021. Join my email list to get future editions.

👋 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 personalized license plate spotted here in Hong Kong.

😔 Insert “mood: 2021” joke here.

(Once again, kudos to Anasuya for the snapshot!) Pair with: “No drama,” spotted last year.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 📦 “Amazon employees in Alabama voted not to unionize, handing the tech giant a victory in its biggest battle yet against labor-organizing efforts that fueled national debate over working conditions at one of the nation’s largest employers,” my colleague Sebastian Herrera reports.

2) 🧠 How will we remember the pandemic? Through anecdotes and stories, writes Melissa Fay Greene at The Atlantic. “The process of crafting these stories will help determine our resilience and well-being. How we tell our stories can transform how we move forward from hard times.”

3) 🇬🇧 Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, died at age 99. They were married for 73 years.

4) 💰 China has created its own digital currency, a “a re-imagination of money that could shake a pillar of American power.” Fascinating story by my colleague James T. Areddy.

5) 🌏 The U.S. National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2040 report, released every four years, is out. Institutions may face “cascading global challenges,” such as “climate change, disease, financial crises and ever-advancing technology,” VOA reports.

6) 🧰 Data-driven WSJ deep dive: “Where Can You Find a New Job? Try These U.S. Cities.” Hint: Think “Silicon Slopes…”

7) 🧙‍♂️ A made-for-TV film based on Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring,” released in the Soviet Union in 1991, was long forgotten. Now it’s enjoying a new life on YouTube.

8) 🎧 Podcast of the week: Economist Tyler Cowen speaks with poet – and former General Foods executive – Dana Gioia on topics ranging from Jell-O marketing techniques to poetry, art, literature, Catholicism – and that sandbox in Brian Wilson’s house.

9) 🤑 Longread of the week, in Bloomberg Businessweek: “Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days.”

10) 🌋 Mesmerizing timelapse video of the week: 18 days of Icelandic volcano eruptions packed into 5 minutes.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “This Is Called Trust.”

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📖 What I’ve been reading:

After reading Steven Pressfield’s excellent “The War of Art,” I turned to a journalistic classic: Janet Malcolm’s 1990 book “The Journalist and the Murderer,” which was originally serialized in the New Yorker.

It’s about a fraud lawsuit Jeffrey MacDonald – who was convicted of murdering his wife and children – brought against Joe McGinniss, who wrote a bestselling book about the case, “Fatal Vision.” Malcolm – who was herself sued by the subject of a profile – explores topics such as journalistic ethics, psychology, and truth. Highly recommended.

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💡 Quote of the week:

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as an email newsletter April 5, 2021. Enter your email address to get future editions.

👋 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.

🐰 I hope you had a restful Easter, friends.

🍫 Image of the week, above, amid a chocolate-centric holiday: There is a new KitKat popup store here in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay shopping district.

Special “limited edition” flavors for sale include matcha, ruby chocolate, and yuzu. Open until May 2. Find more info here. (Well spotted and photographed, Anasuya!)

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🗞 My latest, an exclusive that went online Friday and was in Saturday’s print WSJ: Facebook Staff Fret Over China’s Ads Portraying Happy Muslims in Xinjiang. The story begins:

HONG KONG – Facebook Inc. is blocked in China, but Beijing is a big user of the platform to spread its political views to hundreds of millions of people overseas, sometimes via advertisements.

Now, some Facebook staff are raising concerns on internal message boards and in other employee discussions that the company is being used as a conduit for state propaganda, highlighting sponsored posts from Chinese organizations that purport to show Muslim ethnic minority Uyghurs thriving in China’s Xinjiang region, according to people familiar with the matter.

🧵 I wrote more in this Twitter thread.

2) ✈️ People in America are traveling again as the vaccine roll-out continues. On Friday the TSA screened the highest number of people – more than 1.5 million – since the Covid–19 pandemic began.

3) 🔍 Video cameras, facial recognition, license plate readers, cell tower records: “How America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob.”

4) 🏠 U.S. housing boom 2.0? "Limited housing supply, low rates, a global reach for yield, and what we’re calling the institutionalization of real-estate investors has set the stage for another speculative investor-driven home price bubble.” Smart story by my colleague Ryan Dezember.

5) 🪙 Two fascinating archeology stories caught my eye this week. The first: Arabian coins from the 17th century found in New England could provide a hint as to the fate of pirate Henry Every.

6) 🦜 …and the second: mummified parrots found in Chile show how people during the 12th and 15th centuries ferried goods – via llama – from the Amazon jungle through the Andes to the Atacama Desert.

7) 🎧 Hua Hsu in the New Yorker on the growing popularity of podcasts by professional athletes: “If athlete-driven podcasts were once shoestring affairs, they’ve now been absorbed into the sports-media economy.”

8) ❓Reddit thread full of interesting tips: “What is the most effective psychological ‘trick’ you use?”

9) 🏀 Buzzer-beater of the week: Jalen Suggs’s bank shot from just inside mid-court, sending Gonzaga past UCLA and into the NCAA final.

10) 🛰 See a satellite tonight: “No telescope required. Click to search for viewing times at your location.”

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “A dog in Russia grabbed the reporter’s microphone and ran away during a live broadcast.” (Bonus, related video: “Interviewing Pets With a Mini Microphone Compilation.”)

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📖 What I’ve been reading:

I finished Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” and then turned to the Steven Pressfield classic “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles,” which I enjoyed. Searching for my next nonfiction read…

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💡 Quote of the week:

“The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts.” – Marcus Aurelius

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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of spotlight-stealing dogs.

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

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