Author: Newley

Sent as an email newsletter November 21, 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: taking in a recent sunset here in Hong Kong.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🇺🇸 A group of cryptocurrency investors nearly succeeded in an attempt to purchase a rare copy of the U.S. constitution, raising more than $40 million but losing out to private collector.

2) 🦠 New research on Covid–19’s origins in China points not to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but to the market where animals that can carry the virus were sold.

3) 🎨 A massive new contemporary art museum, called M+, just opened here in Hong Kong; there are concerns about censorship. (I haven’t visited. Yet!)

4) 🪛 Apple is introducing a self-service repair program so people can fix their own iPhones and Macs.

5) 📷 Here are the winning photos from the first-ever Natural Landscape Photography Awards.

6) 🏞️ The National Park Service will for the first time be headed by a Native American: Charles “Chuck” Sams III, who is Cayuse and Walla Walla and hails from Eastern Oregon.

7) 📺 Netflix now provides a list of the top ten most watched movies and shows around the world (also viewable by country).

8) 🍑 The ATL Rap Map, painted by designer Joseph Veazey, shows Atlanta spots mentioned in hit songs through the years.

9) 🍴 FoodTimeline.org catalogs things humans have eaten over the millennia.

10) ⚡ Forget Tesla. Is Hyundai making the coolest looking electric vehicles these days, or what?

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“Dads with dog they say they didn’t want GIF”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.” – Napoleon

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

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

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as an email newsletter November 7, 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.

🙏 If you like NN, please share this link so others can subscribe.

🪔 Image of the week, above: Happy Diwali from Hong Kong! Anasuya and I celebrated the holiday over dinner with friends.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 👏 This feels like big Covid news: Antiviral pills, which lessen Covid’s effects on those infected, appear to be coming soon.

2) 🦠 Also in Covid updates: vaccines for kids are imminent. The CDC recommended children ages 5 to 11 get Pfizer’s short.

3) 💻 Wondering what to make of Facebook – er, Meta – and the so-called metaverse? Here’s Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” on “productizing reality.” (Thanks, Stuart!)

4) 🔨 File under “the world in 2021”: Transitory workers are moving around the U.S. helping fix climate-related disasters.

5) 🔍 Marginalia is a search engine made to “help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.”

6) 🏠 The pandemic is breathing life into America’s suburbs.

7) 😴 Eleven artists explain their bedtime rituals.

8) 🏠 Arquitectura Libre features Adam Wiseman’s photos of “fantastical” houses funded by workers who have sent home money to relatives in Mexico, India, and Romania’s Transylvania region.

9) 📺 David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” seems to suggest what many have long assumed: that Tony was whacked in the series finale.

10) ✍️ Wes Anderson’s latest film, now out: “The French Dispatch,” about (if I’m discerning the plot correctly) the publication of a New Yorker-like magazine by expat staff in mid-century France.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

🐕 “4 puppies walking to Bee Gees – Stayin’ Alive full song.” (Via PB)

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Dog-related reader submission of the week:

Thanks to NN reader Mike S., who sends along this photo of him and his wife, Marsha, in their award-winning Halloween “101-Dalmatians” costume!

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💡 Quote of the week:

“The beginning is always today.” – Mary Shelley

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as an email newsletter Sunday, October 17, 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: Mr. Nudly. I continue to derive joy, even after all these years, from Starbucks baristas’ amusing spellings of my (admittedly unconventional) name. I’ve yet to add this newest gem to my Starbucks Misspellings gallery, but will do soon.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 📱 Is TikTok causing an increase in tics among teenage girls?

2) 👷‍♂️ Why the pandemic is driving a “Great Resignation” in the U.S.

3) ✍️ A New York Times Magazine longread by Robert Kolker that’s been getting a lot of buzz: “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”

4) 🌲 A trip to Skellefteå, Sweden, home to tons of stuff made of wood, including a 20-storey building.

5) 🔫 Weaponry innovation of the week: quadrupedal robots with guns.

6) 🎵 The 200 best albums of the last 25 years.

7) 🎥 Coming December 24: “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, written and directed by Joel Coen. Here’s the trailer. Can’t wait.

8) 📸 Photographer Ola Maddams snaps beautiful nighttime photos of wildlife – right in her back yard.

9) 🎬 Map of the week: What the 1988 comedic classic “The Naked Gun” was called in various European countries.

10) 🎧 Podcast of the week: “The Unraveling of the Murdaugh Dynasty,” featuring my WSJ colleague Valerie Bauerlein discussing tragic events in rural Hampton County, S.C.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“Weeeeee!”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“The rarest of all human qualities is consistency.” – Jeremy Bentham

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley