Category: Newley’s Notes

Sent as a newsletter on April 18, 2024. 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:

☔️ Rainy Hong Kong. Snapped today.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 👉 Good news: Homicides in many American cities are falling, bringing them back to pre-Covid levels. 🎁 <– WSJ gift link

2) 🚨 An eye-opening look at how cheap and easy it is to build a ChatGPT-powered propaganda “news” website. 🎁 <– WSJ gift link

3) 🖼️ Archaeologists undertaking a new excavation at Pompeii have uncovered some dazzling frescoes.

4) 🦷 And another archeological item of note, from Reddit: “Found a mandible in the travertin floor at my parents house.” Bonus link: an archaeology professor weighs in on the post.

5) 🇭🇰 Finish photographer Mikko Takkunen has released a gorgeous Hong Kong street photography book.

6) 🧭 Is sense of direction a product of our upbringing, rather than being innate?

7) 🌌 Here’s a video demonstrating just how enormous the universe is.

8) 🥊 Brazilian MMA fighter Renato Moicano, after winning a recent contest, praised Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (NSFW: profanity).

9) 🌳 Mental health break: this website immerses you in one-minute videos of parks around the world.

10) 🐀 Please enjoy these rats driving little cars.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“His name is Ares. He runs like a cartoon character.”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” — Voltaire

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on April 8, 2024. 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:

Friday March 29th marked one year since our WSJ colleague Evan Gershkovich was wrongly detained in Russia. This was our powerful page one to mark the anniversary. He should be released immediately.

My WSJ latest

I had a couple stories out recently that relate to India.

🤳 The first, with my excellent colleague Vibhuti Agarwal: India’s TikTok Ban Is a Cautionary Tale for the U.S. 🎁 <– Gift link

The lede:

NEW DELHI—Gayatari Mohanty always wanted to be a dancer. But her father, who washes cars for a living, and her mother, a domestic helper, didn’t have enough money for lessons. So the 19-year-old New Delhi native taught herself.

One day in 2019, Mohanty discovered TikTok. She and a friend were drawn to the platform’s lighthearted videos. They often rushed home from school to upload clips of Mohanty’s spirited dancing to retro Bollywood songs from the 1960s and 70s.

Soon Mohanty had gained some 5,000 followers. That didn’t make her a star or earn her any money, but it was enough to boost her confidence.

“My skill gave me my biggest achievement in life,” she said. “TikTok became my stage where I could show my dancing skills and get appreciated for it.”

That all ended suddenly the next year, when India’s government banned the Chinese short video-sharing titan, citing cybersecurity concerns.

“It felt like a personal loss, like someone close to me was no more,” she said.

The South Asian nation provides a case study in what happens when the wildly popular service goes away, as it might in the U.S.

👉 And the second, a scoop out March 29 that was widely read, commented on, and picked by other news outlets: Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B Visa Holders 🎁 <– Gift link

It begins:

A U.S. visa program for skilled foreign workers has long stoked concerns over American workers losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. Now a group of experienced American professionals is accusing an Indian outsourcing giant of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas.

The American workers say that India’s Tata Consultancy Services illegally discriminated against them based on their race and age, firing them and shifting some of their work to lower-paid Indian immigrants on temporary work visas.

Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest companies.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ☀️ It’s solar eclipse day! If you’re watching from North America, here’s a real time map from NASA.

2) 🔎 Has alleged organized crime boss Christopher Kinahan been inadvertently revealing his whereabouts in Google reviews?

3) 🗣️ Author Paul Tough on his son’s unexpected obsession with learning Russian.

4) 🥾 On the rise of hiking app AllTrails.

5) 🪐 Interactive graphic: how a space elevator would work.

6) 🐐 I love these family portraits of farm animals.

7) 🐻 Also: here are photos of bears riding in a swan boat.

8) 🇧🇪 Belgium’s football association created a special version of its national team kit dedicated to cartoonist Hergé’s Tintin character.

9) 🎶 Three words: Boston Typewriter Orchestra.

10) 🎼 And four more: “The Sound of Knitting.”

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“this golden retriever is a professional at swimming”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.” — Greg Mckeown

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on February 15, 2024. 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:

☀️ Sun, tree, shadows. Snapped recently here in Hong Kong.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🇸🇦 Longread of the week, by Bradley Hope in Vanity Fair: “Inside Johnny Depp’s Epic Bromance With Saudi Crown Prince MBS.”

2) 🥽 Also excellent: The great Jaron Lanier in the New Yorker on Apple’s Vision Pro headset and the future of virtual reality.

3) 📻 RIP Bob Edwards, longtime host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.”

4) 🐅 The London Natural History Museum’s wildlife photographer of the year images are out.

5) 🙇 “How to Study: a Brief Guide.”

6) 🚗 Remarkable video of a Waymo self-driving car in San Francisco that a crowd set on fire.

7) ✍️ Neal Stephenson has a new novel coming out in October, the first in a trilogy.

8) 📍NearbyWiki matches Wikipedia entries to locations on a map.

9) 🐗 Passage of the week: “Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack. But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.”

10) 🐶 Dog-related, belated Valentine’s Day photo: “We snapped this photo at our doggy daycare today. 🥰”

•••

📖 What I’ve Been Reading

I recently read, and loved, Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s excellent 2019 novel, “Bangkok Wakes to Rain.” I shared a few thoughts on LinkedIn:

The story spans decades and centuries. Many characters are Thais from various social backgrounds. Others are foreigners.

They are all searching for love, meaning, permanence, connection with families and friends, self knowledge.

Pitchaya includes the Thai capital as a character as well: its riverine nature, its complex history, its religious currents, and its timelessness.

The multigenerational tale jumps forward and backward in time.

There’s even a smartly done sci-fi element.

Much of the story is anchored in one specific location in Bangkok, which I won’t elaborate on so you can discover it for yourself.

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

How different breeds of dogs would dress if they were human.

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💡 Quote of the week:

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on January 29, 2024. 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:

💪 Keep on hustling, Hong Kong! (Thanks, Kinan T!)

My WSJ latest:

I had an exclusive out Thursday with my colleague Neil Western. The headline: A British Businessman Worked in China for Decades. Then, He Vanished.<– 🎁 Gift link

It began:

HONG KONG—Ian J. Stones, a British business executive, worked in China for four decades, including with big U.S. firms such as General Motors and Pfizer before setting up his own consulting firm. Then, in 2018, he disappeared from public view.

Stones has been detained in China since then with no public mention of the case from Chinese or U.K. authorities.

The quiet detention of a foreign businessman who is well known within China’s business community underscores the risks of operating in the country, which has an opaque legal system that is controlled by the ruling Communist Party.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal that Stones had been sentenced to five years in prison for illegally selling intelligence to overseas parties. The ministry said he appealed his conviction but the appeal was rejected in September last year.

Informed of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s response, Stones’s daughter, Laura Stones, said neither the family nor British embassy staff had been permitted to see any of the legal documents related to the case, and therefore she couldn’t comment on the details.

“There has been no confession to the alleged crime, however my father has stoically accepted and respects that under Chinese law he must serve out the remainder of his sentence,” she said.

The story was picked up by BBC News, various UK tabloids, the AP, the Financial Times, and the New York Times, among others.

My latest at Newley.com:

📸 Earlier this month I posted My 12 Favorite Photos of 2023. They feature images I captured in Bangkok, Washington, D.C., Macau and, of course, Hong Kong.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🍿 The Oscar nominations are out and include all of the year's best-known films, though “Barbie” director director Greta Gerwig and actress Margot Robbie missed out.

2) 🤖 Japanese author Rie Kudan says she used ChatGPT to write her recently released, award-winning sci-fi novel.

3) 🧠 Members of Gen Z around the world appear to splitting along ideological lines, with women much more liberal than men.

4) ✈️ Has a Charleston, S.C. real-estate investor located Amelia Earhart's long-lost plane deep in the Pacific Ocean? 🎁 <– WSJ gift link

5) 🇪🇨 Archaeologists have uncovered details about a huge settlement that existed in Ecuador's Amazon some 2,500 years ago.

6) 🚀 Trailer of the week: “Spaceman,” an apparently trippy, very serious sci-fi film from the director of “Chernobyl” – and starring Adam Sandler.

7) 🌋 Here are some surreal photos of lava flowing into a town in Iceland.

8) 🏀 There is now a full-length basketball court in a terminal at the Indianapolis International Airport.

9) 🐶 Was Bobbi, the Rafeiro do Alentejo dog who died in October in Portugal, really 31 years old?

10) 🐀 Two words: rat selfies.

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“If I fits, I sits”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.” –Nadine Gordimer

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on November 30, 2023. 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:

🇹🇭 Work recently took me to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I caught up with an old buddy. And we ate some deliciously spicy food. Is there anything better in this world?

My WSJ latest:

🤖 I helped last week with a story about OpenAI's new board. (More on the OpenAI saga below.) The headline: Larry Summers Is OpenAI’s Surprise Pick to Mend Fences <– 🎁 Gift link

🇨🇳 And earlier this month I had a page one story with my colleagues Stella Yifan Xie and Rachel Liang. The headline: Big Western Brands Are Getting Squeezed by Chinese Belt-Tightening <– 🎁 Gift link

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🌎 Henry Kissinger died at the age of 100, “bringing to a close one of the most polarizing and influential diplomatic lives in U.S. history,” reads his WSJ obituary by Alan Cullison.

2) 📈 Also passing away in recent days: investing billionaire Charlie Munger. “Few people have ever been wealthier, in all the senses of the word, than Munger was,” writes WSJ Intelligent Investor columnist Jason Zweig.

3) 🤖 Elsewhere, WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims on the recent turmoil that shook the AI world: “Sam Altman’s triumph in remaining OpenAI’s CEO was also a win for those seeking the swift development of artificial intelligence.”

4) 💻 Related longread of the week, by Stephen Witt in the New Yorker: “How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution.”

5) 🚂 Trains.fyi is a “live, real-time map of passenger train locations in North America.”

6) 🇧🇹 Is Bhutan secretly mining Bitcoin?

7) 🩳 Comedian Matt Ruby: “We’re still coming to terms with all the different ways pandemic broke us. Perhaps the most unsightly: It normalized employed men dressing like trash.”

8) 🐕 A new drug that could help large dogs live longer is moving toward FDA approval.

9) 🎧 Podcast of the week: Harvard professor and author Arthur Brooks speaks with Peter Attia about happiness and building a life of meaning.

10) 📚 One hundred notable books of 2023, from the New York Times.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

🐶 “Don't blink or you'll miss it.”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” – William Butler Yeats

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on October 30, 2023. 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:

🏃‍♂️ Members of our WSJ Hong Kong bureau participated in #IRunForEvan on Thursday – a jog to mark our colleague Evan Gershkovich’s 32nd birthday. It’s now been more than 30 weeks since he was wrongly detained in Russia for doing his job.

My WSJ latest:

🗞 My latest, an Oct. 21 scoop with my colleagues Sam Schechner and Jeff Horwitz.

The headline: Inside Meta, Debate Over What’s Fair in Suppressing Comments in the Palestinian Territories. <– 🎁 Gift link

It began:

After Hamas stormed Israel and murdered civilians on Oct. 7, hateful comments from the region surged through Instagram. Meta Platforms managers cranked up automatic filters meant to slow the flood of violent and harassing content.

But still the comments kept appearing—especially from the Palestinian territories, according to a Meta manager. So Meta turned up its filters again, but only there.

In an internal forum for Muslim employees, objections poured in.

“What we’re saying and what we’re doing seem completely opposed at the moment,” one employee posted internally, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta has publicly pledged to apply its policies equally around the world.

The social media giant has been wrestling with how best to enforce its content rules in the midst of the brutal and chaotic war. Meta relies heavily on automation to police Instagram and Facebook, but those tools can stumble: They have struggled to parse the Palestinian Arabic dialect and in some cases they don’t have enough Hebrew-language data to work effectively.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🇨🇳 Longread of the week: The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos on “China’s age of malaise.”

2) 📹 A new component of war and terrorist attacks in 2023: ubiquitous videos of violence.

3) 🔥 Charlottesville, Virginia’s divisive statue of Robert E. Lee has been melted down and will be made into a new piece of public art.

4) 🐦 One year after Elon Musk took over Twitter, daily active users, downloads, and ad revenues are all down – though engagement with his account is at all time high. <– 🎁 WSJ gift link

5) 🔨 Shot: While slick influencers dominate Instagram, some of TikTok’s biggest global stars are blue collar workers…

6) 🏍 Chaser: …And gig workers in Latin America are creating viral pop hits.

7) 🧠 The 12 problems that influence author Ted Gioia’s work and thinking.

8) 🎧 Vinyl fans are revolting after the popular Discogs website raised fees.

9) ⚽ Lionel Messi’s pink Inter Miami jersey cannot be made fast enough to keep up with demand (Thanks, Anasuya!).

10) 🐕 Canine-related music story of the week: the Danish Chamber Orchestra brought in three dogs to participate in a recent symphony. (Thanks, Beth D-B!)

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“I work from home so they’re with me all day. This is still the reaction I get when I finish for the day.”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

•••

🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of pups that are so stoked their owners have clocked off.

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on October 9, 2023. 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 queried the Stable Diffusion XL text to image generator to see what a futuristic Hong Kong might look like. What do you think?

My WSJ latest:

A story out Friday with my colleagues Chip Cutter and Elaine Yu: China Is Becoming a No-Go Zone for Executives. <– 🎁 Free link

It begins:

Foreign executives are scared to go to China. Their main concern: They might not be allowed to leave.

Beijing’s tough treatment of foreign companies this year, and its use of exit bans targeting bankers and executives, has intensified concerns about business travel to mainland China. Some companies are canceling or postponing trips. Others are maintaining travel plans but adding new safeguards, including telling staff they can enter the country in groups but not alone.

“There is a very significant cautionary attitude toward travel to China,” said Tammy Krings, chief executive of ATG Travel Worldwide, which works with large employers around the world. “I would advise mission-critical travel only.”

Krings said she has seen a roughly 25% increase in cancellations or delays of business trips to China by U.S. companies in recent weeks. A U.S. government-linked survey, published in September and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, found that nearly a fifth of respondents are reducing business travel to China.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🇮🇱 The latest from Israel: the country’s defense minister has ordered a total siege of the Gaza Strip following Saturday’s surprise attack by Hamas. This WSJ page has live updates.

2) 👉 More from Reuters: how Hamas planned its assault using a “careful campaign of deception.”

3) 🇪🇨 A sad story by my WSJ colleague Ryan Dubé about how Ecuador is being shaken by violence from drug gangs.

4) 🏃‍♂️ Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum broke the men’s world’s record for the marathon with a 2 hour, 35 second run – wearing “supershoes.”

5) 🥬 Being vegetarian might be in one’s genes.

6) 📸 A detailed review of the iPhone Pro Max’s camera. (Spoiler alert: It’s superb.)

7) 🧶 On knitting, domain names, and the power of online communities.

8) 📺 The 50 best TV shows of this century so far, according to Hollywood Reporter critics.

9) 🇵🇱 Headline of the week: “Poles rally to support dog accused of eating 100 cabbages in neighbouring farm.”

10) 🗣 A woman named Siri has changed her name due to the incessant triggering of Apple’s voice assistant.

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

Otto’s just doing his laps with everyone else.

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter September 12, 2023. 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:

😴 Spotted on a red Ferrari here in Hong Kong: NO SLEEP. (Thanks, Anasuya!)

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🇭🇰 Hong Kong was hit last week by mammoth downpours that seeped into subway stations and submerged cars.

2) 🤖 Artificial intelligence tool ChatGPP outperformed Wharton M.B.A. students in creating new business ideas, two professors write in the WSJ <– 🎁 Free link

3) 🎥 The inside story, from the New York Times’s Jim Stewart, of how Mattel hit it big with its blockbuster “Barbie” film.

4) 🇪🇬 Reverse-engineering Egyptian mummifying balms.

5) ⛵ The wreck of a schooner that went down in 1881 has been found in Lake Michigan.

6) 💬 A look at words that are the same, or nearly so, in every language.

7) ☕ A pean to home espresso machines.

8) 📺 The utterly wild docu-series “How To With John Wilson” has come to an end after three seasons.

9) 🎧 Podcast episode of the week, touching on ambition, happiness, and indie rock: “Does anyone actually like their job?”

10) 🐹 A Florida man was arrested while attempting to “sail” to London – in a floating hamster wheel. (Thanks, Mike S.!)

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“Leaving work on Friday…”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – Kurt Vonnegut

•••

🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of fearless canines bounding into the unknown.

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter September 4, 2023. Not on my list? Join 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:

🙃 A license plate spotted here in Hong Kong. (Thanks, Anasuya!)

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🐦 The WSJ has an exclusive excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s new autobiography of Elon Musk featuring the inside story of Musk’s purchase of Twitter. <– 🎁 free link

2) 🍹 RIP Jimmy Buffett, who died Friday at the age of 76, leaving behind not just a musical legacy but a business empire that made him a billionaire. <– 🎁 free link

3) 🧬 Early humans in Africa nearly went extinct some 900,000 years ago, dwindling in number to only about 1,280.

4) 🔭 So…we might need to rethink some of our basic assumptions about the universe.

5) 💤 Longread of the week, in The New Yorker: Do we misunderstand the reason we dream?

6) ❓ A masterwork of obsession: “The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge.”

7) 🌏 Here are some gorgeous 360-degree views of sights around the world.

8) 📺 The 25 best TV episodes from the past 25 years.

9) 🛍️ Photo essay: the world’s longest yard sale, running from Georgia to Michigan.

10) 🗣️ Fun video: changing English accents on the fly.

•••

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“Bebe Backpack.”

•••

💡 Quote of the week:

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” – Eric Hoffer

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley