Category: Newley’s Notes

Sent as a newsletter on April 22, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a newsletter containing my recent Bloomberg News stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.

Image above: Easter Procession, St. Marks (1898), by Maurice Prendergast

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 👉 My latest, an exclusive out Thursday with my Bloomberg colleagues Eric Fan and Paige Smith: US Agency Probes Workers’ Bias Claims Against India’s TCS <– 🎁 Gift link. The lede:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating dozens of American workers’ allegations that India’s biggest IT outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., discriminated against them based on their race, age and national origin.

2) 🙏 RIP, Pope Francis.

3) 🚢 A helpful Bloomberg feature: “Tracking Every Trump Tariff and Its Economic Effect.”

4) 🇭🇰 Related: This week’s Schumpeter column in The Economist. The headline: “The trade war may reverse Hong Kong’s commercial decline.”

5) 🔭 “Scientists have found new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.”

6)🚦 Some Seattle crosswalk buttons were hacked to play what sounded like Jeff Bezos saying “Please, please don’t tax the rich.”

7) ⛵ “The Techno-Utopians Who Want to Colonize the Sea.”

8) 📺 What I’m watching: “The Last of Us” is back for season two. One word on the action so far: wow.

9) 📖 What I’m reading: Last weekend I completed a months-long quest to conquer the great Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I loved it. My (joking, but only kind of!) review, which I shared with colleagues, is: TLDR – 19th-century Russian aristocrats: They’re just like us!

10) 🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “That face says it all – he needs some love.”

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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of traumatized Huskies.

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on April 14, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a newsletter containing my recent Bloomberg News stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.

Image above: dire wolf puppies?

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🐺 Are dire wolves really back from extinction?

2) 📹 Meanwhile: “American YouTuber who left a Diet Coke can for a reclusive island tribe is arrested in India.”

3) 👉 The WSJ’s Jason Zweig on Daniel Kahneman’s death: “The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions.”

4) 🗣️ What did you think of the “White Lotus” season finale? And more important, what did you make of Parker Posey’s Southern accent?

5) 📖 Eighty-seven-year-old Thomas Pynchon’s first novel in twelve years will be out in October.

6) 🏄 On surfing in Hong Kong.

7) 🇵🇪 RIP Mario Vargas Llosa.

8) ⚽ My beloved Arsenal beat Real Madrid in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinal thanks to two incredible free kicks from Declan Rice.

9) 👏 And speaking of football/soccer, quote of the week: “I’m a Southend fan till I die now.”

10) 🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “Autumn goes home with the best stick during walkies.”

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on April 5, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a newsletter containing my recent Bloomberg News stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.

Image above: New York City’s new subway map. (Read on…)

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ✍️ My Bloomberg latest: a scoop out Tues. with my colleagues Mark Bergen and Yazhou Sun. The hed: Microsoft-Backed Startup Builder.ai Hires Auditors to Investigate Inflated Sales <– 🎁 Gift link

2) 📉 Following President Trump’s tariff announcements, the S&P 500 Index has fallen to its lowest level in 11 months.

3) 📱 My colleague Oliva Carville, who has done remarkable investigative work on how young people have been harmed by social media, has a weekend essay out. And there’s a new documentary based on her work, “Can’t Look Away.”

4) 🇺🇦 The New York Times’s Adam Entous on “America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.”

5) 👉 Also in the NYT, my former WSJ colleague Justin Scheck has an important new story out with Abdi Latif Dahir: “Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia.”

6) 🎬 RIP, Val Kilmer.

7) 📩 A look at Emily Dickinson’s “envelope poems.”

8) 🍎 For the first time since 1979, New York City’s subway map has a new design.

9) 🎵 What I’ve been listening to: Jason Isbell has a new solo album out, “Foxes in the Snow.” (Thanks for the tip, Wendy!)

10) 🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “The most beautiful dog in the mirror at the moment🥰”

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on March 31, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a newsletter containing my recent Bloomberg News stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.

📸 Image of the week, above

It’s been too long since I shared a photo of our gorgeous Ginger. Here she is. Out on a recent jaunt.

✍️ My Bloomberg latest

For an edition of our Tech in Depth newsletter earlier this month, I wrote about the popularity of DeepSeek here in Hong Kong.

🤖 The hed: DeepSeek Takes Over Hong Kong in ChatGPT’s Absence. 🎁 <– gift link

I wrote:

Hong Kong for a long time felt like an artificial intelligence no man’s land, caught between east and west.

Major American services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude aren’t offered by their makers here, even though Hong Kong has never been subject to the mainland’s internet restrictions. And many Chinese AI apps have been difficult to access, with companies like Baidu Inc. prioritizing the billion-plus population on the mainland and making signups from Hong Kong complex.

The city’s consumers have largely been watching the AI revolution from the sidelines. They’ve been forced to use workarounds such as virtual private networks to try the most advanced services ushering in generative AI.

No more. Now DeepSeek is here.

⭐ Then on Thursday I had a scoop (scoop-let?) on Meta’s longtime Asia-Pacific business head departing the company.

The hed: Meta’s Asia-Pacific Chief Quits After a Decade-Long Growth Spurt 🎁 <– gift link

It began:

Meta Platforms Inc. is losing its senior-most business executive for the Asia-Pacific, an industry veteran who shepherded some of the social media company’s largest international markets over a decade-long tenure.

Dan Neary, the company’s vice president for the region, assumed the role in 2013 and oversaw the rapid expansion of the company’s user base from Australia to Greater China and Southeast Asia. The Singapore-based executive announced his departure in an internal post. He left for personal reasons, a Meta spokesperson said Thursday.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 💬 A remarkable story that surely you saw, but in case not: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” – The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg

2) 🎧 For more on the incident, national security-focused publication Lawfare has had some podcast episodes.

3) 👉 “Oleg Gordievsky, Britain’s most valuable Cold War spy inside the KGB, dies at 86” – The AP.

(If you haven’t read the excellent 2018 Ben Macintyre book about Gordievsky, don’t miss it: “The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.”)

4) 🧬 “Bankrupt 23andMe’s DNA Data Gets Sale Nod as Concerns Linger” – Bloomberg News

5) 📖 Here’s an excerpt from my former WSJ colleague Keach Hagey’s new book, “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future."

6) 🧠 “Reid Hoffman: ‘Start using AI deeply. It is a huge intelligence amplifier’” – The Guardian

7) 🌍 “Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life” – Live Science

8) 🌞 “Experience the Virtual Sun, our human-centric virtual skylight.” – INNERSCENE

9) 📺 TV Garden: watch TV from countries around the world

10) 🥾 “What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero” – Sam Anderson in the New York Times Magazine

🎵 What I’ve been listening to:

🎸 I’ve been enjoying Charley Crockett’s new album, Lonesome Drifter. (Thanks for the pointer, PB!)

🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

Justice is what you would call an enthusiastic cuddler.

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

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.”

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💡 Quote of the week:

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

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👊 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”

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💡 Quote of the week:

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

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👊 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. 🥰”

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📖 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.

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🦴 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.”

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💡 Quote of the week:

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

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley