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Newley's Notes

NN 150: China Spy Attack; Hi-Fi Cafes; Banksy’s Hoax; Dachshunds Chasing Kangaroos

The latest edition of my email newsletter, below, went out on Sunday. Subscribe to get future dispatches in your inbox before they’re posted here.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

This marks, amazingly, the 150th edition of my modest newsletter. I launched NN in Feb. 2015, or about three and a half years ago. Thanks for subscribing. Here’s to 150 more!

Wanna help me out? Forward this email to your smartest, coolest friends, so they can join our list. If you received this from a pal, sign up here.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🖥️ 1) Bombshell tech story of the week: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies [Bloomberg Businessweek] – The dek on the story by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley: “The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain…” (Apple and Amazon refute the account.)

🕵️ 2) Techno-sleuthing story of the week: Police Use Fitbit Data to Charge 90-Year-Old Man in Stepdaughter’s Killing [NY Times] – The victim’s heartbeat stopped when the alleged killer was in her house, the device showed.

📚 3) Literature-related top 100 list of the week: A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon [Vulture] – A look at the top books so far in the 2000s.

🔊 4) Music-related story of the week: Active listening? Hi-fi bars arrive in Los Angeles… [LA Times] – Audiophiles are gathering in Japanese-inspired “high-fi bars” in L.A. to…simply listen to music on amazing sound systems. I love it.

📓 5) Ivory tower-related hoax of the week: Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship [Areo Magazine]. “Something has gone wrong in the university – especially in certain fields within the humanities,” write Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established…”

TLDR: Over the course of a year, the three scholars published several ludicrous papers (e.g. “Dog Park: Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon” and “Fat Bodybuilding: Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding”) to illustrate what they see as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” gone awry.

Related: the WSJ opinion piece that brought the issue to a head. And a Chronicle of Higher Education story putting the project into perspective.

🖼️ 6) Art-related hoax of the week: ‘Going, Going, Gone…’: Banksy Artwork Shreds Itself After Sale [WSJ] – The artist’s 2006 painting “Girl With Balloon“ sold at auction for $1.4 million – and then, as my colleague Michael Wright reports, ”the canvas passed through a shredder that appeared to be hidden inside the frame, emerging underneath in thin strips." Here’s a video.

🔘 7) Fun tech-related blog of the week: Control–Panel.com, a repository of photos of old “dials, toggles, buttons, and bulbs.”

⚽ 8) Uplifting aging-athlete story of the week: Kazu Miura and the Never-Ending Soccer Career [NY Times] – Jeré Longman on the 51-year-old striker who is still playing professionally – and scoring goals (video here).

🗡️ 9) Story of the week that most sounds like the beginning of an awesome sci-fi/fantasy series: Girl, 8, pulls a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in Sweden [BBC] – And yes, her first name is…“Saga.”

🌭 10) This week’s moment of sausage dog zen: A Dachshund named Kingsley chases some kangaroos [Instagram video] – Fantastic.

What’s new with you? Just hit reply and share your news. I love hearing from folks.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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Newley’s Notes 149: SoftBank’s OYO Bet; India’s Biometric ID; Facebook’s Terrible Week; Chilean Military Puppies

The latest edition of my email newsletter went out on Sunday. Subscribe to get it in your inbox before it’s posted here.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

It was a busy week for tech news here in India.

First, local hotel booking platform OYO raising a whopping $1 billion on Tues. in a fundraising round led by Japan’s SoftBank.

Then on Wed. the Supreme Court ruled that India’s landmark biometric identity program, known as Aadhaar, doesn’t violate citizens’ privacy, and can continue with some new limitations.

Keep reading for more…

Wanna help me out? Forward this email to your smartest, coolest friends, so they can join our list. If you received this from a pal, sign up here.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🏨 1) By me: SoftBank Leads $1 Billion Investment in Indian Hotel-Booking Startup [WSJ] – The lede: “SoftBank Group Corp. is doubling down on one of its biggest bets in India by leading a $1 billion investment in hotel-booking startup OYO Hotels.”

🆔 2) By me and my colleague Krishna Pokharel: India’s Top Court Rules Massive Biometric Identity Database Legal – With Restrictions [WSJ] – The big picture: “The country’s controversial Aadhaar program uses photos, finger and eye scans and has already signed up more than 1 billion people. It has sparked an intense global debate over how far a democracy should be able to go in collecting the personal data of its citizens and how that data can be used, shared and protected."

👋 3) Shot 1: Instagram Co-Founders to Step Down From Facebook [WSJ] – The photo sharing app’s co-founders “clashed with Facebook executives over the extent of Instagram’s autonomy in recent months,” my colleague Deepa Seetharaman. Reminder: WhatsApp’s co-founders have also departed. That means the creators of two of Facebook’s biggest outside platforms are gone.

🔓 4) Chaser 1: Facebook discloses major security flaw, could affect 50 million users [Axios] – The larger contest, writes Axios’s Shannon Vavra: “This is just the latest in a long string of recent problems for Facebook, including executive defections, social media interference, privacy concerns, and accusations of anti-conservative bias.”

🤐 5) Shot 2: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information [Gizomodo] – Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill at says Facebook is using for advertising purposes “information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books…”

🌐 6) Chaser 2: Facebook: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver [YouTube] – A look at Facebook in emerging markets. (Someone wrote on Twitter recently that Facebook now feels like the last days of Blockbuster Video. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s safe to say public opinion has shifted drastically, and quickly.)

🇷🇺 7) Tech-related longread of the week: How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump [New Yorker] – Jane Mayer on a new book by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

🆒 8) Art-related photos of the week: Scenes From the World of WearableArt Competition [The Atlantic] – Wonderful.

🌟 9) Reddit post of the week: What is a website that everyone should know about but few people actually know about?
[Reddit] – Lots of great suggestions here.

🎖️ 10) Amazing dog video of the week: Adorable Police Puppies Take Part In Military Parade [YouTube] – Heartwarming scenes from Chile.

What’s new with you? Just hit reply and share your news. I love hearing from folks.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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NN 148: Florence & Mangkhut; New iPhones; Zuck Deep Dive; Dog-Pandas

Edition 148 of my email newsletter went out Sept. 16. (I’m late in posting it.) Subscribe to receive future editions before I share them here.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

I hope everyone is safe, sound, and dry!

☔ I’ve been monitoring Tropical Storm Florence closely given friends and family in the Carolinas. (All our WSJ coverage on the storm is open to all readers; here are our live updates on Florence.)

And as I type this, Typhoon Mangkhut is pounding Hong Kong and Southern China after tearing through the Philippines. It’s the world’s strongest storm so far this year.

Take care, readers!

Also: one programming note. There will be no NN next week. I’ll be back the following week.

🤟 Wanna help me out? Forward this email to your smartest, coolest friends, so they can join our list. If you received this from a pal, sign up here.

On to this week’s NN…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🆕 1) Apple Launches Bigger, Pricier iPhones [WSJ] – At $1,099, the iPhone XS Max is the company’s most expensive model ever, my colleague Tripp Mickle reports. There’s also the new iPhone XS, which costs $999, and the iPhone XR at $749.
The big picture for Apple: “The new models are critical to maintaining sales in a contracting smartphone market where people hold on to devices longer, and growth of high-price handsets has stagnated.”

Meanwhile our Joanna Stern has a first look at the devices in this video. Apple also announced the fourth version of the Apple Watch. The AP’s Michael Liedtke says the company is “trying to turn its smartwatch from a niche gadget into a lifeline to better health by slowly evolving it into a medical device.”

⏳ 2) Tech-related longread of the week: Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? [New Yorker] – Evan Osnos profiles Facebook’s chief exec. Lots of good stuff here. Axios has the highlights.

❓3) Google-related headline of the week: Where in the World Is Larry Page? [Bloomberg Businessweek] – The dek: “While Alphabet faces existential challenges, its co-founder is exercising his right to be forgotten.” Mark Bergen and Austin Carr write that:

…a slew of interviews in recent months with colleagues and confidants, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were worried about retribution from Alphabet, describe Page as an executive who’s more withdrawn than ever, bordering on emeritus, invisible to wide swaths of the company. Supporters contend he’s still engaged, but his immersion in the technology solutions of tomorrow has distracted him from the problems Google faces today.

⚡ 4) Food for thought: For safety’s sake, we must slow innovation in internet-connected things [MIT Technology Review] – Well-known security expert Bruce Schneier talks about his new book, “Click Here to Kill Everybody.”

🦊 5) File under: pets I one day want… These domesticated foxes were 60 years in the making [The Verge] – Contains an interesting video. Related Newley.com post from 2013: What Domesticating Siberian Foxes May Tell Us About Dogs.

📚 6) Depressing education-related story of the week: Teens Are Protesting In-Class Presentations [The Atlantic] – Students in the U.S. “…have started calling out in-class presentations as discriminatory to those with anxiety, demanding that teachers offer alternative options,” Taylor Lorenz writes.

🎄 7) Latest sign Amazon will one day control all commerce: What’s in the Amazon box? Maybe a real 7-foot Christmas tree [AP] – This year you can buy big-ass Douglas firs and Norfolk Island pines from The Everything Store.

💡 8) Cool photography-related link of the week: Terrestrial Chiaroscuro [BLDGBLOG] – Geoff Manaugh on how photographer Reuben Wu “uses drone-mounted LED lights to illuminate remote geological formations, towering figures highlighted against the landscape with what appear to be haloes or celestial spotlights.” Click through to see some of his gorgeous pics.

🐠 9) Fish-related story of the week: ‘Gel-like’ see-through fish discovered 7.5km down on Pacific ocean floor [The Guardian] – “Scientists have discovered three new species of ‘hardcore’ fish living in one of the deepest parts of the ocean, the see-through, scale-free creatures perfectly adapted to conditions that would instantly kill most life on Earth.”

🐼 10) Silly dog video of the week: Puppy wearing panda costume [Reddit] – Title says it all.

What’s new with you? Just hit reply and share your news. I love hearing from folks.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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NN147: My Newest Page One Story; Amazon = Monopoly?; Space Elevators; Dogs of Twitter

Edition 147 of my email newsletter went out Sept. 9. (I’m late in posting it here.) Subscribe to receive future editions before they’re posted here.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

😎 Wanna help me out? Forward this email to your smartest, coolest friends, so they can join our list. If you received this from a pal, sign up here.

This week was a very satisfying one for me. I story I’d been working on for months ran on the front page of the Journal on Wednesday. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

It’s about how India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has spent billions of dollars building a brand new high speed mobile carrier offering data for extremely low prices – and how millions of people here have gotten online for the first time (and why that’s important to the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google).

More below…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

📡 1) By me: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet—One Billionaire Changed All That [WSJ] – The lede and first graf:

India’s richest man is catapulting hundreds of millions of poor people straight into the mobile internet age.
Mukesh Ambani, head of Reliance Industries, one of India’s largest conglomerates, has shelled out $35 billion of the company’s money to blanket the South Asian nation with its first all–4G network. By offering free calls and data for pennies, the telecom latecomer has upended the industry, setting off a cheap internet tsunami that is opening the market of 1.3 billion people to global tech and retailing titans.

The story, with images shot by the excellent Mumbai-based photographer Sarah Hylton, received a lot of attention on social media. I also liked the responses (some 137 comments and counting) to the story on Hacker News, a Reddit-like site for tech news and discussion.

🗳️ 2) Social media/D.C. story of the week: Lawmakers demand more action from top Twitter, Facebook execs – Axios’s David McCabe sums up the Capitol Hill hearings featuring Twitter chief exec Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg: “With the midterms approaching, policymakers and Silicon Valley are both trying to avoid a repeat of the 2016 cycle, during which Russian operatives spread content on socially divisive issues ahead of Election Day.”

📵 3) Facebook-related story of the week: More than a quarter of Americans say they’ve deleted the Facebook app from their phones [Recode] – “Let’s just say Americans’ relationship with Facebook is increasingly complicated,” Rani Molla writes.

🤑 4) Finance story of the week: Lehman’s Lessons, 10 Years Later [WSJ] – A decade of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, my colleague James Mackintosh provides five lessons.

🛒 5) Law-related story of the week: Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea [NY Times] – “With a single scholarly article, Lina Khan, 29, has reframed decades of monopoly law,” David Streitfeld writes.

🛰️ 6) Crazy space-related story of the week: Japan starts space elevator experiments [Electronics Weekly] – Arthur C Clarke’s dream could become a reality. (Thanks, Colin R., for the pointer following our discussions of this idea many years ago!)_

📸 7) Insta-story of the week: Instagram is building a standalone app for shopping [The Verge] – The app “will let users browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app,” Casey Newton writes.

✍️ 8) Religion-meets-journalism op-ed of the week: The Biblical Guide to Reporting [NY Times] – “Some people might think that Christians are supposed to be soft and acquiescent rather than muckrakers who hold the powerful to account,” Marshall Allen writes. “But what I do as an investigative reporter is consistent with what the Bible teaches.”

🍟 9) Prank of the week: Friends hung poster of themselves at McDonald’s, and no one noticed for weeks [CTVNews] – “Maravilla said he noticed that there were several photos on the Houston-area restaurant’s walls of people smiling while consuming McDonald’s products. He said the pictures contained ‘literally no Asians,’’ and decided he and Toledo should rectify that situation.” More is available in their YouTube video.

💗 10) Two dog-related Twitter feeds you should be following: At I’ve Pet That Dog, ten-year-old Gideon shares images of pooches he encounters, and relates fun facts about them. And Thoughts of Dog contains, well, what the author imagines the canine in the profile pic (a delightfully dopey yellow lab eating a piece of watermelon) must be thinking. For example, this recent gem:

gooooob morning. i had a dream. that i was chasing my tail. and started spinning so fast. i went back in time. and high-fived a dinosaur

What’s new with you? Just hit reply and share your news. I love hearing from folks.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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NN146: India Mobile Money Momentum — New iPhones? — Psychedelic Temple — Dog Punks Lions

The latest edition of my email newsletter went out last week. Subscribe to receive it before it’s posted here.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

🙏 Wanna do me a solid? Forward this email to your smartest, coolest friends, so they can join our list. If you received this from a pal, sign up here.

💰 As as I’ve mentioned here – and written about in stories – there’s growing interest these days in India’s burgeoning internet economy. From e-commerce to ride-sharing to mobile devices, global tech companies are hustling for a piece of the action as people get online for the first time, and as customers already accessing the web spend more and more money online.

One particularly promising sector is mobile payments. Few people in India have credit or debit cards, but lots of people have smartphones. After Prime Minister Modi took the largest domination notes out of circulation in Nov. 2016 and a cash crunch ensued, masses of citizens flocked to a mobile wallet called Paytm for their everyday transactions.

This week mobile payments were in the news again: Berkshire Hathaway – yes, the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet’s, firm – is investing in Paytm, joining the ranks of Asian tech titans who have already done so, like Alibaba and SoftBank.

Meanwhile Google also rolled out some new features for its mobile payments app in India. Keep reading for more…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

📱 1) By me and a colleague: Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Invests in India Mobile-Payments Firm [WSJ].

📈 2) Also by me: Mobile Money Heats Up in India as Google Doubles Down [WSJ] – The lede: “Alphabet Inc.’s Google is raising its mobile-payments game in India with new functions and services as global players race to woo the nation’s legions of consumers who are skipping credit cards and transacting on smartphones instead.”

🔍 3) Meanwhile, an important story by my WSJ colleagues Doug MacMillan, Sarah Krouse and Keach Hagey: Yahoo, Bucking Industry, Scans Emails for Data to Sell Advertisers [WSJ] – Yahoo’s owner “has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain…”

🍎 4) Apple announces next iPhone event for September 12: ‘Gather round’ [9to5Mac] – Look out for “three new flagship iPhones and a redesigned Apple Watch,” Zac Hall says, in addition to new iPad Pros and possibly details on a new wireless charging mat.

🎹 5) Music-related story of the week: Show Tunes [Real Life] – In the age of social media and streaming, “The business model for music doesn’t require a must-have album, then, but rather a week-to-week narrative within the music world to justify a monthly subscription,” writes David Turner. (Editor’s note: I find this all so tiresome. I’ll keep listening to decades-old vinyl, as pretentious as that sounds!)

🛐 6) Crazy art/architecture story of the week: In upstate New York, a DMT-inspired psychedelic temple rises [Architect’s Newspaper] – The story contains this utterly amazing sentence, among many others:

“Selecting a point on their 40-acre plot that aligns with the solar plexus of a projected goddess, ‘the kabbalistic sephirot of justice,’’ CoSM has begun converting a former carriage house into a three-level, 12,000-square-foot concrete structure replete with modern amenities, including an ADA-compliant elevator.”

🔭 7) Mind-blowing photo of the week: Hubble Observes Energetic Lightshow at Saturn’s North Pole [European Space Agency] – Click through to see the “fluttering auroras.” Astounding.

😴 8) #ProTip of the week: How to Fall Asleep in 120 Seconds [Medium] – It can be done, Sharon Ackman writes, with these steps developed by the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School.

🔥 9) College soccer golazo of the week, featuring my old team: Khattab’s OT Goal Gives No. 8 Emory Men’s Soccer 5–4 Win over No.14 W&L in Instant Classic [EmoryAthletics] – Click through for a video.

💪 10) Brave canine of the week: Dog chasing lions [YouTube] – As the saying goes: It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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Newley's Notes

NN 144: Elon’s Amazing Interview; the New Facebook; Goats on the Lam

The latest edition of my email newsletter went out last week. Subscribe to receive it before it’s posted here.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.
So, apropos of nothing: I saw something (especially) funny while in traffic here in Delhi today.

Hint 1: It was a passenger vehicle full of animals.

Hint 2: These particular creatures have been in the news in the U.S. this week.

Hint 3: They are almost as awesome as llamas.

Give up? Click here to see my pics.

And now, baaaack to our originally scheduled newsletter (#sorrynotsorry)…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

⚡ 1) Elon Musk Details ‘Excruciating’ Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil [New York Times] – An astounding interview. I pointed out in a Newley.com post what I see as the most remarkable passages.

🇷🇺 2) Russian Hackers Target Conservative Groups in Widening Cyberattacks [WSJ] – Just out from my colleagues Dustin Volz and Robert McMillan: “Russian hackers linked to the 2016 election cyberattacks on the Democratic Party are widening their targeting for the coming midterms to include the U.S. Senate and well-connected conservative groups, according to new research from Microsoft…”

📱3) Modern Horror Films are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries [The Verge] – Tasha Robinson on the “new standard trope.”

✈️ 4) How TripAdvisor changed travel [The Guardian] – “Over its two decades in business,” Linda Kinstler writes, “TripAdvisor has turned an initial investment of $3m into a $7bn business by figuring out how to provide a service that no other tech company has quite mastered: constantly updated information about every imaginable element of travel, courtesy of an ever-growing army of contributors who provide their services for free.”

💬 5) College chat app pulls a page from Facebook [Axios] – Kia Kokalitcheva on a messaging app called Islands that’s big on college campuses in the U.S. “We launched Islands and our thesis was the group chats are the new social network,” the company’s founder says. (Note: I think he’s right about this. Who needs Facebook when you have WhatsApp groups?)

👂6) The future is ear: Why “hearables” are finally tech’s next big thing – Apple, Amazon and Google are all “working on products that combine the utility of the hearing aid with the entertainment value of a pair of high-end headphones,” reports Peter Burrows.

🚀 7) Tech-related #longread of the week: Virgin Galactic’s Rocket Man [New Yorker] – Nicholas Schmidle on the “ace pilot risking his life to fulfill Richard Branson’s billion-dollar quest to make commercial space travel a reality.”

🌭 8) Fun, useless link of the week: Buns.life is a website that allows you to…“put words between buns.”

⚽ 9) Soccer video of the week: Wayne Rooney’s Incredible World class tackle and Assist vs Orlando City [YouTube]. Honorable mention: trailer for Kaiser: The Greatest Footballer to Never Play Football [YouTube].

🐶 10) Adorable dog video of the week: Kirk, a female Border Collie, watching herself win the 2017 Purina Pro Challenge [Twitter].

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. If you received this from a pal, you can sign up here.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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NN 143: Alex Jones’s Very Bad Week; Wither Snapchat?; White Shark Breach

Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🖥️ 1) By me at Newley.com: Book Notes: ‘The Master Switch,’ by Tim Wu. The book’s subtitle: “The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” An archive of my Book Notes posts is here.

🚫 2) Apple Kicked Alex Jones Off Its Platform, Then YouTube And Facebook Rushed To Do The Same [Buzzfeed News] — “In all, the actions will currently seriously limit Jones’s ability to reach his massive audience,” John Paczkowski and Charlie Warzel wrote. “Twitter and Periscope remain one of the sole major platforms to still host Jones.”

↘️ 3) Snapchat’s Users Slide in Latest Setback for Social Media [WSJ]– After it appears that user growth is slowing at Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat “reported its first quarterly decline in daily users, sending its stock price gyrating,” my colleague Marc Vartabedian reported. The number of daily users fell 2% to about 188 million, the first such decline in seven years.

🤖 4) Robotics-related link of the week: All Is Full of Björk Bots [Slate] — “I couldn’t escape the feeling I’d seen this sort of robot design before, and in a strikingly similar context,” Benjamin Frisch writes. “Then I realized where I recognized it from: the seminal video for Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love.’”

📹 5) This week in surveillance/fashion-related news: Camouflage from face detection [CV Dazzle] — Click through to read how “avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs” can be used to “break apart the continuity of a face.”

📚 6) Shot: Gutenberg’s Revenge [Strategy+Business] — Why “the consumer market for physical, printed books is holding its own in an increasingly digital world.”

💯 7) Chaser: 17 Places Book Lovers Need to Visit [Conde Nast Traveler] — Gorgeous pics, ranging from a trippy bookshop in Yangzhou, China to a three-story library in Rio de Janeiro and a monstary in Prague.

🔥 8) No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man [Smithsonian American Art Museum] — In the first exhibit of its kind, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. is showing artwork from the legendary desert party.

🗣️ 9) 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English) [The Guardian] — My favorite: “sisu.” Runner up: tiáo (条).

🦈 10) Crazy-ass shark-related video of the week: White shark surprise breach off Wellfleet, MA. [YouTube/Atlantic White Shark Conservancy] — Title says it all. (Thanks, Milo!)

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. If you received this from a pal, you can sign up here.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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Newley’s Notes 142: Apple Soars; Google in China; QAnon; Wingsuit Craziness

Edition 142 of my email newsletter went out on Monday.

If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🍎 1) Apple sees strong quarter ahead as earnings top estimates [Axios] — The micro: iPhone revenue rose 20% compared to a year earlier and services sales rose 31%. The macro, from my colleague Tripp Mickle: The results show how Apple is “finding ways to grow amid a contracting global smartphone market that is roiling its rivals,” he writes. And:

The company’s services business reported record revenue of $9.55 billion, a 31% increase from a year earlier, strengthening the case that Apple is in the midst of a transformation from a device-driven business into one increasingly reliant on sales of subscriptions and software.

💯💯💯💯💯 2) … and Apple later marked a milestone: Apple’s Market Cap Hits $1 Trillion [WSJ] — It’s the first U.S. firm to surpass $1 trillion in market cap. Click through for an amazing graphic showing the stock’s rise.

🔍 3) This week also saw two interesting Google-China stories. First: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal [The Intercept] — The service “will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest,” Ryan Gallagher reports.

🇨🇳 4) And second: Google Developing News App for China [The Information] — The news app “will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws,” Wayne Ma and Juro Osawa report.

⁉️ 5) Bizarre story of the week: What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy Theory That Showed Up at a Trump Rally [NY Times] — TLDR: It’s super weird and totally nonsensical. There’s more from Know Your Meme.

📚 6) Meet the YouTube Stars Turning Viewers Into Readers [New York Times] — Concepción de León speaks with “BookTubers,” young book fans who have become influencers on YouTube.

🥤 7) The Decline and Fall of Diet Coke and the Power Generation That Loved It [New Yorker] — “To an astonishing extent,” Nathan Heller writes, “the age of Diet Coke — its rise, its reign, its fall — maps onto a historical bracket that began with the launch of MTV and ended with the emergence of social media: the era of the power of the image in a mainstream burnished form.”

💥 8) Venezuela President Maduro survives ‘drone assassination attempt’ [BBC] — Nicolás Maduro was speaking at a gathering in Caracas when “Two drones loaded with explosives went off near the president’s stand, Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said,” the BBC reports. Meanwhile, Reuters’s Joseph Ax has some analysis:

Wherever the investigation leads, Maduro’s allegations raised the specter of unmanned aerial vehicles being used by militant groups or others to launch bombing, chemical or biological attacks, a tactic that has long worried security experts.

💔 9) Tech longread of the week: Growing Up Jobs [Vanity Fair] — Lisa Brennan-Jobs recounts her difficult relationship with her father, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

🌌 10) Mind-blowing video of the week: Stars orbiting the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way [YouTube] — “This time-lapse video from the NACO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile shows stars orbiting the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of the Milky Way over a period of nearly 20 years.”

⛰️ Honorable mention: Formation Wingsuit Terrain Flying at the Mettlehorn in Switzerland [YouTube] — Title says it all. Insane.

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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi

Newley

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Newley's Notes

Newley’s Notes 141: Back from Summer Break!; Data-Siphoning Apps Exposed; Pachelbel’s Chicken

Edition 141 of my email newsletter went out last Sunday.

If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

🇺🇸 So, I’m back after a few weeks of summer holiday. Anasuya and I enjoyed the 4th of July (and biscuits and grits and burgers and sausages and going out on the water) with family and friends in Beaufort, S.C..

We celebrated a milestone birthday with family in central Pennsylvania.

We caught up with amigos in Washington, D.C., and then spent nearly a week in New York working and eating and visiting with pals and colleagues.

It was fantastic to be back in the U.S., see people close to us, and — let’s not forget about the beautiful game — watch the conclusion of a memorable World Cup (Croatia almost did it, but a dynamic and exciting France were deserving winners).

Now we’ve returned to Delhi and are getting back into the swing of things. Thankfully, while we were away, the blistering heat gave way to the monsoon rains, so the weather is cooler.

On to this week’s NN…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

📵 1) By me: App Traps: How Cheap Smartphones Siphon User Data in Developing Countries — [WSJ] The story, which I wrote with my colleagues Josh Chin, Myo Myo and Kersten Zhang, ran on the front page of our Business and Finance section and online July 5. It begins:

For millions of people buying inexpensive smartphones in developing countries where privacy protections are usually low, the convenience of on-the-go internet access could come with a hidden cost: preloaded apps that harvest users’ data without their knowledge.

One such app, included on thousands of Chinese-made Singtech P10 smartphones sold in Myanmar and Cambodia, sends the owner’s location and unique-device details to a mobile-advertising firm in Taiwan called General Mobile Corp., or GMobi. The app also has appeared on smartphones sold in Brazil and those made by manufacturers based in China and India, security researchers said.

I worked on this piece for a some time and am proud of it because it involved some deep digging and hit on some important themes. Several outlets picked it up, as well.

📉 2) Shot: Facebook Suffers Worst-Ever Drop in Market Value [WSJ] — TLDR: Shares plummeted 19%, wiping out nearly $120 billion in market value, with investors concerned about decelerating growth.

⬇️ 3) Chaser: Twitter User Numbers Slip as It Shuts Fake Accounts; Stock Drops [WSJ] — TLDR: Twitter slipped more than 20% after it said its global monthly active users fell.

🤑 4) And the context: Investors Step Back From Social-Media Highfliers [WSJ] — My colleagues Marc Vartabedian, Yoree Koh and Michael Wursthorn write:

Facebook and Twitter have different business models but each is dependent on grabbing — and keeping — people’s attention and then showing ads to them. That imperative on occasion has led them to embrace content that is viral or provocative, and now they are trying to find a better balance that will keep users engaged without driving them away. For instance, both are scrambling to clean up their platforms, which were the epicenter of Russian misinformation campaigns around the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In a look at Facebook’s earnings, specifically, Shira Ovide at Bloomberg writes:

If what the company predicts comes to pass, the internet’s best combination of fast revenue growth and plump profit margins is dead. All at once, it seemed, reality finally caught up to Facebook.

🛍️ 5) Online shopping-related longread of the week: How E-Commerce Is Transforming Rural China [New Yorker] — Jiayang Fan profiles JD.com, the Amazon of China, which is pushing into the country’s hinterlands.

🗣️ 6) Speaking of China: Balding Out — A bittersweet essay in which a well known American business school professor, Christopher Balding, describes why he’s leaving China after nine years. My colleague Chun Han Wong in Beijing has more on the wider story.

🗳️ 7) Interactive of the week: An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election [New York Times] — This feature is pretty straightforward, allowing you to zoom in to examine individual precincts to see how people voted. But it’s a reminder of the stark political differences between people in big cities and more rural areas. More info available in an accompanying piece called “Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity.”

✨ 8) Not tech-related, but getting lots of buzz online: How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million [New York Times] — Taffy Brodesser-Akner on the “most controversial brand in the wellness industry,” and the woman behind it.

🐐 9) Alpaca-related story of the week: Altiplano review: A brain-tickling board game about…alpacas [Ars Technica] — “Don’t let the grinning llamas (alpacas?) fool you,” Tom Mendelsohn writes, “this can be a powerful gaming experience… but only for a certain kind of player.”

🐔 10) Silly video of the week: Pachelbel’s Chicken [YouTube] — Yes, that’s Pachelbel’s Canon…played on rubber chickens.

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. If you received this from a pal, you can sign up here.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi — and I hope your summers are going well, friends!

Newley

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Newley's Notes

Newley’s Notes 140: Instagram TV; China’s Tech Prowess; Dancing in Movies; See You in a Month!

Edition 140 of my email newsletter went out last Sunday.

If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.


Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes.

🏖️ First, an administrative note:

NN will be on summer holiday for the next month or so. So I’ll be back at you the last week in July.

⚽ So, have you been enjoying the World Cup? Of course you have, because it is the the greatest sporting competition in the history of humankind.

How about defending champion Germany’s injury time win yesterday, to salvage their campaign, against an impressive Sweden, whose Ola Toivonen had earlier chipped Manuel Neuer, perhaps the world’s best goalkeeper?

How about Leo Messi and Argentina’s collapse?

How about Ronaldo showing his might?

Can Belgium go all the way? Can Brazil’s Neymar carry the (imagined?) weight of a country’s expectations on his slender shoulders?

All this, and we’re only, like, still in the group stages!

On to this week’s NN…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🎥 1) Instagram Unveils New Long-Form Video Hub [WSJ] — It’s IG’s “latest attempt to tap into growing demand among consumers and advertisers for mobile video,” my colleagues Benjamin Mullin and Deepa Seetharaman write. IGTV, as it’s called, will compete with Snapchat and YouTube.

At Bloomberg, Shira Ovide predicts it will likely soon be home to inappropriate material, like Facebook and other platforms. From a user standpoint, expect Instagram to become even yet more cluttered. As I wrote recently on Twitter, “Remember when Instagram was a straightforward platform for sharing pics, much lauded for its simplicity?”

🇨🇳 2) Alibaba v. Tencent: The Battle for Supremacy in China [Fortune] — In this lengthy piece, Adam Lashinsky looks at the battle between China’s leading tech firms, which are “as different in culture, style, and approach as Apple is from Google.”

🏆 3) And speaking of which: China is winning the global tech race [FT] — Michael Moritz, a partner at famed Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital, says “Uber, Airbnb and SpaceX may be hogging the limelight” when it comes to tech firms worth $1 billion or more, “but the undisputed gold medal leaders are the Chinese.”

🍳 4) What did ancient Babylonians eat? A Yale-Harvard team tested their recipes [Yale News] — A team “painstakingly recreated — step by step — three stews” from a clay culinary tablet “as closely as possible to how they would have been prepared and eaten almost 4,000 years ago.”

📼 5) Vintage tech-related blog of the week: Vault of VHS [Vaultofvhs.tumblr.com] — Tag line: “Dedicated to the design of retail VHS packaging, for both home & pre-recorded tapes.”

⚭ 6)Five myths about marriage [Washington Post] A piece in which John Gottman — of the the Gottman Institute, whose email newsletter I recommend — and Christopher Dollard dispel fictions about issues such as common interests, going to bed angry, couples therapy, affairs and relationship contracts.

📣 7) Futbol-related long read of the week: How We Watch Soccer Now [New Yorker] — The dek on Leo Robson’s story: “The World Cup shows how money and media saturation have changed the nature of fandom.”

🐾 8) Canine-related story of the week: These dogs sniff out cybercrime [CNET Magazine] — “Only one out of every 50 dogs tested qualifies to become an electronic storage detection, or ESD, dog” writes Alfred Ng.

🥁 9) Adorable video of the week: Watch this 8-Year-Old Channel John Bonham with Impeccable “Good Times Bad Times” Cover [Reverb] — Go, Yoyoka Soma!

🕺🏾 10) SPECIAL BONUS feel-good video of the week because DID I MENTION THE WORLD CUP IS HERE?! Dancing in Movies [Vimeo] — You’re welcome. (The full list of almost 300 films is here.)

Quote of the week:

“It’s almost as if Warner Bros. has been taken over by Voldemort, trying to use dark magic to destroy the light of a little town.”

That’s from this Kristen de Groot story from Philadelphia headlined “Warner Bros. crackdown puts Dark Mark over Potter festivals.

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. If you received this from a pal, you can sign up here.

👊 Fist bump from New Delhi — and see you a month!

Newley