Category: Newley’s Notes

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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

Newley

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.

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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

Edition 138 of my email newsletter went out on 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.

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

So, can you believe the World Cup begins on Thursday? I am nearly giddy with excitement, as I always am when the world’s most popular sporting event rolls around every four years.

Passion! Bravery! Physical skill! Cheating! Subterfuge! National pride! Abject disappointment!

The month-long tournament has all of these, and more. The world today feels increasingly fragmented, destabilized and disjointed; the competition, though, is one of the few truly global events anymore that the vast majority of the world watches and cares about.

Sadly, as you probably know, the U.S. won’t be participating, having failed to qualify for the first time in more than three decades, however. For a post-mortem on this disaster, I suggest this longread from Andrew Helms and Matt Pentz in The Ringer: Own Goal: The Inside Story of How the USMNT Missed the 2018 World Cup.

On a happier note, here’s something decidedly up-beat to consume: a “mixtape” video on YouTube by Beats (yes, Beats) featuring Brazil’s Neymar, Germany’s Mesut Ozil, England’s Harry Kane and more. My favorite part: the cameo by France’s Patrice “I Love This Game” Evra.

With no U.S. to root for, I will be cheering on Egypt. Not just because of their supremely gifted and lovable striker Mohamed Salah, but for their veteran goalkeeper Essam El-Hadary, who at age 45 will be the World Cup’s oldest-ever player. More on goalkeeping below…

Meanwhile, a World Cup-related hobby of mine: Watching from afar as the British media and pundits talk up up England’s chances of victory, then subsequently blame factors supposedly beyond England’s control when the team inevitably crashes out. (I’m betting that this year’s excuse will be that the players are inordinately consumumed with, and have been derailed by, criticism on social media.)

For more on this, see my 2016 blog post, Why You Shouldn’t be Surprised When England Lose. I penned that just hours before England took the field against Iceland in the Euros. Looking back, my only regret in the piece is that I said I expected them to win that game. They lost, of course.

And finally, a new blog post at Newley.com: Loris Karius and the Existential Pain of Goalkeeping. Contains a requisite Albert Camus quote. A subject so close to my heart it has taken me something like two weeks to hit the publish button on this.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🖥️ 1) Microsoft Is Buying GitHub for $7.5 Billion in Stock [WSJ] — Satya Nadella wants to expand beyond Micrsosft’s older products and focus on new tech like cloud computing. GitHub, which allows developers to post and collaborate on code, fits the bill. In a similar deal, you’ll recall Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2016. (Among the winners in the GitHub deal: prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is getting $1 billion back on its $100 million investment in the startup in 2012.)

🔍 2) Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends [New York Times] — Facebook permitted makers like Apple and Samsung “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders,” the Times reports.

🔫 3) Google Renounces AI Weapons; Will Still Work With Military [Bloomberg] — After unrest among staff, Google “pledged not to use its powerful artificial intelligence for weapons, illegal surveillance and technologies that cause ‘overall harm,'” but will keep working with the military, Mark Bergen reports.

📱4) Apple iOS 12: the biggest new features coming to the iPhone [The Verge] — Among the tweaks to Apple’s newest mobile operating system, writes Chris Welch, are Screen Time (reveals how much time you’re spending on your device); grouped notifications (to try to tame alert chaos); Group FaceTime (for video-calling with friends); and Memoji (a Bitmoji-like feature that lets you craft an emoji that looks like you).

📺 5) Amazon Scores Rights Deal for English Premier League Soccer [WSJ] — The deal allows the Seattle giant to stream in the UK 20 matches a season on Amazon Prime. “But the move represents a significant boost to Amazon’s so-far modest foray into live sporting events,” my WSJ colleagues write.

🍴 6) Anthony Bourdain loved Asia without fetishizing it. And Asia loved him back [Quartz] — “Anthony Bourdain was, in many ways, the US’s top ambassador to Asia,” Anne Quito writes. RIP.

🍔 7) The Ultimate Guide to Regional Beach Food in America [Eater] — Sadly, the shrimpburgers at Beaufort, S.C.’s Shrimp Shack appear not to have made this otherwise fine list.

🔑 8) Web surfing #ProTips of the week: 27 Incredibly Useful Things You Didn’t Know Chrome Could Do Shift-Control-T to re-open a recently closed tab, which I discovered a few months back, is a game changer. (Thanks, Mech!)

🌿 9) Gorgeous Japanese thing of the week: The Japanese Mini Truck Garden Contest is a Whole New Genre in Landscaping [Spoon & Tamago] — Every year the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors puts on a contest in which landscapers build (super cool) mini-gardens in the backs of pickup trucks. Click through for pics; more images here and here.

🍉 10) Silly dog of the week: This very good boy eats watermelon in a spectacularly gentle fashion [Twitter video].

🔥 Quote of the week:

“Maybe you’ve seen people doing this in public and thought, what is that person doing with those bonded sheets of paper. FYI, it’s called reading a goddamned book.”

That’s from an excellent video by The Onion called Increase Your Cognitive Ability By Reading A Fucking Book For Once.

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

Edition 137 of my email newsletter went out on 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.

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

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🇬🇧 1) Must-read of the week, despite having nothing to do with tech: British Expert on the Royal Family Is Actually Tommy From Upstate New York [Wall Street Journal] — In this masterful A-hed, my colleague Bradley Hope reveals that purported royal commentator Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills, Esq. — who has appeared on the BBC and in the Economist, speaking in a posh British accent — is Thomas “Tommy” Muscatello.

He grew up in upstate New York, went to college at Coastal Carolina in Myrtle Beach, S.C., then apparently moved to the U.K. — and reinvented himself. So fascinating.

📹 2) Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018 [PewInternet.org] — When it comes to internet platforms, forget Facebook. Teens today are into YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey.

🇨🇳 3) Mary Meeker’s 2018 internet trends report: All the slides, plus analysis [Recode] — Famed Silicon Valley VC Meeker released this week her annual report on big picture tech topics. Of particular interest, writes Rani Molla:

China is catching up as a hub to the world’s biggest internet companies. Currently, China is home to nine of the world’s 20 biggest internet companies by market cap while the U.S. has 11. Five years ago, China had two and the U.S. had nine.

🏻 4) 82-Year-Old Proves You’re Never Too Old to Code [AARP] — Japan’s Masako Wakamiya, a retired bank clerk, learned Apple’s Swift programming language and created a free iOS game. You can find it here.

🕵️ 5) The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account [The Ringer] — Does the president of basketball operations for the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers take to the platform anonymously?

🥂 6) Long-read of the week: Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It [NY Mag/The Cut] — The story of how Anna Delvey, a young and seemingly moneyed German socialite, played a long con on a handful of rich folks in New York.

🦈 7) Great White Sharks Have A Secret ‘Cafe,’ And They Led Scientists Right To It [NPR] — Why do these creatures head to a remote part of the ocean one thousand miles off the Baja Coast? Turns out they’re after a “a complete food chain” built on plant life that exits deep underwater.

🕉️ 8) The one “fascinating” mind-training exercise Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella practices every day [Quartz] — TLDR: Before you get out of bed, take a deep breath, identify something for which you’re grateful, set your intention for the day, then feel your feet.

🎧 9) Hurry, Boy, It’s Waiting There for You: Weezer Covers “Africa” [NewYorker.com] — It came, Amanda Petrusich writes, after “nearly six months of devoted needling from a Twitter account dedicated expressly to the cause.” You can listen here.

🐾 10) Silly dog of the week: The Singing Bulldog [Neatorama/YouTube] — Walter the French bulldog doesn’t bark. He sings.

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

Edition 136 of my email newsletter went out a couple weeks back.

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.

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

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🛵 1) By me, with a colleague, in The WSJ: Hot on the Wheels of Grab, Go-Jek Rides Further Into Southeast Asia. The story begins:

Motorcycle-taxi service PT Go-Jek Indonesia will invest $500 million to expand its operations in Southeast Asia, revving up competition in a fast-growing consumer market just two months after Uber Technologies Inc. reached a landmark deal to exit from the region.

The Indonesian company said in a statement Thursday it plans to enter Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines in the next few months and is currently working with regulators and stakeholders across the region.

Go-Jek will initially offer motorcycle-hailing services in Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, and provide traditional taxi services in Singapore, where motorcycle taxis aren’t permitted, a company spokesman said. The move, in effect, puts Go-Jek in direct competition with regional market leader Grab Inc.

🚫 2) Cautionary tale of the week: Amazon Alexa-Powered Device Recorded and Shared User’s Conversation Without Permission [WSJ] — /Begin rant/ Not to beat a dead horse, but Newley’s Notes readers have been warned about these devices on several occasions. Think long and hard about installing one in your house, if you’re privacy-conscious. Consider Amazon’s business model — selling you stuff — and how that might inform their product strategy. Same with Google Home. The Big G is an advertising company fueled by personal data. And it should come as no surprise that Facebook is also said to be considering getting into the connected speaker business. /End rant/

🤑 3) Tech longread of the week: How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men [The New Yorker] — “Once, Mad Men ruled advertising,” Ken Auletta writes. “They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men — the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence.”

💉 4) Tech video of the week: The Theranos deception — “60 Minutes” sums up the Theranos scandal — uncovered by The WSJ‘s John Carreyrou — in this 14-minute piece. Carreyrou’s new book, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” is just out.

🃏 5) How Trump changed everything for The Onion — [Politico] — How do you make jokes about a president who “often defies satire“? Politico’s Andrew Restuccia interviews The Onion‘s editor in chief, Chad Nackers.

🎹 6) The Songs of the Years, 1925-2018 [Kottke.org] — A simple, cool idea: a playlist featuring one song from each year, running through the decades. On Spotify here; on Apple Music here; on Google Play Music here.

⚽ 7) Soccer trend piece of the week: A New Atlanta, United by Soccer [New York Times] — “For 10 years, I didn’t look at Atlanta as my home,” one fan of the new MLS side Atlanta United says in this story about how team has built its fan base. “Now, Atlanta United is the glue to the community for me.”

💯 8) Soccer goal of the week/year/decade/in Champion’s League history? A must-see from Gareth Bale in Real Madrid’s 3-1 win over Liverpool yesterday. On YouTube (for now at least) here. And here’s a fan’s view on Twitter.

😂 9) One silly thing: Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas “Outtakes.” [YouTube] — Fantastic.

📚10) A quote I’ve been pondering:

If you want to think long-term, you can’t spend all day reading things that train your brain to twitch.

That’s from Wall Street Journal investing columnist Jason Zweig — one of the sharpest minds out there on behavior and money — describing what he reads and why.

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

Edition 135 of my email newsletter went out a few weeks back.

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.

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

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

💬 1) By me in The WSJ: Think American Elections Are Bad? Indian Voters Get 1,000 Texts a Day [WSJ] — A story with my colleagues about how political parties in India are turning WhatsApp into a potent communications weapon. The opening few grafs:

For Gurupad Kolli, a 40-year-old lawyer who lives in a remote Indian village, the torrent of WhatsApp messages surging to his phone a few weeks ago meant one thing: election day was near.

They’re at turns strident, angry, buoyant, informative, misleading, gripping and confusing, he says. Some days he received as many as 1,000 of them through the popular messaging service. Pleased to no longer “depend on the mass media like newspapers,” the resident of Ramapur village in the southern state of Karnataka nonetheless also conceded “there’s so much false and fake news going around.”

He isn’t alone in his bewilderment. The rapidly falling cost of smartphones and mobile data in the world’s second-most-populous nation has turbocharged the spread of WhatsApp, where it is growing far faster than other social media and messaging platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

🥚 2) By me on my blog: Delhi Snapshot: Transporting Eggs [Newley.com] — Delhi traffic is no joke. I snapped a pic of perhaps the coolest customer in all of this teeming metropolis.

✏️ 3) You Can Draw, and Probably Better Than I Can [RogerEbert.com] — Not new, but new to me: an inspiring 2011 post from the late film critic Roger Ebert on the pleasures of drawing and the risks of perfectionism. Just doing the sketching, and not worrying about getting every little detail right, is crucial — and something I always struggle with as I continue by own drawing and watercolor painting, since accuracy is so central to my day job. (Via Austin Kleon.)

🎮 4) Tech longread of the week: How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds [New Yorker] — Nick Paumgarten has the crazy stats:

Released last September, it is right now by many measures the most popular video game in the world. At times, there have been more than three million people playing it at once. It has been downloaded an estimated sixty million times.

And the wider significance:

Game fads come and go: Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What people seem to agree on, whether they’re seasoned gamers or dorky dads, is that there’s something new emerging around Fortnite, a kind of mass social gathering, open to a much wider array of people than the games that came before.

👂 5) We Made a Tool So You Can Hear Both Yanny and Laurel [NY Times] — Obligatory entry about this week’s internet “controversy.” TLDR: Your interpretation depends on the frequencies you hear.

💊 6) My Adventures with the Trip Doctors [NY Times Magazine] — Last week I pointed to Michael Pollan’s WSJ essay adapted from his new book about promising new research into psychedelics. He’s back with another piece, this one looking at the therapists working underground to treat patients.

🗣️ 7) What Google isn’t telling us about its AI demo [Axios] — Remember that bit I mentioned last week about Google showcasing new tech in which an artificial intelligence system carried on a real-life conversation with unwitting participants? Google won’t say if the audio was edited, Axios’s Dan Primack reports.

⛵ 8) This Armada of Saildrones Could Conquer the Ocean [Bloomberg Businessweek] — A fascinating profile (with cool visuals) by Ashlee Vance of Richard Jenkins, whose vision is to launch 1,000 seafaring robots for tasks like collecting scientific data and prospecting for oil and gas.

⚡ 9) Headline of the week: Motorised shed hits 100mph to break speed record at Pendine Sands [BBC News] — Hats off to 53-year-old Kevin Nicks, from England, for this spectacularly silly feat.

🤭 10) Fail of the week: Hilarious video as man tumbles down set of steps into Thames [YouTube] — I love a good fail video. And this one is excellent, from the narration to the blooper itself to the fact that they guy wasn’t hurt. I only hope it wasn’t staged. It’s an instant classic for me, right up there with 2012’s “Catch the Ice Dude.”

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

Edition 134 of my email newsletter went out last weekend.

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

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

💰 1) By me in The WSJ: Walmart Picks a Freewheeling Partner for Its $15 Billion Passage to India [WSJ.com] — It’s official. Walmart on Wed. completed its blockbuster acquisition — the largest in the company’s history — of India’s biggest e-commerce startup, Flipkart. In this piece, my colleagues and I examined the potential corporate culture clash ahead. The lede:

The famously frugal and focused Walmart Inc. is betting $15 billion on a much different kind of company: a sprawling Indian e-commerce startup that has burned through mountains of cash to try to conquer the country’s online shopping market.

🇮🇳 2) By me on my blog: Book Notes: ‘The Other One Percent: Indians in America,’ by Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh [Newley.com] — My notes from an excellent work I recently read. My brief summary: “An illuminating look at how Indians in America – a tiny percentage of the overall population – have come to enjoy such outsized success.” Highly recommended.

🗣️ 3) Shot: Should our machines sound human? [Kottke.org] — Google just showcased new tech that allows an artificial intelligence system to carry on life-life conversations with people.

Click through to listen to the demos as people unwittingly, it seems, speak with this program. This raises real ethical concerns. Should the person on the other end of the call not be made aware somehow that they’re not speaking to a real human?

🔮 4) Chaser: How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.? [New Yorker] — “If the arc of the universe bends toward an intelligence sufficient to understand it, will an A.G.I. be the solution—or the end of the experiment?” Tad Friend writes in the New Yorker.

🕵️ 5) Related: Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t. [NY Times] — From the top of Craig S. Smith’s story:

Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

And:

Mr. Carlini added that while there was no evidence that these techniques have left the lab, it may only be a matter of time before someone starts exploiting them. “My assumption is that the malicious people already employ people to do what I do,” he said.

📖 6) 50 Pulp Cover Treatments of Classic Works of Literature [Literary Hub] — Love it. And these are not spoofs! “Classic works of literary fiction have existed as pulps from the very beginning of pulp—the new paperback publishers of the 1940s and 50s printed them right along with classic crime and some genuinely lowbrow (and sometimes quite lurid) new novels, often commissioning the very same artists to design their covers,” Emily Temple writes.

🎮 7) How is this speedrun possible? Super Mario Bros. World Record Explained [YouTube] — One video game “speedrunner” explains how another, Kosmic, set the world record for completing the game in 27 minutes. Taking advantage of glitches, timing screen scrolling, and more — this is simply incredible.

💊 8) The New Science of Psychedelics [WSJ] — An essay adapted from Michael Pollan’s new book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.” Related: Pollan, author of books like “Food Rules” and “In Defense of Food” was also recently on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

✈️ 9) Heartwarming story of the week: He searched for his Japanese birth mother. He found her — and the restaurant she had named after him [Washington Post] — Kathryn Tolbert tells Bruce Hollywood’s remarkable story.

🐈 10) Silly cat video of the week: Graceful Alley Run [Neatorama/YouTube] — Lest you think I am too dog-centric, here’s a video of a majestic feline parkour-ing through a sticky situation — all set to AWOLNATION’s song “Run.”

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

Edition 133 of my email newsletter went out last weekend.

If you’d like NN delivered to your inbox before it’s posted here, simply enter your email address here. 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) More on Walmart and Flipkart from my colleagues and me Friday: Walmart Takes on Amazon With $15 Billion Bid for Stake in India’s Flipkart [Wall Street Journal] — The story begins:

Walmart Inc.’s battle with Amazon.com Inc. is heading to India.

Walmart is leading a group that will invest about $15 billion for a roughly 75% stake in Flipkart Group, India’s largest e-commerce company, according to people familiar with the matter. Google parent Alphabet Inc. is planning to invest in Flipkart as part of the deal, other people familiar with the situation said.

It would be a big bet by Walmart that India will be a source of growth at a time when Amazon is gaining ground in the country. It is also an effort by Google to keep Amazon from potentially acquiring Flipkart itself.

Watch this space.

😠 2) Highlights From Elon Musk’s Combative Tesla Earnings Call [Wall Street Journal] — Worth a listen. “During the more than one hour call, Mr. Musk cut off two analysts asking about capital-expenditure plans and reservations for the Model 3 sedan, dismissing them as ‘boring, bonehead’ questions and ‘dry,'” my colleague Tim Higgins wrote in an accompanying story. Tesla’s stock fell nearly 6% after the call. I found listening to be interesting insight into Musk’s personality.

❤️ 3) The 5 biggest announcements from Facebook’s F8 developer conference keynote [The Verge] — Facebook: Tinder killer? Among the news from Facebook’s annual developer conference: The social media titan is getting into dating. A new feature “allows people to browse potential matches at inside groups or events you’re interested in attending,” Natt Garun reports.

🌈 4) Tourists flocking to Peru’s newfound ‘Rainbow Mountain.’ [AP] — The latest Andean backpacker must-see, near Pitumarca, Peru: “Stripes of turquoise, lavender and gold blanket what has become known as ‘Rainbow Mountain,” a ridge of multicolored sediments laid down millions of years ago and pushed up as tectonic plates clashed.”

🎵 5) Swan Songs: Music For Your Final Exit [NPR] — I challenge you to listen to this podcast without choking up. NPR’s “All Songs Considered” asked listeners what songs they’d want to have played at their funerals. Morbid? Maybe a little. But also highly moving and inspirational.

🚲 6) The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles [The Atlantic] — Absolutely insane images.

📷 7) Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78 [NY Times] — And speaking of striking pics: Last year a New York City conservancy worker found nearly 3,000 unpublished color slides of life in the city’s parks during the summer of 1978. An intriguing photo essay from the NY Times. There’s beer drinking, swimming, double dutch, landscape paining — and so smartphones.

🎾 8) A Competitive Team Sport. For Your Dog. [NY Times] — My new favorite thing, probably ever: Flyball, aka relay races for dogs (and their owners). Sample videos here and — best of all — here.

😂 9) Quote of the week:

“I’m sitting at one of the firehouses. No pet raccoons are overdosing here.”

That’s from this story out of KSHB in Kansas City: “Pet raccoon, stoned off of too much weed, brought to Indianapolis firehouse. Confusion ensues.” And yes, there is audio.

🐶 10) Silly video of the week: Sound way up –> “Do you like your new toy?”. My favorite part is the owner’s resigned “alright” at the end. Oh, and it has spawned some memes, natch.

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