Newley Purnell

Sent as an email newsletter February 21, 2021. Sign up to receive future dispatches in your inbox.

👋 Hi friends,

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

🍜 Image of the week, above, spotted recently in a 7-Eleven here in Hong Kong: Miso-flavored Pringles chips. I haven’t tried them. Yet. I mean, that sounds like an amazing combination!

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ❄️ Severe winter weather forced parts of the Texas power grid offline for days. What happened? The single-digit temps prompted huge demand for electricity, but many power plants were shut down because they couldn’t safely operate in such cold. That left millions of people (including Texas Senator Ted Cruz) without juice for days.

2) 🦠 “World Health Organization investigators are honing their search for animals that could have spread the new coronavirus to humans, identifying two – ferret badgers and rabbits – that can carry the virus and were sold at a Chinese market where many early cases emerged,” my colleagues Betsy McKay, Jeremy Page and Drew Hinshaw report.

3) 🚀 After a nearly seven-month journey over 293 million miles, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance touched down on the red planet, marking “the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight,” Reuters reported.

4) 🗞 Local journalism-related read of the week: “Corruption is flourishing in the rural corners of South Carolina as newspapers fold or shrink coverage amid a financially crippling pandemic,” Glenn Smith and Tony Bartelme report in The Post and Courier. Read more from a special report on public corruption in the state.

5) 🥾 Forget 10,000 steps. Focus instead on 120 minutes in nature every week. Spending time outside, called “forest bathing” in Japan, is linked to “lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue,” my colleague Betsy Morris reports.

6) 🔘 Control Panel is a photoblog dedicated to “dials, toggles, buttons, and bulbs.”

7) 😂 💀 The laughing/crying emoji is for old people, according to Gen Z internet observers. The skull – aka “I’m dead” or “I’m dying” – is much cooler.

8) 👽 Kickstarter product of the week (assuming it’s real), dedicated to Covid–19 prevention and personal privacy: Blanc, “the only full-face modular mask.” Click through for must-see pics.

9) 🌍 Shot: This week’s antidote to a world in which we can’t travel: WindowSwap. Click a button to see the view from a window somewhere else in the world.

10) 🍺 Chaser: I Miss My Bar lets you re-create the sounds of your favorite watering hole.

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Dog-related video of the week: “So gentle.”

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📕 What I’m Reading

I’m working my way through, and very much enjoying, Martin Gurri’ “The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.”

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💡 Quote of the Week

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as an email newsletter February 14, 2021. Sign up to receive future dispatches in your inbox.

👋 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: Ginger (and her owners) are wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day from Hong Kong!

📆 Administrative note: this is the 250th edition of NN.

Yes: the 250th! I sent the very first NN in February, 2015. (Among items in that dispatch: my newfound love for country musician Sturgill Simpson, the death of New York Times media critic David Carr, and a WSJ column with simple rules for personal finance.)

Here’s to another 250, and another five years. Thank you for reading!

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ☎️ Everyone seems to be talking about Clubhouse, the invite-only audio chat app. The San Franisco-based service has been big among Silicon Valley elite for some time, but more recently gained traction around the world. This week China’s censors appeared to shut it down following vigorous debate about political issues.

2) 😷 Is Covid–19 here to stay? We might need to start thinking of it as an endemic disease, my colleagues Daniela Hernandez and Drew Hinshaw write. A telling quote:

“Going through the five phases of grief, we need to come to the acceptance phase that our lives are not going to be the same,” said Thomas Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I don’t think the world has really absorbed the fact that these are long-term changes.”

3) 🦠 Related longread of the week: Atul Gawande, in The New Yorker, reporting on Ward County, North Dakota: “Inside the Worst-Hit County in the Worst-Hit State in the Worst-Hit Country.”

4) ⚡ Elon Musk’s Tesla bought $1.5 billion of bitcoin, sending the cryptocurrency soaring.

5) 🏈 🐐 Tom Brady, at age 43, won the Super Bowl with his Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “He prevailed not through any great flourish of athleticism but by making sound decisions and avoiding mistakes,” wrote the Financial Times’s Joshua Chaffin “It was a vintage, old man performance that this old man could appreciate.”

6) 💻 Another item to file under: how Covid–19 is changing work. Salesforce – San Francisco’s biggest private employer, with some 54,000 staff around the world – anticipates most of its employees will “work remotely part or full time after the pandemic” and that the company will “reduce its real-estate footprint as a result,” my WSJ colleague Katherine Bindley reported.

7) 🔭 Want to feel insignificant? There is now a 10 trillion pixel map of the sky, complete with a billion galaxies.

8) 🍕 Pizza-related quote of the week: “Pizza was the perfect food for the pandemic, but I think it’s also the perfect food for all time." That’s from the chief executive of Domino’s, in a New York Times story about a boom in sales amid Covid–19.

9) 🐱 Zoom-related quote of the week, from a Texas lawyer who inadvertently appeared as a feline in proceedings on a Zoom call: “I’m here live, I’m not a cat.” Enjoy the video.

10) 🌍 An antidote to a world in which we can’t travel: City Guesser. Click the video, try to determine the place.

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🐕 😭 Dog-related video of the week: “No one can stop dog from protecting its owner.”

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📕 What I’m Reading

I’ve just picked up “The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,” a 2014 book by a former media analyst for the CIA, Martin Gurri. The upshot of the work, which portended the rise of Trump, Brexit and other trends: The internet and social media have triggered an explosion of information, undermining elites, top firms, and global institutions.

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💡 Quote of the week:

“You can have it all. Just not all at once.” – Oprah Winfrey

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as an email newsletter February 7, 2021. Sign up to receive future dispatches in your inbox.

👋 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: on a walk Saturday through Hong Kong’s Mai Po Nature Reserve. More on this soon!

🐦 TLDR: we saw a ton of birds, including two spoonbills. And the weather was amazing.

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

1) 🇲🇲 Myanmar’s military on Monday staged a coup, marking “a major blow to the country’s transition from military rule to democracy, which began about a decade ago,” my colleagues Niharika Mandhana, Feliz Solomon and Sabrina Siddiqui wrote…

2) 💬 …and I pitched in with an exclusive about Facebook removing a Myanmar military television network page from its platform. Facebook banned the network in 2018 as part of a wider crackdown, but it reappeared. From the story:

After The Wall Street Journal asked Monday why the Myawaddy page was operational given its earlier ban, Facebook removed it and it now displays a message saying “This Page Isn’t Available.”

3) 💻 And more on Facebook in Myanmar: it was blocked on Thursday, as I wrote, after some people took to the platform to challenge the coup.

🚨 Meanwhile, the latest on the situation as of today (Sunday): tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Yangon, the country’s largest city, my colleague Niharika Mandhana wrote.

4) 🐦 Elsewhere, on another topic, my colleague Rajesh Roy and I had a story out Wednesday about Twitter in India. The lede:

India threatened to punish Twitter if it doesn’t comply with a government request to restore a block on accounts connected to tweets about farmers’ protests that the government says are inflammatory.

5) 🛒 And hey: How about Jeff Bezos saying he’ll step down as Amazon chief executive to become executive chairman? Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon’s massive AWS cloud business, will take over later this year.

👉 The company’s success has been without parallel, but “The walls of [Bezos’] highly compartmentalized empire have been crumbling for some time,” writes Bloomberg’s Brad Stone, author of the excellent book about Bezos and Amazon, “The Everything Store.” “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be Jeff Bezos (at least by Bezos’s standards),” Stone writes.

6) 🦠 File under: heartbreaking: This WSJ story on Covid–19’s toll on essential workers – delivery drivers, grocery workers – contains one of the hardest-hitting ledes you’ll ever read.

7) 🗣 Invitation-only group voice chat app Clubhouse is all the rage among tech types. It is, writes Will Oremus at OneZero, the opposite of the flat, open Twitter: it’s “hierarchical and closed — more oligarchic than democratic.”

8) 👏 Longread of the week: “Louis Theroux’s Weird America,” by Anna Russell in the New Yorker.

🎧 I love Theroux’s work, including his pandemic-inspired podcast, “Grounded with Louis Theroux.” (Don’t miss his episodes with Boy George, Watford FC’s Troy Deeney, and actress Leah Remini.)

9) 👕 An interesting quantified self-meets-fashion project from digital consultant Olof Hoverfält: “Why I’ve tracked every single piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years.”

10) 💯 A roundup of life tips from the Metafilter community: “What do you always recommend to people?”

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🐕 Dog-related video of the week: “The you on social media vs. The you in real life.”

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📕 What I’m Reading

I’m a day or two away from finishing “Facebook: The Inside Story," a 500-page-plus look at the history and future of the world’s biggest social media platform. It has been an enlightening read.

For fiction, I’ve been delving into a Dan Brown’s first novel, the 1998 thriller “Digital Fortress.” What pacing!

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💡 Quote of the week:

“The enemy is a very good teacher.” – The Dalai Lama

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as an email newsletter January 31, 2021. Sign up to receive future dispatches in your inbox.

👋 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: GameStop’s stock price over the last year. Say what? Read on…

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

1) 🤑 The big markets-related story of the week: Day traders on Reddit’s Wall Street Bets subreddit (tagline: “Like 4chan found a bloomberg terminal”) have been piling into GameStop – yes, the videogame retailer – sending its stock up skyward, and putting hedge funds that have shorted it in a pickle. “The power dynamics are shifting on Wall Street,” my WSJ colleagues write. “Individual investors are winning big – at least for now – and relishing it.”

👉 For more, check out this WSJ interview with Keith Gill, aka “DeepF—ing Value,” a prominent member of the group on Reddit. And for an explanation of what’s going on, listen to this episode of our The Journal podcast with my colleague Gunjan Banerji, who’s been covering the phenomenon.

2) 💻 John Seabrook, writing in The New Yorker: “Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?”

3) ✈️ ICYMI: China flew a bunch of warplanes off southwestern Taiwan last weekend, “its largest show of aerial force toward the island democracy in four months,” my colleague Chun-Han Wong reports.

4) 👃 Longread of the week, in the New York Times Magazine: “What Can Covid–19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?,” by Brooke Jarvis.

5) 🎳 The Ringer has a list of the 50 best cult movies. (Number one is absolutely correct.)

6) 🗺 Fascinating: “Inuit cartography.”

7) 🔥 A thing that now exists, that I absolutely want to eat: Hot Tamales flavored Peeps. (Thanks, Colin R.!)

8) 🍞 Absurd slideshow of the week, courtesy of The Onion: “Watch What Happens When You Zoom In On This Bread”.

9) 🐼 Absurd(ly awesome) panda-related content of the week: “This is the most important video I’ve ever seen.” (Thanks, Anasuya!)

10) 👏 Photo gallery of the week: a global roundup of sniffer dogs being trained to detect Covid–19.

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🐕 Dog-related video of the week: “Border Collies, often cited as the most intelligent of all domestic dogs.”

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📕 What I’m Reading

I’m almost finished with Steven Levy’s excellent “Facebook: The Inside Story." For fiction, I’ve been dipping into Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed climate change-themed sci-fi novel “The Ministry for the Future,” which I’m enjoying.

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💡 Quote of the week:

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” – Dolly Parton.

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley