Newley Purnell

Sent as a newsletter Monday, February 13. Not on my email list? Join here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image of the week, above:

A misty Hong Kong, seen from Victoria Harbour last night.

My WSJ latest:

My newest story, an exclusive out Wednesday: Guns Offered for Sale in Facebook Groups Devoted to Religious Extremists in India

It begins:

Facebook users have offered for sale on the platform handguns, rifles, shotguns and bullets to members of a forum devoted to an extremist Hindu organization with a history of violence in India.

Eight posts, some of which had been up since April, caught the eye of Raqib Hameed Naik, the founder of a group that monitors attacks against religious minorities in India. He began reporting them to Meta Platforms Inc. in late January as contravening the company’s publicly stated policy that prohibits private individuals from buying or selling firearms or ammunition on Facebook platforms.

Facebook declined to remove them, saying the posts didn’t violate the company’s rules, according to responses from the company that The Wall Street Journal reviewed.

After the Journal inquired about the posts, Facebook on Tuesday removed them, saying they ran afoul of the company’s policies.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🎈The Pentagon says it’s shot down four flying objects over the U.S. That comes after the downing last week, off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, what the government called a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.

2) 🇨🇳 In recent hours China has fired back (sorry) by saying the U.S. has sent balloons into its airspace more than ten times over the last year, though it didn’t offer evidence.

3) 🎤 Beyoncé won a Grammy for best dance/electronica album for “Renaissance,” breaking the record for the most Grammy wins – 32– in history.

4) 🏀 LeBron James became the NBA’s all-time highest scorer, surpassing the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

5) 💻 How Microsoft’s Bing search engine is harnessing AI and, just maybe, poised to challenge Google.

6) 🚋 Fun travelogue: What it’s like to ride an Amtrak train 43 hours from Chicago to Los Angeles.

7) 🐔 RIP Bob Born, the candy company executive who gave the world Peeps.

8) 📷 Twitter thread: “Portraits famous photographers have taken of their partners.”

9) ⚖️ I was unaware there’s a new – and popular – “Night Court” reboot, complete with John Larroquette.

10) 🌍 What did Earth look like hundreds of millions of years ago? Check out this interactive globe.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“It’s fun.”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter Monday, January 30. Not on my email list? Join here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image of the week, above:

🚶‍♂️ A recent Hong Kong streetscape.

My WSJ latest:

🔎 My latest story, out Wednesday: Musk’s Twitter Reinstates Hindu Nationalist Accounts That Disparage Muslims

It began:

Twitter Inc. under Elon Musk has reinstated several previously suspended Hindu nationalist accounts that were popular in India, one of its largest markets by users, with human-rights groups saying the move has spurred a resurgence of divisive religious material on the platform.

Some of the accounts that were suspended had been reported for posting hate speech aimed at religious minorities in India, according to groups that reported them. Upon their return in recent weeks, some have tweeted material denigrating Muslims and others.

The tweets include a debunked video that the person who posted it claimed showed a Muslim cleric spitting on rice before serving it to others, another calling Pakistani Muslims “rectums,” and a retweet of a user who called the Quran “the source of all evil.”

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ⚖️ I’ve mentioned in NN a few times the Murdaugh saga in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, which I find transfixing given, among other reasons, the time I spent growing up in the region. As you may have seen, the trial of Alex Murdaugh, accused of killing his wife and son, began last week in the small town of Walterboro. My WSJ colleague Valerie Bauerlein has been all over the case – indeed, she’s writing a book about it – and had a story out last week about jury selection and opening arguments. Follow her on Twitter here and find her WSJ dispatches here.

2) ✍️ For a fresh longread, there’s “The Corrupt World Behind the Murdaugh Murders,” by James Lasdun, in last week’s New Yorker.

3) 🎧 There are also several podcasts about the saga, including the Charleston Post and Courier’s “Understand Murdaugh,” journalist Mandy Matney’s “Murdaugh Murders,” and “The Murdaugh Murders, Money & Mystery,” from WCIV ABC News 4 in Charleston.

4) 📺 And for the truly obsessed: ABC News, among others, is live-streaming the court proceedings on YouTube. (And for the truly, truly obsessed, there’s even a Reddit subreddit, r/MurdaughFamilyMurders.)

5) 🧬 In other news: here’s an eye-opening Bloomberg Businessweek story by Ashlee Vance about a wealthy, 45-year-old software entreprenuer who spends $2 million a year to try to reverse the aging process. It includes this amazing sentence: “He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.”

6) 🤖 “Decoding the Hype About AI”: Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton, speaks with The Markup’s Julia Angwin.

7) 🎵 Dana Gioia – music critic, author, all around brilliant guy – outlines his eight top techniques for judging someone’s character.

8) 📝 Procrastinating scribes in Tokyo, take note: Manuscript Writing Cafe, made for working writers, features an owner who checks in on your progress a couple times an hour.

9) 📍 Wonders of Street View: click the “random” button in the upper right to see one remarkable scene caught on Google after another.

10) 📸 Think you’re a good judge of when a photo was taken? Try your hand with the Chronophoto game.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

Police puppy gets interviewed

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💡 Quote of the week:

“I always work at the edge of what I understand.” – Brian Eno

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter Sunday, December 25. Not on my email list? Enter your address here.

👋 Hi friends,

🎄Merry Christmas!

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.

🚨 Administrative note NN will be away until after the new year. I’ll see you again in 2023, friends!

Image of the week, above:

🌅 A recent Hong Kong sunset. People seriously don’t understand how beautiful this city is.

My WSJ latest:

🔎 My last story of 2022, out a couple weeks ago, before I departed on holiday: Google Faces Pressure in Hong Kong Over Search Results for National Anthem

It began:

Google is under fire from officials and legislators in Hong Kong over a pro-democracy song that is showing up in search results for the national anthem, raising tensions between American tech giants and authorities as Beijing tries to spread patriotism in the city.

As they say: Watch this space.

Here are my top 10 new things of 2022:

1) 📚 Book: “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, ” by Josh Chin and Liza Lin. A deeply reported, downright frightening work by my WSJ colleagues that shows the extent to which Beijing has siphoned up data on its citizens in order to influence their behavior. A must-read for anyone who’s interested in digital privacy or China (or both), and a cautionary tale for people everywhere given the extent to which governments and corporations around the world increasingly have access to our electronic details.

2) 🍿 Movie: “Top Gun: Maverick.” If you don’t like this feel-good, adrenaline-packed masterwork that — best of all — doesn’t take itself too seriously, well, I can’t be your friend. Because it probably means you don’t love America hard enough.

3) 🎸 Album: “Cruel Country,” by Wilco. The band, which was once known as alt-country and then morphed into much more, riffs on…country music in this double album.

4) 📺 TV series: “Somebody Somewhere.” Shines a light on the unique people in small town America who are often ignored. And a special shout-out to the magnificent “Better Call Saul” — could it even be better than “Breaking Bad?” It just might be — which ended this year.

5) 🎧 Podcast: “The Eastern Oregon Connection.” Given my roots in Pendleton, Oregon, I have loved this straightforward show: Locals Ryan Smith and Shannon Hartley interview interesting people from the community and surrounding region — farmers, coaches, physical therapists, entrepreneurs and more. That’s it! There should be more podcasts like this one.

6) 📷 Best gadget: I’m going to fudge a bit here as the Fujifilm X100V came out in 2020, but I only got it this year. It’s a compact camera with a prime lens that captures beautiful images. It is also a gorgeous machine itself. (I took the sunset pic above using my modest iPhone 12, though.)

7) 🐘 Best web service: Maybe it’s recency bias, and it’s been around for some time, but 2022 saw growing adoption of Mastodon after Elon Musk took over Twitter. I was skeptical at first that it could work at scale, and Twitter still has massive network effects, but I think Mastodon now represents a legitimate Twitter alternative. (I’m @newley@journa.host, by the way.)

8) 📱Related — best Mastodon iOS app: Metatext. Simple, clean, open source.

9) 🧤 Best save: Emi Martinez saves with his left foot (from 1:28 in the video) in extra time to preserve the 3-3 draw for Argentina and get them to penalties in the best World Cup final match of all time….

10) ⚽ …During which Leo Messi scored the year’s best goal: an outrageously nonchalant penalty (from 0:28 in the video) under unthinkable pressure. Epic.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

Dogs at a shelter getting to pick Christmas presents

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💡 Quote of the week:

“Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.” — Carol Burnett

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

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter Monday, December 5. Not on my email list? Enter your address here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image of the week, above:

🥧 Once again, for Thanksgiving, I made my Aunt Cece’s world-famous pecan pie.

And once again, it did not disappoint.

My WSJ latest:

🐦 I had two stories out last week, both about Twitter.

The first, with my colleague Selina Cheng, on Wednesday: Twitter Becomes Stage for China Protests Despite Ban by Beijing.

The lede:

Twitter is banned in China, but it is proving a critical platform for getting videos and images of protests occurring across the nation out to the rest of the world.

One Twitter user we profiled, who goes by Li Laoshi, or Teacher Li, had about 760,000 followers at that point, more than three times the number before the demonstrations began. The count has now surpassed 818,000.

And the second story, a spot news piece out Friday with my colleague Sarah Needleman: Kanye West Suspended From Twitter After Swastika Tweet. It began:

Twitter Inc. again suspended Kanye West’s account after the musician and designer posted a swastika in a tweet that the social-media platform’s owner, Elon Musk, said violated its rules.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ⚽ The U.S. lost to the Netherlands 3–1 in the World Cup round of 16. Yes, we made it out of a tough group and were beaten by a much stronger team with more seasoned players and a more storied footballing history. But some avoidable defensive mistakes cost us the game. Still, with World Cup 2026 in the U.S., Canada and Mexico – and one of the youngest teams at this year’s competition – I’m optimistic about our future.

2) 🧤 One bright spot for U.S. Men’s National Team fans, and goalkeepers everywhere: Matt Turner. He walked on at Fairfield University and once gave up a goal so bad it went viral, but has since made it to MLS and the Premier League. He had a great tournament.

3) 🎧 For an entertaining summation of the U.S. performance and thoughts on where the team goes from here, check out this Men in Blazers podcast episode.

4) ⭐ Elsewhere: The Financial Times’s 25 most influential women of 2022.

5) ☀️ How solar engineering could help mitigate climate change.

6) 🐢 Happy birthday to Jonathan, the world’s oldest tortoise, who just turned 190.

7) 💡 Why are streetlights in the U.S., Canada and Ireland turning purple?

8) 🔉 Here’s a collection of obsolete sounds.

9) 🍎 The tastiest apples, ranked.

10) 🐻 And now for something completely bizarre: “Cocaine Bear” is a real movie. Here is the trailer.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“Thanksgiving at Michigan Animal Rescue League 💙”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” – Daniel Kahneman

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley