Newley Purnell

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

Sent as a newsletter Sunday, November 22. 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:

Another excellent vanity plate, spotted here in Hong Kong. If you work hard, as the saying goes, you gotta…

My WSJ latest:

🇮🇳 My latest, out Wednesday: Facebook Parent Meta Sees Executive Exodus in India

It begins:

Three of Meta Platforms Inc.’s top executives in India have departed the company in recent weeks, with the Facebook parent changing the country’s reporting structure amid its first broad global restructuring, according to people familiar with the matter.

They were: India head Ajit Mohan; the head of WhatsApp in India, Abhijit Bose; and Rajiv Aggarwal, Meta India’s public policy director.

The story included the exclusive tidbit that India’s office, which long reported to HQ in Menlo Park, California, will now report to Meta’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore. (That was later confirmed in a statement from Meta announcing the new India head, Sandhya Devanathan.)

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ⚽ The World Cup is here! Ecuador defeated hosts Qatar 2–0 in the opening match yesterday. And England just demolished Iran 6–2.

2) 🍺 More on the World Cup: My WSJ colleagues have the inside story of how (chaotically) and why (a late decision by the Qatari royal family) the tournament’s last-minute beer ban came to be.

3) 📺 And finally: Qatar are a controversial World Cup host. England footballing great turned TV presenter Gary Lineker kicked off the BBC’s coverage of the event with a sober rundown of some of the issues.

4) 🐦 The latest on Twitter: Elon Musk has reinstated Former President Trump’s account, but it’s unclear if Trump will return, given his commitment to his own social media platform, Truth Social.

5) 💸 The FTX débâcle, simplified, by economist Alex Tabarrok.

6) 🇹🇭 Here’s a New York Times travel piece on the revitalization of Bangkok’s Charoen Krung Road, which runs along the Chao Phraya River.

7) 💔 How “Love Is Blind,” over the course of three seasons, went from a “sociological fairy tale to a reality TV nightmare.”

8) 🔉 Soundprint is “like Yelp, but for noise” – an app that helps you find quiet bars, restaurants, and other places.

9) 🎧 Podcast of the week: Ken Burns talks to Tyler Cowen about making documentaries, why he’s lived in the same small New Hampshire town for decades, and why he loves quilts.

10) 🐼 This is the best 12-second compilation of panda fails you will see this week. (Thanks, Anasuya!)

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“There are some Wonderful people in this world”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter November 13, 2022. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image of the week, above:

🐶 I passed by a restaurant here in Hong Kong the other day and had to snap a pic of this King Charles Spaniel birthday party. The one in the middle was turning four!

My WSJ latest:

My latest, a story out Thursday with my colleague Sam Schechner: Facebook Parent Meta Announces Layoffs of 11,000 Staff.

It begins:

Meta Platforms Inc. said it would cut more than 11,000 workers, or 13% of staff, embarking on the company’s first broad restructuring as it copes with a slumping digital-ad market and plunging stock price.

The layoffs add to a wave of job cuts that are roiling Silicon Valley, where tech giants that added employees by the tens of thousands through the pandemic are now retrenching.

In a message to staff on Wednesday morning, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, would cut staff across all of its businesses, with its recruiting and business teams disproportionately affected.

Indeed, what a few days it’s been in the world of big tech. Read on…

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🐦 A week after billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter, the company began mass layoffs – thousands are estimated to have been fired – and now advertisers are fleeing the platform.

2) 👉 More: My WSJ colleagues have the story of what Musk’s first week was like inside the company.

3) 👀 Bonus link: examples of how mischief makers took advantage of Twitter’s new verification rules to impersonate companies.

4) 🛍️ Elsewhere, Amazon’s CEO is conducing a cost-cutting review, with special attention on the company’s Alexa business, my WSJ colleagues reported in a Thursday exclusive.

5) 💸 And then there’s FTX, the cryptocurrency platform, valued at $32 billion earlier this year, which declared bankruptcy on Friday. My colleagues have a look at how founder Sam Bankman-Fried has gone from “crypto hero to villain.”

6) 🇺🇸 On to politics! Shot: A predicted “red wave” in Congressional midterms has not materialized; Democrats are maintaining control of the Senate, and the House is still up for grabs.

7) ⭐ Chaser: “The single most important result of this election was the triumph of the normies,” says David Brooks. “Establishmentarian, practical leaders who are not always screaming angrily at you did phenomenally well, on right and left…”

8) 🇷🇺 Russia withdrew from the Ukrainian city of Kherson, another major setback for Putin.

9) 🐙 Octopuses apparently get grouchy and throw stuff at one another.

10) ⚽ The World Cup in Qatar starts on November 21 – a week from tomorrow! (Yes, it’s weird to have the tournament in the winter, but playing there in the summer was a non-starter.) Here’s a PDF of the match schedule. I will, of course, be pulling for the recently finalized U.S. squad.

💯 Also, here’s bonus footballing video: A player for Poland’s Warta Poznan amputee team, Marcin Oleksy, recently scored a beautiful goal (Thanks, Randy P.!).

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

“this adorable puppy trying to bark away the hiccups will make your day”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.” – Edith Wharton

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

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter Oct. 30, 2022. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

✨ Image of the week, above:

🇭🇰 I can’t put my finger on what it is I like about this photo I snapped near Causeway Bay here in Hong Kong recently – the light, the movement of the pedestrians, the canyon of buildings in the background – but it captures the mid-day, lunchtime feeling of the city, with hundreds or thousands of people in any given area heading in all manner of directions, all for various reasons.

My WSJ latest:

🇮🇳 My latest story, out last weekend, is headlined: Meta-Backed Meesho Is Beating Amazon, Walmart in Race for Indian Shoppers. It begins:

An upstart e-commerce service is winning more new shoppers in India than Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart, posing a challenge to the U.S. retailing titans, which have plowed billions of dollars into the world’s biggest untapped digital market.

That service: Meesho, which an app analytics firm said was the world’s most-downloaded shopping app during the first half of the year, with some 127 million downloads. It’s growing quickly especially in India’s smaller cities and towns.

“Meesho is my Zara,” an 18-year-old shopper told us.

Click through to read the rest.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🦠 A story that’s been getting a lot of attention online since it came out Friday: a deep investigation by Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao into the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the potential origins of Covid.

2) 🐦 Now that Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, here’s a look at what might come next (un-banning accounts, such as Donald Trump’s? Combating bots? Allowing more kinds of speech? New business model?)

3) ✈️ A fascinating tale from my WSJ colleagues: Inside the Secret Prisoner Swap That Splintered the U.S. and China.

4) 🛸 The Pentagon and intelligence agencies are set to update a report on UFOs, concluding that many phenomena spotted by U.S. pilots have been surveillance operations by countries such as China, optical illusions or aerial debris – that is, not aliens.

5) 🤑 The always excellent Matt Levine has written a 40,000-word long cover story – “The Crypto Story” – that comprises the entire issue of the latest Bloomberg Businessweek.

6) 🚌 A sad result of Covid-inspired disruptions to U.S. schools: a massive decline in math and reading scores, a new test shows.

7) 🗣 A video journey through Ireland and the U.K, by accents.

8) 🤭 The 2022 finalists for the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are out.

9) 📺 HBO Max will release a three-part documentary series on the South Carolina Murdaugh murders on November 3.

10) 🌲 Go to Tree.fm to hear the sounds of forests around the world.

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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:

🐕 “this man built a racetrack in his backyard for his dogs”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley