Newley Purnell

Sent as a newsletter on Oct. 21, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Painting of the week, above: Watercolor No. 73, Blue And Lavender (1928), by Allen Tucker

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 👉 Our latest on Builder.ai, with my stellar Bloomberg colleagues Yazhou Sun and Mark Bergen, out yesterday: Builder.ai Ex-CFO Subpoenaed in US for Auditor Communications <– 🎁 gift link. It begins:

US investigators are advancing a criminal probe into Builder.ai, demanding a former executive’s communications with the firm’s UK auditor and with others involved in the financial reporting for the artificial intelligence startup ahead of its June bankruptcy.

2) 🎥 RIP Diane Keaton.

3) 🚗 Bloomberg CityLab review: three new books on the plague that is “car brain.” <– 🎁 gift link.

4) ⚽ Playing at the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico this summer: Cape Verde. Believe it.

5) 💯 “The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time.”

6) 📚 Eighteen writers and critics — people who read a lot — on how they make time for books.

7) 🏍️ Travel story of the week: motorbiking Vietnam’s Ha Giang Loop. (Thanks, PB.)

8) 🏕️ Outdoor video of the week: “A Week Camping Alone on the Notorious Sixth Great Lake.”

9) 💸 50 Cent, adjusted for inflation.

10) 🐕 Dog video of the week: “Made me giggle 🤭.”

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💡 Quote of the week:

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” — Marcus Aurelius

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

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on Oct. 5, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Painting of the week, above: Tennis At Newport (1920), by George Wesley Bellows

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 📈 Big scoop by my Bloomberg colleague Shirin Ghaffary: OpenAI is now the world’s most valuable private firm thanks to its new $500 billion valuation. <– gift link

2) 👉 RIP Jane Goodall, who died at age 91.

3) ✍️ Photos of 2025 Booker Prize nominees’ favorite writing spots.

4) 🇨🇴 “Just as in the United States, where Karen has become derisive shorthand for an entitled, demanding woman, Colombia has its own stigmatized first name: Brayan…”

5) 👟 WSJ: “The Evolution of the Running Shoe and What Comes Next.”

6) 🤖 You may have heard of “AI slop.” What about AI “workslop”?

7) 😴 The science of good sleep.

8) 🚧 Engineering feat of the week: balancing a 700-year-old church on stilts.

9) 📕 What I’m reading: I finished my Bloomberg colleague Parmy Olson’s excellent “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World” and summarized a few points on LinkedIn here.

🎾 Another excellent book I just finished: Gerald Marzorati’s 2017 work, “Late to the Ball: A Journey into Tennis and Aging.”

Marzorati, then editor of the New York Times Magazine, resolved in his early sixties — having never played the sport, and being only moderately athletic — to become good enough to compete in national masters’ tournaments.

In funny, precise, colorful prose, he describes his quest, which involved hiring a coach, attending tennis camps, working with a sports psychologist, and, of course, lots of practice. He muses on his own mortality, questions of philosophy, and, of course, the craft, trends and aesthetics of the game.

Friends and tennis partners come and go. His strokes improve. His serve gets better. He learns to volley. He begins to relax and play each point as it comes — and more that I don’t want to give away.

The central message: Learning as we age keeps us in the present, reminds us that it’s never too late to achieve new goals, and — crucially for intellectuals stuck in their heads — grounds them in the physical. The upshot: it slows down time.

10) 🐕 Dog video of the week: “Dad cuts holes into the fence so dogs can say hi to mom..”

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💡 Quote of the week: “Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement.” — Jane Goodall

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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of canines who just want to look after their loved ones.

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on Sept. 8, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Painting of the week, above: Dog Lying in the Snow (ca. 1911), by Franz Marc

👉 I’m excited to share that our Bloomberg series on H-1B visas is a finalist for an investigative data journalism award at this year’s Online Journalism Awards!

The full list of finalists — including several other entries from Bloomberg — is here. And our entry is here.

The story I helped out with was our investigation out in February: Former Staffers Say India’s Biggest IT Firm Was Gaming the US Visa System 🎁 <– Gift link

🛍️ Meanwhile, my latest story, with colleagues Sankalp Phartiyal, Alex Gabriel Simon, and Satviki Sanjay: World’s Fastest Deliveries Ignite an Investment Frenzy in India 🎁 <– Gift link

It begins:

A few miles from the bustling, labyrinthine markets of Old Delhi — where traders have hawked spices and textiles for centuries — a quiet patch of low-slung warehouses hums with a radically different form of commerce. From here, India is executing one of the boldest bets in modern retail: delivering nearly anything to your doorstep in less time than it takes to hard-boil an egg.

India’s instant commerce revolution is gathering extraordinary pace, fueled by surging demand, rising competition and billions of dollars in global investor capital. Startups are jostling with Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc.’s-backed Flipkart to blanket the nation’s cities with small, hyperlocal warehouses and delivery riders — promising groceries, electronics, and in some cases, even gold coins in under 10 minutes.

It’s a model that has burned through mountains of cash — and flamed out — in nearly every other major market. Yet investors are betting that India will be different. With dense cities, low labor costs, and a rising class of more than 730 million digital-first Gen Z and millennial consumers accustomed to instant services, the country may be the one place where 10-minute delivery can finally work at scale.

Click through to read the rest.

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🇹🇭 Thailand has its third prime minister since 2023, Anutin Charnvirakul…

2) ✈️ …while former PM Thaksin Shinawatra flew to Dubai, where he lived earlier when in exile — and then returned to Thailand today.

3) 🇺🇸 Billionaire Ray Dalio on the US, in an interview with the FT: “I think that what is happening now politically and socially is analogous to what happened around the world in the 1930-40 period.”

4) 🇪🇨 An important WSJ story: how Mexican cartels have engulfed Ecuador in violence.

5) 🤖 The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy on artificial intelligence and economic growth.

6) 🎧 Related podcast episode, which I recommend highly: “Why AI Isn’t What You Think,” featuring longtime tech analyst and writer Benedict Evans.

7) 📚 The Ezra Klein podcast, but just the books.

8) 💻 RIP OG blogging platform TypePad.

9) 🎥 Quentin Tarantino on Quentin Tarantino’s best movie.

10) 🐕 Dog video of the week: “Doggo moments when they think no one is home.”

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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of canines who deserve their own private reveries.

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on Aug. 24, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image of the week, above: Hong Kong Harbor (1843), by Lt. Humphrey John Julian

✍️ I’m behind in sharing some of my recent work!

First, I’m proud of this investigation with my excellent colleagues Yazhou Sun and Mark Bergen, out a few weeks back: How an ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ Brought the First Big Bust to AI Boom 🎁 <– Gift link

It begins:

When the world’s elite gathered in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2024, Sachin Dev Duggal reveled in his role as the founder of a bona fide artificial intelligence unicorn. His startup, Builder.ai, sponsored glitzy events with celebrities and magazine editors. The BBC featured him on air as an expert in the buzzy technology. Builder.ai’s “Chief Wizard,” as Duggal called himself, told another interviewer at Davos that generative AI is “the cape that you make people superheroes with.”

Whatever magic Duggal once conjured is now gone. A year after his Davos appearance, he was pushed out as chief executive as investors began to suspect him of inflating revenue and mismanaging funds. The startup’s board later restated sales and a major lender seized virtually all of its cash, forcing the company into bankruptcy in June.

Click the link for more.

(Related: Long-time NN readers may recall that I wrote about the company, then called Engineer.ai, for the WSJ back in 2019. And I’ve mentioned our earlier Bloomberg stories from the past few months in previous dispatches.)

🍎 Meanwhile, on a far different topic, my latest, out Friday: Apple Claims Ex-Employee, China’s Oppo Stole Trade Secrets <– 🎁 Gift link

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 👉 A powerful Reuters story from my former WSJ colleague Jeff Horwitz: “Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home.”

2) 📚 Here’s a profile of novelist R. F. Kuang by Hua Hsu in the New Yorker.

3) 🧠 TIL: Rick Perry is an ibogaine advocate.

4) 🇧🇴 Socialist rule is coming to an end in Bolivia. 🎁 <– Gift link

5) 📰 The Onion has more than 53,000 print subscribers and is aiming for profitability next year.

6) 🎥 Netflix trailer of the week: “Ballad of a Small Player,” in which Colin Farrell plays a struggling gambler in Macau. Based on the Lawrence Osborne novel.

7) 🎂 Discover newspaper headlines from the day you were born.

8) 📖 What I’m reading: I loved Valerie Bauerlein’s phenomenal true crime work, “The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty.” (I wrote more about the book on LinkedIn here.)

9) 📕 What I’m reading, continued: I’m nearly finished with my Bloomberg colleague Parmy Olson’s “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World.” If you want to learn more about the minds and companies behind this emerging, much-touted tech, start here.

10) 🐶 Dog video of the week: “He really knows how to help.”

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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of pups who just wanna pitch in to help sound the alarm.

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on June 30, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image above: Beach Scene at Sunset (c. 1865–1870), James Hamilton

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

I’m behind in sharing my recent Bloomberg stories! Here’s what I’ve been up to:

1) 🤖 On Friday I participated in a Live Q&A with my colleagues Annabelle Droulers, Shery Ahn and Saritha Rai on the topic of China, the US, and the race to dominate the future of artificial intelligence. You can listen to a recording here.

2) 🚗 A scoop-let from earlier this month: Uber emailed riders and drivers here in HK to say it’s worried that regulators might cap its service in the city. 🎁 <– Gift link

3) 💻 And a few weeks back, I wrote in our Tech in Depth newsletter about experimenting with a hot new agentic AI service, Manus. What’s agentic AI? Give the piece a read. 🎁 <– Gift link

4) 👉 You may recall our story from April about Microsoft-backed AI startup Builder.ai hiring auditors to investigate inflated sales. Well, the latest, by my colleagues Yazhou Sun and Mark Bergen: Builder.ai Files for Bankruptcy After Creditors Seize Accounts. 🎁 <– Gift link

5) ✍️ And another scoop-let from last month: Meta’s new head for Asia-Pacific is its longtime Southeast Asia exec. 🎁 <– Gift link

6) 🌏 And finally, I wrote a bigger-picture story about how countries across Asia are reining in social media services like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. 🎁 <– Gift link

Got all that?

7) 🎥 Meanwhile, in other news: Denis Villeneuve, of “Blade Runner 2049” and “Dune” fame, will direct the next James Bond movie.

8) 📻 D.J. Barry Hansen, aka Dr. Demento, is retiring after 55 years.

9) ✈️ Fun BBC TV clip from 1953: How to travel from London to Tokyo in just 36 hours.

10) 🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “this is so pure.”

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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of canines soaking up gorgeous sunsets on the beach.

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on April 22, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image above: Easter Procession, St. Marks (1898), by Maurice Prendergast

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 👉 My latest, an exclusive out Thursday with my Bloomberg colleagues Eric Fan and Paige Smith: US Agency Probes Workers’ Bias Claims Against India’s TCS <– 🎁 Gift link. The lede:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating dozens of American workers’ allegations that India’s biggest IT outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., discriminated against them based on their race, age and national origin.

2) 🙏 RIP, Pope Francis.

3) 🚢 A helpful Bloomberg feature: “Tracking Every Trump Tariff and Its Economic Effect.”

4) 🇭🇰 Related: This week’s Schumpeter column in The Economist. The headline: “The trade war may reverse Hong Kong’s commercial decline.”

5) 🔭 “Scientists have found new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.”

6)🚦 Some Seattle crosswalk buttons were hacked to play what sounded like Jeff Bezos saying “Please, please don’t tax the rich.”

7) ⛵ “The Techno-Utopians Who Want to Colonize the Sea.”

8) 📺 What I’m watching: “The Last of Us” is back for season two. One word on the action so far: wow.

9) 📖 What I’m reading: Last weekend I completed a months-long quest to conquer the great Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I loved it. My (joking, but only kind of!) review, which I shared with colleagues, is: TLDR – 19th-century Russian aristocrats: They’re just like us!

10) 🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “That face says it all – he needs some love.”

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

•••

👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on April 14, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image above: dire wolf puppies?

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) 🐺 Are dire wolves really back from extinction?

2) 📹 Meanwhile: “American YouTuber who left a Diet Coke can for a reclusive island tribe is arrested in India.”

3) 👉 The WSJ’s Jason Zweig on Daniel Kahneman’s death: “The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions.”

4) 🗣️ What did you think of the “White Lotus” season finale? And more important, what did you make of Parker Posey’s Southern accent?

5) 📖 Eighty-seven-year-old Thomas Pynchon’s first novel in twelve years will be out in October.

6) 🏄 On surfing in Hong Kong.

7) 🇵🇪 RIP Mario Vargas Llosa.

8) ⚽ My beloved Arsenal beat Real Madrid in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinal thanks to two incredible free kicks from Declan Rice.

9) 👏 And speaking of football/soccer, quote of the week: “I’m a Southend fan till I die now.”

10) 🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “Autumn goes home with the best stick during walkies.”

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley

Sent as a newsletter on April 5, 2025. Not on my list? Sign up here.

👋 Hi friends,

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

Image above: New York City’s new subway map. (Read on…)

Here are 10 items worth your time this week:

1) ✍️ My Bloomberg latest: a scoop out Tues. with my colleagues Mark Bergen and Yazhou Sun. The hed: Microsoft-Backed Startup Builder.ai Hires Auditors to Investigate Inflated Sales <– 🎁 Gift link

2) 📉 Following President Trump’s tariff announcements, the S&P 500 Index has fallen to its lowest level in 11 months.

3) 📱 My colleague Oliva Carville, who has done remarkable investigative work on how young people have been harmed by social media, has a weekend essay out. And there’s a new documentary based on her work, “Can’t Look Away.”

4) 🇺🇦 The New York Times’s Adam Entous on “America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.”

5) 👉 Also in the NYT, my former WSJ colleague Justin Scheck has an important new story out with Abdi Latif Dahir: “Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia.”

6) 🎬 RIP, Val Kilmer.

7) 📩 A look at Emily Dickinson’s “envelope poems.”

8) 🍎 For the first time since 1979, New York City’s subway map has a new design.

9) 🎵 What I’ve been listening to: Jason Isbell has a new solo album out, “Foxes in the Snow.” (Thanks for the tip, Wendy!)

10) 🦴 Dog-related video of the week: “The most beautiful dog in the mirror at the moment🥰”

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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,

Newley