snowbird newsletter evolution
It’s Lunar New Year’s eve. Ever since we moved to Singapore (the first time) in 2015, I’ve loved everything Lunar New Year brings - the festive markets, the lion dances, ubiquitous ‘gongxi gongxi’ tracks playing in every taxi - but most of all I like the idea of it being a second chance. A second chance to renew the resolutions you may have mildly failed at since Jan 1. A second chance to review what the last year truly was like vs the need to rush into the new year the way you did back in Jan.
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So that’s what we want to do with this newsletter - a bit of a redux to welcome the water dragon. Starting today there are three kinds of posts you can expect from this newsletter:
[weekly] Five Friday Finds: You know this one, but here’s the reason I do it.
We’re a ‘read everything around you’ household. Financial Times (yes we love the physical copy), New York Times, New York Mag, Quartz, tech publications, Nikkei, Japan Times, Korea Herald, South China Morning Post, Bloomberg Businessweek (the physical copy is def superior), MIT Tech Review, New Scientist Magazine (thank you Singapore National Library), MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, lots of pubs following culture and tech in mainland China and India, 70+ substack newsletters, indie mags from our fav magazine store, and pocket reader recommendations.
I find what’s the most interesting amongst all these and curate five for y’all - I do it because I think this is my service to the people around me - if I can package my curiosity to show people something they wouldn’t have otherwise, that’s a win.
I’m trying to make art a habit, not just a hobby - sharing what I make in this newsletter will help me keep this up.
[coming soon] [monthly] “On…..” series: True to the notion of snowbird of being seasonal travelers into subjects - fueled by all that we consume in the above point - we find oursleves going into rabbit holes that tell us something new about the world we live in. On loneliness in Asia, and why its different from the west. On why we should talk about money. On why Ally McBeal was a radical show. On what national banks can teach us about dealing with AI fakery. We’re trying to deliver two of these a month.
[monthly] “Read These Next” Does what it says on the tin. We think you’ll find something new in these books.
five friday finds: potholes, nostalgia, virtual protests
This is what I made this week
And here are this week’s finds:
- POTHOLE PLAGUE Climate change is causing a pothole plague. Are robots and self-healing pavement the solution?
- ARTIFICIAL CURIOSITY When an AI algorithm is given a simple definition of curiosity, it can, without any human-provided information, explore more than 50 video games. The researchers also found that sometimes it would die on purpose just to see the Game Over screen.
- NOSTALGIA IS GOOD Nostalgia, despite its sometimes damp connotation, promotes progress, helps people resolve their dissatisfaction, and encourages feelings of hope.
- CRATER MYSTERY Love how this whole thing was edited. On satellite imagery, you can spot a village inside a strange crater in Madagascar but no one seemed to know who they were.
- VIRTUAL PROTEST AI-generated celebrities filled a protest against Big Oil. Is this the future of (sl)ac(k)tivism?
My daughter and I are going to mall-hop all week to check out some of the most acrobatic lion dances around the city.
Gong Xi Fa Cai!
