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The Best Newsletters on the Web, the Man Behind Alibaba and More Morning #Mustreads

The email newsletters you should be signing up for and the origins of the entrepreneur behind Alibaba.

Yakobchuk via Getty

Good morning!

To help you get back into the mix of things, here’s some of what’s getting passed around the Re/code newsroom:

  1. Email newsletters are a very old idea that never went away. Even in the Twitter/Facebook era — and maybe because of the Twitter/Facebook era — some people like smart stuff delivered to their inboxes instead of to their feeds. Here are some interesting options for you: Sarah Jeong and Parker Higgins, both free speech and copyright experts, put out “5 Useful Articles,” a weekly focusing on the (mis)adventures of the Internet and the law; former Bloomberg science reporter Elizabeth Lopatto is behind “The Weekly Wunderkammer,” a great weird science compendium; Rusty Foster, a programmer and writer, sends out “Today in Tabs,” a kind-of love letter to New York media that rounds up whatever inane Internet debates and controversies are driving the media cycle of the day; Atlantic deputy editor Alexis Madrigal publishes “5 Intriguing Things,” which primarily deals with futuristic tech and some hardcore geekery.
  2. The New York Times has a fascinating profile of Jack Ma, the CEO of the soon-to-be-public Chinese commerce giant Alibaba. The five-foot-tall former English teacher has outmaneuvered American companies like Yahoo and eBay, and Alibaba looks like it won’t just be a major player in international business, but the kind of corporate force that may alter the balance of power in China.
  3. BuzzFeed has enormous traffic and piles of venture capital money, so it doesn’t really need defending. But Editor in Chief Ben Smith defends it anyway — by attacking the old newspaper and magazine concept of news “bundles” in the British weekly the Observer.
  4. Saturday, September 27 is Museum Day, meaning a good number of museums nationwide will be waiving attendance fees. To find out which museums near you will be participating, check this map on the Smithsonian website.
  5. The NFL is back, which means delicious football highlight reels have also returned. Here’s a Deadspin-captured video, slow-motion video and GIF of a Pittsburgh punt returner hurtling into and over a Cleveland punter. Poor Cleveland.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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