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The Weekender: tunnel tours, game glitches, and snow stored for Sochi

The Weekender: tunnel tours, game glitches, and snow stored for Sochi

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The best of the week gone by

By Jacob Kastrenakes, a deputy editor who oversees tech and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, he’s published 5,000+ stories and is the founding editor of the creators desk.

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Welcome to The Verge: Weekender edition. Every Saturday, we'll bring you some of the best and most important reads of the past seven days, from original reports, to in-depth features, to reviews and interviews. Think of it as a collection of some of our favorite pieces that you may have missed — or that you may just want to read again. You can follow along below, or keep up to date on Flipboard.

  • Feature

    Tunnel vision: how an obsessed explorer found and lost the world's oldest subway

    Bob Diamond rediscovered a long-lost subway beneath Brooklyn in 1980, and went on to lead tours of it for 30 years after. But in 2010, New York City revoked his access — and he doesn't want to go down without a fight.

  • Report

    The coin prince: inside Bitcoin's first big money-laundering scandal

    Charlie Shrem's Bitcoin payments startup, BitInstant, was a success from its start back in 2011. But laws have changed since then, and last week Shrem was arrested on money laundering charges that could kick off Bitcoin's first big regulatory trial.

  • Review

    This just in: Paper is the best Facebook app ever

    Facebook wants to act quickly and boldly and try innovative new things — but that's hard work when there are well over a billion users who it might confuse, lose, or anger. Instead, it launched a brand new style of Facebook app this week that people only have to use if they want to. And this time, they'll probably want to.

  • Report

    Freezing Sochi: how Russia turned a subtropical beach into a Winter Olympics wonderland

    Russia has had seven years to get Sochi ready for the winter Olympics, and that's meant everything from building infrastructure to preparing for the weather: not only is Sochi fairly warm, but climate change has been making it increasingly tricky for many northern cities to host the games.

  • Report

    Carl Icahn 2.0: an icon of '80s greed is back to shake up Silicon Valley

    Carl Icahn has been making headlines lately for his aggressive investments in Apple, Netflix, Dell, and other tech giants. But it's hardly new behavior for him: Icahn is a well-known "activist investor," and now he's back with a bigger cash backing than ever before.

  • Report &
    Gallery

    The punk-rock spirit of Pussy Riot comes to America

    After being released from Russian prison in December, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of the punk collective Pussy Riot have made their way to New York City. Earlier this week, the duo led a benefit concert in Brooklyn to speak out about oppression under Putin.

  • Report

    Grim, broken, and grand: the mad world of 'DayZ'

    DayZ has no goals, is filled with glitches, and isn't even finished. Yet that's somehow made for one of the most compelling games ever — one that's freeing, thrilling, and downright haunting.

  • Review

    Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro review

    Lenovo made one of the first ultrabooks to really take advantage of Windows 8, and now it's back with a successor. The Yoga 2 Pro can transform into four different modes stretching from laptop to tablet: is any one of them good enough to make Lenovo's new Yoga worth picking up?

  • Report

    How the father of 'Saturday Night Live' conquered the rest of the week

    Jay Leno is leaving The Tonight Show again, and this time it ought to be for good. That isn't because Jimmy Fallon is a shoo-in as his successor — it's because SNL creator Lorne Michaels will have his back.

  • Report

    Ctrl, Alt, Nadella: can Microsoft’s new CEO reboot the software giant?

    Microsoft's new CEO has a lot on his plate. After being selected as the third chief executive in the company's history this week, Satya Nadella laid out his strategy for the future — one dominated by mobile and the cloud. That may not sound revolutionary, but it could mean big changes in Redmond.

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