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The Weekender: mocking Macklemore, drawing dinosaurs, and popularizing the pipe organ

The Weekender: mocking Macklemore, drawing dinosaurs, and popularizing the pipe organ

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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.

  • Report

    Tank tops, high heels, and a portable pipe organ

    Cameron Carpenter looks more like a rock star than a classical musician, but his instrument of choice — the pipe organ — is still stuck in the past. Now Carpenter has created an incredible digital pipe organ, and it's ready to hit the road.

  • Feature

    Conflict bubbles: inside SodaStream's occupied territory factory

    The prominence of SodaStream and — in particular — its spokesperson Scarlett Johansson has made the Israeli company the perfect target for activists who want to see Israel pull out of the West Bank. But protesting West Bank businesses may do more harm for workers in the region than good, no matter how you feel about the occupation.

  • Review

    'X-Men: Days of Future Past' review

    Time travel stories can go a lot of different ways and sometimes — just sometimes — do some pretty amazing things. Unfortunately, Days of Future Past gets more than a little loopy, and that means the return of series director Bryan Singer may not live up to fans' hopes.

  • Review

    Microsoft Surface Pro 3 review

    Windows 8 presented a wildly different vision for PCs than anything that Microsoft had tried before. Now that software vision finally has the hardware to match it: can the Surface Pro 3 defeat the MacBook and make Windows whole, or is it still too disjointed to ever work?

  • Report

    Even union activists think Macklemore sucks

    Activists says that T-Mobile's call centers have turned into "electronic sweatshops," and they want to see it begin supporting workers' right to unionize. What's that have to do with Macklemore? He just happens to be a favorite of T-Mobile's CEO, and activists are hoping he can help out.

  • Report

    The scary, wonderful future of the Pentagon's science fair

    DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, took a rare moment to open up its doors this week and show the world some of the incredible projects it's been working on, from robotic prosthetics to a game-like interface for conducting cyberattacks.

  • Review

    Moto E review: the people's smartphone

    Low-cost smartphones are awful. Or at least, they used to be. Motorola is making that assumption a thing of the past, and the Moto E stands out as the first truly impressive low-cost phone — one that you could actually enjoy using.

  • Review

    Razer Blade (2014) review: laptop gaming never looked so good

    Last year, Razer made the first gaming laptop that just about anyone might want to buy: it was appropriately portable, as stylish as a MacBook, and plenty powerful. Now Razer is trying to kick that power up a notch — but it isn't necessarily for the better.

  • Report

    Meet the man who makes dinosaurs real

    You know those incredible drawings of dinosaurs that always accompany science stories announcing their discovery? Julius Csotonyi is one of the artists who draws them, and we caught up with him to hear just what it takes to create accurate and photorealistic recreations of a thing he can never see.

  • Report

    This pill could stop 90 percent of HIV cases in the US

    The US government began recommending PrEP as a way to prevent the spread of HIV last week. Advocates believe that wide use of it could make huge gains toward ending transmission of the virus, but getting everyone to start taking it isn't necessarily possible.

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