1. Norway auctioned its Cold War-era submarine base for a paltry $5 million.

"During the Cold War, Norway built a secret naval base, Olavsvern, that was carved into the mountain just outside the city of Tromsø, in the Arctic Circle. The base—comprised of a submarine hangar made of rock, direct sea access, nearly 150,000 sq ft of buildings and almost double that in bombproof interior space—took 30 years and cost NATO around $500 million to build to fight the threat of the Soviet Union... In 2008, the Norwegian parliament decided to shut down the base amid a restructuring of the country’s navy. The way they decided to go about it was unusual, though. Norway put the base for sale in 2011 on a Norwegian online auction site (link in Norwegian), describing the site—fairly honestly—as “a unique property where ideas can be realized."

2. The advantages of cash.

"Columbia University students are bugging out over the arrest of a student on drug charges who they say accepted payment through the social payment application Venmo. Why are they fretting? Venmo is the opposite of cash: every transaction is shared publicly by default. And the requesting party has to write a brief description of the transaction. He had a rule, one student told Capital: 'The description has to be funny.' The alleged dealer is Michael Getzler, a sophomore English major. New York police arrested him yesterday."

3. Virtual worlds tend to become weird places.

"If that sounds like an utterly dystopian realization of the initially utopian pitch for Home, the behavior of the average user at the time matched it. If you popped into a lobby with a female avatar, getting mobbed by other dancing avatars wanting to chat you up was common enough to birth the original Home prank: Quincying. Those with long memories might recall Quincying as the art of making two avatars, one a young woman to lure in trolls and a second that looks like a hipster version of Sweetums from The Muppet Show. When the troll arrives, turn into the second and start dancing. Home was a weird place."

4. The megachurch in the content era.

"Alongside digital publics, electronic agora, virtual communities, and occupy movements, churches are sites where collective life is reimagined. By designing formediated congregation, churches like the Crystal Cathedral align privatized, mobile, and distributed social conditions with a mythic worldview. They are emblems of collective orientation along a vertical dimension, or the sacred, achieved through the material arrangements better associated with uniquely horizontal dimensions of sociality. In other words, they are the sites whereby mythic cosmology enters a new technological regime."

5. American researchers are returning the blood of Yanomani people to their tribe.

"An indigenous tribe in the Amazon jungle has secured the return of blood samples taken from its people by American researchers in the 1960s. Thousands of samples were taken from members of the Yanomami tribe, in 1967 for genetic testing. A Yanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa, said the blood would be buried with special prayers. He said his people had been horrified to discover it had been kept in freezers far from home for years."

+ I doubt this was for "genetic testing" so much as other kinds of testing, given the timing.

On Fusion: Meet the people who go undercover to reveal the secrets of the surveillance trade.

 Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip:

domestic, n., though it survives in legal & other formal use, in PEDANTIC HUMOR, & as a GENTEELISM, has been superseded for ordinary purposes by servant taken in a limited sense. Such losses of differentiation may be regretted, but usage is irresistible. The adj. in this sense survives in domestic help, domestic employment.

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