Corinne Purtill

In April, the Bern, Switzerland factory that makes Toblerone—the triangular-shaped chocolate bars wildly popular in airport duty-free shops—received a halal certification. A halal designation means that a product’s ingredients and manufacturing process conform to dietary laws followed by some Muslims, such as no pork products or alcohol. Toblerone’s 110-year-old recipe already met all of those requirements.

For all the cozy scenes pictured in the holiday ads, the Christmas season can be an intensely stressful time. Take the anxieties surrounding money, family, and unrealistic expectations, throw in extra alcohol and sugar consumption, and the most wonderful time of the year can take a toll on physical health.

Our social media feeds are full of little reminders of the things successful people allegedly do that you probably don’t, like keep a steady morning routine, meditate twice daily, or wake up at the crack of dawn. Adherents of the cult of productivity may lap them up, but those not on the quest for continual self-improvement may find themselves mumbling an expletive or two when scrolling past the latest pro tip.

Though we know that late-night screen time is bad for our sleep, health, and productivity, scrolling through social media before bed is a frustratingly difficult habit to break.

There is, without question, a right way to accept negative feedback at work. It involves self-awareness, emotional control, and the maturity to step back from the situation and separate the substance of the critique from the emotions it stirs.

It’s hard to overstate how deeply Evelyn Berezin’s legacy is rooted in daily life. Every time you type a document or make airline reservations or a bank transaction online, you are using technology pioneered by Berezin, who died Dec. 8 at the age of 93. She may be one of the most important figures in tech history that you’ve never heard of.

Here is a piece of truth: The perfect gift for the coworker you loathe, the person whose buffoonery and radiant incompetence both attract and repel you like some kind of bewitched ring, is a copy of Who Moved My Cheese?

It wasn’t so much that Kai-Fu Lee had trouble balancing work and life. It’s that work was his life.

Walmart will soon deploy 360 robot janitors across a few hundred of its stores. Using maps plotted by human employees, the AI-powered cleaners will placidly traverse the aisles, sweeping and buffing as they go—just as blue-aproned human employees used to do (and still will, in Walmart stores without an Auto-C, as the robots are called).

Seven years ago, actor and director Justin Baldoni was in a dark place. His acting career had bottomed out after a handful of soap opera appearances and roles  in films like House Bunny and Spring Break Shark Attack. He was directionless and beset with self-doubt.

Gwyneth Paltrow is a famous person, which means her success rate when asking other famous people for favors is typically much higher than an ordinary person’s might be. When Paltrow launched a podcast her friend Oprah Winfrey agreed to be her first guest; when she got married, Jerry Seinfeld and his wife hosted her rehearsal dinner. And when she needs advice on running Goop, her ever-expanding lifestyle empire, she calls Disney CEO Bob Iger (and Oprah, obviously).

Thousands of older customers of the US pharmacy chain CVS spend the colder months of the year in warmer climes, migrating from homes in, say, Minnesota to winter pads in sunny Arizona or Florida. In the mid-2000s, CVS realized that many of its older pharmacy employees wanted to do the same thing.

Since 1992, Rockin Fig Surf Headquarters has been a Main Street fixture in Huntington Beach, California, a coastal town some 20 miles south of Los Angeles. Its owner, Rick “Rockin Fig” Fignetti, is a bit of a legend himself: a 10-time West Coast Surfing Champion and two-time national champion who can still be found surfing the Huntington Beach Pier most mornings. From 1984 to 2010, surfers throughout southern California woke up to Fignetti’s voice reporting the surf conditions on local radio station KROQ, and his name is chiseled into the stone in the Surfers’ Hall of Fame a block or so away at the corner of Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway.

Bedroom furniture maker Liberator, an offshoot of the Atlanta-based company Luvu Brands, has the distinction of being the largest manufacturer of sex furniture in the US. In addition to several foam wedges, mats, and cushions that look like aids one might find in a physical therapist’s office, the company also sells furniture designed, according to its website, to “transform ordinary bedrooms into supportive landscapes for intimacy.”

Terrible photo editing has claimed many high-profile casualties: Lena Dunham’s arm, Adam Levine’s torso, Demi Moore’s hip.

Since the publication of her blockbuster memoir Becoming, former first lady Michelle Obama has spoken with refreshing candor on everything from falling in love at work to the life-changing magic of marriage counseling.

On Sept. 5, 1989, US president George H.W. Bush made a televised speech from the Oval Office announcing his administration’s escalation of the so-called “War on Drugs.” To illustrate the gravity of situation, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine on live TV—drugs purchased, he told viewers, just steps from the White House where he now sat.

Are you the parent of a child aged 8 to 13, preferably living in the Los Angeles area? Are you also irritated by the idea of your kid(s) wasting time in school learning things like human languages, when real-time computer-assisted translation will probably be available in the near future?

The universe began some 13.7 billion years ago and for the first few hundred million years was formless and empty, to paraphrase one popular description. Then the universe said (metaphorically), “Let there be light,” and there was light—in the form of stars.

Earlier this week, representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in support of Central American asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. She referenced previous global refugee crises, including the flight of Jewish families from Germany during World War II—a comparison that Sen. Lindsey Graham disputed.

It is entirely possible that the words that will end your career prospects for the foreseeable future have been written already, and by your own hand. Plenty of promising job candidates have had their hopes scuppered by a potential employer’s discovery of their foul, ignorant, or otherwise offensive social media posts—posts that may have been written during a younger, more foolish phase, but that the candidates must still bear responsibility for.

The term “emotional labor” has evolved over the past few years into a catchall term for the unpaid, unrecognized work of organizing and managing a household, team, family, or relationship—especially when it’s performed by women.

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, is home to the glorified likenesses of thousands of Americans, from US presidents and captains of industry to famous faces from the arts and sciences.

Shortly before the annual turkey-pardoning ceremony at the White House on Tuesday, journalists assembled in the press briefing room got a surprise visitor: one of the actual Thanksgiving turkeys about to be spared by US president Donald Trump.