Gideon Lichfield

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the global body that keeps tabs on cancer risk, has studied nearly 1,000 “agents” to see whether they might be carcinogens. These agents run the gamut from very specific substances (e.g., plutonium) to broad categories of stuff (red meat) to broad classes of activities (working night shifts). And of all the things the IARC has looked at, there is just one it is pretty sure doesn’t cause cancer.

Sorry, everybody. We’re just not that special.

First Trump came for the womenAnd I did not speak outBecause I was not a woman.

“Minister,” said Humphrey, “I beg you not to refer to it as a tin-pot African country. It is an LDC.”

Saudi Arabia’s long-serving oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, lost his job this weekend. But while his successor is a respected technocrat, observers agree the real influence on oil prices will be the man already known as “the world’s most powerful millennial,” deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

A Princeton professor has posted his “CV of failures”—a résumé of jobs not won, awards not awarded, papers rejected. As it went viral, he added a “meta-failure”: “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”

Seven months ago, when Volkswagen admitted to fixing 11 million diesel vehicles to cheat emissions tests, some suspected this was not an isolated case but rather an example of more widespread malfeasance, on par with the rate-rigging scandals that had engulfed the world’s big banks. Was this the car industry’s “Libor moment”?

Prince, the musician who died today aged 57, famously spent the years 1993-2000 under a different moniker: “the artist formerly known as Prince,” signified by his ”Love Symbol,” or . But you can’t type the symbol on a phone or computer. (The one in this paragraph is an image, not a character.)

Southwest Airlines has released a statement on why it removed Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a Iraqi asylee and student at the University of California, Berkeley, from a flight on April 6. It says the passenger who reported Makhzoomi—for making comments in Arabic that were “perceived to be threatening” during a phone conversation with his uncle in Baghdad—was also an Arabic-speaker.

If one person is benefiting from the European refugee crisis, it’s Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Last month, he secured billions of euros in foreign aid, visa-free EU entry for Turkish citizens, and promises for renewed attention to Turkey’s EU accession process, which has now been dragging along for 29 years.

In the days of yore, medical students could take their seats in operating theaters—which really were laid out like theaters—and watch surgeons perform delicate procedures from high above. But on April 14, for the first time ever, anyone with an internet connection was able to tune in to a surgery being broadcast live in virtual reality.

Mexico is approaching the end of its six-month-long dry season, and pollution in the capital is high. On bad days, to ease the fumes, the Mexico City authorities order 20% of the cars off the road, by banning those with certain license plates. On really bad days, it’s 40%.

WhatsApp made waves yesterday with its decision to switch on end-to-end encryption for all its billion-plus users. ”End-to-end” means the communication is encrypted before it leaves your phone and decrypted only after it reaches the other person’s phone, so nobody else, not even WhatsApp itself, can read or listen to it. Predictably, privacy activists are delighted and law-enforcement types are worried (though ironically, US government money helped fund the encryption technique WhatsApp uses).

Back in 1999, Lou Gerstner, then chairman of IBM, prophesied (paywall) that pure internet companies were “fireflies before the storm.” Maybe, he said, “one or two of them will be profitable,” but it would be giants of industry like IBM, Ford, and Wal-Mart that would lead the charge in online commerce.

“It’s not a human move.”

It seems to be reversal-of-fortune time in Latin America. Argentina has settled its battle with bondholders and is already preparing to re-enter the bond markets after 14 years as a pariah. Its president, Mauricio Macri, who has pushed aggressive reforms in his three months in office, is being hailed for making the country a “rare bright spot” (paywall) in emerging markets.

Apple’s battle with the FBI is being talked about as a defining moment for privacy. And it is. But the real reason why is obscured by both sides’ rhetoric.

Poor Pope Francis: He had no idea what he was getting into.

It begins with a birth cry—a ringing assertion of selfhood that is equal parts pride, defiance, and frankly unbelievable hubris:

There’s a lot of alarm about Zika virus, now spreading “explosively” (says the WHO) in the Americas. Travelers have brought cases from the tropics to the US, and a few to Europe.

“Flying While Muslim” is the fun term for the not-so-fun experience of being forced to miss your flight or be grilled by security just because another passenger thinks you look Middle Eastern. It’s happened to a slew of Americans (most recently in three separate cases in November), and this week it happened to two Arabs—one of them an Israeli citizen—on an Aegean Airlines flight to Tel Aviv, when Jewish Israelis refused to take off with them on board. As anti-Muslim rhetoric heats up in America and Europe, it’s likely to happen more.

Because of New Year’s Day, this weekend edition replaces the usual daily brief. Normal service will resume on Monday.

In 2015, Quartz’s third full year, we finally got to spend a little more time on feature stories. Several focus on technology and China, just as you’d expect from a news organization tracking trends in the global economy. But the pieces that made us proudest also run the gamut from global epidemics to gay rights, from Maine lobsters to management theory, and from spacesuit fashion to fetish couture. Enjoy.

This is a story about two guys, both unnervingly young, insanely clever, frighteningly resourceful, and wildly ambitious. One is a “good guy” and one is a “bad guy.”