Zach Wener-Fligner

Alpha males tend to thrive in cutthroat offices—and restaurants that douse their food in hot sauce.

Facebook may finally be ready for the thumbs down.

A speech by the PayPal co-founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel at University of California Berkeley ended abruptly Wednesday night when a crowd protesting the recent deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police entered the lecture hall and overran the stage.

This article has been corrected.

A newly-released Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques offers an in-depth look at some of the brutal tactics used by US intelligence during the so-called War on Terror. The report says that the CIA lied about the harshness of its techniques, and that the techniques furthermore failed to garner useful intelligence information.

The US Senate Intelligence Committee has released the first documents from its multiyear investigation of the CIA’s controversial “enhanced interrogation” techniques used on al-Qaeda terrorism suspects after the attacks of September 11, 2001. According to a press release by Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein, those interrogation techniques included sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours, dragging naked detainees up and down corridors while slapping and punching them, waterboarding that turned into a “series of near drownings,” and “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” of detainees.

Of the rocks in our solar system, Pluto is perhaps the most mysterious. We know next to nothing about the former planet (which might be a planet yet), whose small size and distance from Earth—2.7 to 4.7 billion miles—make it hard to observe for even powerful telescopes like the Hubble:

Online advertising is a fickle thing. It accounts for 20% of the ad industry’s total spending, and over 90% of revenue for the internet giants Google and Facebook. That said, no one seems to have any idea whether it actually works.

For the past decade and a half, astrophysicists have had a problem: there aren’t enough stars in the universe.

It’s no secret that getting a college education in the United States is massively expensive, and costs continue to rise year after year. If you’ve paid much attention to the growing cost of college, you’ve likely seen some version of this chart, which shows just how dramatically tuition costs have outpaced inflation (with inflation represented here by the US Consumer Price Index):

When it comes to leadership, your voice matters. Deeper-voiced male politicians are more appealing to voters, and deeper-voiced male CEOs run larger companies, stay in charge longer, and make more money.

Can you climb a ladder? Drive a tractor? Know your way around John Deere equipment?

Last year on Cyber Monday, consumers spent a then-record $2.29 billion shopping online. This year, sales are expected to hit $2.6 billion (pdf). How does a massive online retailer like Amazon handle all that volume?

Got milk? Coca-Cola soon will. The beverage giant is preparing to compete in the dairy aisle with Fairlife, a new, premium milk product that will cost double the price of typical milk.

Of the world’s population of more than 7 billion, around 200,000 people—or, 0.003%—have a net worth of more than $30 million. These super-wealthy individuals (UHNWs, as the research firm Wealth-X deems them, for ultra high net worth) control a handy $29.7 trillion, according to an analysis of Wealth-X data charted by CNN.

This is part two of our holiday gift guide for your Quartziest friends and relatives. Collect all the installments here.

Americans agree: We hate commuting more than just about anything. Of course, most of us do it anyway: on average, about 25 minutes each way.

Although smartphones do many things well, their screens are highly vulnerable. The technological asymmetry is absurd: phones can stream high-quality video from a moving vehicle, but can’t handle a fall from the height of a coffee table.

Is masculinity killing men? That’s the argument made by a new report released Wednesday by the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), a British nonprofit for the prevention of male suicide.

For many Americans, the morning and evening commutes are the worst parts of the day. Nationally, Americans travel about 25 minutes each way to work. But there are 1.7 million people whose commutes exceed 90 minutes.

Since its first flight in 1994, the Airbus “Beluga”—named for its white, distended body—has been one of the strangest-looking things in the sky.

Facebook has an image problem. Not only has it irked social media users who increasingly fret about privacy concerns. Many employers view it as a productivity killer, which makes keeping its users on the site for long stretches a challenge.

The developed world is covered in paving. In the US, for example, there are 2.65 million miles of paved roads, which translates, by one estimate, to a total area roughly the size of Ohio.

The Rosetta mission, the combined effort by European Space Agency and NASA to land a spacecraft on a comet, has so far been a resounding success.