Researchers programmed a computer to analyze the speech patterns of couples in marriage counseling. And it turned out that the computer was “able to predict marital improvement or deterioration about as reliably as ratings provided by trained humans — in fact, even a little better.” (This was especially true when one of the participants picked up the computer and tossed it in the direction the other.)

+ “No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you. And yet the results of this automated ranking process shape the social lives and reading habits of more than 1 billion daily active users — one-fifth of the world’s adult population.” Will Oremus heads to Menlo Park to find out who controls your Facebook feed.