Gravitational waves carry unique information about the most energetic events in the universe, including the merger of binary neutron stars or stellar-mass black holes. These merger events are the end product of still-weakly-constrained astrophysics: supernovae and the evolution of massive single and binary stars. Simply by opening a new window on the universe, gravitational wave detectors will identify many nearby mergers and measure many of their properties. Individually and as an ensemble, these measurements enable sometimes straightforward and sometimes surprising inferences about the processes which formed them (e.g., the range of black hole masses and spins; possibly, which object formed first). In this talk, I briefly summarize recent progress on the interpretation of detected compact binary mergers.