Ultrafast lasers, generating pulses with durations of roughly 1 ps or shorter, were essentially only laboratory curiosities until the recent development of robust solid-state systems. Today such lasers have a wide range of important demonstrated or near-term potential applications. A central issue with most of these applications is control-the ability to give pulses with well-defined shapes, specific types of amplitude and frequency modulation, and full interpulse phase control is a useful advance. I will review the methods which have been developed over the last few years to control and detect the shapes of optical pulses, and show a variety of applications from my laboratory in telecommunications, medical diagnostics, and fundamental chemistry.