Best of 2021: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.

<p>How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him</p>

A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Credit for the COVID-19 vaccine “belongs to a series of uncelebrated discoveries dating back at least 15 years – and a constellation of unsung scientists.”

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.

In Los Angeles County and around the country, doctors have had to decide who gets a lifesaving COVID-19 treatment and who doesn’t.

Ben Mauk on China’s campaign of persecution against Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities, including “reëducation” camps, long prison sentences, forced labor, and other methods of forced assimilation.

How homelessness is criminalized in small cities and towns across the West.

In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.

“White people still drive the narrative about Asian Americans. We have yet to have control over our own stories.”

Near America’s largest coal-fired power plant, toxins are showing up in drinking water and people have fallen ill. Thousands of pages of internal documents show how one giant energy company plans to avoid the cleanup costs.

For nearly a year, the men of the Lucerne hotel have seen the worst of the city’s self-described liberal residents. They’ve also exposed a decades-long policy failure in permanent housing.

Hundreds of workers at Gopher Resource have been exposed to dangerous levels of lead and other dangerous chemicals.

"Do not retreat to the blindness that you enjoyed before the long night."

At the start of the pandemic, we asked four incarcerated people to chronicle daily life with the coronavirus. Here, they reveal what they witnessed and how they coped with the chaos, fear, isolation and deaths.

The long read: It’s hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity that people are being subjected to. Meanwhile, Modi and his allies are telling us not to complain

Given our history, how can Jews deny another people the right to return to their homeland?

Under the shadow of the Israeli separation wall, one man’s quest to find his son.

Jocelyn Bennett paints her daughters’ toenails, not bothered by the strong scent of nail polish filling the room at the HomeTown Studios in Orlando. The girls show off their pink toes, toddling around the small pay-by-the-week hotel…

Victor Luckerson writes about two under-recognized Black women, Mary E. Jones Parrish and Eddie Faye Gates, who helped document the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre.