Best of 2025: All Our Number One Story Picks

Zakaria Amara was jailed for his part in the Toronto 18 terror plot. Then came the hard work of redemption

How Trader Joe’s remains a beloved brand despite record product recalls, safety violations, worker misconduct complaints, and an environmental record that belies its reputation.

The number of asylum seekers and refugees needing shelter has surged in recent years, leaving officials in suburban municipalities like Peel scrambling to respond.

LAS VEGAS — There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it. The air is all wrong, there’s simultaneously too much in it and not enough of it. Everyone I spoke to about the Consumer Electronics Show before I went to it earlier this month…

In the UK, thousands of people are still dying every year from exposure to the asbestos fibres in our homes, schools and workplaces. My dad was one of...

Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live and embody a time rooted in kinship.

I’ve read some fascinating forensics stories in the past year, and this haunting piece by Fletcher Reveley digs into how Chile has applied the science, unfortunately to disastrous results, in crimes of mass atrocity. For Flor Lazo, the past 50 years have been a “long, long, long, long road in search of the truth.” Her father, two brothers, and two uncles were among the more than 1,000 people who were forcibly disappeared after the 1973 coup, under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Reveley describes how in the late ’80s, forensic anthropologists began to investigate the regime’…

Climate catastrophes and biodiversity loss are endangering languages across the globe.

Against all odds, the struggle to keep addicts alive

A lab at the University of Chicago is protecting artists from theft by a new adversary: the machines.

Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic first swept across the planet, as many as 20 million Americans and at least 400 million people worldwide currently suffer from long COVID. This is the story of two men with the condition who are bonded by their quest to feel like themselves again.

Chris Duncan’s death sentence—built on the testimony of two discredited doctors—illustrates just how faulty the system can be.

Reverend Jeff Hood has made a career of fighting to save men the state wants to kill — and it doesn't matter if they're innocent.

How the discovery of a long-lost monument shattered trust between a Japanese American community and the museum built to preserve its history.

What scares them is something else: the realization spreading across Los Angeles that the private housing market isn’t just failing wildfire victims—it’s failing by design. That the inability to meet this moment isn’t the result of a few bad landlords, it’s a feature of a system built to extract. What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords.

Last year, Harper’s ran a feature about people grappling with systemic, sometimes incapacitating maladies. The afflicted blame the invisible toxins of modernity—electromagnetic frequencies, chemicals, additives—but society sees them as hypochondriacs or crackpots. Maddy Crowell’s piece in the newest issue of Harper’s acts as a bookend of sorts to that story: another case of hardship compounded by dismissal. Frank Vera III worked at George Air Force Base in the 1970s, where he interacted with what we now know are carcinogenic substances; he also claims to have been exposed to radioacti…

Back then, it felt easier to say goodbye to each part of him as they left

For years, North Korea has been secretly placing young IT workers inside Western companies. With AI, their schemes are now more devious—and effective—than ever.

Portland, Oregon, decriminalized fentanyl in 2020 but the experiment failed. Can a blend of law enforcement and harm reduction prevent overdoses?

Interdimensional travel, sex with aliens, communion with God. Anything is possible with just a sprinkle of DMT. Akasha Song’s secret labs made millions of doses—and dollars—until the feds showed up.