Best of Longform.org 2012

Ian Parker on Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers student who committed suicide after discovering that his roommate, Dharun Ravi, was taping his sexual encounters.

The National Magazine Award–winning story about Michael Morton, a man who came home from work one day in 1986 to find that his wife had been brutally murdered. What happened next was one of the most profound miscarriages of justice in Texas history.

How the world’s most powerful drug traffickers run their billion-dollar business.

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

On a sleepy Sunday morning in late July 1965, Detective 3rd Grade James McDonnell received a call in the upstairs squad room of midtown Manhattan’s...

Jill Lepore examines the history of gun ownership in America, from the Second Amendment and the N.R.A to George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.

Andy Capp is the comic strip by British cartoonist Reg Smythe for the Daily Mirror in 1957, the cartoons feature working class belligerent work shy Andy and his long-suffering wife Flo.

Building Apple’s iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies.