Best of Longform.org 2014

The building previously housed the machines that printed the East Boston Times.

In 1982 three teenagers were killed near the shores of Lake Waco in a seemingly inexplicable crime. More than three decades later, the tragic and disturbing case still casts a long, dark shadow.

The death of James Foley in August at the hands of Islamic State jihadists in Syria was a very public end to a hidden ordeal shared with nearly two dozen other Westerners.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.

Patrick Radden Keefe on the capture of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, who is known as El Chapo, the notorious head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

Roger Angell writes about life after ninety: “I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds.”

On the front lines of the pallet wars