Best of Longform.org 2017

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah spoke with Dylan Roof's family, friends, former teachers, and the victims' families to unlock what created one of the coldest killers of our time.

If only we saw the carnage that trauma surgeons see every day.

Guardians can sell the assets and control the lives of senior citizens without their consent—and reap a profit from it.

Who you marry might be the most important decision of your life, but it can also be the least rational.

When Michael Deng, a college freshman, joined an Asian-American fraternity, he was looking for a sense of belonging and identity. Two months later he was dead.

Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s budget is now on the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities?

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

An on-the-ground investigation reveals that the U.S.-led battle against ISIS — hailed as the most precise air campaign in history — is killing far more Iraqi civilians than the coalition has acknowledged.