Longform Best of 2012

A gay freshman at Rutgers, a spying roommate, and the trial that followed.

The decades-long saga of Michael Morton, who was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife.

Part 1 • Part 2

How a Mexican drug cartel makes its billions.

The false promise and double standard of integration in the Obama era.

The rise and fall of the “most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history.”

“When I died, I died of many things: the failing systems; the weakening of age; the exhaustion of the long war against dying. Finally, I succumbed to the lack of ethics in a California hospital, killed by filth and neglect.”

The insanity of U.S. gun law.

“Reg Smythe was the greatest British newspaper strip cartoonist of the 20th Century—and second only to Peanuts’ Charles Schulz on a global scale. So why don’t we treat him that way?”

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone work.

As a 15-year runaway hitchhiker, the writer was nearly killed by a trucker. Twenty seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades.