Longform Best of 2016

An ancient document suggests that Jesus had a wife. But an investigation into its origins leads to … Florida.

On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman entered the University of Texas at Austin’s Main Building. Armed with a number of rifles, he proceeded to kill 14 people and wound 32. Among them was a pregnant Claire Wilson.

Harland Sanders left home when he was 13. He once gunned a man down in the street for painting over one of his signs. During the war, he fed the scientists who created the atomic bomb. And then, in his 60s and going by the moniker Colonel Sanders, he began selling fried chicken.

The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister.

The story of an 86-year-old Norwegian man who tired to circumnavigate the globe, solo, in an engineless sailboat he built himself.