Longform Best of 2017

The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront everyday.

At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away. He had no plan. He had no tools. And he survived alone for 27 years.

“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.”

First her best friend was murdered. Then her mother fell from a balcony. And finally a man she had just met was found dead in her house.

In 2001, Jill Wells’ 6-year-old son accidentally shot and killed her on a remote ranch in Colorado. Or at least that’s what her husband told authorities.

A Dickensian profession that can still pay upwards of $650,000 per year.

Sheryl Waldman lived a reclusive life with her sister, Lynda, in their family’s old home. Over the years she faded from view until she vanished, and no one seemed to notice—until one cold evening last December.

“I decided that if he would not tell us his story, then I would.”

F. Lee Bailey is disbarred, penniless, and giving business advice out of his girlfriend’s salon.

Twenty years later, looking back at an infamous paragraph.