Here are the stories our editors and readers alike loved this year.

In Marlowe Granados’s “Happy Hour” and Christine Smallwood’s “The Life of the Mind,” upward mobility is elusive.

The author of “Crime and Punishment” had a love-hate relationship with the true-crime obsessions of his era.

Few writers examined their own assumptions and misapprehensions as intelligently as Didion.

Biographers get distracted by the photographer’s unusual life story—to the point of diminishing her work itself.

Readers have long bickered over what actually ails Dickens’s famous Christmas tyke, but there’s no argument about how we can help children like him.

Who Peter Thiel is does not really matter. What matters about him is whom he connects.

A sweeping new history of American comics traces the rise of characters caught in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.

Edith Schloss’s memoir recalls a world of spacious, postindustrial studios filled with even bigger ideas about how to reform modern art.

The best reason to listen to Johnny Cash is his music, not his political opinions.

A trip to the New York Historical Society’s exhibition of the legendary biographer’s archive with CUNY journalism graduate students

Hernan Cortes, Captain Cook, and Prince Philip were each worshiped as deities—with very different consequences.

Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.

Monica Black’s new book, “A Demon-Haunted Land,” tells of the faith healers who prospered in post-war Germany.

In “Inseparable,” Beauvoir revisited an intense relationship from childhood. Why did she decide not to publish it?

In his posthumously-published biography of the artist, Alex Danchev unearths the gleeful child behind the highbrow works.

In his lifetime, Robert Welch toiled in the mocked and marginal fringe. Today his ideas are the mainstream of the American right.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

Forty years ago, on the barricades for radical feminism, I set out to “prove” she was overrated.

The final installment in John Richardson’s mammoth biography reveals the artist’s fiendish control over his admirers.