From hipster racism to Honey Boo Boo, and Sarah Phillips to John McAfee, it's been quite a year. For your viewing pleasure, here is a look back at a year in Gawker Media longreads.

Sometimes, instead of writing 40 words to go along with a viral Internet video, we write many words. Thousands of words, even. Since we do this somewhat frequently, those pieces can be easy to miss. With that in mind, we've collected our favorite Gawker longreads from 2012. No one's really working this week, so please…

On a gray Wednesday morning in October, the car headed west on the Lincoln Highway Bridge hit 100 miles per hour and I started to worry it might hurtle off into the tangle of rusted-out warehouses and smoke stacks that pass for a landscape in northeastern New Jersey. I peeked over the driver's shoulder, watching the…

Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres).

I.

If you're a porn star and you learn that a bunch of other porn stars have a bad STD, what you want to know right away is if you've fucked any of those people. This August, a syphilis outbreak plunged the San Fernando Valley's multibillion dollar porn industry into chaos, and any information about the origins and…

Somewhere on the brief walk from the Macon Mall's Spencer Gifts to rue21, a bright discount store glittering with pageant-level tackiness but no pretensions of refinement, somebody farted. Loudly. It was in the potential earshot of the staring kiosk workers in the Georgia mall, the mass of people who were trailing the…

[This work is not authorized or approved by those persons criminally charged or their attorneys, and the views expressed by the author do not reflect the views of anyone other than the author]

I met Liván, Takeshi and the rest of their band of frikis—rock and metal fans of the punk-and-anarchist subcategory—around nine one Thursday night on the median of Havana's G Street. I'd come to Havana to write a book about what it was like to be a young adult in the post-Fidel city and, since G Street was the biggest…

It's not easy to listen to Terry talk about the time he had sex with a seven-year-old girl. But after his psychotherapist put us in touch, he agreed to lay it all out for me during a phone call and email, and I was enthralled the way one might stare at a man falling from a bridge. Terry is 38, a small-business owner,…

My grandmother married a beautiful brown troll named HaLester "Les" Myers 20 years ago. The Christmas before last, Les slumped across from me in Grandma's gaudy pink throne while she finished making supper. I watched the still water flooding the gutters of Les's sleepy eyes, the way his nappy gray chin folded snuggly…

When I was six, my mother left a box of small garbage bags lying around. I found one, cut the bottom off, and used the cinch-tie at the top to make a small, crude dress. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. As my reflection stared back at me, a wave of well-being surged over me, sweeping away any real…

Gawker published the essay, "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America" last year, three weeks after George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that the shooting of Trayvon Martin "was all God's plan." As the jury deliberates in the State vs. George Zimmerman case, we are rerunning it.

Please excuse this brief interruption to your regularly-scheduled programming, but we have a quick announcement to share with you that we hope you'll find exciting: Gawker has teamed up with Longreads, the best source for long-form journalism (etc.) on the web, and we now have our very own page over there.