The Monitor's best of 2018

My hometown schools are segregated again. I went back to see why.

Thirty years after the peak of school integration nationwide, that progress has unraveled. Could the outcome in Buffalo, N.Y., offer lessons on America’s pressing need to address racial separation? Part of an occasional series, Learning Together. 

Louise Penny’s unlikely motto for murder: ‘Goodness exists.’

‘There are no people’: China’s crackdown in the Uyghur heartland

Ann Scott Tyson found reporting especially challenging in the western region of Xinjiang, where she went to witness the impact of China’s forced ‘reeducation’ of its Uyghur minority. But that work produced a rare and nuanced look at the project’s effect.

Why Americans are talking less and less about ‘love’ and ‘kindness’

The legacy of 'boys will be boys' on American life

As the FBI investigates this week sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, many have begun to zero in on a cultural ambivalence about how boys are trained to be men.

Camp Amazon: Inside the 'lungs of the Earth'

Our writer stays at an outpost run by famed ecologist Thomas Lovejoy to find out about climate change and saving the world’s most important rainforest. It's a tale of bearded monkeys, exotic birds, and no snakes. 

Russia takes a new look at an old enemy: Genghis Khan

It isn't easy for the conquered to see the contributions that a conqueror made to their country. It's even harder when that conqueror is Genghis Khan in Russia. But in the republic of Buryatia, the view is indeed shifting. Third in a five-part series.

A system under strain: Is US democracy showing real cracks?

America’s political structure has survived serious challenges in the past. But partisanship linked to cultural and racial identity, and sorted by geography, is testing it in ways the Founding Fathers never envisioned.

In a Nigerian melting pot, living – and loving – despite Boko Haram

Maiduguri has endured Boko Haram attacks for nearly a decade. But many Nigerians here try to carry on with their normal lives – including the city’s tradition of tolerance.

Two mothers, a son’s death, and the struggle for forgiveness

Giselle Mörch realized how much the concept of forgiveness had always been an abstraction for her. But now, confronted with the call to forgive in a way she could never have imagined, it has become something more wrenching and tumultuous, she says.