Kick Off 2017 By Reading Some Of Our Best Journalism From Last Year

Huffington Post reporters have counted how many people have died in jail and at the hands of their loved ones; we’ve investigated lead paint violations in NYC and reported deeply on what happens when you stick cops in schools. Here are some of our best features from 2016.

1. In the mid-1990s, a boy who loved Michael Jackson and Sonic the Hedgehog came up with a theory so strange only the internet could love it. What if he was right?

2. For a month, we counted all the people who died at the hands of their loved ones. This is not a love story.

3. There are thousands of cops stationed inside America’s schools. And their presence means that kids are more likely to be funneled into the criminal justice system even for petty crimes . Sometimes those kids are punished for getting into fights and stunned with Tasers .  

4. Lead paint is making New York City’s children sick. But some landlords see sick kids as the cost of doing business .

5. Half of music festival attendees are women. But on stage, the numbers tell a different story .

6. Ramsey Orta filmed the death of Eric Garner at the hands of a New York City cop. Then he prepared to spend four years in prison.

7. The troubled-teen industry has been a disaster for decades. It’s still not fixed.

8. With Fairfax Media, our partners in Australia, we broke a huge corporate bribery scandal . We documented how major corporations and big banks were implicated. We spoke to an insider who admitted paying a bribe. We even used the documents we obtained to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi .

9. Two boys were born on the same day in the same town in Madagascar, but will lead vastly different lives. Here’s why.  

10. Here’s a story you might think you know, but you really don’t. It’s about a woman named Lorena Bobbitt .

11. David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech almost didn’t happen .

12. Compare Beyoncé with NASCAR. Search the bios of 8 million Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Twitter followers . For example, Clinton followers are 93 percent more likely to use the term in their Twitter bios than Trump followers.

13. Can a summer camp stop kids from repeating the violence they saw growing up?  

14. We wanted to find troubled jails, so we counted the bodies. We made a database of more than 800 Americans who died in custody over the course of the year after Texas motorist Sandra Bland was found dead in her cell. We found that many of the deaths were preventable suicides — and many occurred within the first 72 hours after a person was admitted to jail. And we identified 10 jails that had especially high death rates — some of which are now under investigation.  

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