Good morning. Today we’re bringing you a special edition of the Briefing, which looks back at 2019 with the help of you, our readers. We’re revisiting some of your favorite articles and features, and highlighting some that you might have missed.

Here’s what you wanted to know

One of our goals is to get you up to speed quickly, recapping the biggest headlines and offering a look ahead to the major stories that we’re covering that day.

But some of the most popular pieces in the Briefing this year weren’t part of the daily news cycle. They were human-interest articles, especially those with a hint of mystery. For instance:

A report last month by our former New Delhi bureau chief Ellen Barry on a story she had been following for years, about an eccentric royal family who lived in a ruined palace in the middle of India’s capital.

A piece this month by Keren Blankfeld, the story of reunited lovers who had met 72 years before, at Auschwitz.

Human-interest articles aren’t necessarily confined to our planet: In February, one of our science writers, Dennis Overbye, wrote about how astronomers are trying to explain why the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should be.

Visualizing the news: The Briefing provides the basics, but readers are often interested in digging deeper. Among our most popular features are maps, such as the one showing the extent of wildfires in California and another tracking the path of Hurricane Dorian through the Caribbean and along the Eastern U.S.

A craving for context: With a major investigation or an update to a long-running, complicated news story, we frequently publish a separate collection of takeaways. Like the Briefing itself, the takeaways distill a story down to its key points. Last month’s analysis of President Trump’s Twitter habits, our interview with him in January, and Robert Mueller’s testimony in July were all the subjects of well-read takeaways.