Crikey long reads

Bernard Keane, politics editor

“Doomsday prep for the super-rich” by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker

“Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.”

Josh Taylor, journalist

“These gay Republican activists are making inroads with Trump’s team” by Dominic Holden in BuzzFeed

“Angelo is himself like a young, gay Trump, with a plume of yellow hair and an appetite for combat. His office near Capitol Hill features a framed portrait of Reagan behind his desk and a flag with a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ logo hanging in front of him. Like Trump, he occasionally breaks with Republican doctrine — like diverging from the party’s anti-LGBT platform — but he’s more coy. He said his middle initial stands for ‘Thunder’ and refused to share his age. Most of all in our interviews, Angelo relished that this week, LGBT Americans will have their first Republican president who isn’t openly hostile to them.”

Sally Whyte, deputy editor

“The (viral) ripple effect of ripping off journalism” by Ginger Gorman in MediaShift

“Within hours of my child sexual abuse story being posted online, ripoffs started emerging — with the bylines of other journalists posted on them. Mamamia took 900 words of my 1,900-word story.

“The Daily Mail’s headline was not about the catastrophic impacts of child sexual abuse. It was about a 12-year-old boy having sex with his mother.

“I’d promised Hamish and Ian their stories were safe with me. But they weren’t. After all their suffering, what impact would this have on them?”

Dan Wood, subeditor

“Roger Federer as religious experience” by David Foster Wallace in The New York Times

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

“The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”

Cass Knowlton, editor

“To Obama with love, and hate, and desperation” by Jeanne Marie Laskas in The New York Times

“At the beginning of his first term, President Obama said he wanted to read his mail. He said he would like to see 10 letters a day. After that, the 10LADs, as they came to be called, were put in a purple folder and added to the back of the briefing book he took with him to the residence on the second floor of the White House each night.”