Crikey long reads

Sally Whyte, deputy editor

“Lower-educated men more likely to punish women for keeping their maiden names” by Christina Cauterucci in Slate

“About 50 percent think women should be required by law to do so … About half the people who said women should change their last names to their husbands’ said their reasoning rested on the belief that women should prioritize their families and marriages over their own needs.”

Josh Taylor, journalist

“The troll taunter” by Andrew McMillen in Backchannel

“When people get forced off the web, their voices disappear from the internet’s public squares. The ideas and memes that dominate skew even further toward a white male perspective. The web becomes less interesting, less representative, less valuable. We all lose.”

Cass Knowlton, editor

“James Packer’s long, strange ride from Scientology to Mariah Carey” by William D. Cohan in Vanity Fair

“He’s the biggest fish there by a mile. He’s like royalty,” says a longtime friend of Australian billionaire James Packer. But when you cut through all the bravado that comes with being the only son of the late Kerry Packer, Australia’s larger-than-life media mogul and once the richest man in his country, it’s hard not to feel a little bit sorry for James.”

Dan Wood, subeditor

“He was a crook” by Hunter S. Thomson in The Atlantic (originally published in Rolling Stone)

“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

Charlie Lewis, journalist

“Soul survivor” by David Remnick in The New Yorker

“[Aretha] Franklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Otis Redding, Ray Charles: even they cannot match her power, her range from gospel to jazz, R. & B., and pop. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat and Aretha, with twenty minutes’ notice, sang ‘Nessun dorma’ for him.”

Helen Razer, contributor

“Bourgeois feminist bullshit” by Yasmin Nair on Current Affairs

“Of late, Sociology Porn has turned its attention to Women and, in particular, Single Women … Yet society and the laws governing mundane-but-deeply-important matters like taxation and housing have yet to catch up with the reality that fewer people than ever before see marriage as their lives’ crowning glory.”