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There are places in California that can make a person feel in tune with geological time, newly alert, on the brink of something cosmic. Walnut Creek, an affluent suburb east of San Francisco, is not one of them. Nestled in the foothills of stately Mt. Diablo, the city’s quaint downtown is buffeted by chain retailers and big-box stores. On a recent summer morning, I took the train there to meet Grant Petersen, the bicycle designer, writer, and founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works. Petersen has become famous for making beautiful bikes, using materials and components that his industry has mostly abandoned, and for promoting a vision of cycling that is low-key, functional, anti-car, and anti-corporate. He has polarizing opinions and an outsized influence. Sensing that it would be uncouth to arrive on foot, and wanting to honestly communicate my level of commitment to cycling, I brought my bike: a red nineteen-eighties Nashbar that I purchased in my mid-twenties, rode happily for a decade, and abandoned when I became pregnant and freshly terrified of death. The bike had spent the past two years hanging vertically in the garage, where, from time to time, I accidentally backed into it with the car. The wheels were out of true, and—a separate issue—couldn’t be removed: I had installed locking anti-theft skewers, then lost the key.
Petersen met me at the BART station. There were ways in which my bike was not up to Rivendell standards: it had sylphlike tires and an over-all look of abandonment. He was polite about the situation. “It’s steel, it has lugs,” he said. Petersen is seventy and muscular, with buttony blue eyes, a gentle smile, and graying hair that gravitates toward the middle of his head, like a cresting wave. That morning, he was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt, a red bandanna, and loose pants made by Rivendell’s clothing line, MUSA, which Petersen developed himself. (“They seem to fit like normal pants, thank god,” a description on the Web site reads.) He was riding a Rivendell Roaduno, “a single-ish speed road bike” painted banana-slug yellow, and he set off on the sidewalk, beckoning for me to follow.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Clement Jackson was at home by the South African coast, tending to the meat on his beloved braai, when the call about the body came. He found contentment at the barbecue. Bald, with craggy features and prominent ears, he liked to impart the secrets of a succulent lamb shank or the perfect T-bone to his children. They were grown up, with children of their own, but even as he approached 60, Jackson was not ready to yield the tongs to them just yet.
Since heart trouble brought an early end to his police career 20 years earlier, Jackson had worked as a private detective. Born in 1959 – just as Nelson Mandela was going on trial for treason – he’d followed his father into the force. Jackson loved the sleuthing, assembling a jigsaw of evidence. Specialising in mining, he made his name in the late 1980s, when he cracked the smuggling rings that rich South Africans were using to squirrel bullion and precious stones abroad during the final years of apartheid.
The mining industry was an engine of the bribery, violence and inequality that continued to blight South Africa even after Mandela took power. So once Jackson began to take on private clients, there was plenty of detective work to do. In 2016, one of his industry contacts referred a new client to him. Jackson stepped away from the braai to take the call.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
At one point in Matthew Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, there’s a story about his 2021 stay at a swanky five-star rehab facility in Switzerland, where he was housed in a villa with a breathtaking view of Lake Geneva and assigned a personal butler and gourmet chef. “The kind of luxurious place where you were guaranteed to not meet anybody else,” is how he described the super-private treatment center.
It was hardly the actor’s first attempt at recovery. Before landing in the Alps, he’d been in and out of some 15 different high-end programs for issues with alcohol and prescription drug abuse. There was the luxe detox compound in Malibu where he spent a month in 2001; the therapeutic “trauma camp” in Florida he visited sometime after 2004; the rustic lodge in Sun Valley, Utah, where, in 2011, he practiced yoga and engaged in equine therapy and occasionally encountered a moose strolling the grounds (“No, really, there were moose there; I wasn’t hallucinating”).
By some estimates, Perry spent about $9 million on rehab treatments over the years, not including the $350,000 he dropped on the private jet he hired to shuttle him to and from the facility in Switzerland. But the Lake Geneva program was different. It introduced Perry to a new, experimental form of addiction-recovery therapy that promised remarkable results. Every day, German-speaking nurses would usher him into a darkened room, sit him down for an hour, blindfold him, put headphones over his ears and inject into his arm an IV drip filled with a supposed miracle cure.
Read the rest of this article at: The Hollywood Reporter
What if you woke up one day to discover that millions of people had suddenly won the lottery? Perhaps you’d be happy for these lucky recipients. More likely, you, with your ever-shrinking piece of the pie, would be fuming, even furious, at the injustice of it all. Then again, maybe you’d be one of the winners, quietly exhaling in relief. Finally. Some good news.
A lottery win happened yesterday, and it’ll happen tomorrow, too. Between now and 2026, an estimated $1 trillion will move from Canadian baby boomers to their heirs, mostly millennials. As older Canadians live longer, even more money will stream down in the coming decades. An Ipsos survey found that among Canadian boomers who are planning to leave 100 per cent of their estates to their children, the average inheritance will be about $940,000.
For most people, this is life-changing wealth, enough to pay off the mortgage, to move the kids from public school to private school, to shift their status from renter to homeowner. Some heirs will receive much more—the kind of Porsche-and-penthouse money that they could never earn in their jobs as teachers, accountants, marketing managers. All of this signals an unprecedented economic shift: the greatest transfer of generational wealth in Canadian history, emerging in the form of mass good fortune bestowed upon the demographically lucky. When all the payouts have been made, Canada could look starkly different.
As a Gen Xer whose parents were born before the Second World War, I have noticed, with a touch of envy and an eyebrow raised high, that a lot of millennials are really into their parents. Many boomers retooled the family structure to something more emotionally enmeshed, increasing the level of parental involvement with adult children—a lot of texts and check-ins. To me, this generation of adults so entangled with their parents can seem a smidge infantile. Reaching adulthood usually means arriving at self-sufficiency, signalled by emotional and financial independence. But people are staying alive longer, and the child-parent relationship is, too.
Read the rest of this article at: Maclean’s
“Feruell” is near the top of poker’s food chain. A professional from Russia, he makes a living gambling anonymously on GGPoker, Americas Cardroom and other sites, sometimes using Darth Vader as his avatar. Fellow sharks and smaller fish with money to lose are his prey. Feruell keeps his emotions in check during games, but he’s outspoken in poker forums when he sees something he doesn’t like.
In 2013 another player caught his eye. Vyacheslav Karpov, aka Performer, was posting lurid tales in a Russian-language chatroom about prostitutes and card tricks he’d learned from “gypsies.” To the cerebral Feruell, Karpov’s boasting looked ridiculous. Even worse, he was charging young male acolytes for the privilege of receiving his advice, including how to cure anxiety with booze.
Feruell logged on to the chatroom and accused Performer of telling “fairy tales” to “collect $50 an hour from suckers.” He added that Karpov “doesn’t know how to play poker.”
Karpov threw down a gauntlet: “I challenge you to a fight.”
The duel he proposed was in Limit Texas Hold ’em, a variant in which two cards are dealt to each player, then five more cards are dealt face up, interspersed with rounds of betting in which the maximum raise is capped. This happens to be Feruell’s specialty—he’s been called the “King of Limit.” The match was set up on the PokerStars website. Bets would max out at $200.
Feruell doesn’t lose often. But when the game began, pot after pot went to Karpov. Some 400 hands later, the match was over, with the King of Limit down $20,000. “His level of play was out of this world,” Feruell later recalled.
He was suspicious right away. How could he have been outsmarted by a guy who ranted about homosexuals taking over the world? Although Feruell couldn’t prove anything, he guessed Karpov had used software to direct his moves. Poker-playing programs—poker bots—had been around for decades, but for most of that time they hadn’t been good enough to beat top human competitors.
Feruell and Karpov both made their names in the boom era of online poker, which kicked off in 2003 after a Tennessee accountant with the improbable name of Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Moneymaker inspired millions around the world to try their luck, just as online poker sites emerged to make it easy to do so. These hobbyists were happy to pay good money to test their skills. Maybe they’d even win a little and then—why not?—make it to the World Series of Poker themselves.
Read the rest of this article at: Bloomberg
