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Every weekend we round up the highlights from the other websites in the St. Joseph Media family. Check them out, after the jump.
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Toronto writer Alexandra Molotkow shares the secrets of her cybersexual education
I’m among the first generation to come of age on the Internet. By 13, I was an expert at chat room sex, spotting cyber-pervs and hiding my secret life from my parents
In 1997, when I was in Grade 6, my friends and I sat at the back of the classroom and talked about sex. We would speculate on what it felt like and place bets on how old we’d be when we finally lost our virginity. We would make fun of the way orgasms sounded in movies and imagine what celebrities’ sex lives involved. Later, at home, we’d reconvene on ICQ, one of the Internet’s first major instant messaging systems, which allowed us to have conversations we wouldn’t want our parents overhearing. That was what the Internet was to us: pretty much what a tree house would have been a few years earlier.
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The Conrad Black Book Club: A Matter of Principle, Chapter 6 (wherein Conrad loses the Telegraph)
Going on the word of Conrad Black alone (and his long, obscure words are the only ones we have), the Lord has basically become the business equivalent of Charlie Brown (same initials, even!). He’s just trying to do the right thing. But arch-nemesis Richard Breeden keeps pulling that football out of the way before he can kick it.
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Destination Munkistan: A look at Peter Munk’s new Adriatic playground for the super-rich
The latest project of the gold magnate Peter Munk is a seaside resort and tax haven for fellow billionaires in the post-Soviet backwater of Tivat, Montenegro. A delirious tour of a world of champagne-drenched parties, supersize yachts and the recession-proof Ultra-High Net Worth Individual
Captain Fantastic: Peter Munk on his 40-metre yacht, the Golden Eagle, which has a full-time staff of five. (Image: Jim Ross)
There are birthday parties, and then there was Nathaniel Rothschild’s party this past July. The financier, scion of the prominent banking family and future baron was turning 40 and spent £1 million on the weekend-long extravaganza. The venue: Porto Montenegro, a newly developed luxury resort and marina in the Montenegrin coastal town of Tivat, on the southeast side of the Adriatic Sea. It was the sort of gathering that marks the end of an era or the birth of an empire—and in a way, for Europe’s youngest and smallest democracy, it was both.
Four hundred guests arrived at the village airport on private jets or stepped off the fleet of super-yachts that washed ashore from the world’s most glamorous tax havens—the Grenadines, Gibraltar, Grand Cayman. The attendees were described in the Guardian society pages as “200 ugly rich people and their poorer but more attractive partners,” or, as one guest more generously put it, “plutocrats and the women who love them.” A number of the partiers were so fantastically rich they could bankroll whole armies (which the birthday boy’s family, in its heyday, once did): Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (who arrived on his £70-million yacht, the Queen K); the wealthy Egyptian Sawiris family (who have embarked on their own Montenegrin development nearby); King Leruo Molotlegi, ruler of a tiny, platinum-rich part of South Africa, who hit the dance floor in a fabulous dashiki; British politician Lord Peter Mandelson; Jimmy Choo honcho Tamara Mellon; the historian Niall Ferguson and his Dutch-Somali partner, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist critic of Islam. There was a healthy smattering of European royalty, as well as members of the Guinness and Goldsmith clans.
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House of the Week: $7.5 million for a regal Rosedale mansion
ADDRESS: 136 Glen Road
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Rosedale-Moore Park
AGENT: James Strathy Warren, Royal LePage J&D Division, Brokerage
PRICE: $7,495,000
THE PLACE: An enormous near-century-old mansion nestled deep within Rosedale’s twisting roads that stands as a reminder of Toronto’s regal past.
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Tim Hudak spent his life climbing the Tory ladder and now he has a shot at taking over Queen’s Park—but can he convince voters he’s more than just Mike Harris lite?
Tim Hudak is riding in the back of an RV, a big, bouncy RV wrapped in an enormous picture of his smiling face, and he’s coming to see you. He’s really happy. So happy that he’s tweeting about it on his BlackBerry. “Outstanding,” he types, and, “On my way…” Now he’s peering out the front window, over the driver’s shoulder, toward one of the event venues where he’s going to meet you. “Shit, has this thing started?” He doesn’t want to be late. He wants to look you in the eyes and tell you what he thinks, and he wants to listen to you, too. The whole big meet-and-greet ball of wax: he loves it. This is who he is. “It gets in your blood, right?” he asks. Although that’s not actually a question. Putting “right?” at the end of certain things he says is just Tim Hudak’s way. “You are who you are, right?” he says. “I’m Tim Hudak.”
Conrad Black attacks Stephen Harper’s law-and-order agenda with a lot of big words
Critics of Stephen Harper’s prison corrections plan may have just found an unlikely ally—none other than convicted felon and noted fancy talker Conrad Black. On the brink of his return to prison—the Lord is back in the hoosegow today—Black unleashed his impressive vocabulary on the Conservative government in Ottawa in a diatribe wherein he expressed his “violent disagreement” with Harper’s “so-called roadmap” for Canada’s prison system.
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How running became the city’s collective obsession
Last year I turned 30, broke up with my long-term boyfriend and moved into a tiny apartment for one. The domestic vision I’d had for my future—marriage, a semi-detached fixer-upper, kids with endearingly arcane names, homemade pie—dissolved overnight. When I tried to reformulate a picture of my future, alone, my imagination failed. Usually when I’m lonely or stressed out, I run. I’ve been running non-competitively for 10 years. It eases my anxieties more effectively than anything else I’ve tried: psychoanalysis, yoga, eBay buying sprees, binges on HBO series, even anti-depressants. When I run, for one blissful unmeasured hour, my brain stops spinning.
How Toronto’s lavishly rich Latner family is tearing itself apart
Albert Latner made his fortune in real estate, health care and casinos, and lavished his four children with riches. After his wife died, he gave them their inheritance early. Now they’re feuding over the estate, launching lawsuit after lawsuit and tearing the family apart. A cautionary tale about the burdens of love and money
In February 2010, Joshua Latner was alerted by several friends about a photo posted on the Internet. He sat down at his computer, Googled himself and was disturbed to find his picture with the word “loser” scrawled across his face.
Joshua is not, and has never been, a man with a nine-to-five job. An enthusiastic collector of fine wines and rare antiques, he is 49 years old and lives in Zurich with his wife, Kendal, and their two young children. He also maintains residences in Toronto, Key Biscayne and Tokyo and on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he raises chickens and honeybees as a hobby. He inherited $150 million when his father, Albert Latner, a Toronto property developer and entrepreneur, decided to give each of his four children what’s known in high-net-worth circles as the velvet handshake—shorthand for early inheritance.
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In the ’60s, Marshall McLuhan was Toronto’s most famous intellectual; now, the world has finally caught up with him
In the ’60s, McLuhan was hobnobbing with celebrities, advising politicians and forever changing how we think about mass media. A hundred years after his birth, the world has finally caught up with his theories
Marshall McLuhan. (Image: Robert Lansdale Photography/University of Toronto Archives)
Nineteen sixty-five was the turning point of Marshall McLuhan’s career—the Annus McLuhanis, the Year of Marshall Law, the heady, vertiginous breakout of McLuhan-mania. It was the year the irreverent journalist Tom Wolfe published a star-making profile of the Canadian media guru in the New York Herald Tribune that repeatedly asked, in Wolfe’s typically antic, hyperbolic way: what if he is right? “Suppose he is what he sounds like,” Wolfe wrote, “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game—suppose he is the oracle of the modern times?”
In the 40-odd years since Wolfe first posed this question, many others have asked it again and again. McLuhan was right about so many things. Browse his books, dip into any of the interviews he gave, and almost every probing, aphoristic utterance feels preternaturally prescient. Decades before doomsayers decried the Internet’s negative rewiring of the brain, he dramatically outlined the psychic, physical and social consequences: “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” He predicted the slow death of magazines and newspapers: “The monarchy of print has ended and an oligarchy of new media has usurped most of the power of that 500-year-old monarchy.” And he foresaw the rise of crowd-sourced news: “If we pay careful attention to the fact that the press is a mosaic, participant kind of organization and a do-it-yourself kind of world, we can see why it is so necessary to democratic government.” McLuhan anticipated reality TV long before it was a glimmer in the Survivor producer Mark Burnett’s eye: “I used to talk about the global village; I now speak of it more properly as the global theatre. Every kid is now concerned with acting. Doing his thing outside and raising a ruckus in a quest for identity.” When, in his bestselling book The Medium is the Massage, he wrote, “Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media,” he could have been writing about how Twitter and Facebook shaped the Arab Spring. The world that McLuhan conjured is a world that now looks an awful lot like ours.
50 Reasons to Love Toronto: No.30, There’s a hidden watering hole called Goodnight in an alley at Richmond and Spadina
(Image: Lisa Gent)
The first rule of Goodnight is: don’t talk about Goodnight. The hidden watering hole, located behind a buzzer-access metal door at the end of a dark, graffiti-covered alley at Richmond and Spadina, opened last September, just in time to be Harvey Weinstein’s unofficial TIFF clubhouse. To a certain nightlife species—people who experience a frisson entering a bar with a strict reservations-only policy—Goodnight is proof that Toronto has arrived. The list of regulars includes erstwhile politicas like Belinda Stronach (who often stops in with her boyfriend, Harbord Room chef Corey Vitiello), indie darlings like Metric’s Emily Haines, and professional partiers like Ashleigh Dempster, the co-founder of social climbers’ club The Society (she’s also married to Matt George, one of Goodnight’s owners). Once you get past the door, it’s remarkably cool. Imagine a pub designed by Wallpaper magazine: the raw wood bar is supported by metal radiators; a wooden staircase leads nowhere; vintage posters of Communist leaders and sewing patterns line the walls. And a list of potent concoctions like the Fat Sailor (three types of rum and Tia Maria) and the Bunny Hug (equal parts Canadian Club, gin and absinthe) puts even the most aloof A-lister in a frisky, feel-good mood.
Gregory Burke pulled the Power Plant out of debt and enhanced its international reputation. Then, he quit.
Gregory Burke with Sarah Bywater, the former Power Plant head fundraiser, at the 2009 Power Ball (Image: George Pimentel)
The Power Plant’s first board meeting of the year was held at noon on Monday, February 7. The gallery, situated on prime waterfront property, is a magnet for the city’s wealthy society figures. The clubby board of governors reflects that. Trinity Jackman, an archaeologist and the daughter of Hal Jackman, is the vice-president. The Drake Hotel owner Jeff Stober is a member, as are Rosedale hostess and arts patron Elisa Nuyten and the entertainment lawyer Paul Bain. The board’s president is Shanitha Kachan, an art collector and the wife of investment guru Gerald Sheff. Kachan called to order what should have been a routine, low-key meeting. Then came the big revelation.
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Ontario schools to poor people: suck it
One thing that the provincial Liberals are proud of as they run for a third term is their record in education. Full-day kindergarten, lower dropout rates, more spending in post-secondary education: these are all things the Grits will be certain to make sure people know about before October’s election. The problem, according to The Globe and Mail, is that Ontario’s high schools are increasingly charging fees that are at best exploiting loopholes and at worst are illegal.
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She who cures all: Q&A with Dhun Noria
For over 30 years as a doctor, Dhun Noria has battled disease. As the newest citizen member of the police board, she’s turning her attention to fighting crime
(Image: Adam Rankin)
You’re the chief of laboratory medicine at the Scarborough Hospital. What do you do, exactly?
Almost every patient who comes into our hospital has an encounter with the lab. Eighty per cent of treatment decisions are made on the basis of lab tests. My specialty is cancer diagnosis.
You studied at U of T?
Yes. I came to Canada from Hyderabad, India, in 1968 to do my fellowship in anatomic pathology.
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My husband, Farokh, studied nuclear physics but now makes fashion jewellery. We have a manufacturing plant in India, and my son, Zubin, helps with the business. My daughter, Sabrena, is a surgeon in Columbus, Ohio.
Hell House: Why the Don Jail is a wretched, dangerous dungeon that should have been shut down ages ago
Last year, Jeff Munro was beaten to death at the Don Jail over a bag of chips. His fate was not unusual. The Don is a wretched, dangerous dungeon that should have been shut down ages ago. Instead, it’s where we send people who haven’t yet been convicted of anything
On a Sunday last November, Christine Munro was putting the Christmas tree up early, just like she does every year, when two police officers came to her door. Christine is a dental assistant and mother of four. She lives on a quiet cul-de-sac in Paris, Ontario, with her husband, Paul, who is a mechanic, and their 15-year-old son, Devon. She also has two grown daughters, Brittany and Melanie, who visit often. When Christine saw the officers on her front porch, however, her thoughts immediately jumped to her eldest child. “I opened my door and said, ‘Please don’t tell me it’s about Jeff.’ ”
(Image: Boris Spremo/CP)
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