Maxim

I ’ve been pondering the deBolex db25 for a while. Part monster, part beauty. Tyson Fury in Galliano. A deceptive combo for any café racer arriving fresh from 1960 after a bacon sarnie and roll-up cigarette at the Ace Café. Looks like a bubble café racer, just seamlessly executed—not banged together from the parts bin with a hammer and anvil in a garage near Wembley. And with all sorts of mechanical stuff that makes it look as if it came from the future. Plus enough power and torque to leave a Vincent Black Lightning looking like it came from the Dark Ages. When I asked Calum Pryce-Tidd, founder of the UK’s deBolex Engineering, why on earth he’d start with what is to all intents and purposes the ultimate stock wheelie-bike, his…

Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Duke Ellington, Alain Delon, Marcello Mastroianni, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Gunther Sachs, Gianni Agnelli, Muhammad Ali, and Andy Warhol. A diverse group of super-cool cats who all shared one thing in common: the Cartier Tank watch on their wrists. Warhol once said, “I don’t wear a Tank watch to tell the time. In fact, I never wind it. I wear a Tank because it’s the watch to wear.” The pope of Pop Art was, of course, just being deliberately insipid, as usual. The Tank is as much a marvel of mechanical excellence as it is an aesthetic triumph. This most elegant of watches in fact has a military background, its rectangular design having been inspired by the Renault FT-17 tanks being used on the Western Front…

When Jacques Bollinger died in 1941, he left his champagne house to his wife Lily. She was an extremely colorful personality, who in her 30 years on the throne helped make Bollinger a global name. “I drink it when I’m happy and when I’m sad,” she famously said. “Sometimes I drink it all alone. When I have company, it’s obligatory. I sip it when I’m a bit peckish and drink it when I’m ravished. In other contexts, I never touch it—unless I happen to be thirsty.” Famous tippler and The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald put it slightly more succinctly when he said, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right.” Both quotes, and plenty more, appear in The Impossible Collection of Champagne: The 100…

There’s no quarterback in the NFL who mirrors the particular skill combination that Josh Allen brings to the gridiron. His singular combo of hulking size, precision accuracy, 50-caliber cannon arm, and gazelle-like speed are what makes him a true unicorn across all pro sports. While some of these qualities are God-given, Allen’s destiny as a premier NFL QB was far from preordained. Yet his prodigious college performance at the University of Wyoming and boundless natural talent led to his being drafted seventh overall by the Buffalo Bills in 2018. While early struggles defined his rookie year, in 2020 Allen broke out—leading the Bills to their first playoff victory in a quarter of a century. Ever since, the “Winter Soldier” has solidified himself as one of the deadliest weapons in the game,…

The man credited with being perhaps the most successful Wall Street investor and hedge fund manager in history—and perhaps the most intelligent billionaire in the world—has little interest in the kind of knowledge and information that is seemingly foundational to his peers in wealth management. Simons, currently worth about $28 billion, is not solely focused on the stocks and other financial assets that Renaissance Technologies, the firm he founded in 1982, trades on a daily basis. He doesn’t delve into the detailed ins and outs of each trade, and in fact actively works to avoid trying to decipher the meaning and causes behind the buying and selling transactions of his firm—as he believes these attempts could contaminate the groundbreaking ‘quantitative investing’ system he crafted and that is the heart of the…

I was headed to Argentina to cook with Francis Mallmann. The Francis Mallmann. The maverick chef who turned his back on decades of Michelin training to flip the culinary world on its head, winning the Grand Prix de l‘Art de la Cuisine aged 40 with Argentine dishes described as “delicacies that were prepared by angels.” Intellectual. Foodie. Wine lover. Fire lover. Maverick. Maniac. TV guy. Restaurant guy. All-around character. Mention this type of opportunity to any chef you like and watch them melt in rapture. For Francis Mallmann is not just a chef, but a way of living. The inaugural Francis Mallmann cooking summit at the Siete Fuegos (seven fires) restaurant at The Vines Resort & Spa in Mendoza was my destination. The foodie equivalent of mind melding with Ayrton Senna…