Men's Journal

CAN YOU REMEMBER the best meal you’ve ever had? Having grown up in a vegetarian household and being subjected to gruel like ratatouille for dinner, I definitely remember the first sumptuous dish I ever tasted—the veal marsala at the venerable restaurant Tony’s in St. Louis on my 12th birthday. At the top of my current most delicious list is the simple seafood pasta at Ristorante Bagni Delfino in Sorrento, Italy. I just happened to stumble across the place but there were several photos of Pierce Brosnan with the owner hanging in the entrance, so I knew the restaurant would be special if 007 was a repeat customer. A meal that comes out of left field to wow is a rare occasion, indeed. Especially since factors like atmosphere, service and price…

For the hoi polloi, the day after Thanksgiving is all about Black Friday. For a dedicated band of winter warriors, however, the day has become synonymous with the unofficial start of outdoor skating rink season or ODR Season (#ODRszn). It’s when devotees begin building winter recreation meccas on their lawns, driveways, backyards, front yards, side yards or any space where a personal pond can be frozen and rigged up for neighborhood action. “There are very few things more symbolic of winter than the sounds of hockey skates on outside ice, it just sounds different,” says Brian Houseman, who for the past four years has built a rink in the backyard of his home in Bedford, NH. “We have a 25-by-50-foot rink that we flood once we get consistently cold temperatures.…

FORD REVIVED the Bronco in 2021 with the goal of dethroning the Jeep Wrangler as America’s off-roading SUV of choice. After two years of reviews and critiques from the 4x4 community—mostly revolving around the pros and cons of a solid front axle—the highly anticipated Raptor package now establishes Bronco as king of the four-wheeling landscape. The so-called “Braptor” recipe employs many of the ingredients that cemented Ford’s F-150 Raptor as America’s go-to off-roading pickup. In lots of ways, the Bronco Raptor more closely resembles an F-150 than its lower-spec brethren: a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter EcoBoost V6 pumps 418 horsepower and 440 lb-ft of torque to 37-inch tires through a 10-speed automatic and fully locking differentials front and rear. A disconnecting front sway bar and impressive set of 3.1-inch Fox LiveValve shocks…

YOU BUY a $100 bottle of wine instead of one for $20. Are you excited you splurged? Guilty you spent five times what you needed to? Wondering why your brain told you to do that? So fixated on determining the ideal way to share the vino with your followers you fail to notice your date already scrolling through Tinder at the table? These are strange times for status, prestige and the increasingly complicated concept of “privilege.” Thanks to social media, all of us now have a shot at global fame. But when everyone has the ability to achieve status, no one is quite certain what it means. Enter Men’s Journal editor Chuck Thompson. As readers of his previous books know, Thompson is willing to ask tough questions. For instance,…

FIREFIGHTERS OCCUPY AN increasingly vital position as wildfires seem to grow more out of control each year. Seeking to demystify that existence, firefighter Bré Orcasitas’ Hold and Improve: A Collection of Awesomeness From the Edge of the Fireline gathers extremely can-did stories from firefighters from Florida to Alaska. The book reveals an entertaining world of witty jargon, gallows humor and, of course, courage. Even if that last part is downplayed. “So many books on the fire community are tragedy related,” says Orcasitas. “I want to provide a secret passageway into what it’s like to be a wildland firefighter. It’s an all-access pass to what it’s like and I think that’s pretty cool.” So do we.…

With just 50 yards of tundra separating us, a wary female grizzly had a decision to make. She’d strategically maneuvered downwind of me, and I could see her wet snout in the morning sun tilting in my direction as she sniffed the crisp Arctic air. When I realized what she was up to, I dropped my pack, pulled out my bear spray and made myself look as big as I could. The ball was in mama bear’s court now. I wasn’t hoping for an encounter like this in the roadless, 19.3-million-acre expanse of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). But by rafting the Kongakut River on the North Slope of Brooks Range in northeast Alaska, and hiking in North America’s largest wildlife refuge, I’d immersed myself in an Arctic biome.…