At its best, a summer reading list isn’t one list at all. It’s a set of options matched to conditions and mood. What you might want to read on a plane isn’t the same as what you’d want to read on a beach lounger at 16.00, half asleep and sun-drunk – or even drunk-drunk. It’s about finding books that match both mindset and situation.
Long-haul flights need scale, something big enough to swallow the hours. Poolside afternoons need pace and perhaps a little mischief, narratives you can dip in and out of without losing the thread. A warm evening on a terrace is for a story that could spark your dinner conversation. And when the rain comes, reach for something a little more weighty.
As the host of Meet the Writers on Monocle Radio, I’ve read many different books in many different places. I’ve learned the key to choosing a good book is to match it to the place you’re in and the weather in your head, not just the conditions outside. Here are 14 titles that do just that.
‘The Odyssey’
Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Ancient Greece
Good for: Long-haul flights or beside a wine-dark sea.
Homer invented travel writing. The Odyssey tells the story of a man trying to get home and everything standing in his way. Emily Wilson’s translation – the first complete English translation of the book by a woman – presents a modern take on the ancient work with far more attention paid to the women, the enslaved people and the power structures that were brushed over by earlier translators. Read the book and you can weave it into discussions about the Christopher Nolan film that was released in cinemas this summer.
‘Jan Morris: A Life’
Sara Wheeler
United Kingdom
Good for: Waiting at a departure lounge.
Jan Morris was a prolific Welsh journalist and writer, whose work encompassed travel writing, foreign correspondence and everything in between. Sara Wheeler’s biography does justice to a genuinely singular life, including Morris’s transition, and the decades spent writing about Europe’s cities with real love and precision and questions of identity. Few people saw more of the world or wrote about it with less vanity.
‘Lázár’
Nelio Biedermann
Switzerland and Hungary
Good for: A week away, when you want a century in your carry bag.
Lázár follows a Hungarian family across a century of upheaval, from the Habsburg Empire to the First World War, through fascism, Soviet occupation and the 1956 uprising. Impressively, Nelio Biedermann was only 22 years old when the book was published earlier this year. This is a big, confident book from someone barely out of his teens and one of this year’s genuine European discoveries.
‘Baldwin: A Love Story’
Nicholas Boggs
Brooklyn, Leukerbad, the south of France and Istanbul
Good for: Relaxed mornings, coffee on the boulevard.
Washington-born Nicholas Boggs tells James Baldwin’s life story through the people who loved him and the people he loved, from mentor Beauford Delaney to Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss painter who became his first great love in Paris. The story goes from Brooklyn and the south of France to Paris, Tuscany and Istanbul, and the months at Happersberger’s family chalet in Leukerbad, Switzerland, that gave Baldwin the isolation to finish his debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.
‘The Disappearers’
Marlon James
Jamaica and the US
Good for: Intellectual stimulation on the second week of holiday.
Marlon James won the Booker Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings and he’s back on this year’s long list for The Disappearers. The latter book takes place in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988: eight gay men gather to rehearse a play. Though they are strangers to each other, they’re bound by the one thing they can’t mention. One night a mob violently attacks the group and what follows is a story about the aftermath. This is not a gentle book.
‘The Shadow of the Object’
Chloe Aridjis
Mexico, the Netherlands and USA
Good for: An overcast afternoon indoors when you want something a little uncanny.
Chloe Aridjis grew up shuttling between Mexico, the Netherlands and the US, and that unsettled quality runs through her fiction: it’s visual, faintly eerie and never quite goes where you expect it to. The Shadow of the Object opens with a dog bite from the elderly family German Shepherd and moves through a Mexico City hospital ward, an unlikely friendship and magic lanterns. The book made this year’s Booker longlist.
Listen to a conversation with Aridjis on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Netherwood’
Jake Arnott
UK
Good for: Late-night reading, when you’re feeling brave.
A literary thriller built around Aleister Crowley and Britain’s occult undercurrent, including the communes, the counterculture and the folk horror lurking behind the picturesque seaside postcards. Jake Arnott has always been drawn to Britain’s alternative histories, and Netherwood is him at his most atmospheric, mixing fact and fiction. You might not want to read it alone, though: it’s pretty scary.
‘Our Last Resort’
Clémence Michallon
France
Good for: A languid afternoon on a yacht or at a resort.
A French writer’s take on an American obsession, a luxury resort in Utah, a group of cult survivors trying to rebuild and a murder. Michallon brings an outsider’s eye to a very American kind of story, which is part of what makes it work. A fast-pace read for the poolside.
‘Lust’
Erika Lust
Sweden and Spain
Good for: Sharp, sexy thinking.
The aptly named Erika Lust grew up in a Swedish household that didn’t talk about sex, then moved to Barcelona and built one of the best-known adult film studios. The book argues that porn is a mirror of society’s problems rather than the cause. Part memoir, part feminist rallying cry, Lust goes behind the scenes on the film sets, into the casting and the consent conversations, and makes the case for pleasure as something worth taking seriously. Intelligent rather than sensational.
‘All Fours’
Miranda July
USA
Good for: Reading with a book club.
Sexually frank and very funny, Miranda July’s novel takes on midlife desire, a marriage under pressure, menopause and reinvention. Pair it with Lust for the same subject from two directions: one fiction, one criticism. You will have an opinion and so will everyone else who reads it.
‘Exit Wounds’
Peter Godwin
Zimbabwe, UK and US
Good for: A family holiday or the flight home.
This one is personal: Peter Godwin is my brother. Exit Wounds moves between Zimbabwe, London, New York and Lakeville. It’s about family, war, exile, ageing parents, a marriage ending and three strong women. We’re touring Western Australia together with the book in October. If you’re there, come and have a chat. Or just buy it and I’ll get a drink out of my share of the royalties. Cheers.
Listen to an interview with Godwin on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Attention-Seeking Behaviour’
Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
UK and Greece
Good for: A train journey, or when you need something to argue about.
The narrator is a compulsive liar and she tells you upfront. A young London journalist, she spins outlandish stories, trying to work out where the lying started and what it has cost her. Woven through the book is a real history of lie detection, from Ekman’s discredited theory that a flash of expression gives away what someone truly feels to the polygraph’s long and shaky career in policing. Fiction, memoir and essay run together, I found it utterly compelling.
‘Astronaut!’
Oana Aristide
Romania, Greece and Sweden
Good for: A rainy day when you want something darkly funny.
Romania, 1989, the final months of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule. A detective is told to pin a string of murders on a man-eating bear rather than admit a serial killer is loose in a country where killers officially don’t exist. Meanwhile, an eight-year-old girl gets pulled into her elderly neighbour’s plot against the regime. It is dark and funny and examines what it costs to keep believing an obvious lie. Aristide is a co-founder of the Syros Literary Festival (with me and my brother), which we’ll be holding in the Hotel Aristide Hotel in Greece in April. Come along to meet Oana and many others on this list.
Listen to a conversation with Aristide on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Porcupines’
Fran Fabriczki
Hungary and USA
Good for: Reading at an airport bar.
Szonja arrives in Los Angeles from Budapest at 18 for what’s meant to be a summer visit and never quite leaves. The book moves between Cold War Washington, late-Communist Budapest and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles. The title comes from Arthur Schopenhauer’s fable about porcupines huddling together for warmth and pricking each other in the process.
American media loves a political bunfight, especially an intraparty one. The New York Times reports that moderate Democrats are preparing for war with the party’s progressive wing after the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan state primary this week. The Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, says that it plans to spend $15m (€13m) to help defeat the democratic-socialist movement, as embodied by the likes of El-Sayed and New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
For a party that should be on the upswing, thanks to the general unpopularity of Donald Trump, spending money against a wing of your own party is obviously not a good look. But nor are many of the prescriptions of democratic socialism, not simply because they’re further left but because their chief ideas are not new. “Medicare for All”, the key policy platform of El-Sayed that would bring an NHS-style system to American health care, is a well-worn topic. So are promises to “take money out of politics”.
The current battle among the Democrats is largely about whether moderate common sense or stick-to-your guns progressivism is the best way to defeat the Republicans in November’s midterms. Progressives present themselves as the ones with the passion, beliefs and conviction needed to oppose Trump’s Maga ideology, compared to the moderates sorely lacking in identity and backbone. But the focus, for both sides, should be less on who’s most passionate and more on new and innovative ideas. Let’s be clear: Medicare for All is a pipe dream in a country as hopelessly divided as the US, something that has been talked about for decades without ever having a real path to becoming law. So is abolishing ICE. For all the agency’s faults and misuse under Trump, it’s responsible for monitoring US borders. How about some pragmatic, daring, left-wing fixes for American health and border security that actually have a chance?
Agree or disagree with his approach, Trump has upended traditional policy and got things done: for example, through pressurising pharmaceutical companies to sign deals giving the US “favoured nation” status, thereby lowering drug prices. It’s a surprisingly statist bit of intervention from a Republican president (one that Democrats probably wish they’d thought of) but at least it’s something new. Democrats need bold-but-enactable policies in response. Because while they might succeed in rallying their own voter base by keeping the state-run health-care dreams of Bernie Sanders alive, it won’t win them elections in moderate swing states.
The UK’s prime minister, Andy Burnham, has made some steps in this direction: a more left-leaning Labour leader than his predecessor, Keir Starmer, he’s started off with practical fixes aimed at tackling the spiralling cost of living. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is an example from the other end of the spectrum, a right-winger who preached political stability (a rare feat in Italy) as a means of staying in office. Therein lies the rub: any anti-establishment candidate who enters government still has to adapt when their ideals collide with the realities of office. If we really want to rebuild trust in politicians, why not try campaigning on things that are actually enactable?
The point here is that, whether they’re progressive or moderate, fresh ideas are the way forward. Democrats of all stripes need to work together ahead of November to reform their manifesto and expand their voter base, rather than merely playing to their die-hard supporters. Trump was re-elected in 2024 not by his base but because of inroads he made into minority communities, independents and even younger voters. Democrats can wring their hands as long as they like about how he achieved such a miracle but it’s a reality that still needs to be addressed by the party. Otherwise, despite an unpopular war and the rising cost of living, Republicans will once again hold on to Congress in November.ublicans will once again hold on to Congress in November.
Milan is a city of bakeries. In some areas, it feels as though there’s one on every street corner, peddling the sweet delights that Italians often start their days with (we’re thinking pistachio-cream-filled croissants). In recent years, a new wave of bakers has been setting up shop alongside old-school businesses. From spots serving ancient grains and cinnamon rolls to babka and cruffins, here are five of Monocle’s favourites.
Signor Lievito
Run by Latvian baker Natalia Nikitina, a resident of Milan for more than 15 years, Signor Lievito is a small Nordic-inspired bakery located in Porta Romana. You can place online pre-orders for bakes ranging from cinnamon rolls and lemon cruffins (a cross between a croissant and a muffin) to flan parisien (a vanilla custard tart) and pick them up the following morning to avoid queues. The shop’s design was overseen by Hannes Peer (who recently worked on Merano’s Hotel Aurora) and features terracotta tiles, abstract line drawings and a Foglio wall light by Tobia Scarpa. One thing: this bakery’s name definitely sounds better in Italian. In English, it translates to “Mr Yeast”.
Via Maestri Campionesi 26; signor-lievito.com
Tondo
This tucked-away spot in the Isola neighbourhood refers to itself as a “radical oven” for artisanal bread. Set up by Silvia Cancellieri in 2020 and focused on sourdough, Tondo cares deeply about the provenance of its raw ingredients, including the organic flour. Bread is always centre stage here, with special loaves made from ancient grains and buckwheat. Pick up a slice of speciality focaccia or a brioche filled with cream and topped with blueberries. Planning on staying in Milan a little longer? Tondo also teaches courses in bread- and focaccia-making.
Via Cola Montano 12
Davide Longoni
Davide Longoni arguably set off the new wave of bakeries in Milan. His café-cum-bakeries mean that you can sit down for a coffee, juice and a pastry, or alternatively take away a loaf. Longoni uses grains grown south of Milan and sells everything from dried pasta to wine. His shops have expanded into nine locations, two of which are inside markets. Longoni is also a serial entrepreneur, opening a vegetarian Indian restaurant Govinda in the city centre and founding food magazine L’Integrale in 2020, which is run by Iperborea publishing house.
Various locations; davidelongoni.com
Slow Bread Lab
This off-the-beaten-track bakery might be the best spot for bread in Milan right now. To reach the shop, visitors must ring a doorbell and walk through an inner courtyard, where they can enter the kitchen to buy takeaway goods. The space was founded by husband-and-wife team Michele Dogati and Kaisli Kiuru, who changed professions to open the business. Kiuru says that they bake pastries and seeded loaves with the same love as when preparing something for their own family – and we would be hard-pressed to disagree. After picking up a loaf, cross the street to visit another Monocle favourite, Balay, for Philippine-inspired dishes.
Via Achille Maiocchi 29
Pan
“This is the kind of space that you can find in New York, London or Tokyo,” says Pan co-founder Alice Yamada. “But it was missing from Milan.” She has a point: the Japanese-inspired bakery and café that she founded with business partner Yoji Tokuyoshi wouldn’t look out of place in any of the world’s great metropolises. Its clean neutral tones, prevalence of wood and flashes of green details seem to be going down well with punters, if the tables of people eating ham-and-cheese shokupan (Japanese milk bread) sandwiches are anything to go by. Yamada and Tokuyoshi turned to Studio Wok for the interiors with sage-green drapes hanging from the ceiling, which are inspired by noren curtains. Recent additions include takeaway counter Piccolo Pan and lunch-focused Pan Deli in Porta Nuova.
Various locations; panmilano.com
Were it not for graphite, you would presently be staring at a blank screen. The naturally occurring carbon is a crucial component of the batteries and cooling systems of phones, computers and electric vehicles – and demand for it is expected to cause severe deficits by the end of the current decade. For Western countries, this might prove especially testing. As things stand, China enjoys a near-monopoly of battery-grade graphite, controlling 95 per cent of global supply – and Beijing has demonstrated during its ongoing trade war with the US that it is prepared to at least threaten to restrict exports.
Graphite is therefore worth going a long way to get. Late last year, Greenland’s government granted UK-based mining company Greenroc Strategic Minerals a 30-year licence to extract graphite at Amitsoq, in the south of the vast island. The graphite deposit is not a new discovery – there was a mine there from 1914 to 1922, before demand tapered amid a general economic slump after the First World War. But it is known that the graphite at Amitsoq is the good stuff.
“It’s really rich,” says Stefan Bernstein, CEO of Greenroc Strategic Minerals. “And with graphite, it’s not just about how pure it is. It’s also about the physical properties of the flakes. The main market for graphite today is for anodes in lithium batteries and there you need to change the morphology – the shape of each grain. So it’s not just a question of how clean you get the graphite but also the shape and size of the grain.”
Greenroc hopes to begin extracting this treasure by 2030. “We are aiming for production of about 80,000 tonnes per year,” says Bernstein. “Who knows what Europe’s graphite demand will be in 2035 or so but the mine will provide between 10 and 15 per cent of it.” Bernstein adds that the new Amitsoq mine will also generate about 200 local jobs, with 50 people on site at any one time and most of the workforce commuting by boat from the small town of Nanortalik. “Most other mines in Greenland rely on a fly-in, fly-out workforce,” says Bernstein. “We’re hopeful that we can have a very strong local engagement in the mine, and have people working in it who will still be able to maintain a normal life, like in a mining town in the UK 50 or 60 years ago.”
The EU has granted the Amitsoq mine strategic project status under its Critical Raw Minerals Act – a designation that accelerates the issuing of necessary permissions. Greenland itself has served, this last year or so, as another reminder that Europe needs to look after itself. Indeed, for one bizarre week back in January, it looked like it might need to find a way to defend Greenland from the US. Donald Trump is not the only person taking a close interest in what might lie beneath the ice.
“There’s definitely a boom in interest and investments right now,” says Bernstein. “Mainly from the US and Australia. There’s a close connection between a lot of the investments that we see now and the growing importance of Greenland in a geopolitical context.”
Other hard-to-get mineral resources
Rare earths: Bayan Obo, China
The world’s largest deposits of rare earths lie beneath the desert of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. A recent survey suggested they might be even more immense than previously believed.
Copper: Escondida, Chile
The world’s largest copper mine is in its most arid non-polar landscape: Chile’s Atacama desert, in parts of which it has never rained.
Lithium: Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat – an expanse of parched whiteness about the size of Jamaica. The brine beneath the salt contains what might be the world’s largest source of lithium.
Cobalt: Katanga region, Democratic Republic of the Congo
By some estimates, nine of the world’s 10 biggest cobalt mines are located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Chinese-owned KFM mine might be the biggest of them all.
Phosphate: Bou Craa, Western Sahara
The phosphates near Bou Craa are retrieved from beneath the disputed desert of Western Sahara and shipped to the coast on a 100-kilometre conveyor belt, the world’s longest.
Quality-of-life rankings are all the rage these days – in part spurred by Monocle’s own annual list – but sometimes it’s worth introducing an indefinite article and considering the quality of a life. Because as the general gist of years proceeds into decades, you start to realise that quality is not a constant – what constitutes a good life at 25 rarely resembles one at 45 or 65.
But in the three Australian cities that made Monocle’s latest Quality of Life Survey – Sydney, Melbourne and Perth – we see that it’s possible to have a national quality-of-life ecosystem; a sort of countrywide relay in which each city takes the baton for life’s various stages.
Sydney
Sydney’s central playground is its harbour, which divides the city but unites Sydneysiders. As a deckhand in my teenage years, I came to know the harbour better than most. But I’ve never ceased to be astonished by its big blue belly, the bottle-green coves that shallow into little blond beaches and mangrove creeks rusting in the setting sun.
Like all paradises, Sydney is a great place to grow up and grow old. It’s a diurnal city: locals rise at dawn and settle at dusk. Children enjoy a playing-outside-until-dark childhood, the loss of which elsewhere in the world is the lament of many parents. It’s safe, sun-drenched and – given that sport is as central to Australian life as SPF50+ and going barefoot – there’s no shortage of activities to keep the ankle-biters occupied. This means that it’s also the sort of place where, if you ask about the nightlife, they will tell you about the possums, bandicoots and flying foxes (none of which, sadly, are names of bars).
The water dictates almost every aspect of metropolitan life: where we socialise, how we get around and, above all, what we aspire to. The local religion is real estate; nirvana a mere matter of “water views”. But this property obsession does not make for easy living when you’re a young adult.
Melbourne
The Victorian capital doesn’t have all that bother of panoramic beauty – and without the pressure to live a perfect life, you can have an interesting one instead. While Sydney encourages early risers, Melbourne convinces you to stay out late, to order that post-dinner espresso and find the next bar on Smith Street.
Hence the city’s embrace of a shabby-chic aesthetic and why, once my twenties were in full swing, the grungier and more open-minded Melbourne seemed like the place to be. The city enabled me to live in diverse inner-city suburbs, where you didn’t have to be a ring-tailed possum to go out at night. There’s always something to do, with vibrant music and art scenes, perpetual sporting action and excellent dining options (don’t be dismayed by the lack of Michelin stars, because Australia has its own system using hats). And Melbourne’s well-earned reputation as a coffee capital means that you’re never far away from a perky piccolo.
Perth
In this national relay, Perth is the curve runner. Melbourne’s possibilities make it an ideal setting to explore yourself but when middle age creeps up on you in a pair of orthopaedic sandals, you might want more space and less clatter. The consistency and stability of Perth means that it’s the Western Australian capital’s time to shine.
Now, I might not have lived in Perth but the more time that I spend in said sandals, the more I realise the subtle attraction of a smaller city that has its act together. To settle down, spread out and make a laid-back lifestyle your own, Perth is hard to beat. After all, on the city’s riverine foreshores you can enjoy more hours of sunlight than any other Australian city. What is more, multiple recent infrastructure projects have smoothed links between the city, the airport and the suburbs. Sometimes you need to go to the world’s most isolated major city just to get away from it all.
Timing is everything
But at the end of all our urban exploring, the baton returns to Sydney for life’s final straight. We prize balance once again, we want ready access to both the slow road and the fast lane. We want to start the day with an early-morning swim, a cappuccino at the surf club, and finish it with a harbour cruise to a show at the Opera House.
One city cannot be expected to meet your quality of life needs forever. Our priorities shift as we grow into different versions of ourselves. Australia’s cities are not only highly liveable but also meet us where we live, decade after decade. When it comes to the quality of a life, Australia has it all.
For more on what makes some cities deliver a better quality of life, join us at The Monocle Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon from 3 to 5 September.
Stroll across Singapore’s historic Anderson Bridge, minutes away from the Central Business District, and the skyline gives way to something improbable: a vast, open stretch of grass. Known as the Padang (Malay for “field”), this ground has been at the heart of some of the country’s most significant events. It hosted post-Second World War victory parades, National Day marches and – since British colonisers set aside space in the 1830s to listen to the nostalgic thwack of leather on willow – cricket matches.
The Singapore Cricket Club (SCC) was founded in 1852 by 28 members of the British mercantile community and military officers. Spectators watched on from the sidelines until a simple wooden pavilion was built as its clubhouse in the 1860s, followed by a larger structure in 1877 as membership grew. The preserved iron-structures and brick extensions of today’s clubhouse, built in 1884, contrast elegantly with the built-up skyline behind it.
Within the club’s membership base – for which fees start from S$4,000 (€2,690) a year – are generations of the same families that made up the club’s earliest years. Today, nearly 5,000 Singaporeans and expats gather under the same colonial-era roof to play cricket or rugby – but also to discuss business deals while sipping a cool Tiger beer. “We protect a sense of belonging by engaging across age categories,” says club president Martin Goerojo, an avid sportsman and long-time member. “Junior, open and masters competitions are all interlaced with social events.”
After a match, players and members alike spill into the clubhouse to fraternise and feast on dishes of chicken congee, seared Hokkaido scallop and lobster risotto. Beyond the table, members mingle through games of chess or mahjong, or take part in wine tastings. The institution’s staff – from the car-park attendant to the barman in the underground Men’s Bar – make a point of recalling members by name.
While the clubhouse itself is a listed building, the SCC is open to change. The Main Lounge, recently refurbished by local firm Studio HP, turned to the tones and textures of art deco for inspiration. Under the guidance of the practice’s founder, Rashi Tulshyan, dark reds and burgundies blend with the original wood panelling of the central bar. Hints of tropical modernism are referenced in the bespoke carpet, which features fan-shaped motifs inspired by the ubiquitous traveller’s palm.
As the club prepares to celebrate its 175th anniversary next year, Goerojo reflects on what lies ahead. “The club has become an integral part of the surrounding ecosystem, and we are always asking ourselves how we can add value,” he says. “Ultimately, it is about being guardians of the Padang.”
scc.org.sg
Though the SCC is named after the popular British field game, members can play 13 different sports thanks to the expansive Padang grounds. These include rugby, tennis and golf.
Monocle’s annual Quality of Life Conference is back. After more than a decade of globetrotting, we’re returning to Lisbon, the city that first hosted our flagship event. For three days, Monocle comes to life as readers, speakers, and editors gather to exchange ideas and explore how we might live a little better.
Part conference, part urban retreat, it is designed to create a space for meaningful conversations and fresh perspectives, a chance to step away from the everyday, spend time with interesting people, and leave with new ideas and useful connections.
In October 2024 every Swedish household – more than five million – was sent a bracing pamphlet entitled “In Case Of Crisis Or War”. Prepared by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, it offered counsel on household preparedness – which foods to stash, how much water to store – and how to respond if the balloon, of one sort or another, went up.
It wasn’t the first time that Sweden’s government published such a thing – the tradition dates back to 1943, as the country sat out the war then consuming the rest of Europe. But the latest edition acknowledges lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic and the fact that Sweden is no longer a neutral country but instead a member of Nato committed by treaty to the defence of 31 other countries. The most sobering injunction reads “If Sweden is attacked, we will never surrender. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
Sweden has taken another step towards making flesh this spirit of resilience with the announcement of its first national strategy for psychological defence. Launching the strategy, Sweden’s minister of civil defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, spoke of a need to strengthen Sweden’s “resilience in the cognitive domain”. The country has grasped that there are – especially now – many more ways to threaten, unnerve or undermine a country than pointing missiles at its capital or arraying troops along its borders. The first of the four pillars of the new strategy for psychological defence is “work against undue influence of information”.
Sweden has – like pretty much every other western country, whether those countries understand it or believe it or not – been a regular target of Russian disinformation campaigns. This goes back years: from 2015 to 2016, state-owned Russian news outlet Sputnik operated a Swedish language service, in which, according to Sweden’s Institute of International Affairs, it published roughly 4,000 articles, many of them negative stories about the EU and/or Nato. Not coincidentally, in 2022, Sweden’s Ministry of Defence established a Psychological Defence Agency, tasked with resisting foreign-influence operations.
The Russian threat to Sweden has since grown somewhat more sophisticated and aggressive. In the past couple of years Russian hackers have targeted Swedish digital services and energy infrastructure but disinformation campaigns are ongoing. They’re cheap, easy, deniable – and, so long as people remain eager to consume whatever nonsense reinforces their prejudices, effective. Earlier this year, Russian media floated the false and, you would hope, obviously absurd story that King Carl XVI Gustaf, having taken the trouble to visit Ukraine, refused to shake the hand of Volodymyr Zelensky in order to express some obscure grudge over the 1709 Battle of Poltava, in which the army of Carl XVI Gustaf’s predecessor Charles XII got clobbered by the legions of Peter the Great. The director-general of the Psychological Defence Agency, Magnus Hjort, responded with admirable clarity: “Absolutely nobody cares about this in Sweden.”
The national strategy for psychological defence is part of a minor blizzard of related initiatives from Sweden in recent weeks. Stockholm has also announced the creation of a new foreign-intelligence service to be known as the UND, its first national strategy for ensuring security of supply, and its intention to increase access to civilian shooting ranges. The Nordic nation’s European neighbours and allies might chafe at any suggestion that they take lessons in this sort of stuff from a country that hasn’t fought a war since a minor scuffle with Norway in 1814 but they – we – should. Sweden is taking seriously one of the most basic principles of resilience, military and otherwise: better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
Andrew Mueller is a regular Monocle contributor and host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe today.
Curious about how the US-Israel war with Iran is affecting air travel? Take a look at Flightradar24. The flight-tracking website shows where airborne planes are at any given time – and there is next to nothing above Iran. Flight traffic is also diminished over Iraq, where existing aircraft consist almost entirely of Iraqi carriers or those flying between the Middle East, Armenia and Azerbaijan. On the other hand, Saudi airspace is as busy as ever, and a narrow corridor across the Caucasus between Iran and Russia is now used by many Europe-to-Asia flights.
The conflict in Iran is putting immense pressure on route planning, operating costs and reliability, and negotiating turbulent geopolitical tensions and daily airstrikes have once again become the norm for the aviation sector. But the industry has shown that it is one built on adaptability, whether in response to airspace closures, fuel sourcing or other crises.
Even so, recent developments are putting that adaptability to the test. In July, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) reinstated its warning to avoid Gulf airspace, though a number of flights are still travelling to and from the region. Some carriers have extended cancellations to services while others, such as Finnair, have announced that they are suspending their flights to Dubai – a busy and profitable route – until October of this year at the earliest. Gulf carriers, on the other hand, have little choice but to use this difficult airspace if they want to fly at all, and most are doing everything they can to maintain a regular schedule.
A number of air carriers recently reported their second-quarter financials, showing that while higher airfare and increased consumer demand have helped to absorb a portion of operation costs, long-term projections remain uncertain. Still, the overall system is continuing to function: oil is flowing at major airports and some airlines are making profit. But even as flight planners and air-traffic control systems work to find viable routes, the rising cost and fuel shortages could send reverberations through the industry for months or years.
As the crisis in the Gulf drags on, Europe has managed to find new ways to source oil and keep things moving, including importing from the US. Ironically, this has positioned the North American nation, which now exports more oil than any other country in the world – 10.5 million barrels per day at its recent peak – as something of a stabilising influence. Meanwhile, willing Asian nations have imported record levels of oil from Russia and countries including Japan have diversified imports by drawing from the US, as well as African and Latin American states. However, the reduction of Persian Gulf supply remains a significant loss, which means we will likely see spikes in price and renewed fears of supply issues in coming months.
And yet, as we saw at the Farnborough International Airshow, which wrapped on 24 July, the industry continues to move forward with what could only be described as stubborn optimism. Companies are placing orders for aircraft and pursuing new innovations, including incremental gains in efficiency as well as entirely new technologies. Any day now, Heart Aerospace’s X1, the largest battery-electric aircraft to ever fly, is due to take its maiden flight.
While most of these developments won’t solve the pressing headaches of today, it’s a reminder that aviation plays a long game, with its eyes on the horizon. The industry has seen it all before, in one form or another.
When we’re asked if there’s a morality to air conditioning, let’s focus on the smaller scale and ask instead: what keeps you cool? What is cool? What’s really cool? There are things that say they’re cool, offering a nod and a wink and a promise of refreshment. But many are lacking; many are operating under false pretences.
Such as? Well, denouncing ice cream in high summer might seem like madness but bear with me. No one is saying that gelato is not magnifico – but is it cooling? Does the speedy absorption of 600 calories of sweet milky goodness wick the beads of perspiration from your brow? It doesn’t, does it? Ice cream, a cone of plenty in a world of slight returns, is a marvel that cheers on the cheap. However, buy it, lick it, love it – but don’t expect to get a degree cooler thanks to it, my friends.
Instead? Pour a double espresso over a big ice cube in a tumbler, add enough full-cream milk to fool yourself that it could have come in a cone and feel the mercury drop with every sip. Coffee, with its kick of jittery caffeine, keeps you cool. Do it with ice-cold brown tea from the fridge, too, (no milk, though, are you mad?) and feel the depthless pleasure of your hot body zooming down toward the temperate zone quicker than you can wonder, “Would this be nice with some gin in it?”
Aha, we’ve raised the spectre of the proper drink. Can booze be cooling? A frosty beer, a pale and flinty rosé, an ice-cold martini, surely? Well, it saddens me to break the habit of a lifetime in recommending a short, sharp shock of something meaningful but you might end up with a hotter collar, a moister clavicle, a wetter lip than when the garçon popped your cork in the first place. Wait until you’re in the shade, though, and enjoy an everything-out-the-freezer martini, the vodka (better in the heat) viscous as the mercury that you’re hellbent on besting.
Of course, a Japanese konbini or a Don Quijote are predictably awash with excellent accoutrements for getting, staying – but sadly not looking – cool. Lion Brand cooling sheets are excellent for the puffy calves and feet of heat (and have been known to be used on the forehead). I’d like to say that I’d attempted the more sensitive areas of the anatomy but the pads’ robust adhesion means that even ripping them from a slightly hairy calf is a take-a-deep-breath moment. The thought of conducting this operation on more delicate areas makes the mouth dry at the very thought.
The frozen eyemask, a Japanese summer favourite that has spread sporadically westward, is a complete joy on a hot night in bed. Again, start with your brow and see where you go. I’ve found that almost everywhere likes being cool. Make sure this is a private affair, though: few others will want to see you trussed up in a turquoise eyemask at the best of times.
Finally? Fans. There are many battery-powered hand-fans about and I don’t want to begrudge a hot face a cold solution but they’re not a great look, are they? However, the concertina fan – the Penguin Classic to its rivals’ Kindle – is an elegant solution to any number of hot onslaughts and coquettish to boot. Fluttering a fan is a good look: it’s honest and it’s for everyone. It’s eco-conscious and it’s stylish.
It turns out that there are plenty of ways to keep cool. But bear in mind that your office might benefit from some proper air conditioning by Daikin, Midea or Mitsubishi – nobody needs to see the accounts team tearing into a pack of those cooling sheets.
Robert Bound is a contributing editor at Monocle. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
