It’s Saturday midday in Zürich and it’s snowy, blustery and comfortably cosy. My mother and I just boarded the Swiss LX 160 to Tokyo Narita, mom is across the aisle and I’m looking forward to a few days of work mixed with mama-son time. Mom hasn’t been to Japan for about 10 years so it’s going to be a few action-packed days of good bites, shopping, coffees, sunny days on the terrace at the Palace Hotel and late nights at private restaurants. If you want to do something similar with your mama, here’s my top ten for Tokyo:

1.
Use up all your points and treat mom by flying first class. If you’re not hooked up with a carrier that still has first-class cabins, then the lady deserves business at the very least.

2.    
It’s always good to start with a little surprise on arrival. I have my dear friend Noriko picking us up at Narita.

3.    
We’re doing two nights at the Palace to start. Since the Park Hyatt closed for renovations, this has been my new address. To spread the love, we’ll do two nights there and two nights at the recently reopened Park Hyatt. Stay tuned for the review. 

4.    
Winter is the best time to hit Tokyo. Forget sakura season and autumn leaves as Tokyo is rammed with muppets in polar fleeces and bad trainers. January is good but February is great as spring/summer collections start hitting the rails, so you get big sunny skies, fewer tourists and the best shopping.

5.
Lunch at Shiseido Parlour is a mama pleaser. I grew up going to department stores where an elegant lunch was part of the Saturday programme and Shiseido Parlour still captures this with its calm dining room, perfect dishes, fine wine list and generally Japanese clientele. Most visitors wouldn’t get it but that’s the whole point. It’s from another time, has a menu of classic yoshoku dishes and perhaps the best Caesar salad in the world. 

6.
Who doesn’t like going a bit Wako? In a similar spirit to Shiseido Parlour, Wako has become my favourite department store in the world. An anchor in the heart of Ginza and part of the extended Seiko family, it has shades of old school Henri Bendel and Montreal’s Ogilvy from its golden years. The store has many things that you might need and zero tat. Indeed, it’s like a very good magazine – exquisitely edited, beautifully presented and there’s always something to discover. Sound familiar?

7.
And who doesn’t like a second surprise, all in the same day? Noriko is well sorted with a group of private restaurants and it’s always a treat to visit one of her establishments and be treated to pretty much whatever you fancy. Fancy a tiny filet made with the finest beef from Hokkaido? Tick. A crab croquette with a tangy sauce? Tick. A plump tomato from Kyushu with the skin removed and soaked in a delicate vinaigrette? Double tick.

8.
Mom loves a well-assembled burger and she still remembers our trip to Golden Brown all those years ago. This will be repeated. For sure there are many places with a better burger in Tokyo but the location in Omotesando Hills is hard to improve on, so that’s on the cards for Tuesday or Wednesday. 

9.
After burgers there will most definitely be a little Aoyama tour and this will include a trip through the Nezu Museum, some grocery shopping at Kinokuniya and hitting a few bookshops as well. Dinner at Appia Alta is also in the diary. 

10.
I am looking forward to my return to the Park Hyatt on Tuesday. The withdrawal during the Covid years was bad enough (can we pause for a moment and reflect on how ridiculous that period was?) but the closure for renovation has been agonising. Anyway, I cannot wait to sample room 4701 again and treat mom to a dazzling eve at the New York Grill on Wednesday. Tune in to Monocle on Sunday and I’ll let you know how we’re getting on.

Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns. 

New York has always been a bibliophile’s city. Most jobs at newspapers, magazines and publishers in the US are here, and despite the eye-watering rents, it remains one of the best places in the world to make it as a writer. No wonder, then, that the city also teems with savvy booksellers.

While bricks-and-mortar bookshops in New York don’t enjoy particular tax breaks or subsidies, they do have the advantage of sky-high foot traffic by people generally keen on browsing. Thanks to the city’s literary reputation, tourists often gravitate towards books as souvenirs. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that bookshops can be some of the quietest places to escape to in Manhattan.

There are the big chains and the used-books juggernauts but once you’ve been to The Strand, take the time to explore some smaller, more specialised addresses. Here we pick ten of our favourite of the lesser-known outlets, including an artists’ bookshop, a bookshop for children, a culinary bookshop, a bookshop for French-speakers and even a bookshop in a private living room. The beauty of New York is that almost any niche, no matter how off-centre, can find enough adherents to support a brisk business. 

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1.
Three Lives & Company

Set on a quaint corner of the West Village, Three Lives & Company packs plenty of literary clout into its 60-odd sq m. With a small display of new releases that reflects the tastes of the historically bookish neighbourhood, this is where you will reliably find the novel that is about to become the talk of the town.   

Three Lives was founded in 1978 by three women: the couple Jill Dunbar and Jenny Feder, and a friend, Helene Webb. In 2001, it was taken over by Toby Cox, who worked in publishing and had been a regular at the store. “At the time of my realisation that I wanted to switch to bookselling, they told me that they were looking to sell,” he says. Cox has preserved the store’s old fixtures, as well as the refined but generalist selection on the shelves. 

Mainly because of spatial constraints, Three Lives only organises book signings at breakfast time, with authors and readers mingling over coffee and scones. Guests have included Zadie Smith and Ocean Vuong, while Karl Ove Knausgaard is stopping by in January. “These are authors that pack a big hall,” says Cox. “They seem to love it here.”

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2.
Mast Books

This East Village bookshop intentionally defies easy categorisation. In the spare, glassed-in space, there are no labelled sections or promotional signs. The selection ranges from a memoir of a graffiti artist to a survey of photographer Luigi Ghirri, and from a manifesto on the art of listening to a tome on colour in 1970s interiors. The main through line is the personal taste of co-founder Bryan Leitgeb. “If you like one thing in the store,” he says, “there’s a good chance you’ll find a way to like almost everything.”

Together with his wife, James McKee, Leitgeb founded Mast in 2010. Today, the split between old and new titles is about 50-50, with both self-published artists’ books and choice titles from established publishers in the mix. The shelf space is tightly curated and always changing. “It is edited down so that each book speaks to the others,” says Leitgeb. “At its best, the store can create narratives just by the way that it’s organised.” It works: Mast is frequented by the young and culturally keen who spend hours poring through the titles and rarely walk away empty-handed. 

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3.
Peter Harrington

Fourth Avenue below Union Square was long known as Book Row, for the used-book shops that lined the street. While those businesses are largely gone, the city still has a large antiquarian trade – it has just migrated north, into townhouses on the Upper East Side. The latest addition to this rarefied world is Peter Harrington, the longstanding London dealer that opened a Manhattan outpost in September.   

In a third-floor walk-up on 67th Street that was once inhabited by Audrey Hepburn, the shop contains a treasure trove spanning seven centuries of print. “We brought over the cream of what we have in London,” says manager Ben Houston. The inventory runs from handmade booklets from Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded by Virginia Woolf, to books bound by William Morris and all the way to 17th-century Shakespeare folios. There’s also plenty of Americana, including the first photocopy of Jack Kerouac’s typewritten manuscript of On the Road. 

Peter Harrington is far from the stereotypical dusty antiquarian: the books all have price tags and visitors are welcome to sit down in a Hans Wegner chair to leaf through them. “People tend to stay for a long time,” says Houston. “Everyone can find something they love.”

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4.
Albertine Books

New York’s premier address for French literature is tucked inside a Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue. Villa Albertine, named after the love interest in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, has been the cultural arm of the French embassy since the 1950s. A bookshop for Francophone literature opened in 2014 after the last one in the city closed. Covering two floors in the back of the building, the serene space – with a hand-painted night sky gracing the ceiling – has become a sleeper hit in New York.   

Albertine Books stocks about 14,000 titles, the majority of them in French, with a sizeable children’s section on the second floor. (A bronze statue of The Little Prince, seated on a wall facing Central Park, serves as advertisement out front). There is also a robust selection of translated French literature, as well as novels by James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway and other writers with a strong connection to the country. Albertine hosts a monthly book club, with works always available in translation to accommodate French-speakers of all levels. “We necessarily have a limited audience,” says director Miriam Gordis. “But it’s a close-knit community.”

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5.
Kitchen Arts & Letters

This shop on Lexington Avenue claims to be the oldest in the country to specialise in cookbooks and food-related literature. Founded in 1983 by anthropologist Nach Waxman, Kitchen Arts & Letters has always taken a wide remit within the niche. “We want people to walk in and find things they didn’t even know existed,” says managing partner Matt Sartwell. “This shop is a cure for potential food ennui.”

Kitchen Arts & Letters caters to chefs of all stripes: Julia Child was an early customer, but there are also cookbooks for amateurs, with a focus on smaller, independent publishers. Just as extensive is the literature related, even tangentially, to food. There are classics of the genre from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and MFK Fisher but also a book about the linguistics of menus and a zine about lampredotto, the Florentine tripe sandwich. The back room contains a reference archive of rare books that is only opened for special requests. 

The shop’s speciality is a boon, as cooking has become one of the fastest-growing areas of publishing in recent years. “Books are forgiving,” says Sartwell. “If I spill something on the counter, it’s easier to replace a 35-dollar book than an 800-dollar phone.”

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6.
Head Hi

Most bookshops pride themselves on their sheer quantity of books but Head Hi takes the opposite approach. Only a small number of publications are displayed at any one time; mostly brand-new releases on architecture and design that are stocked in very limited quantities. “It becomes a snapshot of contemporary culture,” says Alexandra Hodkowski, who founded the space with her partner, artist Alvaro Alcocer. “We’re both obsessed with what is happening right now.”

Head Hi was founded in 2018 after Alcocer, an artist and musician, and Hodkowski, a curator, came across a vacant space a block from their home in Fort Greene. The focus on the built environment reflects the industrial surroundings of Brooklyn Navy Yard, where many artists, architects and woodworkers have their studios. But the space welcomes a broad audience. “We tell people that you don’t have to be an architect to like architecture,” says Hodkowski. The eclectic programming includes listening parties and performances, as well as a biannual lamp show. 

“We always loved record shops, bookshops and places where you pick up flyers and run into friends,” she says. “These alternative art spaces add so much cultural value to a city.” 

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7.
Books Are Magic

When Emma Straub and Michael Fusco-Straub opened Books Are Magic, a neighbourhood bookshop in Cobble Hill, the couple also had a one- and a three-year-old to take care of. “A big part of it was, ‘Where do we bring our children?’” says Straub. From day one, the bookshop catered to readers of all ages, with a kids’ section not much smaller thanthe one for adults.

Books Are Magic is a popular stop on the high-profile book launch circuit – recent guests include Margaret Atwood and Patti Smith – but the most-loved events at the shop are story time sessions for kids. Any child who enters is welcome to write a so-called “shelf talker”, a handwritten recommendation that draws attention to a book. “The bar for entry is enthusiasm,” says Straub. “The key is not to talk down to kids but to treat them as full people, which they are.”

Books Are Magic now has a staff of about 30 and a second shop in Brooklyn Heights opened in 2022. Both shopfronts are easily recognisable with their colourful signage painted directly on the brick façade, as well the huddle of strollers parked out front. 

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8.
Printed Matter

On 12 December 1975, a group of seven artists sent out a letter to their friends asking whether they had ever made an artists’ book, specifying that they didn’t mean catalogues. The packages they received in return became the basis for Printed Matter, which opened the following year. The shop and publishing press posited that books can, in themselves, be an art form too.   

The first books included John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of 36 Attempts), and Sol LeWitt’s Four Basic Kinds of Lines and Color, both simple and sublime works that have become classics of the genre (with collectors’ prices to match). Exactly 50 years later, Printed Matter still receives half-a-dozen submissions a day from artists around the world. The Chelsea shop lives up to its name: every available surface is covered with print.

Printed Matter also organises annual book fairs in New York and Los Angeles, which have grown into the main industry jamborees for the beguiling world of artists’ book publishing. “We understand how far-reaching our work has been,” says head of distribution Craig Mathis. “But in a weird sort of way, we still feel very scrappy.”

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9.
McNally Jackson

McNally Jackson is the rare thing: a retail chain that has held onto its indie character. In 2004, Canadian-born Sarah McNally opened the first shop on Prince Street in Nolita. The company has since expanded into Rockefeller Center, South Street Seaport and two locations in Brooklyn. Many of the business strategies that McNally pioneered –   giving staff the freedom to curate displays, paying as much attention to the backlist as to new releases and prioritising the sheer quantity of books – have been emulated by booksellers across the board.   

Included in this literary empire are an in-house press that resurrects out-of-print gems, more than a dozen different book clubs (McNally’s own is wading through Infinite Jest, about 100 pages at a time) and a biannual book festival held for the first time this year. Crucially, in every shop there are tens of thousands of books, neatly lined up on hardwood shelves and deep leather armchairs to encourage getting lost in them. 

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10.
High Valley Books

Inside a baby-blue clapboard house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is a mecca of print for the fashion designer, decorator, photographer or anybody aesthetically inclined. Its owner, Bill Hall, who lives upstairs with his family, started selling second-hand books more than 25 years ago. Today the home is packed to the rafters. There is one wall for fashion, one wall for photography, a nook each for architecture and interior design and a cellar crammed with back issues of Vogue and obscure German typography magazines. “When I dreamt of having a bookshop, I thought it would be art and literature,” says Hall. “Pretty soon, I was seduced by the decorative arts.”

High Valley Books is open by appointment but the living room still gets crowded, creating an informal salon for serendipitous encounters. Celebrities occasionally pop in – one recent incognito visitor turned out to be Frank Ocean. Everybody rummages through the same overstuffed bookshelves and piles of arcana. “This is fed by people in the creative industries,” says Hall. “It could only exist in New York.” 

Read next: Monocle’s complete city guide to and map of New York

There’s an unspoken agreement on our epic Christmas drives from London to Palma. Wait, what am I on about, it’s very spoken. The other half makes it clear that he wants to do most of the driving and for me to manage the snacks, the dog and the music. He claims that it’s because he’s a bad passenger. What he means is that my driving strikes the fear of God into him: lane drift, looking at the passing landscape, not knowing what any of the buttons do. He’s harsh. But just before Christmas, as we came to the final stretch of day one, he admitted to needing a break and suggested that I do the non-motorway section to get us to our hotel in the town of Montluçon.

The town has, it transpires, used many road-design devices to slow down its urban traffic, including a system of chicanes featuring high-kerbed traffic islands. I know this because I hit one. With ambition. The car swerved but somehow no harsh words were said. A night at the Château Saint-Jean hotel was enjoyed. The following morning, a valet returned our car and we were off, with me not even pretending that I was getting anywhere near the steering wheel.

We pulled on to the motorway. “There’s a funny sound; can you hear it?” asked owl ears. I couldn’t but I needed to restock the snacks (it’s vital work) and the dog said that she wanted a croissant, so we pulled into the next service station and I did a car check. Oh dear. There was a blister on the tyre that had kissed the kerb. Don’t imagine a diddy thing on your toe, think plague-like bulla, a gargantuan pustule the size of an on-heat baboon’s radiant bottom.

We did some Googling (“your tyre might blow and you might die”). There was a call to our expensive breakdown cover provider (“bad luck, you must phone the police if you are on a French motorway. Bye.”). There was a family debate. It was a Sunday, just before Christmas but we were not far from the city of Clermont-Ferrand, home of Michelin, so surely we could drive slowly and find a tyre shop? It seemed that there was one which, via Whatsapp, we ascertained would be able to replace our warty ring of rubber. We limped along, lazy hedgehogs undertaking us on the hard shoulder.

The tyre “centre”, however, was a bit of a surprise. It was a van, with broken wing mirrors drooping like dislocated limbs, parked on a road in an industrial part of town. In the back of the vehicle was squeezed a contraption capable of removing tyres from their hubs, another for balancing wheels. Oh, and the tyre that we would be purchasing was second-hand. We had no choice. Some two-and-a-half hours later (there were others in the same predicament ahead of us in the queue), we were on our way again. Our old tyre added to a pile by the repair truck.
 
Now we had a hard deadline for completing this second day of driving – a place on a ferry departing from Barcelona that evening. But even with the lost time, we would still be at the port two hours before it departed. Except that, after a few kilometres on the motorway, we hit a diversion. All the traffic was being siphoned off to a road that, judging by the satnav, would take us cross country – and for some distance. Back to Google, “Protesting French farmers are blocking the highway.”

Over the next two hours, we eased along narrow tracks, drove convoy style through forests and saw villages that I dearly hope never to see again. Every time that it looked like we might be about to rejoin the highway, the slipway was barricaded by bags of manure and piles of old tyres (I have a suspicion of who might have been supplying the farmers). Though not a single person was defending the barriers – there wasn’t a rustic rebel bearing a muscular arm and a pitchfork in sight.
 
Finally, there was a tyre-free motorway access point but by now the satnav said that we would arrive in Barcelona port only 35 minutes before the ship left and our ticket said that you needed to be there 90 minutes ahead of schedule. “We can do this,” said the other half bravely, before adding, “but no coffee stops, no loo breaks”. I looked at the dog. We crossed our legs.
 
And so, we drove. We wove. We began to make up time. We crossed the border into Spain. Signs for the port appeared. The dog’s and my legs were clenched like nut crackers. And, suddenly, there we were on a winter night in Barcelona joining the back of a line of cars snaking into the belly of a ferry. In the cabin we opened a bottle of champagne.

To read more columns by Andrew Tuck, click here.

Berlin’s authorities struggled to disguise their helplessness after an arson attack on a cable bridge on 3 January that plunged parts of the city into darkness and cold. Many neighbourhoods were left without electricity or heating for days and with winter temperatures well below seasonal norms, the timing could hardly have been worse. Several hospitals were forced to be evacuated and schools faced closures.

A left-wing, extremist anarchist group claimed responsibility for the fire, framing the attack as part of a global struggle against “climate destruction, digitalisation, artificial intelligence, the arms industry and capitalism”. It said that it sought to disrupt the lives of the city’s wealthy residents, later conceding that cutting power, heating, warm water and even mobile-phone reception for approximately 100,000 people went far beyond its intent, issuing apologies to less well-off Berliners.

For many Germans, the attack was an unsettling reminder of how brittle the systems underpinning everyday urban life have become. Yet the blackout resonated for reasons that go beyond infrastructure and highlighted the country’s increasingly deep-seated divisions.

After the collapse of the so-called “traffic-light” coalition between the Greens, Social Democrats and liberal FDP in 2024, Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, promised a Neuanfang – a fresh start intended to stitch the country back together. Instead, Germany’s political fault lines appear to have widened.

This week the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party topped national opinion polls, a sobering marker in postwar German politics. Merz, meanwhile, has struggled to command authority beyond his core electorate. His approval rating stands at just 22 per cent – the lowest of any chancellor in the country’s history and hardly the profile of a conciliator.

To critics on the left, Merz is the embodiment of corporate privilege: a wealthy former Blackrock executive perceived to be out of touch from everyday realities. To the right, he is dismissed as hesitant and insufficiently conservative; too attached to the centrist consensus to address cultural anxieties but accused of borrowing the AfD’s rhetoric without offering a coherent agenda of his own.

The arson attack also exposes a long-standing blind spot in German politics. While the nation has invested heavily in confronting right-wing extremism, violence from the far left has not been dealt with in the same way. This asymmetry is rooted in the fear that taking a firmer stance against the radical left could fracture alliances that are deemed essential in the wider struggle against the radical right.

In a country already anxious about economic stagnation, ageing infrastructure and geopolitical vulnerability – compounded by fears of foreign sabotage, particularly from Russia – this selective vigilance deepens the impression that control is slipping. Merz attempted to counter that narrative in his New Year’s address, insisting that “We are not victims of circumstance. We are no one’s geopolitical plaything. Our hands are not tied. We are responsible for our own security and we live in a safe country.”

Germany’s strength, he added, rests “on social cohesion, above all”. But a recent study by the Technical University of Dresden suggests that such cohesion is in short supply. More than four in five Germans say that they perceive the nation as being deeply divided. Yet the research also offers an interesting insight: beneath the rhetoric of polarisation, many positions remain less entrenched than public debate implies.

The tone, however, has indeed hardened. Whether Merz can translate reassurance into resolve will depend, in no small part, on his own – something that he has previously struggled to find. His response to moments such as Berlin’s blackout will shape not only his legacy as a leader but Germany’s ability to steady itself at a time when solidarity has become both the nation’s most invoked ideal and its rarest resource.

“The last straw was when gangs started holding up ambulances.” That’s what a Venezuelan ambulance driver told me eight years ago, while queuing with his family in front of a church in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, waiting to process an asylum claim. Hijackers put a gun to his head and made him an unwitting chauffeur. He fled soon after.

His story – and those of several other Venezuelans I met on that 2018 reporting trip – have been at the front of my mind as Latin American heads of state have condemned the US operation to extract Nicolás Maduro. Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Spain and Uruguay issued a joint statement insisting that the region remains a “zone of peace” and appealed to the United Nations Charter. Their top diplomats made forceful speeches denouncing the White House’s unilateral action at hastily convened meetings of the Organization of American States and the UN Security Council, citing the principles of territorial sovereignty, non-intervention and international law.

I put this rhetoric to one of the Venezuelans I met in Trinidad and Tobago, who fled after participation in opposition protests put a target on his back. “The ends justify the means,” he said, countering that none of Washington’s critics succeeded in ousting Maduro after his 2013 rise turned dictatorial. Every peaceful means had been exhausted, he added, from street protests to sanctions.

Thus, the Trump administration’s deployment of the Monroe Doctrine’s Theodore Roosevelt Corollary. As Roosevelt put it in 1904, “Chronic wrongdoing… may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation.” There’s a strong case that Maduro is guilty of chronic wrongdoing, presiding over an economy in shambles ravaged by hyperinflation and stealing the 2024 election. Though whether the US is capable of – or even wants to – restore a prosperous democracy buoyed by oil wealth is entirely opaque.

What’s clear is that diplomacy has failed in a region that prides itself on a nearly impeccable track record of avoiding armed conflict between states. But what could we have done differently and what can we do now instead?

Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva thought that he was playing tough in 2024 by vetoing Venezuela’s Brics ascension after Maduro refused to release election records. A reasonable diplomatic censure but hardly one that would evict Maduro from Caracas. Even Bolsonaro didn’t exceed the Biden administration’s tepid pressure campaign. As the US amassed an armada in the Caribbean, Latin America’s most powerful military could have mustered a larger force on its 2,200km shared border with Venezuela and tipped the scales for Maduro to have accepted a comfortable exile in Turkey or Qatar.

But hypotheticals make for easy punditry, so here’s a next step that puts a novel spin on Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum’s mantra “co-operation yes, subordination and intervention no.” She should reverse course and invite the US military to conduct air strikes on fentanyl factories, provided that the Mexican armed forces can join in and learn from their northern counterparts on how to wage a more effective war against the cartels. Invite other countries struggling with narco violence, such as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and you have the makings of a reconstituted Inter-American Peace Force, the multilateral unit deployed to quell the Dominican Republic’s 1965 civil war.

The prospect would be a hard pill to swallow for the region’s diplomats but it will win hearts and minds among beleaguered citizens craving action over abstraction.

Gregory Scruggs is Monocle’s Seattle correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

For five decades, Syrians were reminded of their despotic rulers every time they reached into their wallets. The faces of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, adorned banknotes, which, since the currency crashed under sanctions, Syrians have been forced to carry around in huge stacks. Now, however, they are getting a fresh start, with new notes that have had two zeros removed from their nominal value: each new Syrian pound is worth a hundred old ones. The central bank began issuing the redesigned notes on 4 January, the first working day of 2026. The move is a promising sign for the long-suffering country.
  
The change of currency will bring psychological relief to Syrians. The Assads were omnipresent through the pictures of them that were hung on public buildings and stared down from behind every shop counter. Those images were removed and defaced after Bashar al-Assad fled the country for Moscow in December 2024, bringing his family’s 54-year dictatorship to an end. The new notes will remove a lingering reminder of the old regime – and turn the old notes into collectors’ items.

Crucially, the move is an important step in stabilising the economy. The almost 14-year civil war plunged most Syrians below the poverty line and wrecked what was once a middle-income economy (the World Bank reclassified the country as low-income in 2018). Profiteers with regime connections sucked much of the wealth from Syria throughout the war and billions in assets were spirited out of the country by Assad before he fled. Thankfully, the new rulers managed to protect the Central Bank’s vaults from looters during the chaotic transfer of power.  
  
Embargoes that were aimed at punishing the regime inflicted extra pain on the population, particularly after 2019, when the US imposed measures in response to evidence of the industrial torture and murder taking place in Assad’s prisons. The lifting of international sanctions has brought foreign investment back into the country and the promise of US, Turkish and Gulf backing has boosted confidence. In June the government hiked public service salaries by 200 per cent, though the price of bread and fuel has also increased significantly. With much of the nation’s housing stock destroyed, rents in the capital remain sky high.  
  
Obstacles are to be expected but the signs for Syria are positive. On Tuesday, Israel and Syria agreed to set up a joint mechanism for de-escalation and intelligence-sharing during US-mediated talks. It was an extraordinary step towards normalising relations. If the talks continue, Syria will be one of the few states in the Arab Middle East to maintain relations with Israel.  

Entrepreneurs and businesses might soon be able to move beyond cash too, as the EU and US sanctions that severed the nation from international payment systems were lifted last month. Facilitating electronic transfers will be key to allowing businesses to begin operating fully again in 2026, particularly for those traders who brought Syrian products to much of the Middle East before 2011.
  
It’s quite the turnaround. Until Assad’s fall, Syria was firmly part of the Russia-China-Iran power bloc that Donald Trump now appears to have in his sights. Venezuela, like Assad’s Syria, fell within that sphere of influence until US special forces moved into Caracas on 3 January. Syrians watching events in Latin America and the ongoing protests in Iran will be relieved that their country has moved firmly into Washington’s sphere – and looking forward to the year ahead with a rare sense of optimism and opportunity.
  
Hannah Lucinda Smith is Monocle’s Istanbul correspondent.  She joined a flight from Istanbul packed with returnees and Turkish investors just after the fall of Bashar al-Assad to discover how the nation’s future is shaping up. You can watch the film  here.

Read next: The effort to rebuild Syria: Life after the fall of the Assad regime

Every September the Westfalenhallen conference venue – known for darts tournaments and dog shows – is transformed into Intertabac, the world’s largest tobacco fair. It is billed as a “global meeting place of the industry” – a space to clear the air over how the market worth more than €1trn annually is plotted, priced and branded for acceptability over the year ahead.

The crowd is a curious mix: cigar purists in linen jackets, vape bros in streetwear and a small army of tight-lipped lobbyists huddled in side rooms over Powerpoint decks on FDA rulings and EU directives, muttering about the possibility of a UN plastics treaty.

It’s a strange and sometimes unsettling scene when you consider the proven ill effects of much of what is sold here (and the questions around what is yet to be proven). Cohiba cigars from Cuba are displayed as if they are objets d’art, start-ups peddle candy-flavoured vape juice from neon booths (Grandma’s Apple Pie, anyone?) and nicotine pouches are branded like wellness products. But something is strangely absent: the condemned ancestor to the smoking industry – cigarettes. 

The nicotine market is undergoing its biggest rethink in decades. At British American Tobacco, the manufacturer of Pall Mall and Lucky Strike, an aspirational banner unironically declares “Building a smokeless world”. The company unveils an e-cigarette with an app that tracks every puff and allows users to fine-tune their vapour clouds with a feature cheerfully called Cloudcontrol. “You can even set a limit for when it stops,” says representative Joshua Bakker, pitching self-quantifying nicotine intake with the breeziness of a clued-up personal trainer.

Next door, Philip Morris International (PMI) is showing off the newest iteration of its Iqos device – the name being an abbreviation for “I quit ordinary smoking” – now with a touchscreen and a pause mode that is “perfect for when the pizza guy arrives,” says spokeswoman Beate Kunz. The company has poured some $14bn (€11.96bn) into the device’s development over the past two decades and its research effort is still largely bankrolled by Marlboro sales. Iqos, Kunz says, is designed to be about 95 per cent less harmful than traditional cigarettes because it heats tobacco rather than burning it. PMI, however, has no plans to end the sale of cigarettes. “Pulling the plug overnight would just tank our business while competitors keep selling – we wouldn’t have ‘saved’ a single smoker,” she adds.

A smoke-free future is marketed as a moral project but it’s also a business plan. The gadgets on display at the fair are proof of strategy. With cigarette sales shrinking across major markets due to higher taxes and growing stigma, Big Tobacco has found in vapes and heated-tobacco devices not only fresh profits but a new narrative to cast itself as part of the solution rather than the problem. Its fiercest rival isn’t other tobacco brands but Elfbar, the Chinese vaping powerhouse. Its candy-coloured, highlighter-like devices are banned in its home market but in Europe, the company is doubling down with even more flavour blends planned for next year, its distributor tells Monocle.

Some countries, including the Netherlands, have already banned flavoured liquids – a move that Philip Drögemüller, head of the German lobbying group Alliance for Tobacco-Free Enjoyment, calls a serious mistake. “Flavours are what get adult smokers to switch in the first place and banning them just fuels the illegal market,” he says. It’s a persuasive point, though one that conveniently ignores the reality that the same fruit and candy flavours are what make vaping so appealing to teenagers. Drögemüller cites his own success story. “I quit smoking after 20 years because of vaping. Fruit liquids made me lose the craving for tobacco completely. There really is no good political reason not to support it.”

Behind the glossy booths, side rooms hum with strategy sessions where lobbyists and executives plot their next moves. Panels with titles such as “Switching evidence on trial” and “Navigating the EU tobacco product directive” parse rulings, court cases and the next rounds regulation. There is talk of whether filters could be banned entirely under new environmental rules, what the UN plastics treaty might mean for cigarette butts and how to keep flavoured products in circulation despite looming restrictions. It feels a bit like a crisis summit where the industry quietly co-ordinates its survival strategy, trying to stay one step ahead of regulators.

The fight is no longer just about profits but about legitimacy and the industry’s right to remain a serious voice in policy debates even as its core product faces mounting political and social pressure. At the fair’s opening press conference, associations struck a combative tone, warning that planned tax hikes would push smokers to the black market, drain state coffers and wipe out mid-sized manufacturers. Germany, for example, is preparing to align with new EU rules by raising its comparatively low cigar tax by as much as 1,000 per cent. “That is nothing short of a war of annihilation by the EU Commission against our industry,” says Bodo Mehrlein of the German Cigar Manufacturers Association.

The shift is rippling through the entire smoking ecosystem. Zippo, the lighter brand that kept generations of GIs and rockabilly kids flicking, now offers a vape insert that slips neatly into any classic case. OCB, best known for its rolling papers, is reorienting toward cannabis smokers, partly because roll-your-own tobacco faces a steep tax hike. Even Nuremberg-based heritage pipe maker Vauen reports that its Lord of the Rings-style churchwardens (the very kind used in the films) are now its most popular line, beloved by cannabis smokers for the same reason hobbits prized them: you can sit back and puff in peace.

There are hi-tech twists on old rituals too. Air, calling itself the “global leader in social inhalation”, presents a coal-free shisha device: Nespresso-style capsules slot in and an NFC chip adjusts the heat profile to the chosen flavour for a perfectly calibrated draw. Nearby, Dr Karsten Behlke unveils what he calls the first true pocket-sized shisha. “Our development actually comes from medicine,” says the lawyer-turned-entrepreneur. “It’s a genuine shisha that uses real tobacco – no vape liquid like the fake ones.” Rather than burning the tobacco, the device heats an air stream, cutting out many of the harmful by-products still present in vapes and water pipes. “But the main selling point is really the size. Most shisha smokers aren’t exactly worried about their health,” says Behlke.

The newest star of the so-called “reduced-risk” market is the nicotine pouch – banned in some countries, barely regulated in others and a clear darling of this year’s fair. “The market is exploding,” says a Chinese manufacturer of pouch-making machines. “In Europe, you currently have to wait a year for a new machine. We can deliver it in two months.” Exhibitors tout faster nicotine hits with lower doses that “bring flavours to life and improve mouthfeel” while others present “pouches designed with your mouth in mind”. Panels promise insights into “smooth, satisfying nicotine delivery over 45 minutes” and strategies for “where the oral nicotine market is headed – and how to stay ahead of the curve”.

With cigarettes barely visible on the show floor, you might think the coffin lid has been nailed shut – but not quite. Esse, a super-slim cigarette brand from South Korea that has sold nearly a trillion sticks since its 1996 debut, has just expanded to Germany. “Demand is on the rise,” says Christopher Lim of Korean tobacco giant KT&G Corporation, the label’s producer. At the fair’s own Intertabac Stars award show, it was crowned cigarette of the year. “Cigarettes still command a considerable market share, especially outside Europe,” says Atanas Doychinov of KT International, the Bulgarian outfit born from the state tobacco monopoly. Akin to other manufacturers who will only say so off-record, KT International is looking toward rapidly growing markets in Africa and Asia-Pacific. “We’ll see a big increase in these developing markets throughout the next few years,” adds Doychinov. Why no vapes? “For us, as an independent company, it’s too risky to put large investments in a market that is still fairly unregulated,” he says. “We‘ll wait until things are sorted out.” The “smoke-free future”, it turns out, might still be a long way off.

After US forces captured Nicolás Maduro, members of the Venezuelan diaspora in Brazil gathered in central São Paulo to celebrate the downfall of a man widely seen as corrupt, brutal and dictatorial. The occasion was joined by many Brazilians, particularly those from the right, who have long lamented the degradation of once-wealthy Venezuela under Maduro and his socialist predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

The impromptu celebrations, however, were at odds with the prevailing political climate across much of Latin America, where leaders expressed shock over the White House’s casual readiness to intervene in the region. Not only was the operation against Maduro an affront to national sovereignty but it raised the spectre of military conflict in a region that – despite its many other problems – has for decades been peaceful at the nation-state level.

In Brazil, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva condemned the intervention as crossing an “unacceptable line” and the “first step toward a world of violence, chaos and instability.” But it was Gabriel Boric, the outgoing leader in Chile, who addressed the elephant in the room: “Today, it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow, it could be anyone.” He pointed out that the US’s blatant coveting of strategic resources is hardly confined to Venezuela. In this case, it is oil. But in Chile, it might be copper, which is essential for AI infrastructure. In Brazil, it could be rare earths, critical for next-generation military technologies. In Paraguay, it might be access to bountiful hydroelectric power for data centres and other digital infrastructure. The list goes on.

The US has a long history of interference in Latin American politics, including the support of brutal Cold War-era military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere. The return of gunboat diplomacy and military adventurism in Venezuela is, for many Latin American leaders, a return toward a dark past. And US officials have done little to assuage anyone in the region of such concerns. A day after the Venezuela strikes, Trump told reporters that he liked the idea of a military operation against Colombia, calling left-wing president Gustavo Petro a “sick man”. The US has also openly threatened Cuba and made veiled threats against Mexico. And if the intention of the White House was not clear enough, a cartoon image posted to an X account linked to the US president showed Trump as a colossus standing astride North and South America, brandishing a large baton.

While the prospect of fresh military strikes might currently preoccupy Latin American leaders, another potential avenue for US adventurism in the hemisphere is upcoming elections. This year, Brazil, Peru and Colombia will head to the polls and leaders there will need to be on guard for signs of electoral interference. Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, as well as the incoming administration in Chile, are already sympathetic to the Trump White House. If Brazil, Peru and Colombia swing in that direction this year – either with or without interference – Washington will be one step closer to its dreams of overt US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

Bryan Harris is a journalist based in São Paulo. You can read more of his pieces here. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

South American literature is enjoying some well-earned attention right now. Die My Love, a film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson that graced cinema screens at the end of last year, is based on the 2012 novel ​​Matate, amor by Argentine author Ariana Harwicz. But before a translated version of the book was published in 2017 (and then picked up by the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay), the story was inaccessible to the English-speaking world. 

There are several publishers bringing contemporary South American literature to fresh audiences – Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions among them – but perhaps the most stylish is Charco Press. The tight-knit publishing house, comprising just five people, is a global affair: founders Carolina Orloff and her husband, Sam McDowell, hail from Argentina and New Zealand respectively, though they currently live and work in Edinburgh. They have made room for themselves in the competitive publishing arena by identifying which untranslated works will do well in front of new audiences – a mission that began back in 2016. “Our first catalogue consisted of only five titles, all from Argentina,” Orloff tells Monocle. “We wanted to make an immediate impact and show just how many styles, aesthetics and tones could be offered from the contemporary literature of a single country in the region.”

Now, Charco has a growing roster of nearly 50 writers from across the continent and an output of eight to 12 books a year. Their determination is finding success. Within the first two years of starting the press, Charco was longlisted for the International Booker Prize – one of the leading awards for global works in translation – with Die, My Love. It was then shortlisted in 2022 with Claudia Piñero’s Elena Knows and once more in 2024, for Not a River by Selva Almada.

That year was something of a watershed for literature from the region; in total, four South American titles featured on the International Booker longlist. But bringing the right titles to English-speaking audiences at the right time is no easy task. Orloff and McDowell’s respective disciplines help them to identify gaps in the market, blending taste with the mechanics of the industry. “I’m more obsessed with the academic side of things,” says Orloff. “The translation, the literature, the words. Sam comes from a different background. He’s concerned with marketing and getting projects off the ground, bringing them to life. It’s a good combination.”

In publishing, books are – for better or worse – judged by their covers. The striking, figurative façades of Charco Press novels are also South American exports. Pablo Font, Charco’s in-house artist and designer, works remotely from Argentina – and the connection with Orloff’s homeland isn’t taken for granted. “I don’t know how other designers are but I work closely with him and he gets very involved,” she says. “We have long discussions about the themes and what we want to evoke at first glance.”

With a growing presence of the region’s writing in English-language markets, it’s becoming easier to identify burgeoning trends. In South America, there is a wealth of Narco-literature: books devoted to (and perhaps romanticising) its problems with crime. While these dark novels are often written by men, there are plenty penned by women. The key difference is that the latter rarely garner the same attention nationally. 

Both of Charco’s works that graced the Booker’s shortlist are written by women. As these violent and often abrasive novels journey up into North America or hop over the Atlantic Ocean, they begin to tell a slightly different story. In translation, there seems to be more scope for work by female writers to be lauded than in South America. 

The differences are language and labelling. As the novels cross the pond, they also move across genres, becoming “translated fiction”. Perhaps this primes readers for a different experience, imbuing the titles with an exotic allure and reeling in audiences who might not have gravitated towards the original genre. But this, Orloff thinks, fails to properly credit the standalone merits of the text. “Those books weren’t chosen because we thought that they were doing something niche and unseen. We choose books that we think are brilliant – and that need to exist in English,” she says. “As an editor, there’s a feeling that almost transcends commerciality. I feel as though we have an ethical responsibility to get these books read.”

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Saudi Arabia and the UAE have presented themselves as the twin pillars of Gulf power for much of the past decade. Aligned on security, broadly synchronised on diplomacy and increasingly influential beyond the region, they have mediated conflicts, bankrolled fragile states and styled themselves as pragmatic problem-solvers in a volatile world. This is why the latest tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi over Yemen feel both striking and consequential.

On the surface, the dispute looks procedural: flights suspended at Aden airport, diplomatic delegations prevented from landing and disagreements over inspections, airspace and who ultimately exercises authority on the ground. But there is a strategic divergence between the two allies, whose visions for Yemen – and, by extension, regional order – no longer align as neatly as they once did.

Yemen has long been fragmented. After more than a decade of war, the country remains divided between the Iran-aligned Houthis in the north and a loose constellation of forces in the south, backed by different external actors and driven by competing agendas. Saudi Arabia entered the conflict in 2015 with a clear set of priorities, including border security, the rollback of Houthi influence and the restoration of Yemen’s internationally recognised government. The UAE joined the fight with similar ideas but gradually pursued a different logic – cultivating local power brokers, securing ports and coastlines, and backing the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a separatist movement seeking autonomy, if not outright independence, for the south.

These differences were managed for many years. Co-ordination continued, disagreements were contained and the shared imperative of countering the Houthis provided enough common ground to keep the partnership intact. What has changed recently is not the existence of divergence but its visibility and stakes. The STC’s expanding territorial reach across southern Yemen, particularly in areas close to the Saudi border and key infrastructure, has sharpened Riyadh’s concerns. 

The UAE, meanwhile, has further reduced its overt military footprint but retained significant political leverage through local allies. This recalibration has left space for those allies to act more assertively, testing not just Yemen’s fragile arrangements but also Saudi Arabia’s tolerance for a southern power structure that it does not fully control.

What makes the current moment unusual is how public the friction has become. Airports closed, delegations turned away and accusations exchanged in plain sight – these might not equal a partnership in collapse but they are not the signs of seamless strategic alignment. Rather, they point to a relationship under strain; one struggling to reconcile competing priorities at a time when both capitals are keen to project stability and diplomatic maturity.

The irony is that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent recent years positioning themselves as brokers of de-escalation: in Sudan, across the Horn of Africa and even on more internationally visible stages (Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine). Yet in Yemen, they appear unable to mediate between their own interests. Two states that increasingly speak the language of restraint abroad now find themselves locked in a contest at home, conducted through proxies, pressure points and procedural disputes rather than direct confrontation.

Will this lead to an open rupture between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi? That remains unlikely. The economic, political and security costs would be enormous and both capitals are acutely aware of the value of their partnership. This is not a march towards conflict. It is, however, a reminder that Gulf alliances are fundamentally transactional. Shared history does not guarantee shared futures. For the wider Gulf, the lesson is sobering. Unity cannot be assumed, even among the closest of partners.

While regional powers recalibrate and jostle for influence, ordinary Yemenis bear the consequences, trapped between rival agendas that they have little ability to shape. Each diplomatic standoff entrenches that fragmentation further; each unresolved power struggle pushes a political settlement a little more out of reach.
 
Inzamam Rashid is Monocle’s Gulf correspondent, based in Dubai. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.