I ask this, having frequently been told a variation of the same story by friends, who have been on the phone to a bank or an airline, an internet service provider or an energy company. The organisation has screwed up and they, the customer, are attempting to rectify things.
 
In response, the customer-care call-centre employee is parrying their efforts with a rota of empathetic phrases that they were taught on a one-hour induction course. Finally, exasperated, my friend will have expressed their frustration a little more firmly. Not the F-bomb. No raised voice. Nothing personal. But at this point a ripcord is pulled: “I am sorry, I do not have to accept language like that, I am transferring you to my supervisor.” The supervisor, without being privy to what has preceded, informs them that the call is being terminated because they, the customer, have not remained civil.
 
It has happened to me too. A young plumber, visiting to fix a repeatedly failing pump in our basement, explained that the problem was a faulty batch from the manufacturer. He removed the pump and returned an hour later with a new one. On closer questioning, he conceded that it was from the same faulty batch. I hesitated, fearful of appearing naive. “But mightn’t that also be unreliable?” The plumber admitted that, yes, there was that possibility. But I could always go down to the basement and just, you know, nudge the ballcock, if the drain filled up. Presumably he imagined that I should sit all night beside it, like an Inuit at a fishing hole.

Instead, I made him an offer. “If the basement floods, you come on Monday morning and clear up the water. Or pay me compensation. How does that sound?” He blanched and stuttered. A few moments later, his boss rang me. “You should talk nicely to people,” he admonished. “You should behave properly. It isn’t Alan’s fault.” Alan was upset. I apologised to Alan. He replaced the faulty pump with the other potentially faulty pump. And so, the circle of life continued. I hadn’t raised my voice to Alan. I hadn’t insulted him personally; I had merely expressed my frustration and offered what I thought was a reasonable solution. But I had supposedly overstepped the mark.

I have been reflecting on how that mark must have moved in recent years, without anyone telling me. Or had there been some other shift, a diminishment in a sense of personal responsibility, an increase in the fragility of the collective ego?

I offer these stories not with any eyeroll about snowflakes or political correctness gone mad. The most famous perspective on all this is probably Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind, which focuses on the youth of their homeland, but I don’t think that the issue is generation-specific. 

What is odd is the anonymising distance afforded by the digital world, turning a large section of the population into total monsters, unafraid to hurl obscenities and wild accusations. Similarly, offence can now be taken so easily and, it seems to me, arbitrarily.

So who is to blame? Well, as ever, it’s the politicians: this kind of tactical, performative offence-taking is particularly loved by the right wing. Here in Denmark, one far-right politician often deploys the “Are you accusing me of being a racist?” defence in the manner of an affronted maiden aunt fluttering her lacy handkerchief at the mention of sexual impropriety. In the UK, Nigel Farage uses the technique of pretending to get upset at some imagined slight, raising his voice in protest – “How dare you suggest…!”; “That is grossly offensive!” – when he knows that he is on shaky moral or factual ground.

Politicians might be beyond saving but the rest of us really need to buck up. If the Russian army really is about to roll across Western Europe, are we as robust as we need to be? Before we spend billions on our defence hardware, shouldn’t we also spend a little time considering our mental resilience to the quotidian vicissitudes of life? If we indulge in offence-taking to evade our basic responsibilities, is that likely to help us resist the crushing heel of the Russian jackboot? And if anyone has a good water pump spare, feel free to drop me a line.

Michael Booth is Monocle’s Copenhagen correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

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Over the past fortnight, Iran has been gripped by a wave of unrest that has taken even seasoned regional analysts by surprise. What began in late December 2025 as protests in Tehran over the collapse of the Iranian currency and punishing inflation has quickly morphed into something deeper and more existential: a widespread repudiation of the ruling system. 

From the bazaar merchants who first rolled down their shop shutters in protest to young people in universities and working-class districts, the discontent now spans generations and geographies, across Tehran to Isfahan, Mashhad and beyond. This breadth is one of the defining features that separates the current upheaval from earlier tides of dissent, including the widespread protests in 2022 to 2023 triggered by Mahsa Amini’s death. 

For a regime that has survived for decades on strict ideological control and a tightly bound clerical establishment, this distinction matters. Slogans such as “Death to the dictator” and chants calling for the return of former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi signal not just economic grievance but a challenge to the legitimacy of the system. 

Tehran’s response has been forceful. Authorities have cut nationwide internet access in an effort to slow the protests and obscure the scale of state violence. Security forces have fired live ammunition at demonstrators. Dozens – if not hundreds, according to some rights groups – have been killed. The top judiciary has branded protesters “enemies of God”, a designation that carries the death penalty. Against this backdrop of state repression, a broader question looms: is the Iranian regime on the verge of collapse?

The short answer from many analysts is: not yet. But the system’s fragility is no longer theoretical. For years, the Islamic Republic has been juggling economic stagnation, political dissent and international isolation. And today, these pressures have converged. The Iranian rial’s dramatic depreciation, double-digit inflation and widespread hardship have stripped the government of its ability to deliver basic economic stability – a core pillar of its claim to legitimacy. 

Still, collapse is not imminent in the traditional sense. The clerical state commands robust coercive tools, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia, and key centres of power remain intact. The leadership’s sweeping narrative of foreign instigation aims to delegitimise protest movements and rally conservative sections of society. But there are cracks. The sustained intensity of the protests, the erosion of routine communication through blackouts and the visible strain on the regime’s security apparatus all point to systemic exhaustion. Even some loyalists whisper that the government’s current course is unsustainable. 

From the vantage of the Gulf – where Iran’s economic and geopolitical weight is never far from view – the real question isn’t whether the Islamic Republic will fall this winter. Rather, it’s whether Tehran can withstand a sustained legitimacy crisis without ceding meaningful power or undertaking serious reform. And in that sense, 2026 already feels like a turning point. Only time will tell if this moment yields transformation, fragmentation or something altogether unprecedented. 

On ‘The Globalist’ our foreign editor, Alexis Self, spoke with Negah Angha about the latest. Listen to it here.

There’s a meme going around. It features US secretary of state Marco Rubio facing an improbable future as the president of Venezuela, the leader of Cuba and the shah of Iran – all at the same time. It’s a cheeky take on the current political condition but one that reflects the former senator from Florida’s unexpected position as the most powerful man in Washington, besides his boss of course.
 
Rubio is now far more than a mere senior cabinet member – he’s the physical manifestation of the most muscular foreign policy agenda since the Cold War. This week’s workout? He’s trying to lift the mineral-rich island of Greenland out of the Danes’ hands. It’s heavy stuff. Indeed, despite campaigning as a president to “end wars”, Trump has become one of the most aggressive and adversarial American leaders since Ronald Reagan. And he has Marco Rubio, in many ways, to thank for it. Trump even suggested the US strike on Venezuela might have been “Marco’s revenge” against Maduro, who had lavished the communist regime in Havana with vast supplies of oil. Even if this betrays barely a shred of truth, the level of antipathy felt by Cuban Americans such as Rubio to Havana makes him ideally suited for the White House’s new hawkish course.

The question is how much of this is Trump and how much Rubio? The likely answer is a whole lot of both. And as Iran continues to convulse – and Trump threatens to attack drug cartels in Mexico as he has done off the coast of Venezuela – can Rubio contain his boss’s ambitions amid an increasingly outraged global community?
 
There are few more seasoned politicians in the Trump administration than Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who spent a quarter of a century in public service. At just 54, he is among the elder statesmen in Trump World and a clear political rival to vice-president JD Vance, more than a decade his junior. The pair have been engaged in a not-so-subtle pas de deux over who will next assume the Oval Office and carry on Trump’s Maga legacy. 
 
Rubio has shown impressive restraint and consummate team player deftness in allowing Vance to stand as Trump’s presumed successor. But Rubio’s highly prominent public profile suggests his ambitions are far more aggressive than his baby-faced demeanour might reveal. Rubio is the modern incarnation of Henry Kissinger but whereas Kissinger was barred from the presidency owing to his foreign birth, Rubio seems like the most organic fit possible.
 
Despite his impressive wins, Rubio’s most difficult days are still ahead of him. Hamas might be vanquished and Nicolás Maduro imprisoned in New York but the new Iranian revolution has only just begun and Denmark – if not all of Nato and the EU – will not stand idle as Trump eyes Greenland. Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s leader, has repeatedly declared that she will not tolerate a US violation of Mexican sovereignty and Colombian president Gustavo Petro – despite recent signs of warming – has yet to back down from the White House’s posturing. 
 
Rubio has so far managed to get most things right. But even a mild military confrontation with an American neighbour – and an existential crisis within the country’s most strategic military alliance – would be both unprecedented and perhaps insurmountable. Worst of all, both would be highly unnecessary, raising the spectre of a still pliant global community fully turning its back on Trump’s borderless land grabs. 
 
The US, of course, is too powerful to become a nation isolated or alone. But even powers that cannot be ignored by the global community can be shut out of the rites and rhythms – look at Israel following the war in Gaza. Considering that he has essentially declared that he is beyond international law, Trump might not care. But ultimately, it will be Rubio who’s dispatched to do the dirty work. His goal will be to keep his hands clean as the world order shifts. It’s not an easy task and it’s likely that Trump sees him as a potential scapegoat for any problems along the way. If he can avoid calamity, he will be rewarded handsomely in 2028.
 
Kaufman is a New York-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. Read more from him here.

Mongolia-born designer Oyuna Tserendorj hosted her first fashion show last year in Paris to present her eponymous label’s autumn/winter 2025 collection – a cosy line-up of cashmere coats, lightweight knits and loose trousers in earthy honey hues, crisp winter whites and deep blues inspired by dark skies. The striking colour palette was developed in collaboration with Pantone, the global authority on colour trends, which has partnered with companies as wide-ranging as Barbie, Bentley and Roman fashion house Valentino. 

Staying true to her brand’s timeless ethos – and her own gentle nature – Tserendorj did things her way: she hosted an intimate, salon-style show at a friend’s Left Bank apartment overlooking the Seine. Models walked barefoot and a family-style dinner was served shortly after the show. The inspiration behind her new collection, dubbed “Caravan”, was the journey of a nomadic Mongolian family moving to its next base for winter and observing the changing natural landscapes along the way. 

Here she tells Monocle about the process of working with Pantone to find the colours that perfectly matched her vision, the importance of manufacturing in Mongolia and her new winter residence on London’s Savile Row. 

Talk us through the creative process for your new autumn/winter 2025 collection. 
I always start with a concept. Sometimes it’s something abstract, the idea of dualities, for example, but this time I was thinking about a nomadic family transitioning from autumn to winter. I looked at images of Mongolia during the changing of the seasons – I had the vision of a family on horses moving from golden autumnal landscapes into colder winter ones.  

Given the collaboration with Pantone, it made sense to talk about the richness of colour. But there were also other elements such as belting, inspired by Mongolian nomads who often need to pack up their lives in minutes and keep moving.

What role did Pantone play?
The idea was everything to me, so we colour-matched the images that I had in mind to Pantone shades. I never used colour charts in the past – I would go to flea markets or ribbon shops to find [inspiration for] colours to use – but when you have a specific vision, Pantone charts can give you a much broader spectrum of choice. It’s interesting to see the business opening up and supporting smaller, more niche brands.   

Can you share more about the silhouettes that were chosen for the season? 
It’s all about having a really nice drape, so that each piece can work on any figure and the wearer can make [the design] their own. I look at clothing as shields. There is this cliché about wearing cashmere to sit on your sofa with a cup of tea – sometimes it’s nice to do that but my designs are about bright colours and wearing them out in the world and bringing about change. It’s connected to Mongolia, where people are always engaging with the outdoors, with animals, with nature. 

How important is it for you to champion Mongolia and manufacture your collections in local factories?  
Mongolian cashmere is so well known but up to 85 per cent leaves the country as raw material – that is why it’s important for me to produce my collections locally. But it’s becoming challenging. There is a major workforce shortage: Mongolia might be a big country but its population is only a little more than three million, so the talent pool is very limited. 

Tell us about your new winter residence on Savile Row. 
We have been around for 23 years now, so I felt that it was to put our name out there with a central location. When we moved in [to the space], we tried to experiment and do a lot of things by ourselves, including repainting a series of repurposed office desks in a soft grey to match the autumn/winter collection. I also painted some of the cabinets cobalt blue – Mongolia is a country of blue skies, so I always try to incorporate different shades of blue into my work. 

Finally, what are the biggest factors to consider when buying cashmere? 
I would recommend buying something light that can be layered and worn year-round. Also, remember that cashmere is a natural material so it loves fresh air and sunlight. You don’t need to wash your cashmere after every wear – sometimes all you need to do is leave it outside.

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