In the Carpathian Mountains around 6,000 years ago, copper miners faced a major problem: ore was heavy and dragging it out was proving a pain. Their solution was to create a cart mounted on circular wooden discs, with each pair joined by an axle. Copper miners in the place that we now call Ukraine had invented the wheel – and with it comes a lesson about humanity’s new frontier of innovation, AI.
Solid wooden wheels were heavy and hard to steer. Even so, in the right places, wheels changed daily life. They let nomads carry harvests, household possessions and tired kids, as well as trade goods. Wheels allowed people to remain mobile while owning more than they could shoulder. Later, spoked wheels made chariots lighter and faster, turning a device for hauling into one associated with ceremony, racing, hunting and war.
The wheel is the sort of discovery that seems inevitable once you’ve seen it. Simple, round, portable and useful. And yet wheels only prospered in the ecosystems that suited them. In many societies the technology didn’t roll out until thousands of years later. Far from a failure of imagination, the delay was the natural environment talking. In the sandy deserts of Egypt, the stones that built the pyramids were moved by river barges, then dragged into place on sleds. In sub-Saharan Africa, dense forest, river routes, human porters and the scarcity of large draught animals made wheeled transport less practical. In the mountains and jungles of Papua New Guinea, wheeled carts offered little advantage compared with human porters. An invaluable invention on hard-packed plains can be useless on sand or steep hills.
But wheels also needed help where they were adopted. They became more useful in societies that built roads, such as ancient Rome. When Roman roads decayed, wheeled transport became less attractive. As late as the 1700s in London and Washington, streets were essentially dirt tracks, meaning that carriages frequently sank into deep mud and they could be easily outpaced by horses. The lesson is simple: wheels need good roads. To judge their historical usefulness by today’s standards is to put the cart before the horse, since the roads that surround us were built to make the most of the wheel.
Great inventions rarely arrive fully formed. They often wait for complementary technologies, systems or cultural shifts to unlock their full potential. Writing, for example, began as a method of accounting before it became the foundation for literature, law and bureaucracy. Printing started with religious texts and calendars before it helped to spread scientific ideas and political messages. The early internet was populated by digital brochures; the social and commercial uses came later. General-purpose technologies often improve slowly, spread across sectors and then inspire further inventions.
This is one way to think about artificial intelligence. Like sailing ships, railways and electricity, AI won’t transform everything overnight. The technology is built on prior roads: faster chips developed for gaming, large stores of labelled data, open research communities and decades of trial and error. Its future will depend on its own roads too: reliable energy, trusted institutions, skilled workers and rules that encourage use while curbing harm.
Innovation lengthens lives and lifts living standards but it also produces failures and dangers. The right response is to help ensure that good ideas can flourish and bad ones can be checked. That means encouraging innovative tinkering, facilitating diverse teams and promoting freer trade in ideas across the world. It also means letting cosmopolitan cities, universities, labs and firms combine what they know.
The wheel is a beautiful invention because it is uncomplicated. But its history is a warning against a simplistic view of innovation. The device is rarely the whole story. Progress comes when the road is ready.
Andrew Leigh is an author and member of the Australian Parliament. His new book, ‘The Shortest History of Innovation’, is published in the UK on 25 August.
The Dutch were once at the centre of Europe’s publishing world. When the printing press rolled out across Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, the people of The Netherlands were early adopters – helping to create a thriving literary culture driven by commerce. But they didn’t limit themselves to publishing the Bible like other obedient merchants. Thanks to a lack of national censorship, Amsterdam’s printers could satisfy a whole European market with radical texts from the emerging Enlightenment. People such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes took advantage of this freedom to print their controversial ideas in the Dutch capital before smuggling them into their native countries.
Today, there is still a thriving market for books of all kinds and all languages in Amsterdam. There are bookshops all around the city, and while prices tend to be higher than elsewhere in Europe, that’s partly due to regulation protecting local authors’ earnings and ensuring a fair market between bookshops.
1.
ABC, Centrum
It was slightly more than a decade ago that Monocle dubbed the American Book Center “the best bookstore in the world”. Plenty of people still agree. Based in the heart of Amsterdam’s shopping district on the Spui, it is a true original with its lurid blue lettering, a tree trunk running through the building and an Instagram-worthy hand-painted window. The shop, which now has sister stores in The Hague and in Leidschendam, boasts one of the Netherlands’ largest collections of English-language titles but there’s also room for games, magazines and knick-knacks.
Its director, Martijn Meerts, says that ABC’s great strength during its 50-year history has been adaptability. “We are a family-owned, indie bookshop and have reinvented ourselves again and again over the years to adapt to the times,” he says. “We read the room.” Until recently, ABC had its own book printer called Betty for use by the self-publishing crowd. The bookshop also runs regular talks and events linking writers with agents and illustrators, and offers both “booklover boxes” (selections of books ideal for friends) and consultancy services about what to buy. “You have a space; we can fill it with books,” says Meerts. The promise that all the staff here are certified book lovers is even printed on its cotton bag.
abc.nl
- The top ten bestsellers at ABC in 2025 included a translated Belgian novel originally published in 1995, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, and a Japanese book about colour theory, A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Sanzo Wada.
- ABC started out as the American Discount Book, Magazine, Poster Retail and Distribution Center – “American Discount” for short. It sold excess stock and magazines from the US, and teachers and students still get 10 per cent off.
- If you are open to chance, ABC sells “blind book dates”, a mystery book with a few key words and phrases on its wrapping.
2.
Scheltema, Centrum
Scheltema is Amsterdam’s largest bookshop and is right in the centre, just off Dam Square. It has a historic feel with escalators and a charming staircase leading to floor upon floor of books. If you can’t find something specific, there are helpful staff, and the café on the first floor is an Amsterdam insiders’ haunt for excellent cake (the appeltaart and carrot cake from Patisserie Holtkamp are top sellers but staff also recommend the vegan chocolate torte).
Founded in 1853 by author Jacobus Hendrik Scheltema, the shop now holds more than 125,000 titles, and provides a welcome antidote to the rowdy red-light district, which is a stone’s throw away. “We have something for everyone, from magical children’s books to delicious cookbooks and adult fiction,” says staff member Marlou van Beek. “With five floors full of books, anyone could walk around for hours.”
athenaeumscheltema.nl/scheltema
- The author handprints in the literary “walk of fame” pavement outside, created when Scheltema moved to this location in 2015, include wine reviewer Harold Hamersma’s corkscrew and a paw print in honour of Italian fictional mouse Geronimo Stilton (pictured above).
- Find out more about the city in the Amsterdam section on the fourth floor. There are maps and walking-tour suggestions, while popular titles include the bilingual edition of the photography book, Amsterdam Then & Now by Sharon Hansma, the evergreen Amsterdam by historian Geert Mak and journalist Marcel van Engelen’s Amsterdam (De stad in Dutch).
- Scheltema is unusually accessible in a city that is known for its steep and wonky staircases: there is a lift to all floors and ramps on the split levels.
3.
Island Boekholt, Jordaan
This friendly neighbourhood bookstore makes you feel connected to the world by stocking a wide range of international papers and magazines; it also has a well-curated children’s section. Originally opened by collector and bookseller Henk van der Does in the charming Tweede Tuindwarsstraat, it now sits on a main shopping street in Jordaan and is part of a group of four stores. The glory years of bookselling might have been 15 years ago but manager Martijn van Bommel says that he has seen many customers return to physical books in recent years. “We do hear people saying, ‘I have played around with the e-reader and it’s sometimes handy on holiday but I just want a real book in my hands,’” he says.
The collection of newspapers and magazines spills out onto the street and the store tries to encourage a sense of casual hospitality. “We try to make everyone feel welcome and not like they have to buy something,” says Van Bommel. “You are free to look around and we have a kind of neighbourhood function – you really get to know people and strike up friendships.”
libris.nl/boekholtboekhandels/island
- The Anne Frank House is just around the corner so this bookshop is the place to buy a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl – the latest version has been updated with passages that her father, Otto, edited out.
- At Island, you might spot some familiar faces as plenty of TV journalists live in Jordaan and are regulars at the shop. The staff are too discreet to name names.
- Island has a particularly good selection of Dutch books in English, such as Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven and Willem Frederik Hermans’ classic Beyond Sleep and Belgian writer Lize Spit’s coming-of-age novel, The Melting.
4.
Minerva, Oud-Zuid
This is a bookshop that could be transported to modern-day Amsterdam from Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road. Literature, cookbooks and histories are piled to the ceiling here.
English-language stock might be small but the owners know their stuff and will give you a perfect experience of no-nonsense Dutchness. Tom Dulfer, who runs the business with wife Patricia, says that they are unapologetically analogue. “We don’t try to be a commercial bookstore but we read a lot of books ourselves,” he says. “And we talk about them to our clients. We don’t do anything on the internet or follow people via Facebook – we do everything in the store.”
The bookshop welcomes both locals and visitors, though its stock is mostly Dutch fiction and non-fiction. “We have all the time in the world for people,” says Dulfer. “If they find you’re attentive, you give the right answers and you recommend books honestly, then that shines out in their enthusiasm – and then they tell other people about us. That’s how simple it is, and that’s what we have been doing for 50 years. So far, so good.”
boekhandelminerva.nl
- This is one place in Amsterdam where you can find British newspapers – at least, the Financial Times’ weekly edition.
- Wartime literature is always popular as more stories continue to emerge about the secret history of buildings, resistance fighters and collaborators during the Second World War. Recommended books include Roxane van Iperen’s The High Nest about a house where Jewish people hid from the Nazis under the noses of local collaborators and Miep Gies’s Anne Frank Remembered (The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family).
- Popular factual books include the Atlas of Mokum (Der Atlas van Mokum) by Maarten Hell and Mirjam Knotter, a well-illustrated history of Jewish life in the city. The title is inspired by the Jewish nickname for Amsterdam.
5.
Boekhandel Over het water, Amsterdam-Noord
Instead of heading into the city, take a free ferry north of Central Station to Buiksloterweg, where you’ll find the Eye Filmmuseum, A’dam Lookout and a great little bookshop.
Over het water (which means “over the water” in Dutch) is on the ground floor of a modest brick terrace that features fairy lights and a small but wide-ranging collection with emphasis on minority points of view. “I really focus on quality in each subject and people like that,” says Jildau de Boer, who took over the shop two years ago. “On the internet, you have an endless selection but here it’s a question of choosing things well. I pay a lot of attention to minorities: women, queer authors, climate, animal rights and feminism.”
De Boer tries to provide more diversity in children’s books too, as well as giving space to smaller publishers. And the feel of the book matters, she says, as well as “its smell, the layout and typography, the material used”. Most books are in Dutch but De Boer does have a tight English selection and a friendly feeling between visitors. “People often meet each other unexpectedly here, which is funny… it feels like a community has grown up around the bookshop.”
boekhandeloverhetwater.nl
- There’s a well-stocked children’s section, including a little desk and toys. The shop regularly hosts authors, including Dutch children’s writer Joke van Leeuwen, a recent guest whose fans packed out the small venue.
- Although high-rise buildings are going up across Amsterdam-Noord to meet housing demand, this shop is in the 1920s “garden village” (tuindorp) of Van der Pekbuurt, one of the first social-housing projects in the area.
- De Boer says that one of the shop’s most interesting current publications is artist Nynke Deinema’s 48-page De Schaduw van de Witte Kebaya (The Shadow of the White Kebaya). The limited-edition book is based on Deinema’s artistic project exploring colonial relations in the Dutch East Indies through the white blouses worn by Indo-European women.
6.
De Boekhandel van Pampus, Amsterdam Oost
When the founder of this much-loved local spot in Amsterdam East, Carel van Pampus, passed away last December, a crowdfunding campaign turned the page for two new owners: former joint managers Mieke van Dooren and Marianne Drissen (pictured below).
According to Drissen, they can sum up their whole ethos in just three words: uitnodigen tot oponthoud (inviting you to linger). The shop is part of a harbourside area called the Oostelijk Havengebied and the water feels close: many books are displayed on wooden crates and Van Pampus’s collection of ships is mounted on the wall. There is a small, mixed line-up of books: plenty of literature about birds, a section on politics and current affairs, a bit of beach reading and some English titles. “The shop breathes homeliness and you can also stop by for a cup of tea or coffee and a chat,” says Drissen. “The personal side is very important.”
boekhandelvanpampus.nl
- There is a casual book club every six weeks. You don’t have to sign up, just come along.
- This area is a great place to admire Dutch architecture and engineering: on the other side of the water are the four manmade islands of IJburg, created to relieve some of the housing pressure in one of Europe’s most densely populated cities.
- A curious touch: the shop’s artistic handy person has made a sketch of Dalí on the wall and a Leonardo-esque Vitruvian Man on the ceiling.
7.
Java Bookshop, Amsterdam Oost
Behind a modest shop window is a space as warm as the cup of hot coffee that’s pictured in the logo of this bookshop in eastern Amsterdam.
The shop was opened in 2010 by friends Sanne Fase and Sharon Perlee, who met playing football, and has grown from three bookshelves to a packed store, with Sanne’s sister Lisa Fase joining the team to focus on children’s literature. Opening out onto the busy shopping street of Javastraat, it feels clean and inviting.
There’s a broad range of literature, including a large English-language section and recommended titles, plus comfortable chairs to sit and browse. Staff will giftwrap your book in elegant paper and there’s a good selection of children’s books and cards. “We often think of Java Bookshop as a kind of living room, and it certainly feels like a second home to me,” says Lisa Fase.
javabookshop.nl
- The Java team recommend Yael van der Wouden, whose first novel The Safekeep – about the enduring impact of the Holocaust – was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Other recommendations include novelist Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and poet and writer Nadia de Vries.
- Discover some Dutch children’s books: Lampje by Annet Schaap is ever popular, translated as Lampie and the Children of the Sea. Everyone loves Max Velthuijs’s Kikker books about the adventurous Frog and his friends. Yorick Goldewijk’s Movies Showing Nowhere for readers from “nine to adults” is another tip.
- While you’re on the Javastraat, head out for a wander: there are breezy café terraces on the street and some of the best baklava and savoury börek in Amsterdam, made at Turkish bakery Divan Pastanesi.
Keen to explore more bookshops in cultural capitals?
– Leaf through London with 10 bookshops that are bound to please
– New York’s 10 best lesser-known bookshops
– Ten of the best bookshops in Paris
Crime
Dallas
Arresting data
Monocle’s 2023 Quality of Life Survey was the first in its 15-year history that didn’t include a single North American city. Our reasons for this were manifold but coalesced around the idea of safety and how, in many US and Canadian cities, a fraying of the social fabric has led to many citizens no longer feeling secure as they walk the streets. In response to this omission, Eric L Johnson, the mayor of Dallas – which came first place in a recent Gallup poll of how safe 16 large US cities were perceived to be – writes about how rising rates of violent crime need not be the norm in his country.
“Dallas is the ninth-largest city in the US and the hub of the fourth-largest metro area. Like other major American cities, after the arrival of coronavirus in 2020, we faced many challenges that threatened our quality of life, such as increased homelessness and violent crime. We committed significant public resources to addressing both of these issues – and we are seeing results. But the biggest win for Dallas has to be the significant reduction in all forms of violent crime, including murder, over the past two and a half years – a drop that has made us stand out among the most populous US cities.
According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organisation that comprises the top police executives representing the largest cities in the US and Canada, Dallas was the only top-10 American city to record year-on-year declines in every category of violent crime tracked by the FBI in both 2021 and 2022. With regards to murder, the number committed in Dallas in 2022 was 5 per cent higher than the number committed in 2019 – the last full year before violent crime of every type, including murder, increased dramatically in most major US cities – most likely related to the onset of coronavirus, according to experts. Comparatively, the number of murders committed in Los Angeles in 2022 was 50 per cent higher than it was in 2019; that same metric was 45 per cent higher in Philadelphia, 41 per cent higher in Chicago and 37 per cent higher in New York.
While many major US city mayors embraced the ‘defund the police’ movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, I never succumbed to the political pressure, despite vocal opposition and multiple protests at my home. Instead, our city took a very different approach.
I attribute our success in lowering violent crime in Dallas to three essential elements: our police chief, our violent-crime reduction plan and our attitude towards policing. Our police chief, Edgardo Garcia, is not only respected by his officers; he is also an excellent communicator and a strong believer in the power of data, planning and community policing. Our violent-crime reduction plan is more than mere guesswork; it’s a written, data-supported plan created with the help of criminologists. It includes law-enforcement strategies, such as hot-spot policing, but it also consists of non-police strategies, including street-lighting improvement and blight remediation.
And, most importantly, the bond between the Dallas Police Department and our citizens is something special. This is hard to create but it is vital. A recent poll showed that most Dallas residents, regardless of race or the neighbourhood that they live in, support our police. That kind of backing does not just happen; it is the result of years of effort by the police and the community to improve how they interact with each other.
No matter which way the national political winds have been blowing, public safety remains our top priority. As a result, Dallas is leading the US when it comes to reducing violent crime.”
Johnson is the 60th mayor of Dallas. First elected in 2019, he was re-elected in May.
Every June, the same ritual begins. School holidays loom, temperatures climb and residents of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and beyond begin plotting their annual escapes. My Whatsapp groups fill with plans for Tuscany, the Côte d’Azur, Australia and the UK. But this year is different. The conflict between the US, Israel and Iran has added uncertainty to summer travel planning. Rising fuel costs continue to affect airfares, routes are disrupted and would-be travellers are thinking twice about spending big on long-haul flights. For many Gulf residents, the answer has been surprisingly simple: stay closer to home.
That doesn’t necessarily mean staying at home. Hotels across the UAE and the wider Gulf are aggressively rolling out summer offers, with five-star resorts suddenly available at prices that would have seemed unimaginable not so long ago. The result is that many of my friends who would ordinarily spend July and August in Europe are staying put. Some are booking weekends in Ras al-Khaimah, a few are escaping to Oman and others are treating themselves to luxury resorts in Dubai that are usually fully booked until winter.
Last year I wrote about how summers in the UAE aren’t for everyone – but that’s part of the charm. The old assumption that the country empties out between June and September no longer holds true: since the war, the hospitality sector has become better at making the most of these quieter months. There’s also a growing recognition that the Gulf offers more variety than many residents previously appreciated. A weekend in Muscat will give you a different pace and atmosphere to a trip to Dubai. The mountains of northern Oman provide a refreshing alternative to the coast. Saudi Arabia’s tourism ambitions continue to expand. Even within the UAE, the range of hotel and resort experiences is broader than ever. What began as a travel compromise is increasingly becoming a choice.
Geopolitical uncertainty tends to make people cautious. Staying within the region offers a degree of reassurance. The longer-term question is whether this behavioural shift will permanently change travel habits. If more residents spend their summers exploring the Gulf, they might discover destinations that become part of annual traditions, rather than temporary substitutes.
What would accelerate this is better connectivity. The long-promised Etihad Rail network and the wider GCC railway project remain among the region’s most exciting infrastructure ambitions. The prospect of boarding a train in Abu Dhabi and arriving in Muscat, Riyadh or Doha a few hours later would further transform how locals think about holidays. For now, Gulf residents are making the best of the available options. They are trading Tuscany for the Palm Jumeirah, the Amalfi Coast for Muscat and Mediterranean beach clubs for shaded resort pools.
What to do with a completely free Saturday, aside from writing this column? Sleep in and get up when you feel fully rested? You bet. Answer the door buzzer in pyjamas when a friend drops by with some fresh bread from Pão do Pastor (a respected bakery here in Lisbon)? Absolutely. Chart a course for a morning walk that includes visiting a newish branch of Spanish supermarket Mercadona at the far end of Campo Grande? A must.
It’s now a little more than a year since we were properly installed here in Lisbon and the apartment is as finished as a part-time residence ever is – there’s some good photography and art on the walls but some things need moving around and key pieces are still missing in the den and mom’s room. I would like to transfer part of my magazine archive here but the fact that it’s sitting somewhere out near Wembley makes it a logistical project that I’m not quite ready to face. It means I’m missing some of the titles that I enjoy having to hand elsewhere, and I’m trying to decide if there might be some good Portuguese or Brazilian journals that could stand in for old copies of Arena, The Face, Blitz, Sky and Tempo. All ideas welcome.
The star of the transformed apartment is the kitchen. For a very, very brief moment we were going to keep the original 1960s cupboards but, in the end, went for marine plywood open shelves and doors. With original stone floors and counters to match, it’s long and lean and the nook at the far end is perfect for a cosy dinner for six. It’s also set for a bit of a workout and this is where the hike up to Mercadona comes in.
If you’re not familiar with the Iberian grocery store scene (you really should be), Mercadona is a unique proposition. While it would be easy to suggest that it’s a Spanish-speaking version of Aldi or Lidl – given its no-frills offer – it’s actually so much more. For starters, you never see the brand unless you walk or drive past a storefront as Mercadona is famous for not advertising or engaging in traditional supermarket comms tricks. Inside, the stores are austere and dull from a design perspective but there’s always a parking lot to secure Rolser shopping trolleys and clean, well-maintained toilets have become something of a trademark that makes the brand popular with convenience-minded people.
The Mercadona that has opened near my place is in the middle of a mid-income neighbourhood that’s currently being upgraded. By 11.00 it was busy but not rammed with Lisboetas who are happy that the chain has now ventured down from the country’s north. With just shy of 1,700 stores across Spain and, more recently, Portugal, Mercadona is another one of those Spanish retail success stories that has created one of Europe’s richest families you’ve never heard of. While the Ortegas of Inditex (Zara, Massimo Dutti) fame are discreet but globally known, Valencia’s Roig clan are generally hidden from view. Privately held, the company recently posted sales of more than €40bn and distributed approximately a billion of that to employees across the group. Perhaps this is the reason why the woman at the cash desk was so smiley and helpful. It also made me curious as to where the self-checkout units were. For a brand-new store, there wasn’t a self-scanner in sight – at least not at this branch.
As I walked out with my takeaway bifana in hand, I wondered if Mercadona is a concept that’s likely to stick to the Iberian Peninsula or will it go Europe-wide? Would French customers care for the gentleman on hand with slices of ham? Would Italians want the fresh fish counter? Would British customers take a fancy to a personal care department almost free from major brands? Given their results, I’m sure the Roigs and employees are content being regional retail stars.
Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns.
The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in London’s Clerkenwell opened this week. The museum is both a monument to a national treasure and a celebration of a medium in dire need of protection.
The project has been decades in the making – a dream of illustrator Quentin Blake’s since he was children’s laureate in 1999. Now that it’s finally here, it arrives as the world’s largest space dedicated to illustration. The site is unusual – an 18th-century waterworks, which has been derelict since the 1950s – and comprises three exhibition spaces, a café, shop, gardens and a library. The breadth of the artform is apparent through children’s story books, comics, graphic novels and more on display. “We think of illustration as art with a job to do,” says the centre’s artistic director, Olivia Ahmad. “It’s art that’s trying to tell you something specific: that might be a story or an instruction, or it might be trying to persuade you of something for good or bad.”
The first temporary exhibition, Queer as Comics, charts 80 years of queer comic-making. Pieces by Tove Jansson, Alison Bechdel and Tom of Finland are included in a line-up of 60 artists. Elsewhere, a solo exhibition spotlights the colourful, kaleidoscopic work of contemporary British Sri Lankan illustrator and designer Murugiah. The third and final space is dedicated to the centre’s namesake and will feature rotating thematic shows of Blake’s work. The first of these focuses on performance, highlighting the artist’s close relationship with the theatrical. On the walls are characters breathing fire – rendered in a wispy cloud of yellow-and-orange watercolour paint – as well as cartwheeling circus performers and the illustrations that Blake created during opening nights of plays to accompany theatre reviews in Punch magazine in the 1950s.
The centre’s opening comes at a time when AI threatens to replace the role of illustrators and does so by stealing their work and breaching copyright. “AI-generated imagery looks at what’s already there and re-presents it,” says Ahmad. “What is special about when people make work is how leaps are made, as well as the direct communication between one person and another through an image.” The scribbles and wiggles of Quentin Blake’s drawings have accompanied many of us since childhood. This new space will help to inspire and defend the illustrators of the future, whose works will enrich the lives of many to come.
qbcentre.org.uk
Runners are heading along La Rambla sporting jackets and leggings to keep out the chilly wind sweeping in off the Río de la Plata. On the beach, dog walkers are letting their hounds play fetch on the vast arc of sand. It’s autumn, of course, and the ginkgo trees are covering the pavements in brimstone-yellow leaves while the doormen who attend to the modernist apartment buildings that line the coast road are out chatting with tenants heading to work. It’s a city stretching awake, limbering up for another day.
Air travel still amazes me. Now it did take almost 18 hours and a change of plane in Madrid but – almost – suddenly, you can switch seasons, arrive in a city you have never visited and start assembling a new mental database from scratch. Everyone keeps saying that we need to come back in summer but this autumn-cloaked capital has been a revelation. Welcome to Montevideo.
We landed at Carrasco International Airport on Tuesday night. The terminal is compact – it has just eight gates – but it’s beautiful: a single, sweeping white building, designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly. We seemed to be the only flight landing at this hour and by the time we headed out to the taxi stop it was just us standing on the forecourt under the airport’s soaring roof. We were in our hotel 30 minutes later.
Montevideo might be small – some two million people call the metropolitan area home – but it is poised and polished. Between meetings – I am on the road with my London colleague Rebecca and Nicholas, who works for Monocle out of Santiago – I have snuck off to walk the streets of the neighbourhoods near our hotel: Pocitos, Punta Carretas and Parque Rodó.
In these affluent neighbourhoods there is no sign of the edginess that you feel in similar barrios in other Latin American cities. While Masterson Seguridad signs are plentiful, few buildings are barricaded behind the sort of metal fencing you see in, say, Rio. Though a nice café owner did tell me to be wary of pickpockets, so perhaps my risk radar needs some tuning.
And the architecture is knock-out – well, if you are a sucker for gems from the 1950s and 1960s. There are celebrated buildings such as the huge housing block Edificio Panamericano. But what’s most impressive is just the sheer number of impeccably maintained residences. They have names that play on suggestions of European glamour – St Moritz, Saint Laurent, Cap Ferrat – all rendered in gold lettering. I also found an Edificio Andy, which I am sure is the best address in town.
It’s hard to think of another metropolis that has such a legacy of design from this period. And people clearly appreciate the power of good architecture – most buildings proudly display signs revealing who authored them.
On Thursday night we met up with a former Monocle correspondent who lives in Montevideo. She took us to an old-school joint, Bar Paysandú, and told us more about how life unfolds here, about the city’s unwritten codes. She recently bought a house nearby and loves Montevideo as a base for reporting across South America – the fact that she returns to a city where she feels safe and can traverse the streets on a bicycle. In the close embrace of the cosy bar, you could feel its charm, though the vermút in hand might also have had a small influence on the hunkered-down mood.
To read more from Andrew Tuck, click here. Further reading? Is Uruguay South America’s next cinema hotspot? It certainly has reel potential.
The French Riviera is synonymous with striped awnings and a chic, beachy freedom that hovers in my mind’s eye. It is an idea of summer, as well as a place. As much as I crave discovery, it is always blissful to flex a familiar muscle, returning to the same rocky shores with new perspectives. Whenever I frequent the Côte d’Azur, its complexity shows itself – it is every bit as Graham Greene as it is Bonjour Tristesse. Small towns lie between wild nature reserves, nudist beaches, boatyards and military outposts.
A few years ago I found myself in and around the école navale in Toulon, not far from where submariner Jacques Cousteau pioneered the art of Aqua-Lung and scuba in the mid-20th century. Photographer Julien Oppenheim and I were shadowing some French navy seals for a Monocle report and were at one point required to leap from a motorboat onto a naval frigate as a tempestuous storm blew in. We explored the depths of a hyperbaric chamber used to treat the bends as we met a new cohort – all Cousteau’s disciples. I remember watching some young frogmen as they practised a drill for deep-sea technical diving, exclaiming how they found freedom 70 metres below. It was another side to the Côte d’Azur, every bit as intoxicating as mountains and beaches.
In the new issue of Konfekt, our travel special, we linger on the stretch of coast east of Cassis. In a report shot by Oppenheim and written by contributing editor Robert Bound, we spend time at the shipyards in La Ciotat and meet the hosts of old hôtels particuliersmade new, raise a glass with a coterie of artichoke farmers and natural vintners, and stop for a large pastis on the Ricard family’s private island, recently reopened as a hotel, with interiors that feel like an ode to the 1960s.
You’ll glimpse some familiar azure shores further up the coast on fashion editor Daphné Hézard’s shoot at the newly renovated hotel Le Provençal on the Presqu’île de Giens, where she styled this issue’s cover with a slew of breezy summer looks and dashing swimwear. The hotel has a coastal pool set into the rocky shore and an enviable clay tennis court. Designed by Paris-based Rodolphe Parente with help from Benjamin and Damien Piffet (the owners and grandsons of the hotel’s founder, Marius Michel), the interior features an art collection curated by Julie Liger, the deputy director of the nearby Villa Noailles. Daphné and her sister, Maud (who produced the shoot), were born and raised on the Riviera – and their work captures its essence.
My appetite for reading shifts rapidly as soon as the sun appears. Summer is a time for essays – those deep dives into niche and, usually, left-of-field subjects that your city self can’t and won’t process. The literature that we discover poolside or propped up on a rock on an Atlantic beach becomes part of our holiday too; it trickles into the fibre and feel of any itinerary. Up front, The Tone section introduces a clutch of brilliant new novels inspired by hotels; we meet an artist representing Somalia at the Venice art biennale; and columnist Barry Pierce dissects the celestial thinking of esoteric artist Hilma af Klint.
In our travel section we delve into the modernist heritage of Malta in an expansive report and our essays take aim at everything from the history of melons and the colour turquoise to a taxonomy of swimming strokes.
You are never far from the sea in this issue and features in our fashion section are littoral themed. Writer Laura Rysman’s report on northern Sicilian family business Asciari is a particularly striking portrait of an intergenerational venture producing fine garments using traditional skills. “Sicily has many layers,” says Marta Cigala of her brand’s minimalist aesthetic. “Farmers, fishermen, artisans, priests, nuns – look at their clothes from the 1940s and before. They were unadorned but beautifully crafted. We had an extraordinary tradition of tailors and fabric-making in Sicily and we still do – it has just been reduced.”
Perhaps my favourite piece in this issue is Chiara Rimella’s Conversations, a roundtable on the essence of islands, convened over lunch outside an 18th-century windmill on Greece’s Hydra. Her panellists exchanged ideas and even read passages from books that they loved over the course of lunch, touching on the idea that atolls, archipelagos, rocky outcrops and small islands loom large in our imaginations – be it Robert Louis Stevenson or Homeric shipwrecks. It’s a reminder of how islands mark our culture and minds, from their mythic past to our geopolitical present.
It just so happens that Hydra is the setting for one of my favourite summer books: Australian writer Charmian Clift’s Peel Me a Lotus, which documents her bohemian attempt to settle on the island with her young family in the 1950s, when there was very little running water, and where a revolving cast of artistically inclined expats infuriate and console each other in equal measure. The book encapsulates the freedom that we find on islands, despite their geographic limits. It reveals how our archetypal dreamy spots often have their quixotic allure and challenges too. But that, when swimming off some rocks in the azure-blue sea, they are nearly always worth contending with.
Sophie Grove is the editor of Konfekt and Monocle’s executive editor. Want to read the issue? Pick up a copy at the newsstand or order it here.
If Russia were to abandon its assault on Ukraine tomorrow, the war-torn country would still face another generational challenge. Though the official numbers of Ukrainian casualties are still unknown, it is certain that at least tens of thousands of Ukrainians, both military and civilian, have suffered life-changing physical and psychological injuries. When the day comes for Ukrainians to properly rebuild their nation, the needs of the impacted must be taken into account.
Getting ahead of this task is the NGO Superhumans, which provides free care to severely wounded Ukrainians by offering surgery and psychological support. Co-founded in 2023 by Ukrainian shipping magnate Andrey Stavnitser and Olena Pinchuk Foundation’s former executive director Olga Rudnieva – now Superhumans’ CEO – the organisation has established centres in Lviv and Dnipro, with another to open soon in Odesa.
Superhumans’ work is a precursor of what will be a significant aspect of the country’s post-war reconstruction. Ukrainian architects and city planners are already discussing how to design new homes and urban spaces that will not only accommodate a significant disabled population but encourage them to live their lives as fully and freely as possible. There seems a general and commendable determination to avoid the cloistering and forgetting of this community, which was often the lot of the severely injured of previous wars.
Monocle spoke with Rudnieva about how Superhumans is providing medical care to 1,500 people a day, “moral trauma” at the front lines of war and why Ukraine must begin to think about what a post-war society looks like.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Tell us about how Superhumans began.
When the full-scale invasion started, the Ukrainian health-care system wasn’t ready. We already had people with coronavirus, the flu and cancer, then we started seeing this huge inflow of injured people – civilian and military. Also, a lot of women left the country and it’s predominantly women who populate the nursing sector. We decided to jump in and complement the work that the government was doing.
How has the work evolved?
We looked at data [from the 2014 war, when Russia annexed Crimea], and we realised that people were going to be losing limbs [from a high number of land mines]. We saw that limb reconstruction and prosthetics were going to be needed but what we couldn’t have predicted is that the trauma would change dramatically. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, most trauma was in the lower parts of bodies because people were stepping on mines or running over mines. Right now it’s more first-person view (FPV) drone trauma, which more frequently injures the upper parts of the body: upper limbs, head trauma and facial reconstruction. A lot of these people have hearing loss because of concussions, so we’ve added surgeries to restore hearing and we’re giving hearing aid devices to people.
Can you give us a scale of what you’re facing? Do you have a number for how many people that you’ve helped already?
More than 5,000 patients over three years received prosthetics, facial reconstruction or hearing-aid services but the need is much more. On any given day we have 1,500 people standing in line at Superhumans, and the line is not getting shorter. By the end of this year we’ll have three centres – but the idea of Superhumans is not just providing services. We want to actually fix the system and start sharing this experience with the rest of the world. Ukraine has become very experienced in working with war trauma.
Are there specific lessons that you’ve learned?
This is the first war in a long time that has happened under cold conditions, with people fighting in freezing temperatures. They’re losing fingers, which causes other conditions. Evacuation at the beginning of the invasion took five to six hours but now it takes days, weeks and months because of the dominance of FPV drones, and because the Russians are targeting our medics. If you kill the medic, they can save fewer lives, which demotivates the whole military unit because they understand that there is no help. The longer it takes to get a person from the front line, the more complications you’re going to have.
How does contact get made between the injured person and Superhumans?
It happens in two ways. We can admit the patient if they meet our criteria of face trauma or amputation. We work directly with the Ukrainian military, so if they have a patient, they immediately connect to us. Or the patient can apply at our website. They have to have trauma as a result of Russian aggression. [The people we have treated so far include] civilians, military personnel and children. The youngest patient we have [treated] was five years old, the oldest was 76. The idea is to create a full ecosystem where the patient gets everything: psychological support, prosthetics, surgical support and rehabilitation. We’ve added social reintegration – basically helping our patients to find new roles in life, because these patients are very expensive to the health-care system and to Superhumans. It’s a pity if they are sitting at home without having a reason to leave their apartment.
What are you learning about the psychological aspects of trauma? How hard is it to get people past that?
We were expecting a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but that’s not true. We have a very low level of PTSD – about six to 10 per cent [of patients who have been treated by] Superhumans. That’s because they’re relatively fresh patients and PTSD is something that happens a bit later, or might never happen. What we are dealing with is a moral trauma, which is a new concept: you live all your life and you know this is right and this is wrong – and then you get to the front lines and everything is mixed. Also, we need to take into account that it’s not trained military personnel fighting for Ukraine. It’s civilians who, just yesterday, were IT workers, and now they’re at the front with their Kalashnikov [assault rifle] or their drone. So the moral trauma really impacts them.
In what kind of ways?
If I’m a commander who sends their unit to a task, and everyone is killed, am I a bad person? The right decision brought the wrong results, so maybe I did something wrong? Or I’m in the city where I grew up, and I had to bomb the school because Russians occupied it. Everyone in this country has survivor’s guilt. Only the dead don’t have it. So, people come to Superhumans worried that they didn’t fight enough, or they weren’t skilled enough because they were injured.
Does Ukraine’s government fully understand the challenge ahead, that the country will have to adapt for so many injured citizens?
We need to start predicting what the future is going to look like but we have so many challenges that we have to deal with right now. We have this joke: we don’t buy green avocados, because there is no guarantee you will survive until the avocado is ripe. It’s very difficult to shift your whole attitude from surviving today, to forecasting what kind of resources we will need in the future.
Canada’s best-known football fan – prime minister Mark Carney – was recently in Ottawa to greet football’s most coveted prize ahead of the kick-off of the Fifa World Cup next week. Beaming as though he had won the tournament himself, Carney kissed the trophy and lifted it high into the air for the cameras. “It’s magic, eh?” asked Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino. “That is magic,” Carney replied, all smiles.
It is not unusual for elected leaders to hitch themselves to the big, global events that overlap their time in office. London’s then-mayor, Boris Johnson, infamously dangled from a zipwire above an agog crowd in the run up to the 2012 Summer Olympics. Twelve years later, French president Emmanuel Macron strained every sinew to ensure that Paris’s glorious Olympic Games were very much his gloire too. But Carney exuded the genuine joy of a fan, one for whom the fairytale of hoisting that storied trophy in the air had, by some miracle, come to pass.
South of the border, however, the public build-up to the World Cup has been defined by a more corporate dialogue, by a transactional president and a profit-hungry organising body. Indeed, the attorneys general of two host states – New York and New Jersey – are launching investigations into Fifa’s alleged manipulation of ticket prices for World Cup matches. Throw in the fact that international tourism to the US is down more broadly and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the American Hotel & Lodging Association is reporting much reduced hotel bookings across the US’s 11 host cities than was previously forecasted.
Despite all of that, the World Cup remains a significant soft-power star in its own right. The jubilant scenes in capital cities from Sarajevo to Willemstad, in Curaçao (whose sharp World Cup away kit has also become a surprise global bestseller for its manufacturer, Adidas), when their national teams qualified for this year’s tournament, demonstrates how coveted a currency the World Cup still is. And that’s where Canada, as co-host, comes in.
Its own standing in the world’s imagination is higher than it has been for years, spurred, in part by its prime minister’s admirable ascent to high office in a turbulent time. Inward investment into Canada’s economy is up. As are the numbers of tourists, international and domestic, venturing to all corners of the country.
Yes, Canada might have begun its World Cup co-hosting duties somewhat reticently; one by one, most of the six cities vying to stage games – Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa and Regina in the western, prairie province of Saskatchewan, all withdrew, citing high costs and limited stadium capacity per Fifa’s guidelines. This left Toronto and Vancouver as Canada’s only formal World Cup venues, which will host 13 games – of the tournament’s 104 – between them. “To some degree, [Canada] has not optimised this opportunity,” says David Soberman, a professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “But at least we haven’t missed it completely. And when something is scarce, you tend to maximise the return from the events that you do have.”
There is still good reason for Canada to embrace the World Cup. And the timing – as international travel to the US lags and security concerns in Mexico persist – couldn’t be better. “Most of the world has a pretty idealised vision of Canada,” says Ryan Abrams, publisher and co-founder of Darby magazine, which launched in 2019 to report on Canada’s ascendant football culture in print. “Any time that we have the opportunity to host big sporting events, it’s a platform to show off how diverse the country is. The excitement here is definitely growing.”
In the spirit of a football manager pacing the sideline, devising strategies to secure an 89th-minute winner, here are some last-minute plays that Toronto and Vancouver should make to ensure that Canada gets a kick out of this World Cup.
1.
Welcome your guests: Many cities hosting big events find themselves a little begrudging of the build-up. But, without fail, the magic of having the world roll into town is hard to resist. Embrace this as you welcome your guests. Offer directions, suggest places to go and things to do – because it is these warm interactions outside more formal itineraries that will likely outlast memories of the tournament proper. Say hello, shake hands, make your guests feel at home in your city. That shouldn’t be too difficult in Toronto and Vancouver because with big populations who were born elsewhere, much of the world is there already.
2.
Meet face to face: If you’re in business, big or small, set up meetings with your counterparts visiting for the World Cup – particularly those from the countries whose teams are playing in your city. Buoyed by their experience during the tournament, they might want to keep their ties to your city going long after the final whistle blows. Invite them to your shop or studio, or for a tipple at a favourite spot. Showcase the city’s commercial cache. You’d be surprised how a good venue and a bit of sport can smooth the edges of deal-making.
3.
Show off your city: Action should not be confined to the pitch. Big events such as these do best when the whole city is wrapped in the festivities, be it formally or otherwise. The Paris and London Olympics are prime examples of how lasting a place’s refreshed image can be in the minds of both guests and residents. Stage a concert, open an exhibition and enliven public spaces.
As kick-off approaches, Canada would be wise to remember that it is already in the spotlight for a slew of good reasons. Nevertheless, the world will be watching for the six-week span of the tournament. Canada must shake off its pre-match nerves and follow the lead of its prime minister by grabbing the World Cup with both hands.
