From Bjarke Ingels’ harbour-inspired Brick to Naoto Fukasawa’s craned-in Hiroshima, The Monocle Book of Designers on Sofas – available to buy now – reveals how 50 of the world’s top architects and designers sit, think and live.  Leading architects and designers share their relationships with their settee, unpacking what it says about them and their design sensibilities.

Though the US government crashed into a bruising shutdown at the end of its fiscal year on 30 September, one arm of Uncle Sam’s vast bureaucracy weathered the storm. The Army enlisted 62,050 recruits in the 12 months to September, its highest amount since 2019. That figure exceeded its 61,000-soldier target and marked the second year in a row in which the Army met its recruiting goal after falling short in 2022 and 2023.

Democratic nations are at a crossroads when it comes to staffing their armed forces, with Germany’s conscription debate taking centre stage in Europe. So what’s behind the success across the pond and why are more young Americans joining the Army than the Air Force, Navy or Marine Corps? The secret weapon is not, as some might think, the small but welcome wage bump but instead the Army’s advertising office.

The Army Enterprise Marketing Office (AEMO) is a creative agency born out of scandal. In 2019 the Department of Defense dissolved its marketing arm and cut ties with its old ad agency, McCann Worldgroup, after damning audits uncovered millions in wasted marketing dollars, alongside allegations of a romantic relationship between a US Army marketing director and a McCann staffer.

The Pentagon cleaned house, keeping only one employee from the disgraced department, and signed a 10-year, $4bn (€3.4bn) contract with ad agency DDB Chicago. DDB swiftly designated a group of specialists to work exclusively with the Army. The newly constituted AEMO set up shop a few blocks away in the global advertising hub of the Windy City and embarked on a novel hiring spree. First, it recruited seasoned marketing and advertising executives from the private sector. Second, it opened up some 50 internal jobs in marketing and behavioural economics – career paths that previously did not exist in the Army.

“We’re bringing best practices from the business world into the Army and operating more like a Fortune 500 company,” says deputy chief marketing officer Ignatios Mavridis, a former Johnson & Johnson associate marketing director with no prior military experience.

While DDB is plugged in to the latest trends in advertising and can keep abreast of what’s hot at the Cannes Lions, AEMO’s in-house team sits in on creative briefs to ensure that the Army experience is portrayed accurately and retains sole access to military data for prediction and modelling. With a central location in Chicago, the combined force of DDB and AEMO can easily reach bases around the world to gather footage, photos and interviews for campaigns, which tell the stories of real soldiers engaged in real-world training.

“We work closely with AEMO to make sure that we’re capturing the Army experience accurately within our concepts,” says Team DDB’s chief creative officer John Carstens. “Not just the technical aspects but the feeling of getting on the bus to basic training, jumping out of an aeroplane or creating the bonds that can only come from accomplishing difficult things together. So I’d say that we’re battle buddies, not just marketing partners.”

The unconventional new marketing agency did initially have its sceptics, however, including US Army Recruiting’s Colonel Che Arosemena. When the old method was disbanded, he worried that “we were pulling apart something relatively understood and operationalised and now we have to relearn”. But Team DDB and AEMO won him over, especially through their signature move thus far: a comprehensive brand refresh with a new logo and the relaunch of Be All You Can Be, a popular military-recruitment tagline from the 1980s and 1990s.

Army messaging has long been a bellwether of the national mood and the agency isn’t immune to this decade’s whipsaw changes in US public opinion and political directives. Its 2021 campaign, “The Calling”, with animated ads, including one featuring a soldier with two mothers, reflected Biden-era cultural sensitivities that some critics thought had run amok. Amid a conservative backlash reflected by the election of Donald Trump and a slew of executive orders on culture war issues, a new Army Special Forces ad this year, “Generation”, harkens to the Second World War and the Greatest Generation, while a regular Army ad, “Own the Night”, showcases soldiers’ night-vision capabilities with an emphasis on “lethality” – a favoured priority of defence secretary Pete Hegseth.

The Army is officially apolitical and Mavridis declined to say whether “The Calling” could run today but argued for a throughline between radically different messages airing just a few years apart. “Our campaigns are grounded in American ideals of opportunity, service, resilience and the belief that anyone can rise to their full potential,” he says. “Attracting qualified, motivated, talented prospects is the driving force behind all our campaigns.”

Col Arosemena knows the value of a resonant campaign. Two decades ago, as a young captain recruiting in Bronx secondary schools during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (he served multiple deployments in both), he relied on Yo Soy El Army, a Spanish-language campaign designed to connect with New York’s Latino communities.

“Those marketing materials changed the narrative and started to open some doors for us,” he tells Monocle. It’s a lesson that he now passes on to today’s recruiters, urging them to treat the Army’s sales pitch as strategically as any field manoeuvre. “If the recruiting force doesn’t understand what the marketing capability is, they’ll be less effective in the field.”

As Washington remains mired in partisan deadlock, the Army’s marketing revolution stands out as one of the few government success stories – a reminder that even the most traditional institutions can rebrand themselves when they start thinking like a business and, crucially, when they remember how to tell a good story.

—

United Airlines has invited travellers to “fly the friendly skies” since the 1960s but US airspace has been anything but amicable of late. The record-breaking 37-day-and-counting federal government shutdown has had many casualties, with the some 13,000 air-traffic controllers who have gone without pay among the most critical. The nation’s aviation safety specialists are at breaking point: nearly 80 per cent of controllers were absent at facilities in the New York area on Friday and several US airports issued ground stops over the weekend. For frequent flyers, the Misery Map – a live visualisation of flight delays – has become a more compulsive news source than any social-media platform. 

In a continent-sized country where flying remains one of the only viable ways to connect far-flung cities, air-travel disruptions might force Democrats and Republicans to make a deal – as they did during the last government shutdown that ended in January 2019. But in the haste to resume normal operations, both parties are missing an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how air-traffic control is run.

This weekend I witnessed how things could be done differently while on a visit to Olympic National Park in Washington. National parks have been severely affected by the shutdown, with more than half of staff furloughed, impacting guided tours, rubbish collections, road maintenance and more. While I didn’t meet any mounted park rangers, I was able to soak in a hot spring and dine fireside in a handsome lodge. The difference? The facilities are privately run and not reliant on federal funding. 

With an increasingly erratic federal government, a similar model would make sense in aviation. Some democracies – including Canada, Switzerland and the UK – already use a mix of not-for-profit and state-owned enterprises to operate their air-traffic control systems. Airlines and travellers pay for the service, which is heavily regulated and closely monitored to ensure that profit motives don’t trump the critical life-safety function of air-traffic control. With a steady flow of income, ageing systems can quickly be upgraded and key staff kept on the payroll. 

Like too many reasonable ideas these days, however, this one is unlikely to get a hearing on Capitol Hill. The US transport secretary, Sean Duffy, is pursuing a $12.5bn (€10.86bn) plan that involves replacing systems running on old technology such as floppy disks. Unfortunately, he works for an administration that has shown little appetite for big-ticket spending on civilian infrastructure. 

It’s a shame because US airports are finally showing glimmers of hope. While they have long lagged behind the service provided by hubs in Singapore, Tokyo or Dubai, that could soon change. New York’s LaGuardia – once derided by Joe Biden as “third-world” – finally saw its overhaul completed last year. Two of the metropolitan area’s other major aviation hubs, JFK and Newark, are also being given a thorough revamp. Portland just won a global design award. New terminals are under way everywhere from Denver and Seattle to Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. With the football World Cup next year and the Olympics in 2028, airport authorities, which are predominantly run by local and state governments, are working hard to make a better first impression on the ground. If only the federal government in charge of the skies could do the same.

Gregory Scruggs is Monocle’s Seattle correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. Further reading? Here’s why US national parks are a soft-power icon targeted by the White House. Plus: is the great American roadtrip back and on rails?

Free childcare, free bus services, rent freezes on stabilised apartments and city-owned grocery stores – these are Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani’s signature proposals in the 4 November mayoral election. To anyone living in a Western European state, the self-professed democratic-socalist’s ideas probably sound entirely reasonable. But to many Americans, they’re wildly ambitious – radical, even. It’s easy to forget when you’re outside the country that in the US, the welfare state barely exists, and anything “free” is seen as borderline communist.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t? New York is arguably the most expensive city in the country. Groceries are exorbitant (tariffs have certainly not helped) and rents are spiralling. The median rent in Manhattan hit $4,700 (€4,084) in July – up 9.3 per cent from last year. Apartment hunting has become warfare. Lines for places that are even remotely affordable snake around the block and bidding wars have become the norm. Without getting into the nitty gritty of how Mamdani plans to pay for it all, you can’t deny how refreshing it is to hear someone rally for an improved quality of life. 

It’s hard to picture a New York where everything isn’t outrageously priced. But imagine a city where people can actually afford to stay in their homes, where groceries don’t cost as much as eating out and where schools have more green spaces. Somewhere that daily life is less defined by economic anxiety.

Love him or loathe him, Mamdani is proposing some of the most progressive ideas the city’s seen in decades, in a country that appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Many New Yorkers find his campaign energising; others, understandably, are skeptical (not least because it sounds very expensive). The idea of a democratic socialist leading the financial capital of the US is, to some, terrifying. Critics worry that aggressive rent freezes will discourage new housing supply and that tax hikes will chase away businesses or high-earning residents. But the reality is also that inequality in the city is deepening and working-class families are being squeezed out. Something has to shift. 

Mamdani isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel: former mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio pushed for free bus routes and more affordable housing. As for the idea of city-owned grocery stores (which would mean one subsidised shop in each of New York’s five boroughs), it hardly amounts to replacing Whole Foods. Europe shows that welfare programmes don’t turn a place communist. If Mamdani manages to pull even part of his agenda off, it would be transformative; not just for his city, but the entire US. He might be tackling uniquely New York problems, but if a metropolis of over eight million people proves that free buses, stabilised rent and subsidised childcare can work in an American context, it could provide a template for the rest of the nation, while reviving the Democratic Party. 

I’m generally averse to recommendation lists. Every city has been Google Doc’d and mapped to death, especially Tokyo. And yet there’s one longtime Monocle favourite where I always send visitors: Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama, better known as T-Site. Not only is this a design pilgrimage – Klein Dytham’s three-pavilion architecture is handsome – but it makes a convincing argument for what bookshops should be. The space itself tells you everything. There are generous proportions and sight lines that encourage wandering. An afternoon here doesn’t require purchasing anything. Lingering is the point.
 
Walk into any section and the depth is beyond considered; it’s obsessive. Not twelve books on Japanese ceramics but first editions, contemporary practitioners, historical surveys, exhibition catalogues and the design magazine profiling a specialised kiln town. Architecture doesn’t end at Tadao Ando monographs and cycling doesn’t stop at Tour de France photography: every interest gets treated with the sincerity of a specialist shop.

The magazine walls are a telling sign. Hundreds of titles serving micro-interests that elsewhere exist only as newsletters or Reddit threads. There are publications devoted to specific prefectures, particular menswear styles, individual craft traditions, niche sports and specific schools of graphic design. These survive in print because Japan still has an appetite for focused cultural production. There are razor-sharp editorial points of view, supported by actual advertising markets. Essentially, the internet hasn’t atomised everything.
 
Then there’s Anjin, the café. First editions are shelved as wall décor and there’s museum-quality mid-century furniture that you’re meant to use and sink into. It’s a common space, open to anyone, that depends entirely on this rare quality of ambient respect. There are no ropes, no defensive design, no “please don’t touch” placards. Just an expectation that people will behave properly – as the architects, designers and curators intended. Most Western cities would require guards or else it would be vandalised within a week. Here it simply exists, beautiful and accessible.

T-Site also stays fresh through rotating exhibitions and thematic collaborations. A corner featuring Scandinavian design some months ago now pivots to Japanese folk crafts. The space curates like museums do collections, understanding that a bookshop isn’t a fixed repository but an ongoing showcase.

Most such shops optimised themselves into irrelevance – bestseller tables, Moleskine notebooks, corporate sameness. T-Site works because it takes seriously every aspect of what a bookshop can be. Transactional, yes, but also communal, curatorial, atmospheric and aspirational. It’s a place reflecting the density of urban interests rather than flattening everything to algorithmic popularity.
 
Here’s why it matters: most bookshops died because they stopped being interesting, not because people stopped wanting them. T-Site should be the standard.
 
Colin Nagy is a Los Angeles-based writer and strategist. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. And if you’re after extra tip-offs in Tokyo, take a look at our City Guide.

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The vice-presidency of the United States is one of the strangest jobs in global politics. The holder of the office is all at once extremely close to awesome power, yet miles away from any power at all. So long as the occupant of the White House stays healthy and lucky, the vice-president is usually a ceremonial eunuch, sent on diplomatic visits to ghastly places that the president can’t be bothered with, engaged to speak at state fairs teeming with uncomprehending riff-raff or confined to their opulent quarters, wistfully reading biographies of John Wilkes Booth.

Many who have done the job have hated it. John Adams, the very first vice-president, griped that “my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” John Nance Garner, vice-president to Franklin D Roosevelt, legendarily growled that the position was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”; he might not actually have said “spit”. Thomas Marshall, vice-president to Woodrow Wilson, is credited with a joke about two brothers, one who ran away to sea, one who became vice-president, and from neither of whom was any more heard.

But Richard Bruce Cheney, who died today at the age of 84, was never going to be one of those vice-presidents. He was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on 30 January 1941 and raised substantially in Casper, Wyoming. He was a bright but wayward young man – smart enough to get into Yale, not disciplined enough to stay there and a repeat offender of traffic violations. He was, like many middle-class young American men, a serial dodger of the Vietnam draft – in his case by being an apparently perpetual student, then a married man before 26 and then a father. It was waspishly noted that his first daughter, Elizabeth, later a politician herself, was born nine months and two days after the draft was extended to married men without children.

Cheney’s ascent of the political greasy pole began properly in 1969. Having finally completed his political-science studies, he became an intern to Wisconsin’s Republican congressman William Steiger. Shortly afterwards, he began making himself useful to former Illinois congressman Donald Rumsfeld, the then-counselor to president Richard M Nixon.

Cheney acquired a reputation as an efficient functionary and survived his service in Nixon’s administration unscathed by its implosion following the Watergate scandal – so did his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, who had been serving as ambassador to Nato in Brussels. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, engaged Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff with Cheney as his deputy. When Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defence, Cheney inherited the chief of staff’s job – gatekeeper to the Oval Office.

Cheney did not keep it long. Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter but Cheney was not done with politics. In 1978 he won Wyoming’s only seat in the House of Representatives. He was re-elected five times and rose to become House minority whip and chair of the House Republican conference. In 1989, president George HW Bush named him secretary of defence, in which role Cheney oversaw the US invasion of Panama in late 1989 and the US-led eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in early 1991.

Cheney’s progress in politics was interrupted by Bush’s loss of the 1992 presidential election. There was some vague talk of Cheney seeking the Republican nomination himself someday but three key factors always weighed against it. His health was rickety: he suffered recurrent heart attacks from his late thirties onwards; he would have a heart transplant in 2012. He was protective of his second daughter, Mary, a gay woman whose private life would have become public. And he was a notably dismal public speaker.

Cheney spent much of the 1990s making money, as CEO of the colossal energy-services multinational Halliburton. He was summoned back to public office by Texas governor George W Bush, seeking to bolster his own tilt at the presidency by putting an experienced heavyweight on the ticket. If Cheney, once Bush’s narrow victory was confirmed, had doubts about what he might make of the vice-presidency, events – specifically, the events of September 11, 2001 – clarified matters for him.

Significantly at Cheney’s urging, Bush presented the pair of them to the world – to the Middle East especially – as bad cop and worse cop. While Bush gave the jut-jawed speeches, Cheney seethed in an assortment of bunkers, scheming to vanquish enemies real, potential and altogether imaginary. He was a significant architect of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, amplifying intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which was widely believed dubious at the time and eventually proved entirely bogus. He was an aggressive enthusiast of the brutal – and debatably effective – tactics that became known by such sinister euphemisms as “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition”.

Cheney’s vice-presidency was a rebuke to that hefty lexicon of jokes about the impotence of the office: he made himself the most powerful person ever to inhabit it and, for the first eight years of the 21st century, one of the most powerful people on Earth. It is arguable that some of what he did with that power, even if furtively and unaccountably, made his fellow citizens safer but that presents the difficulty of measuring terror attacks that never happened. It is certain, however, that Dick Cheney played a key role in unleashing events that grievously and lastingly damaged America’s reputation and moral authority. He left office with an approval rating among his fellow Americans of 13 percent, probably not all that far in front of Osama bin Laden.

There are few cultural projects that have so perfectly captured both a nation’s ambition and its inertia as the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Two decades in the making, more than $1bn (€870m) spent and several false starts later, the colossal complex at Giza has finally opened its doors, a stone’s throw from the pyramids and the Cairo ring road. The story, like the building, is monumental. Yet, as the first visitors wander through its marble-bright atriums and past the 3,200-year-old Ramses II statue, it’s worth asking: what does Egypt really want this museum to say? 

From its conception in the early 1990s, the GEM was always about more than archaeology. It was a gesture of modern nationhood, Egypt announcing itself as a cultural superpower with institutions capable of rivalling the Louvre, the British Museum or the Smithsonian. But the museum’s journey tells a more complicated story. Construction began in 2005, stalled after the Arab Spring, was revived with loans from Japan, then delayed again by the coronavirus pandemic. In many ways, the museum became a metaphor for modern Egypt: heavy with history, halted by politics and ultimately propelled forward by the stubborn belief that grandeur can substitute for good governance.

Designed by Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects, the building is suitably theatrical. Its vast triangular façade of alabaster and glass tilts toward the pyramids in a silent architectural dialogue with the ancient world. Inside, a grand staircase ascends through a procession of statues, sarcophagi and stelae. There is a sense of awe leading up to the full Tutankhamun collection (shown together for the first time). Though breathtaking, it also feels carefully stage-managed. Is this a museum or a national theatre? 

The guest list for the grand opening this weekend underscored this point. Egypt invited presidents, kings and crown princes from Europe and the Arab world. There were red carpets, drone shows and speeches about civilisation’s cradle reawakening. The message was not subtle: Egypt is back on the global stage. Yet such pageantry hints at a quiet insecurity. After all, Cairo’s other great museum, the dusty, beloved Tahrir building, told its story without ceremony or LED screens. This new iteration feels like it’s trying to prove something. 

Beyond the symbolism, the GEM forms part of a vast redevelopment of the Giza plateau with new roads, hotels, a planned airport and even manicured parks where there were once chaotic streets. Tourism accounts for about 12 per cent of Egypt’s GDP and the government hopes that the museum will boost arrivals by up to 20 per cent. It’s a tall order in a global economy that’s wobbling, with Egypt grappling with debt, inflation and youth unemployment. But the museum offers a different kind of investment: narrative. It allows Cairo to reframe the conversation from crisis to civilisation, from IMF loans to the legacy of the pharaohs. Indeed, who is this museum for? The ticket prices will certainly deter many Egyptians and the scale of the site feels designed for international tour groups rather than locals on an afternoon outing. This is spectacle as soft power. 

In a country where history is counted in millennia, the opening of a new museum should perhaps be taken with a pinch of desert salt. The GEM is an extraordinary achievement, yes, but it’s also a reminder that modern Egypt is still negotiating its relationship with the recent past. Whether it becomes a living cultural institution or another monument to ambition will depend on what happens when the world’s cameras leave and the red carpets are rolled away. Until then, Egypt’s newest wonder will have to wait to see if the 20-year process was worth it. 

Inzamam Rashid is Monocle’s Gulf correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. Further reading? We caught up with Shirin Frangoul-Brückner, the CEO of Stuttgart-based design studio Atelier Brückner, who designed the galleries, Grand Staircase and atrium for the Grand Egyptian Museum. Read our conversation here.

Dubai Design Week 2025, which begins today and runs until Sunday in Dubai Design District (D3), arrives at a moment when the city’s design ambitions are no longer being underestimated. What began a decade ago as a fledgling regional showcase has matured into one of the most credible stops on the global design calendar; an event that now attracts serious attention from curators, critics and creative directors who once confined their itineraries to Milan or London.

For this year’s edition, the festival’s 11th, international heavyweights such as Kartell, Vitra, and Roche Bobois sit comfortably alongside an increasingly self-assured roster of regional voices. The tone is confident and cosmopolitan – this is not a week for novelties or spectacle but for substance and dialogue. As the director of Dubai Design Week, Natasha Carella, explains, “Our approach is guided by a commitment to high-quality, original design that contributes meaningfully to the global discourse.” That philosophy is visible across the programme, from material-driven experimentation to urban commissions that rethink how public space can foster connection.

Across D3’s courtyards and waterfront terraces, there’s a hum of anticipation. Designers from Sao Paulo to Seoul are setting up installations alongside collectives from Manama and Muscat. The Abwab pavilion, curated around the theme “In the Details”, is among the standouts: Bahrain’s Maraj Studio has woven a delicate, embroidered mesh inspired by the thob al nashil national dress to explain the fragile ecology of Nabih Saleh Island – a poetic intersection of craft and environmental storytelling.

Carella has resisted turning the festival into a single-theme spectacle. Instead, she’s building a framework where design is treated as a civic act as much as a creative one. “We look at design not only as a practice of innovation,” she says, “but as a social connector.” That ambition translates into the details: from low-carbon DuneCrete structures by ARDH Collective to collaborations between Japanese architects Nikken Sekkei and Emirati woodworkers, the work on display emphasises material intelligence and dialogue between cultures.

For observers, the significance of Dubai Design Week lies less in scale than in perspective. It reflects a city that has invested heavily in cultural infrastructure, museums, architecture schools, and public-art initiatives and is now seeing the dividends. The result is a festival that’s as much about exchange as exhibition – a meeting point between emerging nations and established design capitals, between institutional might and independent experimentation.

The first time I ate the smoked-eel sandwich at Quo Vadis I was alone and new to Soho. Tangy pink onions. The sharp slap of horseradish. And a buttery crunch, the kind that only exists when bread has been toasted in fat by a chef. You can order it late into the night and it pairs wonderfully with a martini. 

The dish was created by Quo Vadis’s chef proprietor, Jeremy Lee, a man so jolly that one bite can summon him like a genie to greet you at your table. It’s said that on one unremarkable day in the mid-1990s, Lee had “a load of smoked eel and Poilâne sourdough to use up” and, well, that’s the whole story. Born out of thrift, perfected by repetition and still presented with panache, that sandwich has been on my mind since 2013, and Lee’s menus for some 30-odd years. First at Blueprint Café, the restaurant that he ran at the Design Museum, and now at Quo Vadis.

But the smoked-eel sandwich is a symbol of a greater culinary question: in an industry with a novelty addiction, how do we celebrate the magic of what’s already here? Getting people into new restaurants is easy: algorithms reward it, the media ranks it, diners chase it. The refrain of “Have you been to…?”is a daily dinin my industry. Long-established restaurants are expected to reinvent themselves to stay relevant because diners are guilty of treating old favourites like old lovers: fondly remembered, rarely visited. 

And yet, many of London’s most beloved restaurants and dishes aren’t new at all. The steak haché at Brasserie Zédel, the fish-sauce chilli wings at Smoking Goat, the curry udon at Koya – none of them have really changed. They have simply remained excellent. Returning to them is akin to revisiting a favourite book: taking pleasure in familiar beats or perhaps introducing someone to them. 
 
What if the shortcut to joy isn’t constant change but repetition? Dishes needn’t be about surprise so much as return. The smoked-eel sandwich hasn’t changed much since the 1990s and nor should it. Its power lies in its delicious consistency: the joy of knowing exactly what’s coming and being transported back to that first bite. Of course, restaurants must evolve, whether through sustainability, provenance or sheer creativity. But there’s a difference between evolution and panic reinvention. Not everything has to be a debut.

Perhaps the trick – for diners and creators alike – is to resist the reflex to chase the new for its own sake. To be confident and let the classics shine. Because sometimes, what we need isn’t the next big thing but the same crunchy, horseradish-laced sandwich that has been waiting at the bar all along. Martini in company. As perfect as ever.

Emily Bryce–Perkins is a London-based writer. In London and in need of a few suggestions? Be sure to consult Monocle’s City Guide. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

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Were school buses ever part of your academic routine? Were you packed off to the end of the driveway with your lunch, books, overstuffed pencil case and sports gear in your backpack to be picked up by a functional vehicle (in my case yellow) rammed with schoolmates of varying ages and occasionally a monitor to keep things in check? Did you have a friend who saved you a seat? Were you a loner who sat at the front? And did you make faces at the drivers when you pulled up at stoplights? Or perhaps you were so bold as to press your bum up against the window? I believe that might have been called a “pressed ham”. I didn’t have many years of school buses but I look back at those chilly mornings in Hudson, Quebec, with a certain fondness as the 20-minute circuit to get to campus created a certain camaraderie that wouldn’t have happened if we’d all been shuttled by our parents. 

Four decades on, and it feels a bit the same when I fly in and out of Zürich on home carrier, Swiss. With an out-of-proportion airport compared to its population (Zürich proper has around 500,000 inhabitants), it’s perhaps the best-served city in the world when it comes to both short and long-haul connections – yet it also remains familiar and cosy. Swiss isn’t Air France or Cathay Pacific when it comes to the size of its long-haul fleet but with 30-odd Airbuses and Boeings (and 10 new A350-900s inbound) it does a good job of touching down in most of the places that I need to go. 

North America is best served, there’s a highly profitable route to São Paulo that some days connects on to Buenos Aires and I mostly fly its routes to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. I’ve been doing these jaunts for quite a while now and it’s almost a given that I’ll be familiar with at least two crew members in the cabin, will have met the captain a couple of times and likely know one or two passengers seated nearby. This is when one of their Boeing 777s starts to feel a bit like a school bus for grown-ups. 

On my return from Tokyo Narita the other day, one of the Japanese crew came by toward the end of the flight, clutching a crisply folded shopping bag from Books Kinokuniya and a black pen. She introduced herself as Maya-san and said that she was a fan of not just Monocle but my Monocle on Sunday radio show. “When we couldn’t fly during the pandemic, your show was my connection to Switzerland and the world,” she explained. “I would be most honoured if you signed my copy of the magazine.” There are many perks that come with this job but a ‘Maya moment’ ranks at the top when you realise that all of the paper, ink and airtime does have a proper point of connection with exactly the kind of people we all imagine (hope!) that we’re writing and producing for. 

As the flight was on a Saturday, Maya showed up the following morning to watch the show live from our studio at Dufourstrasse in Zürich, and across the two hours also met other contributors, readers and listeners. Yesterday, I boarded the LX180 to Bangkok and, as I was settling in, a gentleman across the cabin nodded and waved. A regular at Dufourstrasse, he was on his way to meet his partner in the Thai capital and as drinks were poured and orders taken the captain came round to introduce himself and discuss the route, the jetstream over the Himalayas and the belly full of cargo. “Watches heading to boutiques in Bangkok?” I asked. “I couldn’t possibly say,” he winked. At that point, the café regular popped over to show me a picture of a vehicle on his phone. “It’s a 1950s Ferrari and I need to convince the other half that it’s what we need. What do you think?” he asked. In an instant I was back on the school bus in Hudson, except that I would have been looking at a Corgi Toys catalogue with my friend Peter and he would have been showing me the cars that he was hoping Santa would bring for Christmas. “You need to convince her that the car is a must,” I said. “And I’ll happily assist when we get to Bangkok, if a drink is required.” 

Brands can get carried away with fancy new cabins, destinations and menus but an Airbus is still an Airbus, a Boeing a Boeing. Leadership needs to remember that it is people, both staff and passengers, that define a brand and cosy proportions are far better than the impersonal and oversized.

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