Stockholm is easy to explore, especially because you can traverse its islands on foot – something that I highly recommend to all first-time visitors to the archipelago. Though I’ve spent decades living abroad, I’ll never tire of my hometown’s natural beauty, from the beaches hidden along the shoreline of Lake Mälaren to the city’s lush parks that turn into winter wonderlands during the colder months. Even if you don’t like snow and ice, there’s many a cosy café to enjoy a coffee and cinnamon bun.

Like many other big cities, the Swedish capital faced a spike in rental prices and crime in the years following the coronavirus pandemic. However, Stockholm is now back on its pre-pandemic trajectory, reclaiming its position as a premier Nordic destination with a truly international outlook.

Indeed, you cannot help but notice a sense of liveliness about the place. Gone are the shuttered Sundays when street life petered out early in the afternoon. Instead, as you’ll find in Monocle’s City Guide to Stockholm, the culinary scene and retail landscape are full of verve and energy. The city’s restaurants and wine bars rival the best on the continent and traditional shops, including old-school department stores and heritage ceramicists, can be found alongside envelope-pushing fashion and design labels. Add to that a cultural scene that’s brimming with established venues, such as the Nationalmuseum, as well as up-and-coming galleries promoting emerging young talent. 

While the city renews popular attractions and urban projects, including the harbour on the island of Södermalm and an ambitious overhaul of the city centre that connects to the Old Town, it still has a sense of fierce independence. So pack your bags – remember to bring some good footwear and a sweater even when travelling at the height of summer – and make tracks to our recommended nooks.

Madrid’s having a bit of a week. Multiple metro stations are closing as a precaution. Government bureaucrats have been ordered to work remotely. Meanwhile, multitudes of devout fans cram streets, squares and stadia – all for vastly different motives. If you’re a Madrileño pedestrian then be sure to wave at the many police-escorted motorcades stopping traffic this week because it could potentially be carrying the Pope Leo XIV, Bad Bunny or King Felipe IV, who is currently hosting the Prince of Monaco. Amid so many disparate spectacles and visiting dignitaries, the city’s infrastructure is being tested but such dynamism means that the city has never felt so alive. 

I’ve been hearing pundits push the line that “Madrid is the new Miami” for as long as I can remember. While no one has ever properly explained what that really means, the past weekend – and the days to come – proffer a pretty compelling argument. You only have to open your ears to the Latino melodies tickling the air or look out for the plaza-filling political rallies, football fans at fever pitch and light sprinkle of religious zeal. 

Last weekend was the first major stress test. More than 300,000 eligible Colombian voters living in Spain were called to the capital to vote in their home country’s first round of presidential elections. That same Sunday, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny – the most streamed male artist in Spotify’s history – kicked off his 10-concert residency at the Metropolitano Stadium. Performing to around 50,000 fanáticos a night until 15 June, gross revenue from the marathon musical event’s ticket sales is expected to eclipse €75m. Mobilising some half a million concertgoers is fuelling a hospitality spending windfall across the city. Hostelería Madrid estimates that €28m will be spent at restaurants, bars and venues, many of which are hastily programming Latino flavours and flow-on celebrations. We all know how much Madrid loves an afterparty.

There are two notable new trends on show, too. The first points to the way savvy artists are anchoring their extravaganzas in reliable, stable and predictable places, programming extended concert series as opposed to a constant, no doubt exhausting, caravan of one-off shows. Just last year Bad Bunny performed a sold-out 31-concert residency in Puerto Rico that boosted the island economy by an estimated $700m (€600m). In 2024, Colombian superstar Karol G also sold out four successive shows in the Spanish capital. For a city that was once left out of international tour calendars due to inadequate venues, Madrid is fast cementing itself as a leading hub for Latin music in Europe.

Despite the fast-tempo spirit spreading through the streets, parts of the city are also preparing for a standstill. Fresh from publishing his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which takes a spiritual stand against AI and drew comparisons to the “Butlerian Jihad” against thinking machines in sci-fi novel Dune, the Pontiff touches down in Madrid this Saturday for three full days of papal programming. 

On the same Sunday, when thousands will be rollicking their hips to reggaeton (at the Metropolitano Stadium), the Pope will preside over a mass expected to draw some 1.5 million devotees to the Plaza de Cibeles and surrounding streets. Two mighty idols holding court to two mightily different but equally enraptured crowds. 

On Monday the Pope will attend the Bernabéu Stadium for a gala-like event that seems to have everyone scrambling for a sacred ticket. The resulting security operation is so stringent that Real Madrid CF’s snap elections, in which some 95,000 members will vote on whether to continue with the tenure of their club’s bombastic president, has had to be relocated from the team’s home ground to the Valdebebas training facility on the city’s outskirts.

The Pope’s visit is also big business. Figures from The Spanish Episcopal Conference put the trip’s cost at around €15m. With the additional public funding, sponsorship deals, ticket sales and private benefactors willing to pay top dollar for a private visit (potentially in excess of €1m per person according to El País), co-ordinators expect the Pope’s terse residency to accrue around €100m. Bad Bunny should be so lucky.

But it’s not just Madrid’s high-end hotels raking in the rewards. With a citywide stock of around 75,000 hotel rooms, the broad appeal of multiple, massive events has been a boon for bookings across the spectrum. “It’s unusual for two events capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands of people to coincide in the same city and on practically the same dates,” says Kiko Requena, CMO of Room Urban Hostels. The Spanish hotel group’s three Madrid locations have seen a 73 per cent, 86 per cent and 103 per cent uptick in reservations on the year previous. “We’re seeing how completely different types of travellers are competing to stay in the same areas of Madrid, something that rarely happens with such intensity.”

While economic estimates help provide pithy snapshots of the predicted scale, Madrid’s calendar-packed week isn’t all about the money. The still-unfolding story is one of conviviality, where all shades of the faithful can celebrate at the same time and perhaps find themselves happily fused. That’s because, in a city such as Madrid, a devout Catholic and a rip-roaring reggaetonero needn’t be mutually exclusive. I’ve lived in Madrid long enough to remember the night that Spain’s UEFA Euro 2012 victory coincided with the capital’s massive Pride celebrations. Not only were the major Pride parties broadcasting the big game on giant screens above the dancefloor but revellers later spilled into the streets to join the celebrations of elated football fans. 

Good cities make room for everyone. They also allow space for myriad celebrations and let people thrive somewhere in the fuzzy middle. If you’re passing through a very Miami-flavoured Madrid this week, we hope to see you at one – or two, or three – of our fair city’s panoply of fun, fervour and fiestas.

Among all the events on the calendar of diplomatic and security conferences, the Black Sea Security Forum (BSSF) in Odesa can claim that it is not discussing these matters in the abstract. The host city is still under frequent Russian air attack: in the days leading up to this year’s forum, at least one person was killed and several more injured by Russian strikes on various targets in the city, while three foreign ships were hit by Russian drones as they attempted to come and go from Odesa’s port. The night after the event, five people were injured in another Russian air raid.

But the show – held largely inside Odesa’s magnificent opera house – went on. “We’ve already proved that such big events can happen in Odesa,” says Oleksiy Goncharenko, the Ukrainian MP who launched the BSSF with British peer Lord Michael Ashcroft in 2024. “We are ambitious. We want to make this a great tradition, and we want to show that Odesa is rethinking itself and becoming the second centre of Ukraine. Yes, Ukraine has one capital but a serious country should have several centres of gravity – and Odesa today is probably the most important.”

There are obvious logistical difficulties with convening the present an event in such circumstances. It is not currently possible to fly to Odesa, so guests arrive by road or rail from elsewhere in Ukraine or – like this reporter – by road from Chisinau, in neighbouring Moldova, about four or five hours away, depending on the queues at the border. The arguable upside of this is that everybody who attends the Black Sea Security Forum is someone who really wants to be there. This year’s headliners included several other Ukrainian MPs – mostly, like Goncharenko, from opposition parties – as well as former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, Georgia’s fifth president, Salome Zourabichvili, a handful of US congresspeople, and Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran, who is currently pitching for the overthrow of the regime that overthrew his father. 

“I believe in Ukraine’s sovereignty and freedom,” says US senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, when asked why he finds himself waiting out an air-raid alert in a hotel shelter. “But it’s really symbolic of where the world is going to go. If Ukraine falls to the aggression of Russia, it’s going to give a lesson not just to Russia but to other countries about what they can and can’t get away with.”

This has been true for a little over four years. But what is different this year – certainly when measured against last year’s Black Sea Security Forum, which Monocle also attended – is a cautious but unmistakable optimism, not only that Ukraine is at the very least holding its own on the battlefield but also that it is beginning to project itself elsewhere as an increasingly serious global power. The lessons that Ukraine has been compelled to learn the hard way turn out to have exportable applications. 

This is most obviously the case with battlefield technology. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE all hastened to conclude defence and security arrangements with Ukraine when they found themselves on the receiving end of modern drone warfare earlier this year. The BSSF is accordingly abuzz with representatives from domestic and foreign drone start-ups, for whom Ukraine’s armed forces are grateful test pilots. But to cite just one other – though grimly related – example, Ukraine also now finds itself a world leader in addressing the injuries, both physical and psychological, caused by 21st-century warfare.

“At the beginning we saw that limb reconstruction and prosthetics were going to be very needed,” says Olga Rudnieva, CEO of Superhumans, a Ukrainian NGO offering free rehabilitation services to severely wounded soldiers and civilians. “But what you couldn’t have predicted then was the need for facial reconstructions. We mostly see drone injuries, which are usually in the upper parts of the body. So the idea now is to create a full ecosystem where the patient gets everything: psychological support, prosthetics, surgical support and rehabilitation. We also added social reintegration, helping our patients to find new roles in life, because it’s a pity if they are sitting at home without having a reason to leave their apartment.”

It is difficult to think of a punishment to visit upon Vladimir Putin that might be remotely commensurate with the horrors that his absurd war has inflicted on Ukraine. It would be the merest karmic justice if the inadvertent legacy of his revanchist delusions proves to be turning Russia’s neighbour into something like the leader of the free world.

“For the first three years of the war, we were coming to other countries only with our problems,” says Hanna Shelest of foreign-policy think-tank Ukrainian Prism. “Today we’re coming with solutions. Maritime security, you’re welcome, food security, you’re welcome. Now it’s drone diplomacy. That’s our expertise, that’s our technology. It’s our time to help you.”

Finland is an unlikely supplier of top talent for the fashion industry. The city’s unofficial fashion week, Fashion in Helsinki, ended this weekend and has emerged as an important stop for recruiters and journalists. “I am here to look for up-and-coming talent from Finland,” says Alexis Djouahra, director of communications for Villa Noailles, a French arts centre and organiser of the Hyères International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories. Monocle meets Djouahra on the verdant Seurasaari island, where models strut alfresco in a scene far removed from the busy runways of Milan and Paris. “Finnish designers do really well in our competitions and have won it many times,” he adds.  

Though the country doesn’t shout about its fashion credentials, Finnish designers are shaping the creative direction of the world’s top luxury brands. “There are currently about 50 Finns employed by design teams at major European houses,” Jani Niipola, journalist and former executive director of Fashion Finland, tells Monocle. 

Central to the country’s reputation are Aalto University’s fashion and textiles degree programmes, which are often rated among the best in the world. “Unlike many courses elsewhere, Aalto combines textiles, garment construction and fashion design into the same curriculum,” says textile-design professor Maarit Salolainen. Students are taught to work with industrial weaving looms and knitting machines, as well as learn about fabric development, pattern cutting and garment construction. The emphasis is on understanding how materials behave and how clothes are made. It is this holistic approach that fashion houses appreciate and why brands such as Chanel choose to mentor the school’s students.

Monocle meets one of the university’s former pupils, fashion and print designer Tuuli-Tytti Koivula, in Helsinki. She graduated from Aalto in 2023 and has already worked at the likes of Raf Simons, Courrèges and Prada. At Prada, she was part of the print and fabric team, where she earned praise for her experimental take on prints and textures. “I soon realised that my technical skills were much broader than most other young designers,” she says. “At many fashion schools, students specialise early in areas such as knitwear or print design. At Aalto, students were expected to learn it all.” This material knowledge and curiosity was evident at Aalto’s Näytös26 fashion show and its accompanying exhibition, where students experimented with transparent horse leather, grew their own flaxseed for linen and exhibited age-old weaving techniques. 

But the country’s young talent has more than just know-how. “Finnish designers are often identifiable through their silhouettes, layering and use of materials,” says Djouahra. “[Their work] is artistic instead of commercial and they all have something to say – something to represent. It’s very different.” 

The lack of a mass luxury-fashion industry frees Helsinki designers from strict commercial constraints, allowing them to prioritise pure artistic expression. Instead of buying ready-made luxury components, students have to invent them. And while much of this talent leaves the capital for opportunities in bigger cities, fashion circles are increasingly confident of its sartorial output. So, if you’re after skilled designers with a strong point of view and original ideas, perhaps it’s worth looking beyond Paris. 

Every few days or so, I will take a break from work and catch up on the world’s skies. Rather than train my eyes upward, I’ll open Flightradar24, a popular service for tracking anything that humans put into the air. The site is used by everyone from journalists monitoring the airborne movements of deposed potentates to deskbound workers looking for a connection to the outside world. It relies largely on Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), a satellite-based technology that provides faster, more accurate speed and location data than radar. 

The more you look, the more you will begin to see. While scanning Shasta Lake in California, I saw a curious cluster of helicopters. “Power line inspections,” says Ian Petchenik, Flightradar24’s director of communications. “Any time you see a big cut in the forest it’s power lines.” 

There is lots to discover in the sky, if you know where – and how – to look. “I’ve been doing this for more than a decade now,” says Petchenik, “and I’ve learned so much about the world just by clicking on a random thing on the map and being like, ‘What’s that?’”

In my time looking screenward and upward, here are a few things that have caught my eye:

1.
The jet stream. One of the site’s most striking patterns is the prominent flow of aircraft between the US and Europe, a big arcing band with its apex near Greenland. Those flights are following the North Atlantic Tracks, a kind of highway in the sky that helps organise things when transatlantic flights slip out of the watchful eye of air-traffic control radar. The tracks are modified twice per day (by Canada’s Gander Control Center and Ireland’s Shanwick Control Center) to make optimal use of the jet stream – that atmospheric current blowing from west to east. The stream is stronger at night, which is one reason why so many Europe-bound US flights are red-eyes.

2.
The most tracked. The pop charts of Flightradar24. Military flights tend to do well, as does anything big, such as the Airbus Beluga cargo plane or Antonov’s massive AN-225, when it was still in use. A plane that has declared an in-flight emergency, or a “Squawk”, gets clicks, as do celebrities of all stripes flying around in private jets. The most-tracked flight of all time was the one carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II from Edinburgh to London in 2022.

3.
Supply chain survey. Zoom in on Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Alaska and you will see many more aircraft than you might expect. In terms of passengers, the airport is a minor player but looked at by another metric it is the third-busiest hub in the world. Aircraft carrying cargo from China to the US stop to refuel here, as it’s more efficient to stop than to fly nonstop with the added weight of fuel.

4.
The loneliest flights. Like a map of the human circulatory system,Flightradar24 clearly depicts the most vital arteries, with great thrombotic knots around crowded airspaces, such as New York. But then you will spot a seemingly wayward plane, wending a lonely path at the far reaches of the globe: a LATAM flight from Santiago to Auckland or a European cargo flight heading north from Antarctica’s Wolf’s Fang Runway. Many places used to be off limits to commercial aircraft but changes in aircraft technology and aviation rules now mean that aircraft such as Airbus A350 only need to be within 370 minutes’ flying time of a diversionary airport.

5.
The blank spots. On a map filled with aircraft what stands out are the voids. The large blank circle over Tibet reflects the mountainous Tibetan Plateau, an aviation challenge due to its height and isolation. Other no-go zones are geopolitical: Russia, with the largest airspace over land in the world, has been off limits to most Western countries since 2022. The airspaces over Iran and Ukraine tend to be empty as well. 

But there are other kinds of blank spaces. Many military aircraft do not appear, either because the planes are not equipped with ADS-B or the technology is not turned on. And in response to complaints from private-jet owners, the US Federal Aviation Administration began limiting tracking for them. No longer can casual flight trackers watch Taylor Swift or Elon Musk jet across the globe.

But what breaktime flight-watchers like me can do is look to the skies to learn more about the comings and goings on the ground.

Tom Vanderbilt is a journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

On the afternoon of 28 May, art enthusiasts flocked to Lisbon’s Cordoaria Nacional museum for the opening of Arco Lisboa’s ninth edition. The offshoot of the Madrid-born fair has grown from a tentative experiment of 45 galleries in 2016 to more than 80 today. Alongside it, the past decade has also seen Lisbon’s art scene burgeon. Foreigners have brought fresh sensibilities and new wealth to the city, a generation of local collectors have opened institutions to the public and new galleries have set up shop here. Although Lisbon still holds a peripheral position in the art world, there is a sense that everyone here is helping to thread an art ecosystem into being. Speak to any one player though and you’ll find out they’re working to a different strategy.

Arco Lisboa, for its part, remains deliberately modest in scale. For fair director Maribel López the challenge is to expand the fair’s reach while also keeping it rooted. Unlike the generic pavilions of most international art fairs, the setting of Arco Lisboa gives the event a distinctly local character. Beneath the heavy wooden beams of Cordoardia Nacional, about 35 per cent of the galleries showcased are Portuguese, and more than half are Iberian. This regional focus offers foreigners – including some 150 VIPs – a chance to deep-dive into the local art scene, still not very well known outside the country. “If we can elicit that sense of discovery, we will have done our job,” says López.

“Portugal has very good artists but opportunities abroad are still missing. Fairs are important in that respect,” says João Azinheiro, director of Porto- and Lisbon-based Kubik Gallery and a member of this year’s organising committee. This year, Kubik’s booth presented works by Pedro Vaz, whose acrylic landscapes draw on the ancient herding culture of Portugal’s Serra da Estrela. The artist is also simultaneously showing at the gallery’s Lisbon space. “We want to create that connection so people can encounter him in different contexts during Arco,” says Azinheiro.

Links like these between what’s happening inside and outside of the fair are increasingly well explored. For this edition of Arco Lisboa, Portuguese museums (many of them a short walk from the Cordoaria) created an exciting parallel programme of curated visits, exhibition openings, dinners and late-night gatherings. Lisbon Design Week, which overlaps with Arco Lisboa, takes over a shared space within the fair titled “The Living Room”, designed by Portuguese architect Joana Astolfi. 

International players are also creating routes in. Lisbon’s historical ties to Brazil and Africa continue to carry cultural and commercial potential for many. Others aim simply to spark curiosity and surprise by bringing lesser-known artists into the city. While the Portuguese collector base remains largely oriented toward local artists, “there are opportunities if you bring the right person,” says Matteo Consonni of Lisbon, Milan and Warsaw-based gallery Consonni Radziszewski, and also a member of Arco Lisboa’s organising committee. “We need these meeting points that help connect the dots between foreigners and locals,” he says, also mentioning a series of guided walks organised by him and neighbouring galleries of the picturesque Estrela district in previous years.

Before the fair opened its doors, a cohort of national and international collectors, curators and gallerists lunched on the terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre at the Belém Cultural Centre (MAC/CCB). In the sweltering heat, with views over the glistening Tejo, conversations drifted from the professional toward what people had planned to see and do in the city beyond the fair itself. “This is way more relaxed than other fairs. The weather is nice; the food is good. It’s just nice to be here,” said one gallerist from Colombia, returning for a second time. So far, it seems the scene’s winning strategy is still Lisbon itself. 
ifema.es

At 91 years old, Frank Bowling is still finding new ways to let paint run its course. “I’m always following my instincts,” says Bowling, who has painted, poured, sprayed, stained and stitched vivid colours onto unprimed canvases for more than 70 years. “There was a time when I didn’t have a dealer and museums weren’t buying,” he says. “Now, my paintings are in more than 70 museums around the world.” Last year his works went on show at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – a full-circle moment for the South America-born artist in the bright throes of his twilight years.

Now the London-based artist is set for another milestone: his first solo exhibition in Asia. Hauser & Wirth’s Frank Bowling: Like Water opens on 11 June in Hong Kong. But for a more intimate experience, make your way to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime brings together a collection of 11 artworks spanning the Guyanese-British artist’s long career. Unlike the major shows that he is now used to, the cosy gallery compresses Bowling’s bright colours until they detonate.

The exhibition moves like a swift and confident brushstroke through his oeuvre: the early expressionist phase, a piece or two from his transitional period in the mid-1960s and a pair of “poured” paintings from 1976, produced after the artist moved to New York. It was this shift of perspective that led Bowling to the abstraction that would make his name. There are even two more recent works that are being shown for the first time, “Swan Upping” (2020) and “Yellow Map” (2025). 

Each of Bowling’s poured paintings begins on the floor. Every cotton-duck canvas receives its first colours in the form of drips of paint that fall from an earlier in-progress painting hanging above – a sort of artistic assembly line. “Then my assistant fills a bucket with paint and water and pours it down the canvas while I direct the flood,” he says.

When Monocle visits his studio in South London, Bowling is directing his son, Ben – who’s armed with silver glitter-laced spray paint – from a wheelchair. “Brighter,” says Bowling of a long white streak that cuts down the canvas like a coastline, “all the way.” When Ben reaches a patch of empty space, Bowling reacts instinctively. “Put red in it,” he says. But the painting is still not finished. Later it will appear “on the ceiling of my room.” Bowling’s imagination never rests. “I’m preoccupied with the search for something new in painting so I’m always working in different ways.” 

Even in his nineties, Bowling is still letting paint find its path of least resistance. Age might have hindered his movement but his imagination hasn’t wearied. “I catch youthfulness from the people around me,” says Bowling. Many of whom are family members – studio assistants and collaborators – who replenish the current of curiosity that traces back to Bowling’s childhood spent helping his mother with her sewing business in New Amsterdam. “It’s absolutely a family affair. Many years ago I told the Royal Academy that I wanted my studio to become something like a laboratory and I’m really pleased about how that has worked out.” 

Bowling still shows up to his laboratory at the same time each day. There he sits, watching how the paint pools, how it “spreads and bleeds”. “You never know what you’ll find the next morning after the paint dries overnight.” 

‘Frank Bowling: Like Water’ opens on 11 June and runs until 29 August 2026.
‘Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime’ runs until January 2027.

Further reading:
– The art of ageing: Inside the studios of seven in-demand artists in their eighties and nineties

For the record (a very public one), I love AI (artificial intelligence, in case you’ve missed it)! I know this might come as a bit of a shock given that it’s putting journalists out of work, killing off critical thinking and guaranteeing that anyone entering high school will be part of the dumbest, most disconnected generation yet. But dig a little deeper, with the most selfish motivations, and I firmly believe that daily life is going to vastly improve. Allow me to replay a real-life scenario that might soon be a thing of the past thanks to the wonders of AI.

Thursday evening was a night of serious celebration. After decades of diplomatic acrobatics, trade hustling, on-the-fly cultural education and general (albeit pragmatic and measured) flag-waving for Japan, Monocle friend Melanie Brock was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (no less!), principally for her contribution to Japan-Australia relations but I would add that her greatest skill in smooth negotiations is knowing her way around a Japanese corporate boardroom, tracking down the AC panel and knowing how to turn the temperature down from a nap-inducing 25C to a more contract-signing-conducive 21C.

To mark the occasion, I booked New York Grill at the Park Hyatt as it has become a bit of a company classic for significant milestones. The steak ordering comes with a proper briefing session on Hokkaido versus Sendai tenderloin cuts and there’s an ever-improving Japanese wine cellar to match. Even before bums touched seats, the sommelier was pouring a very crisp bottle of sparkling wine from Yamanashi Prefecture while Melanie passed around the medal for our gathered group to inspect. As dining rooms atop modern towers go, New York Grill is hard to beat. The Japanese waitstaff are pressed and well-tailored, the linen likewise and there’s a wonderful choreography between kitchen, bar, tables and the dazzling, endless city beyond.

As we moved to another bottle of the Koshu sparkling our attention and conversation became punctuated by the frequent distractions drifting near and far across the Grill. Often it was a simple raising of eyebrows or a rapid sideways glance that would draw our table’s attention to a visual disturbance. Sometimes it was an expanse of bad denim atop a weird athletic sandal or maybe an even larger expanse of fatty bare back squeezed into a gingham tablecloth turned prairie dress. “Honestly, what are people thinking?” started our medal recipient. “Can they not see how everyone else makes an effort in this country when they go out?” We all quickly agreed – while watching an athleisurely clad, tablet-toting family shuffle past – that things were officially out of control in many Japanese public settings and swift action was needed to remind people that the world is not an extension of their living room.

Indeed, the lack of sartorial common sense was at such a low level on Thursday evening that by 22.00 the overall elegance of the Grill had been snuffed out by couples and quads of the very poorly dressed. Need I tell you where most of these tech-bro-influenced people were from? No, I didn’t think so. Which brings me neatly to the wonders of AI. As most of this crowd are likely at the leading edge of all things digitally powered and energy-sapping, and increasingly leave all decision-making to far-flung data centres, I find some relief in the fact that soon very basic, daily exercises such as getting dressed or going out the front door will require some level of consultation with a supposed digital know-it-all.

Thanks to a bit of scraped input from the likes of the Park Hyatt, Chad and Britney will find that they won’t be allowed to show up at the Grill dressed as though they’re off to Starbucks in Santa Monica. When they ask “where should we go for dinner tonight in Tokyo?”, an AI service will respond: “Park Hyatt would be a good choice but based on your retail purchase patterns and the images that you’ve uploaded over the past 18 months, you don’t possess the appropriate wardrobe to visit this establishment. The Isetan department store is 10 minutes away and closes at 20.00. Would you like me to make a dinner reservation once you’ve updated your wardrobe with the appropriate pieces?”

For people who don’t know any better, or are simply oblivious to their surroundings, the world might just become a more attractive place thanks to the imminent collapse of basic decision-making and general self-awareness. Then again, Chad and Britney could also trot down to the Monocle Shop in Tomigaya, where not only would we kit them out with some new gear to look the part but also give them some fitting establishments to go with their new wardrobe. They would even get to interact with real, live Japanese people for a few minutes. How luxurious, how novel.

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

Scan the bookshelves of any French home, bookshop or library and there’s a title that you will invariably find: Le Petit Prince. Written and illustrated in 1942 by military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the book is a children’s novella so synonymous with Gallic identity that the French still purchase between 200,000 and 300,000 copies a year.

Saint-Exupéry was an intrepid explorer and his narrative was inspired by his own experiences. He wrote Le Petit Prince while in exile on Long Island after being demobilised. In the story, a stranded pilot meets a prince from a neighbouring asteroid. After encountering six narrow-minded, egocentric characters, the young prince grows disillusioned with the meaning of life. It’s a wise fox who identifies the story’s moral: “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux” or “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The message is impossible to misunderstand: the most meaningful aspects of life – love, kindness and friendship – aren’t visible. It’s a predictable moral, perhaps, but the book’s success is anything but. 

For a novella that has become a paradigm of quintessential Frenchness, Le Petit Prince was ironically first published in the US. The book was banned under the Vichy regime, a government that Saint-Exupéry had denounced. When Gallimard eventually published the book in France in 1946, the prestigious publishing house couldn’t have foreseen that 80 years on, it wouldn’t just be Francophone readers who would cherish the title. 

Available in more than 650 languages, Le Petit Prince has become the second-most translated book worldwide, second only to the Bible. Its uncomplicated storyline, universal themes and simple lexicon have fostered remarkable longevity. Today you can find a copy in Chinese, Hawaiian or Emirati Arabic and you can also read the enchanting fable in endangered dialects. These include Sardinian, Quechua and Toba, spoken in Argentina and Paraguay. Le Petit Prince is also one of a handful of modern works that has been translated into classical Latin. 

With more than 300 million copies sold globally, the universally understood tale has become an unlikely ambassador of French soft diplomacy and the linchpin of its well-admired literary capabilities. “Antoine was a stylish and courageous French pilot who smoked cigarettes,” says Thomas Rivière, Saint-Exupéry’s great-great-nephew and head of licensing for the estate. “A bit like Chanel, his story has become the epitome of the ‘Made in France’ brand.” 

Sales are particularly buoyant in the US – a bronze statue of the prince was installed on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 2023. The French American Cultural Foundation also champions the book as a paradigm of successful cross-cultural exchange between the two nations. Even the UN has identified the publication as aligned with its own mission to foster understanding across borders. 

But the narrative has travelled further still. When an animated film adaptation hit the Chinese box office in 2015, it became the highest grossing title of its kind in the Chinese mainland at 158m yuan (approximately €20m), prompting more than 70 Mandarin translations and collectible prince figurines. And, in Latin America, the book is a mainstay of the school curricula as the author had personal ties to the region: Saint-Exupéry travelled to Argentina in 1929 to serve as the director of Aeroposta Argentina, a subsidiary of the French airline Aéropostale. 

Le Petit Prince is not just an unlikely bestseller, but a multifarious brand that has spawned a musical, opera, graphic novels, ballet productions and even a self-help book entitled How to Live like the Little Prince. For the 80-year anniversary of its publication, La Poste has released an official Le Petit Prince stamp featuring Saint-Exupéry’s whimsical watercolour illustrations, while the Monnaie de Paris has introduced a collectable €2 coin into circulation. 

Beyond its pop-culture prominence, the sustained global sales of that same Le Petit Prince story indicate how literary characters – even those created for children – can become dependable protagonists during fractured times. Though Saint-Exupéry, who perished in an aviation accident in 1944, never lived to see the success of his novella, his legacy speaks volumes. “The book is 80 years old and yet somehow still feels modern,” says Rivière. “I’m confident that Le Petit Prince will still resonate with readers 80 years from now.” 

I don’t want to shock you but I am very promiscuous. Well, when it comes to city transport. I’ll go home with a London taxi, an Uber driver, a big old bus, a tube too. Or, if there’s no better option, under my own steam. And, even if it never co-ordinates with my outfit, I will use a Lime bike, that ugly beast that’s now available in more than 200 cities.

But there’s one very irksome thing about them: wondering what the hell you will find lingering in the green bucket-shaped basket at the front of the contraption. Because it seems that whatever city you go to, locals are under the impression that these are garbage bins. Demi-devoured doners, half a dozen empty beer cans, unwanted boyfriends – you never know what you’ll find lingering there.

I had to nip across Rotterdam by Lime bike on Thursday (I’ll explain more in a moment) and was hoping that the Rotter folk might be better behaved. But no, each available bike had some unwanted gift awaiting me. Even when they were parked next to actual bins people had deposited their detritus in the baskets.

So, if people love Lime-disposal so much, perhaps the company should just embrace this and sponsor garbage trucks in key cities with giant green buckets attached to their fronts? No more littering – everyone would be waiting for their chance to lob a banana skin into the big green basket. And the company would get great brand kudos.

Now my Rotterdam dash combined two things: I wanted to see some of the projects that were being discussed at the Utopian Hours urbanism event that I was in town for. I had also just discovered that I needed to get a yellow-fever certificate for an epic work trip to Latin America that kicks off next week. And I had tracked down a clinic able to help with a jab. The nurse was efficient but the best thing about her was her slightly subversive bedside manner. “Be very careful of the mammals in South America,” she cautioned with a sudden earnestness. “If they bite you, go straight to the hospital because you could get rabies. And then you will die,” she concluded with a smile that seemed a little reminiscent of Mike Myers’ Dr Evil. I liked her. But she had me worried.

Later, unnerved by the Latin American house of mammalian horrors that I am about to enter, I thought it would be wise to check out some of my potential killers. Now while the big-eared opossum looks like it could be a pal, I think that the white-eared opossum might take a finger or two from you in a fight. And the red howler sounds like someone I once dated – definitely staying away from him. As for Stephen Nash’s titi – I don’t want to see one of those up close ever again. I just hope none of these beasts is partial to napping in a Lime bike basket. I have my concerns. 

I realise that I should have used this column to tell you more about Rotterdam, or at least the brilliant content of Utopian Hours but, hey, this is my column and I make up the rules here. Though I will invite you onto the roof of the year-old, migration-focused Fenix museum in Rotterdam. 

On Thursday evening, Utopian Hours, in partnership with Droom en Daad, the foundation behind the museum’s creation, held a reception here as the sun very slowly made its exit. The space is in a vast converted warehouse that was re-engineered by Mad Architects. It’s spectacular and sits on the very docks where a century ago, Europeans looking for a better life in America or Canada boarded ships to cross the Atlantic – many never seeing their birth nations again. Below us water taxis cut through the sunset-blushed waters. And Rotterdam, with its mix of new towers, 1960s architecture and wide boulevards, looked like a place of reinvention and change. Hard to pigeonhole.

As I wended my way back to the hotel, driving my bright-green garbage cycle (with one buckled pedal dancing away like it was at a rave), I thought about the power of good cities, of good conferences. But all the time I kept a watchful eye out, just in case a brown tent-making bat or Paraguayan rice rat was lingering in the bushes. You cannot be too careful – just ask my nurse.