The week started with a quick dash to the UAE for a few meetings and briefings, a bit of scouting for some projects and 48 hours of intense observation and analysis of life on the ground. Before departing, more than a few friends and associates asked, “How are you getting there? Isn’t everything still closed?” I quickly informed them that airline timetables were ticking upwards both in and out of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and that for the return leg to Lisbon I was even waitlisted. 

On Sunday evening I boarded an Etihad Boeing 787-9 out of Zürich and before the doors closed I did a tour down the aisles and determined that the plane was operating with a load factor of about 80 per cent. Not bad considering that you can fly direct to a broad range of Asian destinations from Zürich (and needn’t fly via the Gulf). But this was a little reminder of the power of strong brands and relentless marketing as many travellers in Europe, Asia and Australia feel that a stop in Doha, Dubai or Abu Dhabi is somehow a logistical necessity.

Flight EY144 started its descent towards UAE airspace about five hours after departure and as I tracked our progress on Flightradar a curious, rather alarming thing happened – our 787-9 entered into a series of stomach-churning spins. Thankfully this was only on screen, onboard all was stable with our aircraft as it made a few graceful turns on its approach to AUH. Back in the app, UAE airspace was clearly being digitally manipulated as groups of commercial aircraft were clustered near Al Ain, flightpaths were zig-zagging across Saudi Arabia and aircraft (including my own) would disappear and then reappear as they approached Abu Dhabi. The atmosphere inside the airport felt the same as it did a few weeks back, just before Iran started sending cruise missiles and drones across the Gulf. Plenty of passengers were connecting to points in Thailand and Indonesia, and there was a steady stream of labourers from Pakistan and defence contractor types from the US and Europe lined up at immigration. 

For the past three decades this journalism gig has seen me dip in and out of war zones (Lebanon, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone), spend considerable time around weapon systems and heavily armed commandos, interview PR-savvy rebels and buttoned-up public affairs officers, crawl through blown-up buildings and charred tanks, and have ugly entry and exit wounds in my left and right arms from an ambush in Kabul. I know how zones of conflict look, smell, sound and, most importantly, feel. Quite often it’s remarkable how normal it all is. As I pulled off the highway onto the perfectly groomed Saadiyat Island and arrived at the hotel, I was immersed in a hyper version of normal. I met my London and Zürich colleagues for a little pre-meeting catch-up in the lobby before heading off in our NPO – Nissan Patrol Office, remember? 

While schools are on a remote-learning footing (much to the annoyance of many locals) and hotels are running at around 20 per cent occupancy, the roads are busy, offices are full and the same goes for malls. Indeed one luxury goods retailer had a record day at its Dubai flagship last week and construction cranes working on the Grove Saadiyat retail development swing late into the night. The terraces at restaurants below were full and buzzy on a Monday eve. That same evening, the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National reported “UAE intercepts 11 missiles and 27 drones”. We hadn’t heard one boom or had a single phone alert all day. 

Since Russia invaded Ukraine much has been written about the future of war. How drones have reshaped not only the battlefield but also air-defence requirements and the types of recruits required to man them. In the skies over the UAE and in control rooms at various ministries, another chapter is being written about how to effectively intercept Shahed drones (Apache helicopters are most effective I was told), manage (control) information flow and keep the public informed, connected and calm. “We have day and night settings for our message alerts now and they’re geo-targeted,” one minister told me. “You only receive an alert if there is an intercept in your area. The day alert is urgent and cuts through all the other noise [that] you have going on around you but at night it is more gentle to not cause undue stress. We’re working to improve the messaging further.”

Shortly after I left the meeting with the minister the day alarm sounded while I was browsing and buying at Fount, a select shop devoted to the best in local and international design. It advised to seek shelter and remain in place until all was clear. About seven minutes later another message popped up (no alarm) thanking me for my co-operation and informing me that all was clear. Upon meeting up with my colleagues a few hours later, I asked what they’d done during the alert. They hadn’t received it. Even though we were all in Abu Dhabi, the overall system proved to be pinpoint in both its targeting and narrowcasting.

When I landed in Lisbon on Wednesday I read a story on the “live” feed of an international broadcaster about a woman in Dubai who hadn’t been able to visit friends for a month because she can’t leave the house on account of all the booms and intercepts. Perhaps she lives by a missile battery, perhaps she suffers from other health issues, the report didn’t say but it did paint a rather distorted image of what daily life looks like. I went out to get a read from the street and I can assure you that the UAE is very much up and open for business. 

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

Just as no two Italian regions (or nonnas) share a recipe, each of London’s restaurants have their own charm. Here are three new openings that are putting the Bel Paese on a plate. 

Burro, Covent Garden
“Italy and Ireland have plenty in common,” chef, restaurateur and Belfast native, Conor Gadd, tells Monocle. “They share a real care for hospitality.” After earning his red, white and green stripes over 16 years as head chef and owner of Trullo, the fan-favourite Italian spot in Highbury, Gadd’s Italianate inclination has now manifested itself into a new trattoria, Burro.

The slick, new 95-cover tenant in Covent Garden sees the Northern Irishman slip from kitchen clogs and into founder’s shoes. “I won’t pretend [that] I’m half Italian – but I’ve travelled around the country and am profoundly in love with the nation’s relationship to food,” he says. His admiration is evident: tables laid with drum-tight linen cloths sit under warm lighting from round lamps while the walls are festooned with Irish and Italian art.

Following the traditional antipasti, primi, secondi and dolci framework, the dishes – best shared – fight for attention. Think focaccia, anchovies laid in long stripes under crispy, wafer-like crostini or lightly fried artichokes. Rich primi follow but the duck and porcini ragù quickly wins favour. “Trullo is known for pappardelle beef shin ragù,” says Gadd. “I loved the idea of adding minced duck instead.” Porcini mushrooms were added as an afterthought. “It was the missing depth that it needed,” says Gadd.
trattoriaburro.com

Monocle recommends: The braised beef shin with polenta and wilted ‘cicoria’ with a glass of 2019 Conterno Fantino, an elegant red hailing from Piedmont.

Osteria Vibrato, Soho
It was the buzz of Greek Street that drew Australian restaurateur Charlie Mellor to Soho when looking to house his Italian-inspired restaurant, Osteria Vibrato. “Soho came first,” he says. “I wanted to create a comforting oasis in the middle of a hectic part of town.” But why Vibrato? “I studied music and had a short career as a professional opera singer working in the United States, Australia and, of course, Italy. It felt right to echo that connection.” 

The old-school osteria format adopts culinary traditions from Liguria, Valle d’Aosta and Abruzzo, blending staples such as the white risotto with parmigiano reggiano and lesser-known delicacies such as cotechino, a slow-cooked sausage from the Emilia-Romagna region. “The food is best described as respectful rather than authentic,” says Mellor. “Every recipe has been lovingly assembled with ingredients that have been carefully sourced from across every region in Italy.” 

But the real stamp of approval has come from winning over the Italians themselves. “One of the most touching experiences has been the number of Italians who are falling in love with this restaurant because they recognise the respect that we have for their country,” says Mellor. “It makes me very happy indeed.” 
osteriavibrato.co.uk

Monocle recommends: A slab of aged ricotta finished with a lick of Sardinian olive oil – simplicity at its best.

Cece’s, Notting Hill
For a hospitality group that has built a foolproof formula for rebooting the great British pub, Public House Group’s seductive, New York-style Italian restaurant in Notting Hill is a reminder of the group’s ability to continually surprise.

Located next to a dry cleaner and a corner shop, Cece’s nameless façade feels deliciously incongruous. Inside there’s nothing modest about the hall of mirrors, tasselled lampshades and outré decor – the palm leaves and stag heads stop just short of kitsch. “We left much of the decor intact from what was here before,” co-founder James Gummer tells Monocle, motioning to the copper panelling and velvet banquettes on the upstairs level which conjure the atmosphere of a moody cocktail lounge more than a sit-down affair. “We wanted Cece’s to feel like a surrealist slice of 1920s Hollywood glamour in Notting Hill.”

But as we’ve come to expect from Public House Group, Cece’s takes food seriously. Polpette made the old way – with a mixture of beef, pork and veal – arrive before pinched agnolotti in a silky butter sauce followed by the pink beef fillet served alongside reliable side dishes (or contorni): polenta fritti, cavalo nero and olive-oil-crusted potatoes. And while the restaurant’s musky incense and recurrent reflective surfaces offer more than a hint of the American speakeasy, one thing is for sure – Cece’s certainly isn’t smoke and mirrors. 
ceceslondon.com

Monocle recommends: The dinky bomboloni – the Italian take on an American donut – lined with ‘crema pasticciera’ and spiked with rhubarb compote. Bravo.

I lose things. A lot. But I am delighted to say that these misplaced items usually find their way back to me. A wallet dropped in the park, a jacket left hanging in a hotel wardrobe, a suitcase forgotten on a train – all have been returned to my possession. I have also been reunited with several laptops left to fend for themselves in the seat-back pockets of aeroplanes. This is such a trait of mine that when my colleague Tom recently made the same error on a flight to Zürich, he rather ungraciously shouted out, “Oh no, I’ve done an Andrew!” I’ve never liked the man.

So while a little panic-inducing, it wasn’t a huge surprise on Sunday evening when I could not find my wedding ring anywhere in the house, just as we were about to head out for dinner. Some people boast of never having removed theirs since the day that it was popped on their finger; I remove mine at night and before I go to the gym. And I don’t like typing with a ring or watch on. This all means that the little band of metal has numerous opportunities to go astray – and it does.

I once dropped it in Geneva Airport – someone kindly handed it in to the lost and found. On another occasion, when I was playing with it in a restaurant and left it on the table, the waiter called an hour later to see if perhaps I was missing an important finger accessory. I have assured the other half that this is not a sign – well, of my forgetfulness, maybe.
 
As we got home, a few glasses of champagne down (toasting the dog’s departure has seen an uptick in alcohol consumption), the other half reminded me of the search-and-rescue mission that we would need to undertake in the morning and – at that exact moment – I looked down and saw, in the middle of the street, glistening brightly in the lamp light, my ring.
 
Our road is a popular route for pedestrians. Did 100 people step over the ring without even seeing it? And how did it even fall off my finger and land there?
 
Luck is a funny concept, hard to explain with reason or statistics but it should not be discounted. And I am not talking about family privilege masquerading as luck but rather those coincidences, fleeting encounters, that can reorientate not just your day but your life.

When you hear people’s stories of success or of missions accomplished, we tend to focus on the quantifiable – on how hard they must have worked, on the time they invested in training. We like to believe that it’s hard work, ambition and intelligence that deliver results. And while these are key, luck can play a blinder. In some moments fate simply intervenes.
 
I see this in my career. I did everything I could to get into journalism but it has all been stitched together with pure luck – from a publisher who took time to speak to an over-keen intern to a Canadian journalist who came in for a meeting and got stuck talking to me.

Of course this is not really career or personal advice that you can hand out without sounding like the sort of person who has their cards read (tarot, not credit). But to get where you want to be, or just to keep hold of what you have, you are going to need luck to show up every now and then. Oh and notice when it does, glinting there at your feet.

To read more columns by Andrew Tuck, click here.

For decades, airline schedules and route plans have been built around predictable demand, including global sporting events, holidays and high-traffic business routes. But in 2026, Asian air carriers in particular are being forced to redraw both schedules and flight paths in response to K-pop touring cycles – mostly those of supergroup BTS – that are creating demand spikes powerful enough to rival peak seasons. 

K-pop isn’t new but its global popularity is accelerating. Bernie Cho, president of Seoul-based creative agency DFSB Kollective, told Monocle that most K-pop fans aren’t from South Korea. “When we look at the latest streaming statistics from [platforms] such as Spotify, South Korean listeners are only responsible for about 15 per cent of the total streams worldwide,” he says. “Mexico is now the fifth-largest market in the world and, over the past five years, there has been a 500 per cent increase in streaming volume for it.”

Is this international fanbase fundamentally reshaping aviation economics? It’s now common for single groups and artists to tour in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Latin America all within the same year, creating a predictable surge model that airlines can plan to. By monitoring tour announcements, venue capacities and pre-sale trends, air carriers have been successfully forecasting passenger volumes weeks or months in advance, turning fanbases into forecastable yield outside of traditional holiday seasons.

The impact is not limited to BTS, though they remain the clearest case study. Global tours by artists including Harry Styles, Taylor Swift and Coldplay have triggered similar demand spikes worldwide but K-pop’s highly mobilised audience makes the effect more demonstrable.

Germany, Japan, China, Hong Kong, the UK, the Philippines and Taiwan have emerged as the top markets driving this travel surge to South Korea. Searches for flights to the country have increased by more than 200 per cent, driven directly by the BTS tourism wave. The larger and more flexible fleet that came from the merger of Korean Air and Asiana Airlines is well positioned to capitalise on demand surges tied to major tours. It has been regularly adding temporary flights to Seoul from Tokyo, Manila and Los Angeles according to tour dates. Pricing dynamically and partnering with fan travel agencies has created a scalable model.

“Major concerts are a big hit with airlines as they attract many more travellers into a destination for a short period of time,” says Paul Charles, CEO of travel consultancy The PC Agency. “The likes of Taylor Swift and BTS enable companies to add more flights at higher prices as the commercial teams know that people will be wanting to travel on specific dates around a concert performance. Savvy carriers will also theme certain flights, perhaps playing the band’s hits over the public address system or even playing music videos on the in-flight entertainment screens.”

The implications extend beyond aviation into the wider hospitality economy. Sudden surges in travel drive revenue across airports, hotels and local amenities, while also exposing capacity constraints. Can flights and accommodation scale quickly enough to absorb these spikes without the kind of price distortion that makes the trip unappealing?

Thanks to K-pop’s heavily industrialised model, airlines can rely on these groups to produce albums and tour year after year. British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are the latest to adjust their schedules because of “Hallyu”, the Korean cultural wave. In an industry where consistency is currency, K-pop might just be the most reliable hit in the schedule.

The UAE is projecting calm under fire but its military leadership is leaving little doubt that restraint has its limits. Five weeks into sustained Iranian attacks, the country’s official position remains defensive. Yet in a detailed interview with Monocle, Major General Abdul Nasser al-Humaidi of the country’s Ministry of Defence offered a more layered message: one of preparedness, endurance and conditional escalation. “Since the inception of this tragic aggression from the Iranian side, the armed forces continuously monitor, detect threats and counter them,” he says, pointing to what he described as a “very high success rate” in intercepting more than 2,500 missiles and drones.

Those interception rates – above 99 per cent for missiles and more than 95 per cent for drones – have allowed the country to maintain an image of stability. “People are living normally. They function. Trade is flowing. The economy is thriving,” says al-Humaidi. Yet that sense of normality sits alongside a far more disruptive reality. Iranian strikes have targeted civilian infrastructure across the country – including airports, ports, oil facilities and even luxury hotels – with debris and direct impacts causing fires and damage in urban areas. At least 12 people have been killed and many more injured since the conflict began, underscoring the human cost beneath the headline interception rates.

The scale of the assault is striking. By the UAE’s own account, it has been targeted more heavily than any other Gulf state during this conflict, a sustained campaign that has tested both its air-defence systems and its strategic patience. The response has been disciplined so far. “We’re not part of this conflict,” Al Humaidi insists. “So we will continue that posture in defending our territory.”
 
That line repeats consistently across Emirati messaging and underscores a deliberate positioning – the UAE as a reactive, not proactive, military actor. Yet there might be a subtle but important shift. Pressed on whether joining offensive operations alongside allies is entirely off the table, al-Humaidi was keeping options open. “The UAE preserves its right to self-defence upon any aggression that aims at the UAE and that’s the primary role of the military,” he answers. It is a carefully calibrated response, one that stops short of signalling imminent escalation but clearly avoids ruling it out.
 
There are also firm red lines. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has justified their aggression by claiming that US strikes are being launched from bases inside the UAE. Al-Humaidi was categorical in his denial of this. “UAE territory will not be used for any attacks against Iran” he says. “So from a military standpoint, that’s not correct and it’s not happening.” The message is twofold: the UAE is not a staging ground for offensive operations but it will defend itself if drawn further in.
 
This ambiguity reflects a broader recalibration taking place across the Gulf. While early rhetoric in some quarters focused on regime change in Iran, officials now appear to be converging around a more immediate priority: securing the Strait of Hormuz and restoring maritime stability. The UAE has aligned itself publicly with that objective, stressing the importance of keeping the waterway, a critical artery for global trade, open and secure. Behind the scenes, however, there are indications that contingency planning is under way should international efforts require a more active contribution.
 
That dual track of public restraint and private preparedness is consistent with the tone of al-Humaidi’s remarks. “The armed forces retains its readiness and preparedness for any type of aggression,” he says. “We have the capacity, we have the capability and we will continue to do that.” At the same time he repeatedly returned to the UAE’s broader identity as a “peace-seeking nation”, positioning military action as a last resort. But balancing deterrence and diplomacy is becoming an increasingly difficult task. 
 
Inzamam Rashid is Monocle’s Gulf correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. 

Heartbeat isn’t your typical music magazine. Open its pages and you’ll be invited into the homes of prolific record collectors in São Paulo, taken through the history of hearing aids and guided across Mexico City for a sonic day-in-the-life. The magazine is “time agnostic”, meaning that it focuses on enduring stories overlooked by conventional music magazines rather than chasing the hype of the moment. 

The debut issue unearths ephemera from the 2000s punk scene in the US state of Michigan, revisits Suzanne Ciani’s pioneering work with the Buchla synthesiser in the 1970s and goes behind the scenes with Additional Dialogue Recording (ADR) artists. Printed alongside each article are carefully curated playlists that give you something to tap your feet to as you read. The result is a highly intentional exploration of the experience of sound, with something for everyone.

The magazine is the latest venture from indie company Broccoli Publishers, which already has a devoted following for their niche, collectable titles: Catnip for cat lovers; Mildew for devotees of second-hand fashion; and, of course, Broccoli for cannabis enthusiasts. With the release of Heartbeat, they turn their focus to music and sound.

Stephanie Madewell has been an editor at Broccoli for almost a decade. She spoke with Monocle Radio’s Annelise Maynard about the team’s decision to create a magazine specialising on sound, their focus on foregrounding underrepresented histories and voices in music, and why chasing the moment is futile when magazines are made of paper. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview on The Stack from Monocle Radio. 

How did you arrive at the title Heartbeat, and why music and sound as the focus of your latest magazine?
Heartbeat came to be in the way that many of our productions do. As an editorial team – Anya Charbonneau [founder and editor in chief], Ellen Freeman [deputy editor] and myself  – we often just start thinking of ideas and stories, and they tend to coalesce around a core. In this case, Pitchfork had announced that it was changing hands. It was quite a force in music writing and people were having all sorts of emotions about it. We were really fascinated because what they all seemed to evoke was that people wanted more stories – and they wanted stories that they weren’t getting. So we started thinking about what it could look like if we were to make a music magazine. Very quickly, the focus broadened from music to sound because it felt so emotionally resonant. The name Heartbeat came about because the one sound that every human shares is a heartbeat. There is this incredible point of connection at the base that pulls everything together, which then allows us to open up this broad lens about the way sounds make us feel.

Was the distinction between sound and music important for you? Or did you like how they combined?
The distinction comes down to intentionality. Music has a degree of intervention and intentionality, even if it’s a field recording that somebody has taken of a [certain] environment and placed it in another context. We quickly realised that this is a magazine about how music and sounds make us feel. By giving that as the brief, we were able to attract all sorts of stories from different corners of the world with different angles that felt exciting, stories that weren’t finding other ways to get out and into the world.

The editorial team has called Heartbeat a ‘curated mixtape of sonic tales’; many of the articles feature accompanying playlists in the margins and interjections from writers reflecting on their motivations for the story. What drew you to these moments of dialogue between the reader and writer?
We’re living in this time of unprecedented richness and people are able to access sounds and music in ways that they never have before. In many traditional music publications, there is a sense that the editors are an arbiter of taste, of boundaries and of what is worth listening to. We wanted to flip that on its head and create a space where many different people could tell us what was worth listening to. Many writers and artists create in another format while listening to music. We were curious to know what songs they were listening to. One of the things we keep telling people is that no matter how much music you listen to, if you flip through Heartbeat, you will find something that you haven’t heard. We’re hoping that it acts as a tool for people – that the intentional experience of going through the magazine encourages listening.

What unifies all of the articles is a focus on unrepresented histories. How important was it to foreground these stories as opposed to the biggest stars of the moment? 
One of the things we think about intentionally is the fact that magazines are made of paper. Magazines last and we create them to be worth reading for a long time. They act in two dimensions. They’re a bottle for a particular moment and set of ideas but that bottle then floats out on the tides and we hope that whatever is in it is still evocative to whoever picks it up, whenever they pick it up. If you chase the moment too hard, you end up with something that feels ephemeral. When you look through history, there are so many fascinating folks who have never had their moment in the spotlight, or who have something about their story that is resonant now in a way you wouldn’t expect. All of our publications are time-agnostic. We hope that gives the reader a way to step out of the hectic narrowness of a screen-mediated existence, into something that is richer, stranger and maybe takes them to places that they didn’t know they wanted to go.

There is also such a range in where these stories take place. Was it important that Heartbeat was representative of experiences from across the globe?
It really was. One of the unique things about Broccoli as a team is that none of us grew up in a major media market. We all come from places where our stories aren’t seen as the stories worth telling. I know the place that I’m from is rich and layered, which means there are many other places in the world that fall beyond the major media and news focus. We wanted [the magazine] to feel capacious and for there to be space for stories from all sorts of places that people wouldn’t think of for a major feature.

Listen to the full episode on The Stack, Monocle’s podcast about print media:

More than a decade into developing hotels with Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, and Kerry Properties, Jason Kuok felt that it was time to build something of his own. An intrepid adventurer at heart, he had long dreamt of a unique hospitality property connected to the outdoors. Years spent learning from the best in the business had shaped his own perspective and House of Koa would embody his personal tastes and values. 

That vision eventually grew into Koa Niseko, a collection of turn-key luxury villas and townhouses in Upper Higashiyama, an upscale ski area in Japan with scene-stealing alpine views. Given the destination, it might come as a surprise that Kuok wasn’t interested in winter sports at the time. “I never was into skiing or the mountains. My dad was into diving, so I did that instead,” he says. “It was my brother-in-law who asked me to check out Hokkaido.”

Kuok took his advice and set off to Japan’s northernmost main island in 2017 and was profoundly moved by the mountains. Beyond Niseko’s natural beauty, he discovered that land in Higashiyama was primarily freehold and soon spotted a market opportunity. “What was being put out creatively was decent but it wasn’t on par with what I had seen in Bali, Australia, Tokyo or even Karuizawa,” he says. Within months he purchased a plot, putting his hand to the plough.

The decision, however, was met with skepticism. “People said to me, ‘Why are you buying there? You’ve got to buy in Hirafu, the main area. Your spot is a bit far away.’” But thankfully, he found unwavering support from his primary-school classmates – Justin Potter, Jason Cheung and Joseph Luk – who came on as shareholders in the business, and helped to handle the branding, marketing and finance (areas in which Kuok lacked expertise). “We all happened to have different but complementary skillsets, and our friendship has become richer through this journey of building something together,” says Kuok.

Taking on the role of full-lifecycle developers, the team is involved in every part of the project, from early feasibility studies down to the selected fragrance. They collaborated with Craig Takahata, creative director of Zoo Design Group, and Ryoichi Niwata, interior design director of Bond Design Studio, to craft homes that fused traditional Japanese farmhouse architecture with modern Scandinavian sensibilities. Natural materials, lofted ceilings, bespoke Stellar Works furniture and a Jøtul cast-iron gas fireplaces make for a warm and intimate abode. 

“Koa is a curated, immersive experience that makes you feel at ease,” says Kuok. It’s a space that only grows in value when temperatures dip and time slows in the wintry mountains. This “experience” also extends into products – beanies, candles, drip coffee and more – reinforcing the brand’s thoughtful approach in tactile ways.

And the years of effort have paid off. Nearly all 10 villas and townhouses have been snapped up. Last year, Kuok introduced four Koa Super Villas – larger five-bedroom properties with a Japanese onsen-style bath and sauna – and the first home sold right away. “That was real validation,” says Kuok. Buyers – many from Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines – were drawn to the homes’ supreme comfort and timeless style. “Even the children loved it, without us needing to add Disney-like elements.” The response has been so good that Kuok has a line-up of interested partners who are keen for House of Koa to build hospitality ventures and even personal homes. 

As Niseko’s popularity continues to rise, so too has the demand for residences and the influx of developers looking to make a quick buck. “They will hire an architect and just furnish it based on their price point,” says Kuok. House of Koa, however, takes a longer view. “Our homes are designed from the inside out, where everything is custom-made. Not many people will go to the lengths that we do,” he says. “You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone else fussing over the tableware, artwork or the print labels on the soap.” 

House of Koa breaks all the trappings of a traditional real-estate company. It has artfully harmonised elements from different domains – fashion, food, music – to create a considered lifestyle, one that many now aspire to call their own.

Dmitry Shishkin worked at the BBC for 21 years. He helped to pioneer the broadcaster’s digital offering and devised a question to stress test any news organisation: what would happen if it disappeared tomorrow? This recently resurfaced in an interview that Shishkin gave to Brian Morrissey for The Rebooting Show, a newsletter and podcast dedicated to the business of journalism, during which the former BBC man was briefly befuddled by his own test. Morrissey has his own theory, developed across years of reporting, that news organisations have consistently failed to think about their work as a product: something designed around user need rather than professional habit. That product is not providing updates to live blogs, it’s providing understanding of complicated issues through depth of coverage. 

Case in point is coverage of the current conflict in the Gulf, one of the most structurally complex stories of the decade. It has multiple fronts, rotating actors and compounding consequences. Events in the Strait of Hormuz connect to Houthi targeting doctrine, which connects to Red Sea shipping rates, which connects to insurance markets in London. Following any single thread requires holding several others in your mind simultaneously. The format that large news organisations have typically reached for to help explain what is going on is the live blog. But a linear scroll of time-stamped updates conceived for a single breaking event is unfit for purpose when it comes to covering a multi-theatre, multi-faceted conflict.

Into the space that institutions have left open, a new class of product has arrived. Dozens of AI-powered dashboards that assemble satellite imagery, ship-tracking data and news feeds into something resembling a single story are flooding social media. Craig Silverman, a digital investigations expert who catalogued more than 20 of these dashboards for MIT Technology Review, describes the result as “an illusion of being on top of things”. One dashboard built by two people at Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz ran a scrolling feed of prediction-market bets on Iran’s next supreme leader alongside the news feed. This is war as a spectator sport – and this time the stakes are clear for all to see. 

The confusion that these products exploit exists only because media institutions have abandoned the field. Aggregating updates is not the same as building understanding. The dashboards offer the former while implying the latter. 

The data on what better looks like is not new. When Shishkin was running BBC Russia, 70 per cent of the output was commodity news that drove just seven per cent of page views. When the team rebalanced, cutting total output by 60 per cent and shifting towards explanation, perspective and context, the audience tripled. This is not a marginal finding. This is a direct challenge to digital newsrooms that still optimise for volume and recency above comprehension.

The New York Times is usually invoked at this point as the exception and it is true that the US title has built genuine product ambition into its bundle. But on the Middle East, even the Old Grey Lady usually defaults to the same format that it was using 10 years ago. The sophisticated reader trying to understand how the conflict’s moving parts connect is left to stitch these together themselves.

Why should readers maintain their news subscriptions when they can follow Substack writers who build context across weeks of posts or former intelligence analysts treating their social media followers as a continuing seminar? Because these are not replacements for institutional journalism; they are proof of concept for a format that barely exists in proper form. A continuously updated briefing on a single strand of the story, authored by someone with genuine specialist knowledge, that accumulates context rather than discarding it each news cycle: call it the “persistent thread”. Beyond that format, the tools already exist: structured topic pages that accumulate rather than reset, audio digests built around explanation rather than headlines, subscriber-only Q&A formats in which domain experts field the questions readers are actually asking. None of this requires new technology. 

Shishkin’s formulation is elegant: story first, user need second, format third. The live blog, on the other hand, is less refined and only gives the sensation of being informed rather than the development of understanding. Solutions exist – knowledge-management software, structured databases, audio production, even a well-maintained Substack – but at the moment the willingness of big news organisations seems absent. And the more complicated the news becomes, the further behind our venerable news organisations will seem. 

Colin Nagy is a Los Angeles-based writer and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

You wouldn’t normally find Corsica on any list of “lucky” places. Since antiquity, the Mediterranean island’s historical narrative has been dominated by onerous tales of rebellion, romanticism and a consistent knack for failing to make profitable use of its strategic position.

Yet Calvi, on Corsica’s northern coast, occupies a small but vital place in the history of modern tourism. It’s all thanks to the intentions of one individual. And no, I’m not thinking of Napoleon, the island’s most famous son. 

More than 75 years ago, a plane chartered by UK-based firm Horizon Holidays took off from London bound for Calvi. The firm was set up by a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz, whose idea was to deliver an all-in-one holiday experience in which flights, hotels, food and entertainment were included in a single price.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a package holiday to me”, then you’re absolutely right. Raitz demoed this new idea with a group of schoolteachers in 1950. The following year tickets became available to the general public.

Despite its pioneering package-holiday offering, Calvi never became as overrun by tourists as other popular places in the region. Though it had first-mover advantage, Mediterranean glamour, cheap flights and a romantic origin story, the town avoided becoming a relic, a forgotten coastal destination or fly-and-flop resort. 

“We’re pretty busy in summer but a lot of the people who dine here arrive by yacht from the Côte d’Azur,” a local told me as I reclined outside Île de Beauté café eating a salade de chèvre chaud on a recent low-season trip.

Calvi failed – or, for my money, succeeded – due to a mix of geography, politics, culture and sheer awkwardness.

The first puzzle pieces are the mountains that frame the town. Compare the obdurate landscape here with the Costa Blanca’s endlessly buildable coastlines. Then there’s the fact that package tourism lives or dies on cheap access. Calvi might have welcomed those early package-holiday jets but its airport remained small with volatile, weather-dependent landings, limited runway expansion and fewer direct routes.

Then add in the attitude of postwar France, which prioritised domestic tourism and had a preference for small hotels, pensions and campsites. Spain did the exact opposite, welcoming overseas tour operators with open arms. It also invested heavily in airports under Francisco Franco in the 1960s and 1970s.

Wandering around Calvi’s bijou squares and narrow lanes, I can’t help but to feel that the atmosphere of the place is innately inimical to populist tourism. Then I read more about who actually went on that maiden Horizon Holidays trip.

As Raitz later recalled in his memoir Flight to the Sun, the people attracted to his idea were not those you might expect. Raitz typified his guests as “The man in the street [who] acquired a taste for wine, for foreign food, started to learn French, Spanish or Italian, made friends in the foreign lands he had visited; in fact [became] more ‘cosmopolitan’, with all that that entailed.”

Based on Raitz’s recollection, it seems that the package holiday began with quixotic ideals before mutating into predictability, big hotels, English breakfasts, familiar nightlife and repeatable experiences.

And yet it’s difficult to identify a single quantifiable way to keep a pretty French coastal town such as Calvi from swapping the auberge for the all-inclusive, or the broody citadel for the bawdy souvenir stand. But it certainly helps to have a lot of mountains in the vicinity – and a motto along the lines of, “Whatever Spain did in the 1960s, let’s be forever grateful that we didn’t.”

Rob Crossan is a London-based journalist. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Running a city in today’s world requires grit and gumption. For some mayors, city management includes helping ageing populations to live better in their twilight years, while others work to politically engage young people. Developing parks, healthcare plans and accessible transportation are the goals for many mayors, and securing affordable housing is top of mind for most. Whether the city is in Portugal, Finland, Italy or London, the core realities of the job are the same: to help people live better lives in the place they call home.

Monocle spoke to several mayors and deputy mayors at Mipim, an annual real-estate conference in Cannes, France, about the challenges, projects and opportunities that they face in their cities. These conversations have been edited for clarity and length.

What are the main challenges that your city faces?
Silvia Salis, mayor of Genoa
Our city has one of the highest average ages in Europe. So the challenge is to convince young people to stay and invest in Genoa. For this reason, we need [to find] a good balance in the relationship between the public and the private [sectors] for investment and development of new projects. [We have a] university that could grow a lot in the future, so we must invest in student housing and find cultural and events programmes for young people. We want them to be happy in our city.

Tom Copley, deputy mayor of London for housing and residential development
We [have been] affected by rising construction costs and the cost of materials, by Brexit, the war in Ukraine – all of those things. But there are three things in particular that have impacted London disproportionately, largely because of the nature of our built environment. The introduction of the building-safety regulator [was botched], which led to enormous delays before spades could even go in the ground and developments could get started on site. Thankfully, that is now being reformed.

Carlos Moedas, mayor of Lisbon
Attracting young talent is fantastic but you have to invest in social welfare to counterbalance the idea that if people come to your city, the real-estate prices increase. Since my first term, I have maintained that for every euro that the city invests in culture, innovation or technology, we need to invest tenfold in social welfare. For example, in Lisbon, residents over 65 have a city health plan where they can call a doctor to their home for free. And we now own more than 22,000 apartments, which means that nearly 12 per cent of our population lives in housing owned by the municipality. That’s not just social housing but also affordable housing, so that professionals can afford their rent and are able to live in the city.

Tell us about some projects that you’re working on.
Piia Elo, mayor of Turku, Finland
Turku has an ambitious target to become carbon neutral by 2029. We still have issues with traffic but if we can solve those, we’re heading toward our goal. We are trying to make a new tramway – that’s a decision that we’re going to make this spring – to attract more people [to use] public transport. We’re building new lanes and roads for that, so even more people can use either the tram, ride a bike or walk.

Silvia Salis, mayor of Genoa
We have four main projects. The first is the redevelopment of our biggest stadium. We want to have a place where you can watch a football match, attend a concert or another big event. [The second project is] the Giacomo Carlini Stadium, a multifunctional venue that can help [residents of] the city live their days through sport. We have a project about tourism too: the Granarolo-Begato Sports Park, with mountain biking, trekking, climbing and a lot of other activities. The last one is a healthcare and social programme called Free Sport for people over 65 years old. We have to think about projects that can help older people to face the future in good shape.

Tom Copley, deputy mayor of London for housing and residential development
London needs housing, so our plan at the moment is [to build] 52,000 [homes annually], which is the statutory target. But the target announced by the UK government is 88,000 homes per year and we fully expect that to be the target in the next London plan. The question is: how do we plan for 88,000 homes over 10 years?

Raffaele Laudani, deputy mayor of Bologna for urban planning
In recent years, Bologna has become a key strategic European [partner] on big data and artificial intelligence. We host the second strongest supercomputer in the world for AI – the so-called Leonardo – and around it, a new ecosystem of knowledge and technology is emerging. There is an ecosystem of research centres and universities that is already operating in a quadrant of the city. We are redefining our policies around this flagship project, which we’re calling the City of Knowledge, to attract new start-ups and firms.

Roberto Gualtieri, mayor of Rome
We are pushing public transportation. We are investing billions in improving the accessibility of the city with metro, tram, train and new buses. We have a climate-adaptation programme, which is extremely ambitious, and we are planting a million trees in Rome. Rome is [the greenest] city in Europe: about a third of Rome is parks, a third is agriculture and a third is built. Few people know that and the green part is a strong asset. We are investing a lot to improve [our citizens’] quality of life. 

Carlos Moedas, mayor of Lisbon
When I compare [Lisbon] to other cities, there’s something that you can’t describe – almost like the soul of the city. As its mayor, it’s crucial [that I] maintain that identity. We have created different programmes: there’s one to protect historic shops and another for owners of small libraries. One of the most successful initiatives is a scheme in which we loan spaces for free to locals who might want to start a business in their neighbourhood. Some have become cafés, others tailors or small independent shops. These shopfronts would otherwise be empty. By helping people to create their own businesses, we are adding to the identity of the city.

How are you engaging young people?
Silvia Salis, mayor of Genoa
I’m attracting public and private capital to Genoa for student housing. That’s the first step. Then we are building a cultural programme with many events for young people. They have to feel that the administration sees them. A big problem in Italy is that young people don’t follow politics. They don’t believe in politics because politics don’t speak to them. A good administration must speak to them, even if they don’t vote. We have to think about them – about their tastes, about their future and even about [how they spend] their spare time.

Piia Elo, mayor of Turku
We’re looking toward the future and how we can attract different businesses. [We want to build a] humane city, where it’s good to do business and it’s very safe. We also want to provide a good living [situation] for the students, so that they [want to] stay here. That’s where our politics are at the moment. 

How are you planning to improve the quality of life of your residents?
Silvia Salis, mayor of Genoa
The Granarolo-Begato Sports Park is a big project – a wonderful idea to connect the city to sport, open air and a green way of life. 

Piia Elo, mayor of Turku
We are investing in wellbeing and sustainability. That’s something that we really work on: the cultural atmosphere of tolerance. We’re the fastest-growing city in Finland and I would say that we also invest a lot in services such as schools and safety – everything that makes a city a good place to live in. So it’s not only about investment but also how the city can support the people that live there.

How are you thinking of designing your cities around the needs of people?
Silvia Salis, mayor of Genoa
We must construct services [that you can get to] in 15 minutes. Genoa is a polycentric city: it has many historical centres. It’s important for us that services stay close to the people.

Tom Copley, deputy mayor of London for housing and residential development
One of the big [challenges] that cities, such as London, have in terms of people wanting to live there [is that it] is affordability. We can do a lot more to address those challenges: we need to be thinking about how we get more buildings to rent. For example, we need to look at creating good options for older people to downsize, which frees up larger family-sized homes for people that need them. We also need to focus on social and affordable housing. If we’re going to deliver at the scale we need, we need the diversity of tenure and options in our housing market.

Raffaele Laudani, deputy mayor of Bologna for urban planning
Bologna is famous for its plan for the historical centre, which produced the conservation of the historical patrimony but also its social dimensions. If, today in Bologna, we still have 50,000 residents from different social classes living in the same historical centre, it was because of that plan and the idea of making the area liveable for all. 

Economic development, social justice and environmental justice have to work together. We do it with the different actors of our territory, combining economic development, private profit and social justice. It’s complicated to keep the balance between social welfare and economic development but it’s something that we work on.

Carlos Moedas, mayor of Lisbon
The first thing – and this is a bit of my own dream for Lisbon – is to properly connect the city to the waterfront. We have a train that runs from Estoril into Lisbon and essentially cuts between the city centre and the river. I want to move this below ground so that people can walk from one side to the other. But that’s a 10-year project that can’t be done in a day. Then I want to turn to transportation. We are building the first new tramline since the 1960s to connect the centre of Baixa with a new park [to enliven] the east of the city.
Read the full conversation with Carlos Moedas.