Finland claiming the top spot in the Open Society Foundations’ annual Media Literacy Index has become an inevitability. The Nordic nation has placed first every year since 2017, when the list – which compares 41 countries based on things such as resistance to fake news and trust in media institutions – was launched. As with its stellar performances in other indexes (most famously the World Happiness Report), Finland’s media-literacy success is the subject of hand-wringing enquiry on the part of less happy and more distrustful countries. 

Some of the qualities that Finland possesses are impossible to replicate elsewhere. Its small, culturally homogeneous population fosters a great sense of unity, while the complex Finnish language (which even other Nordic peoples often struggle to understand) makes it difficult for foreign actors to spread false information. The country’s modern history – which has involved two wars against its former colonial master, Russia, followed by decades of Moscow-approved neutrality – has also engendered a deep appreciation of democracy, coupled with a heightened awareness of the threats posed to it. 

Still, there are other things that Finland does that can and should be imitated. Among these is education. Finns are taught media literacy almost as soon as they begin formal learning. These lessons come not through a media-studies course but a cross-curriculum effort that involves, for example, looking at the manipulation of statistics in mathematics, images in art, propaganda in history and language in Finnish.

The government has funded media-literacy programmes since the 1950s but the current model was only implemented in 2016, following elections in which there was an increase in Russian-led destabilisation efforts. Much of the country’s institutional bulwark against false information is also relatively new – including Faktabaari, a fact-checking NGO launched in 2014 that confirms or dispels stories that go viral. In 2023 it exposed false claims made in Arabic that social services were abducting children to sell them for profit across Nordic countries. 

The work of Faktabaari and similar organisations is helped by the fact that Finns maintain high or moderately high levels of trust in both their government (47 per cent, according to an OECD report, against an average of 39 per cent) and traditional media. The country has managed to avoid the obliteration of its regional press and its public broadcaster, Yle, reaches 94 per cent of Finns a week across TV, radio and online. This trust comes not only from those natural advantages mentioned above but as a self-fulfilling consequence of continuous and open debate. 

Then there’s the other half of the puzzle: literacy. Finland’s 5.5-million-strong population borrows close to 68 million books per year from its network of well-funded libraries. It is in these buildings, found in every decently sized settlement across the land, that older citizens are also taught classes geared towards things such as how to identify social-media bots and deepfakes. By contrast, about 40 public libraries in the UK are closing per year, while many of those that remain resemble the final scene of a particularly depressing Samuel Beckett play. 

Maybe the Finns’ greatest asset in the fight against false information is a philosophical one. At a time of growing polarisation, Finland is a society that knows what it stands for, which means that it doesn’t have to define itself by who or what it stands against. The promotion of the rule of law, gender equality and media literacy comes not just in the form of clear rhetoric (which is important) but also through well-funded, creative policies. 

In recent years, other countries have been trying to catch up. Germany has passed a law that fines social-media platforms that fail to remove hate speech, while France has sought to enforce greater content moderation during election campaigns. But the protean nature of fake news requires a level of urgency that is mostly absent elsewhere. The Anglophone world, for example, seems hopelessly adrift in a sea of mis- and disinformation. Much is made of Big Tech’s responsibility to police the misuse of its platforms but these companies have been neutered since Donald Trump’s re-election and, anyway, can such a powerful industry be trusted to properly regulate itself? While we all approach an uncertain future, the Finns, at least, have faith that their leaders and media companies will protect them and tell the truth. 

Alexis Self is Monocle’s foreign editor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Monocle’s December/January issue is out now. With handy insights from the past year and a view of what’s to come in 2026, our bumper winter edition is packed with reports, ideas and long reads to savour. We head to Beirut to hear about how the city is bouncing back, step behind the curtains at the Royal Danish Ballet, pick up presents in our festive gift guides and sit down for culinary treats at a few of Paris’s best bistros. Plus: dip into our Japan survey, which has plenty of lessons in mobility and retail for the year ahead.

When asked a tricky question related to the US cost-of-living crisis by a reporter earlier this month, Donald Trump knew exactly who to turn to: his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who happily obliged with a full-throttle defence of the president’s economic record. So devoted did she seem to her boss’s cause that Trump’s visiting dignitary that day – Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán – quipped that he would like to hire her.

With Maga-blonde locks and an angelic face that can instantly transform into the glare of a loyal attack dog, Leavitt has become one of the most recognisable figures of Trump’s second administration. Utterly committed to the Make America Great Again cause, the 28-year-old is the youngest person in US history to step up to the White House press podium – and is arguably one of its best. She is quick-witted with a pitch-perfect grasp of her commander-in-chief’s messaging and appears to share his deep disdain for many of the reporters who she goes into daily battle with. 

White House press secretaries have always held a higher profile than their counterparts in other countries, which is unsurprising given the fact that their boss is often considered the most powerful person on the planet. But there is also something uniquely American about the performative nature of the job, with telegenic personalities relishing combative back-and-forths with an equally ego-heavy press corps. Try to name any other press secretary in the world and you might be able to conjure up Alastair Campbell – the spokesperson and communications chief of former British prime minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003 – who took a similarly combative approach. After which, you would likely be stumped. 

I was a member of the Brussels press corps for five years, and the EU had a host of spokespeople, all of whom were picked for their blandness and inability to create anything resembling news. In the many other countries where I have reported as a journalist, press secretaries exist as conduits for public statements, regurgitating sound bites while keeping the media at arm’s length from those in positions of power. Trump’s approach is different. He speaks to the press regularly, whether it be in the back of Air Force One for an informal chat with travelling media or fielding questions during Oval Office sit-downs. Leavitt’s job is not so much to act as a gatekeeper for the president but as an amplifier of his message. And for that, she is the perfect pick. 

A lifelong conservative, Leavitt began writing pro-Trump op-eds for a student newspaper in 2016 when she was 19, already laying into the “unjust” and “unfair” liberal media. As a university student pursuing a degree in communications and political science, she interned at Fox News and then at the White House, before joining Trump’s press team as a full-time staff member in 2019. After Trump lost the 2020 election, she unsuccessfully ran for US Congress – but her stardom in the Maga world continued to rise.

In January 2024, she was appointed as Trump’s campaign press secretary and landed the government’s top communications perch soon after his re-election. Now she has crafted an image as a highly effective operator – albeit a deeply divisive one. To conservatives, she is an icon: a whip-smart, beautiful Christian woman who is both a devoted wife and mother. (Leavitt gave birth to her first child in July 2024, three days after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. She often brings her child to work.) To liberals, she embodies the worst of the Trump regime, spouting propaganda and parroting the president’s many false claims while bad-mouthing journalists. And Trump? He appears smitten. During his first term, the president went through five press secretaries: the most famous of whom, Anthony Scaramucci, lasted only 10 days. But now, with a press secretary who seems to relish forging herself in his own image, it looks like he has found his perfect match. 

Like Louvre jewellery or DB Cooper, the US president provokes headlines even in his absence. His recent nonappearance at three seminal events has drawn particular attention: the funeral of former vice-president Dick Cheney, the Cop30 climate talks in Belém and the G20 summit in Johannesburg. The first two of these were to be expected but the latter was more surprising. The reason for this decision was ostensibly over allegations that South Africa is mistreating its white population. It’s a choice that he might yet come to regret.

The G20 summit has convened annually since 2008, a year in which Washington hosted during one of then-president George W Bush’s last major appearances in office. That summit, which I covered as a young reporter in the US capital, was a coming-out party for the economic bloc. Remarkably, it was held just weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the meeting of nations to resolve a global emergency felt palpably optimistic. It marked the height of multilateralism and a turning point in the financial crisis, as investors became convinced that governments would serve as a backstop to prevent the worst economic calamity.

This is how multilateralism is supposed to work. It might not always function in the good times but nations should at least be able to come together in the bad. What’s also special about 2008 is that Bush was brave enough to call on world leaders for support – helping the US get out of a mess of its own making. A sort of mea culpa from the world’s superpower. Would Trump ever do the same?

Now the world is hurtling towards another possible bubble: an inflationary one brought on in part by US tariffs, a financial one brought on by AI and a governmental one caused by too much debt. Andrew Ross Sorkin, the acclaimed financial columnist, CNBC host and author of Too Big To Fail, tells Monocle that he’s convinced another bubble is building. “How could it not?”, given our history, he asks. And it’s the last of the three causes that is most concerning to him. Government debt levels are unsustainable, with investors operating under the assumption that the debt of major nations such as the US and France will continue to be bought, merely because they have been in the past. What if confidence simply evaporates? It can happen quickly, as it did in 2008 and 1929, arguably the first financial crisis of a globalised economy and the subject of Sorkin’s latest book.

This brings us back to the G20: this economic bloc of the world’s most powerful nations was elevated to its current status for precisely these moments. In 2008, they co-ordinated after the fact but the whole point of the G20 was to prevent the next crisis. If and when the next bubble bursts, president Trump might yet have to call on the world’s largest economies to come to his rescue. But if he can’t do them the service of attending, will the nation’s other leaders heed that call when it comes?

Chris Cermak is Monocle’s senior news editor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

It’s just before dawn on a chilly Friday when Monocle arrives to witness the secret delivery and installation of the window decorations. The precious cargo arrives in a huge truck at about 07.00. Nicolas Tillet, the project’s technical lead, is among the dozen workers unloading the pallets and positioning them in the department-store lobby. Tillet is clean shaven but with his grey hair, happy face and spectacles, he resembles an undercover Father Christmas in cargo pants. “Today’s the day!” he says as he greets us, electric drill in hand. Like a dance troupe that has rehearsed for months before its big premiere, Tillet and his coworkers skillfully manoeuvre their pallet jacks through the department store’s main entrance. Not unlike Santa’s elves, the dozen big men take tiny steps to glide past glass cases where customers will soon be browsing jewellery or fine leather gloves. Under Tillet’s exacting guidance, the technicians contort to slide into the narrow window spaces and wriggle the dressing in, all through concealed doors that the public will never see open. 

There are myriad festive gifts, fuzzy toys, shiny wrapping paper and boxes of artisanal chocolate that will be sprinkled around the shop’s 50 street-facing windows. The four most prominent frames will also play host to playful animations, from a makeshift chocolate factory to larger-than-life dentures being polished by toy rabbits – anything goes when it comes to imagining festive themes.

“It’s the busiest time of the year, so we have to get this right,” says Le Bon Marché’s creative director, Frédéric Bodenes, whose aim is to present a concept that will delight the shop’s youngest visitors and entice parents to embrace their inner child. Here on the ground floor, they will find 1,000 sq m dedicated to Christmas shopping, including a set designed to resemble an Alsatian Christmas market, complete with rows of chalets and cobblestoned streets.

This is the 29th year that the broad-shouldered creative director has worked on the windows. Across the decades he has experimented with numerous themes and protagonists, from lobsters to flamingos. “Once, I even did Christmas windows that were inspired by contemporary art – a total flop,” he says, wincing playfully. Since Le Bon Marché does not rent out its window space to brands (unlike most of its competitors around the world), Bodenes and his team can let their imaginations run wild.

“The windows have to be magical and joyful but also a little transgressive to get the parents into that playful space of Christmas cheer,” adds Bodenes. The windows become an attraction in and of themselves, he says with a sense of pride. “Each year, the unveiling draws a crowd – people even travel from outside of Paris to see them.”  

Balancing the need to show something fresh while respecting the sacrosanct boundaries of Nöel is a delicate mission. It’s why the planning phase begins months in advance, in a secret workshop outside Paris. Here, Bodenes and his crew present initial sketches and mock-ups to their teams, kicking off a flurry of discussions around the technical feasibility of each concept. Tillet, who is a specialist in electronics and mechanisation, is the first to be given the brief in early summer. Technicians and lighting designers then follow suit and the creative back-and-forth begins to make what seems technically impossible possible.

Bodenes describes Tillet as the shop’s very own “Gyro Gearloose,” a reference to the infinitely resourceful inventor from the DuckTales comic series, ubiquitous in France. “The first time we worked together I asked him to make me a dancing Christmas tree,” he says, while attempting a ballet pirouette. “He pulled it off, so naturally it was the start of a long partnership.” 

For this year’s storyline, the choice of protagonists comes as a surprise: a group of soft, toy rabbits. The idea came up during a visit to the Nuremberg International Toy Fair. “I saw this big mural of bunnies in all different colours and I immediately fell for them,” says Bodenes. “We had already decided on a traditional Christmas market theme for this year and I thought that they’d be perfect for the window show.” 

The team’s ambition goes well beyond token animation. There is lighting, music and choreography involved, making each window a standalone performance that plays in a loop for onlookers on Rue de Sèvres. “It has to be a real spectacle. The team spends hours mechanising and wiring each toy,” adds Bodenes while Tillet, who leads the mechanisation of the windows, is carefully undoing the seams, removing the stuffing and adding articulated frames and wires to the inside of each toy.

Making it all worthwhile 
Every team member is well aware that this is a high-stakes project – Le Bon Marché’s well-heeled customers feel strongly about Christmas. “One year, we installed the Christmas tree on the earlier side and many customers complained vociferously that it was inappropriate to put it up so early,” says Pierre Dromson, Le Bon Marché’s communications director. That, of course, goes for the windows as well: lifelong regulars feel a sense of ownership over the shop and let their displeasure be known if they feel that the window design misses the mark. 

The pressure is also on because the holiday season makes up a disproportionate number of annual sales for the retailer: the months of November and December alone are responsible for up to a quarter of annual sales. During that period, close to 1.5 million customers walk through the doors. To cope with the surge in foot traffic, executives from every department sign up for shop-floor shifts to assist overwhelmed sales associates or to man the gift-wrapping station – it’s all hands on deck for the most wonderful, lucrative time of the year. “One year I made the mistake of wearing a Christmas sweater on my gift-wrapping shift,” says Dromson. “It got way too hot. You won’t catch me gift wrapping in a cable knit again.”

It might come as a surprise that for a department store known for its fashion and beauty offering, Le Bon Marché’s festive windows deliberately omit traditional luxury goods. Instead, both the street-facing windows and the vast Christmas market focus on the art of gifting: clever knickknacks and trinkets, artisanal chocolates, knitted accessories and even carrot juice are merchandised throughout the space, alongside a selection of own-label products. “We offer gift ideas in dedicated spaces throughout the year, with a natural high point at Christmas time, when there is a strong emphasis on customisation,” says Elodie Abrial, the company’s commercial director. 

By looking beyond its core offer of designer handbags and high-end ready-to-wear items, Le Bon Marché is differentiating itself in an age of online shopping and stiff price competition. But it’s not so much a case of rethinking its role as a department store, than leaning into its long history of hosting cultural happenings. These date as far back as the 19th century, when the shop would host reading salons to entertain men while their female companions had dresses fitted. Since then, they have evolved into a rich, year-round agenda of art installations, performing arts happenings and shopping events featuring exclusive collaborations with designers and artists. 

The holiday season is the most extravagant manifestation of this retail strategy. “We go all out to put on a show that takes over the entire store,” adds Françoise Dilasser, Le Bon Marché’s lead scenographer. As the sun comes up, Tillet and his team continue their work. Several crew members glance at their wristwatches between tasks: every trace of the delivery must be gone by the time Le Bon Marché opens at 10.00.

Inside, the Christmas market is lit up, Le Bon Marché’s instantly recognisable escalators are clad in special, chalet-like decorations. The shop’s four Christmas trees, covered in hundreds of ornaments, stretch up towards the Gustave Eiffel-designed roof. Soon, crowds of passersby will flock to Rue de Sèvres to take in all of the team’s hard work and perhaps drop in to pick up a gift or two.

“It’s the most complex exercise of the year,” says Bodenes. “But when you ride the escalator, you hear customers laughing and you can tell that you’ve put them in the holiday mood – it makes it all worth it.”

I touched down in Toronto this week to meet some clients, scope out some potential business, do a little retail tour, say hello to my new colleague, Sally, at our College Street outpost and watch Prime Minister Mark Carney squeak his budget through parliament. On Wednesday, over drinks at a heaving Ritz-Carlton, I also met with a gentleman hailing from Winnipeg – the city of my birth. I no longer have much connection to the city, so it was like meeting a centuries-ago trader from the Hudson’s Bay Company (more on this in a moment) after his return from years trapping and trading in the Canadian wilderness. 

I wanted to know everything about the city and how it was developing. Had they managed to sort out the Downtown core? Where were the interesting pockets for better dining and shopping? What was the best hotel in the city? And where did he see opportunities? While the gentleman was damning in his assessment of Winnipeg’s Downtown, he was nevertheless hopeful that new initiatives and a group of passionate, patriotic locals were going to turn things around. As the conversation carried on and the hotel bar filled with more Torontonians in search of very early Christmas cheer, it turned out that I, too, was being recruited to be part of Winnipeg’s turnaround. 

As he discussed new developments on the horizon and the success of the city’s arena, my mind drifted to those early years in Winnipeg, when the city boasted a functioning and vibrant Downtown, three department stores on Portage Avenue and not a single vacant storefront along its main shopping strip. The Winnipeg of my childhood was a gateway to western Canada, a transit hub for grain and minerals bound for distant shores via Thunder Bay and even had its own ballet with a royal appointment. On Saturdays, I would go Downtown with my parents to visit the fashion and furniture floors of Eaton’s and The Bay (the retail brand of the Hudson’s Bay Company for several decades), plus a spin through Holt Renfrew for fancier gear. 

At this time of year, department store windows were filled with elaborate Christmas displays and I would jostle with other children to catch a glimpse of what Eaton’s visual merchandising team had created for passing traffic. Inside, I would make my way to the toy department and, for a couple of years, pay a visit to Santa. Eaton’s always had the best Christmas catalogue and I would flip back and forth across the pages looking at new trucks, tanks, planes, Playmobil police sets and scale-model collections of naval ships and armoured vehicles. Down the street, The Bay was housed in a more impressive building and was every bit what one would expect from a big-city department store in the early 1970s. There was a well staffed information desk, a buzzy cosmetics and fragrance hall and across its multiple floors The Bay could look after pretty much all household needs – from fur storage and full dining sets to the latest looks from New York and London. Paris, in most stores, was a bit of a stretch. 

Earlier this year the Hudson’s Bay Company went bankrupt after more than 350 years of business. Like so many North American department stores it shifted strategies on multiple occasions, went through endless management changes, ventured into markets where it didn’t belong and drifted away from its core of being a solid retailer for Canada’s middle classes. Today, Canada’s downtowns and malls are marked by scores of Hudson’s Bay shops that are permanently shuttered and the nation is poorer for it both economically and culturally. 

This week, Toronto’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House put some of the store’s art collection on the block, including fine pieces of Canada’s history that traded hands for quite reasonable prices. I grew up in a Canada that had about 10 national and regional department stores (Woodward’s, Ogilvy’s, Simpsons and more). Today there are two – Holt Renfrew and Simons. I walked past an empty Hudson’s Bay store at Yorkdale Mall (one of the most successful shopping centres in North America) and had to wonder whether, in the right hands, it could have turned itself around and made a case not just for the relevance of department stores in today’s retail landscape but for a thoroughly more pleasant and modern way to consume – and not only during the run-up to Christmas.

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

The decision by US president Donald Trump to acquiesce in the release of government files pertaining to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein might seem a surprising one. That Trump was an associate of Epstein is beyond dispute. That Trump is mentioned repeatedly in the tranches of Epstein’s correspondence that have been made public is equally incontrovertible. That Trump might have sat this long on an Epstein email that reads along the lines of, “Just to be clear, though, Donald Trump is a saint among men who stoutly resisted every tacky blandishment with which I ever tried to tempt him,” seems unlikely. 

There are two principal reasons why Trump might have agreed, after months of obstruction and deflection, to go along with this. One is that he has realised that he simply didn’t have the numbers to stop it, even among his usually obedient Republican colleagues in Congress, and is therefore observing the old rule of politics that if you can’t change the direction the parade is heading, get out in front of it. The other is that he has calculated that however gruesome any further revelations might be, his supplicant voters and media outriders will largely not believe them or simply not care. After all, they haven’t yet, through uncountable scandals, uproars and crimes.

Trump might be right about this. The already established and altogether irrefutable public record of Trump and Epstein’s association would – and should – have ended the careers of any other similarly lofty figure. In a few instances, it has. The recent release of correspondence with Epstein has cost the UK’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, his job. Prince Andrew is now plain Mr Mountbatten-Windsor. Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary under president Bill Clinton and former president of Harvard University, was revealed to have been soliciting Epstein’s counsel on how to hit on his students up until the day before Epstein’s arrest in 2019. He has announced a penitent slink into the shadows.

Trump has grounds for worry. One of the animating passions of his base has long been a morbid obsession with the idea that a cabal of powerful people furtively operates a child-trafficking racket. This is one of the key tenets of the QAnon cult and the associated Pizzagate conspiracy theory, towards both of which Trump has nodded and winked repeatedly. In recent weeks, Trump has tried to call back to this by suggesting that Epstein was a better friend to various Democrats than he ever was to Trump. But certain of his hitherto most reliable acolytes have been notably disinclined to fall in behind him.

We have, as a world, proceeded a distance through the looking glass where we are regarding Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as a voice of reason and pillar of decency. She has giddily amplified and endorsed any number of absurd, paranoid, pernicious and/or downright racist manias and been one of Trump’s most indefatigable cheerleaders. She has deserted him over the Epstein matter and he has reciprocated: Trump called her a traitor and has begun encouraging a primary challenge in her seat, Georgia’s 14th district, in 2026. Many of the glassier-eyed Maga faithful will regard this as akin to a parental separation. That feeling was compounded yesterday when, in another unexpected turn, Greene announced her resignation from Congress.     

Given Greene’s record, any assertion that she knows what she’s doing would be a bold one. Given Trump’s, we all know better than to confidently call any impropriety, however bizarre or grotesque, the beginning of the end. But Greene – and a few others – might have divined sufficient Epstein-related unease among the Maga tendency to perceive a first mover advantage in being among the earlier rats off the sinking ship.

I have spent my entire adult life going to the gym. There was a time when I would hand over whole chunks of my salary to personal trainers in the hope of suddenly transforming into some muscle-rippled god. Of course, this never happened. Instead, I would find myself standing with a group of people as they indulged in some fitness banter, debating the merits of various classes or routines, until one of them would inevitably turn to me and say, “How about you Andrew, do you ever work out?” Don’t worry, I have workshopped this with my therapist and moved on. 

Anyway, at this stage in life I am just grateful that they don’t ask me if I have a Zimmer frame parked outside. But you’d think that I would at least feel at ease when heading to a hotel gym for the first time or especially when using one of my regular hangouts. But no, it seems that I am one of those people who suffers from gym panic.

Like lots of folk who are not very fit, I am excellent at paying for gym memberships and currently have two to my name. One in London and one in Palma, Mallorca. The Spanish addition is relatively new and is for the very beautiful Palma Sport & Tennis Club. I can see this low-slung 1960s beauty of a building from my apartment. Indeed, sitting on my terrace, I can hear the music from various classes, see people swimming, whacking balls on the clay courts. This summer, after two years on the waiting list, they buckled and let me join. On my induction day, the lovely staff gave me a detailed tour, explained how the lockers worked and informed me of the various protocols to be obeyed. And then it was over to me.

In the gym, free of my chaperones, I felt like a child joining a new school where everyone knows the routines, how things work. I found myself watching people to make sure that I wasn’t breaking any etiquette codes, that I had the dress code covered. Staring at people in the gym, especially handsome ones, however, needs to be done with extreme caution, so I tried to observe them out of the corner of my eye as though I was in an old-school espionage movie. It probably just marked me out as a bit furtive.

While most of the machines were contraptions that I had unfortunately encountered before, there were several that were new to me and which I approached with the sort of trepidation that a cowboy might display when edging up alongside a particularly troublesome steed. Deep down, I feared inserting myself into a device back to front, or upside down, and hearing the rest of the gym break out in roars of laughter. I read the little charts attached to the machines and finally devised how you were supposed to get yourself into what looked like a fighter pilot’s cockpit. 

I occasionally search for workout-routine ideas on my phone to be prepped and primed but this is especially irksome when using Instagram because suddenly the algorithm starts serving you up invitations to accept all sorts of fitness challenges. “Start your 30-day calisthenics workout tomorrow and by Christmas nobody will recognise you!” declared a recent one. Fine – but I am not sure that it will be helpful sitting down for Christmas lunch and my other half asking, “I don’t mean to be rude but who are you exactly?”

I put in an appearance at my London gym this week – I have been going there for years yet still avoid certain sections that I consider to be for the big boys. There’s a vast muscly guy who I often see in the morning – he’s about the size of Malta – and on Monday I suddenly saw in the mirror that he was heading in my direction. I panicked. Was I in his favourite spot? Had I broken some secret gym rule? I took out my ear-pods. “Grrrrr,” he said a little menacingly. But then he laughed and fist-pumped me (maybe my first-ever first-pump, what a day!), said “Well done” and walked away.

I have tried to workshop my encounter with various people and while the exact meaning might be hard to divine, I am taking it as a compliment – otherwise I might never return. But the gym panic? I think it’s here to stay. 

To read more of Andrew’s columns, click here.

Helsinki in late November is not an obvious stop on the global tech calendar, yet the 2025 edition of start-up event Slush drew in a mix of 13,000 founders and investors. The delegates, representing more than $4trn (€3.46trn) in assets under management, seemed unfazed by the -10C temperature as deals were struck and parties extended into the late hours. The sums alone say something about Slush’s relevance but the event’s real appeal is its precision matchmaking: a tightly curated environment where capital, conviction and opportunity meet with uncommon clarity (and eye contact).

As Slush CEO Aino Bergius points out, more than 80 per cent of the attendees are either start-ups or investors. “If you come to Slush, the likelihood of meeting the right people is higher than ever,” she tells Monocle. That is what the event sells: high-yield proximity.

For investors, the added appeal is efficiency. Zhenya Loginov, partner at Accel, one of the largest VC firms on the planet, describes Slush as “suitably small” and “well curated”, a contrast to the sprawling, low-signal events that dominate the circuit elsewhere. Loginov moved from California to Europe because “opportunity is here”, and views Slush as the clearest snapshot of where value is emerging and which founders are worth backing. 

The dominant theme this year came as no surprise: artificial intelligence cropped up on almost every pitch deck and in myriad conversations. Beneath the hype, investor attention is maturing as behaviour becomes more disciplined and focuses on the offerings that are truly commercially ready. Loginov points to specific applications – developer tools and customer support – as already maturing, while warning that the rush to build ever-newer AI models might turn out to be an overfunded area in the long run. The attraction is obvious but the path to monetisation remains unclear.

A quieter but significant shift at Slush is the renewed focus on deep tech. Founders working in med-tech, space, quantum, advanced materials and energy systems say investor attitudes have changed markedly; timelines once dismissed as “too slow” are now viewed as essential to solving the world’s most expensive problems. “Scientific innovations have been around long enough that investors finally believe in them,” says Richard Jerome, a founder and science-commercialisation specialist. He cites the strong presence of European public funding as another reason that the sector is gaining momentum. 

This reassessment is visible in companies such as Robeauté. Co-founder Joana Cartocci is building microrobots for neurosurgery – tiny devices that move through the brain more delicately than conventional surgical tools. The company has raised €27m this year and is preparing for human studies. She sees investors shifting focus from quick returns to “the hard stuff”, and notes that portfolios are filling up with companies keen to fix society’s big problems. It marks a more ambitious mindset, one that aligns with Europe’s desire to reclaim a more assertive role in global innovation.

Beyond funding rounds, Slush acts as a calibration tool for anyone assessing where the smart money is moving. Jerome, an Insead MBA graduate who moved to Helsinki and launched a start-up here, notes that the event teaches first-time founders how to approach investors and which ones are worth their time. 

Maija Itkonen, co-founder of Onego Bio, a Finnish biotech company producing animal-free egg proteins, says Slush remains uniquely valuable because it forces deep-tech companies out of the lab and into the market conversation. Investors, she notes, now better understand the slower logic of deep tech, capital is moving again, and they are asking for hard numbers, genuine unit economics and verifiable traction. The era of speculative storytelling is fading.

For those trying to interpret where the smart money is going, Slush offers a clear if fast-moving picture.

• AI remains the dominant force but is splitting into the investable and the hopeful.
• Deep tech is sliding back into favour, supported by geopolitics, patient capital and a recognition that Europe must build its own industrial base.
• Climate-related technologies are shifting from moral argument to economic logic. 
• Defence tech, despite significant funding, remained curiously absent from the keynotes and PR pitches. 

Across the board, investors now place a premium on founders tackling real-world problems rather than producing small optimisations. As Bergius said in her opening remarks: “The big question is no longer what technology can do – it’s what it should do.”

Thousands of Belgraders marched down Kneza Miloša street last week, banging drums and blowing horns with Donald Trump’s name ringing out. The crowd stretched across all six lanes of the avenue as it made its way through the centre of Serbia’s capital. 

Those in front carried a banner, bearing the unwieldy but unequivocal slogan, “We will not give away the General Staff building”. It was a message to Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Serbia’s government. The extended Trump family has designs on a prime piece of Belgrade real estate, a ministry of defence complex known as Generalštab, directly opposite the main government building. Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, plans to build a new development on the site that will include a Trump International hotel.  

Serbian MPs gave the project a significant boost earlier this month when they voted in favour of redeveloping the site that has, for decades, enjoyed protected heritage status. This legislation achieved the unlikely feat of bringing together a disparate coalition of opponents, from student activists and architects to military veterans and right-wing nationalists. War veterans view the site as a memorial. (The complex took several direct hits during the 1999 Nato air-strike campaign against the government of Slobodan Milošević.) Architects point out that the buildings are a rare example of surviving work in Serbia by the renowned Yugoslav-era architect Nikola Dobrović. Meanwhile, students and anti-corruption campaigners highlight the lack of transparency surrounding the decision to sign the site over to Affinity Partners for a 99-year period. 

But what are they protecting? It is a site that consists of crumbling concrete, shattered windows and twisted metal. The ruins have offered the people of Belgrade a daily reminder of wartime ever since. However, it also provides a warped welcome to visitors of the city, whose route often takes them directly past the bombed-out buildings. 

Here lies the positive aspect of Affinity Partners’ interest: it recognises the need to breathe new life into the capital. Three decades on from the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia is still struggling to move forward, with historical arguments dictating the national narrative. Serbia’s leaders, and its people, vacillate between East and West, with exaggerated nostalgia for a warm, supportive relationship with Russia and a long, potholed path to EU membership.

The state of the Generalštab complex epitomises this indecision. Perhaps the site could be respectfully restored as a tribute to Nikola Dobrović. Or, given its utterly dilapidated state, replaced by something that represents the best of contemporary Serbian architecture.

After all, Trump-branded redevelopments have a track-record that could charitably be described as “chequered”. Take the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, later known as the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Ahead of its opening in 2011, it was a controversy magnet, from Trump’s misleading claims about financing and development to his daughter Ivanka’s inaccurate boast that she had personally sold 40 units at the complex. Within two years, the project was bankrupt; the Trump name was later removed and the hotel rebranded as a JW Marriott. Other examples include: Trump International in Toronto, opened in 2012, rebranded as a St Regis in 2018; and Vancouver’s second-tallest building, which lasted just three years as a Trump International before its closure in 2020, when employees learned that they were out of jobs through media reports. It now operates as the Paradox Hotel. The lesson? Serbia’s government should tread carefully.

The Trump International project is the wrong development for a country that needs infrastructure that can inspire for at least 99 years. It is not too late to harness the controversy to produce something better. To do that, however, Serbia must begin to look forward rather than back.

Guy de Launey is Monocle’s Ljubljana correspondent. Further reading? Monocle caught up with Serbia’s foreign minister, Marko Đurić, who has a Maga hat in his office – read the story here. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.