Stephen Miller, whose official title is deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, is known in Washington as “Trump’s brain”, such is his reputation for masterminding many of the president’s most radical policies. But perhaps a more accurate moniker would be “Trump’s translator”. Miller doesn’t think for the president but acts as a conduit for his most extreme messaging and impulses. While Donald Trump frequently obfuscates, leaving people unsure if he really means what he says, Miller distils his bluster and spells it out in no uncertain terms. 

Take, for example, when Trump sent the military into Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro in early January. It was a brazen raid against another head of state and the world wondered if it marked a seismic shift in US foreign policy. Where Trump was vague, Miller was crystal clear: “We live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

The full extent of Miller’s power is on display as the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) patrol agents rampage around Democrat-run cities, tear gassing and dragging residents out of cars. It’s the realisation of his life-long ambition and the manifestation of a world view that divides everyone into “us” and “them”. Within hours of Ice agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti on 24 January, Miller was on social media calling Pretti a “would-be assassin” and directing homeland security secretary Kristi Noem – who, in theory, outranks him – to claim Pretti wanted to “massacre” law enforcement.

Once again, it was Miller who was in charge of the narrative. Even when it backfired and Trump distanced himself from the “assassin” comment, there was no suggestion that Miller would step down. He is among an exclusive group of people that the president trusts absolutely – a trust built up during Trump’s first term when Miller was a speechwriter and senior policy adviser. At the time, the policies that he devised – including the Muslim travel ban and the separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border – were considered too extreme and many were reversed. 

Now with the president emboldened by his second election win, Miller has found his moment. He is the architect of the mass deportations of migrants and the deployment of the National Guard and federal agents onto the streets of American cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. In May 2025, when the normal rules of immigration law enforcement were not producing the results that he desired, Miller demanded that Ice hit an arrest quota of a minimum of 3,000 a day, paving the way for the brutish tactics and dragnet approach seen today. Miller’s public comments often skirt close to white-nationalist rhetoric, with The New York Times reporting that Trump once said Miller would be content if there were “only 100 million people in this country and they would all look like Mr Miller”.

The 40-year-old’s disdain for people from diverse backgrounds dates to his high-school years in Santa Monica, where he wrote a screed to a local paper denigrating Spanish speakers and Native Americans. (It’s also worth noting that Miller himself has a family history of immigration: he is the son of Jewish parents whose ancestors migrated from Russia in the early 20th century.) He moved in fringe right-wing circles while studying political science at Duke University before heading to Washington and working for a series of conservative legislators. It was his single-minded obsession with curbing immigration that caught Trump’s attention, but today, Miller’s reach in policy goes well beyond border control. 

From flooding the zone with executive orders to greenlighting military strikes on Yemen and engineering Maduro’s capture, all of the Trump administration’s most audacious policies are marked with Miller’s stamp. So, for anyone wanting to know what Trump is really thinking – and what he might do next – they would do well to pay close attention to Stephen Miller.

Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar, who is leading in the polls ahead of the country’s pivotal April elections, is hardly the first politician to be threatened with the publication of compromising material of an intimate nature. Though if the best that his opponents can do is threaten to release video of a healthy 44-year-old man having consensual sex with an apparently enthusiastic partner, he is entitled to feel confident about the looming vote. 

The honeytrap is, nevertheless, a venerable espionage technique, used throughout history to great effect – frequently on balding, pudgy, middle-aged male officeholders who have clearly not paused to wonder why 22-year-old lingerie model Svetlana finds their views on missile procurement so riveting. This past Valentine’s Day, the US Army Counterintelligence Command posted an image of a scarlet-clad woman making eyes at a gawky, bespectacled grunt with the caption, “It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out 10 + 5 = honeytrap. Report suspicious behaviour.”

A model for such operations might be that which undid Sir Geoffrey Harrison, a UK ambassador to the USSR in the mid-1960s. Harrison embarked on an affair with a Russian chambermaid in the embassy’s employ, heedless of the near-certainty that she was a KGB plant. The Briton gave himself up to his superiors at the Foreign Office after the Red Army marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was swiftly, if discreetly, recalled. Speaking about the incident years later, he said, “It is happening all the time to diplomats and journalists.”

The honeytrap is not exclusively a tactic of the West’s antagonists or a relic of the Cold War. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear technician who, in 1986, spilled details of his country’s officially denied nuclear weapons programme to a British newspaper. While in London, he struck up a relationship with an American tourist, who suggested a city break to Rome. The American tourist was a Mossad agent, as were her colleagues waiting in the Italian capital. They spirited Vanunu to an Israeli navy ship and back home to stand trial for treason and espionage. He served 18 years in prison.
     
Last year, a 60-something retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel David Slater, working as a civilian contractor on Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska – overseer of American nuclear forces – was handed nearly six years in the federal clink for conspiring to disclose classified material. In 2022 he had been chatting online, or so he believed, to a Ukrainian woman with what should have seemed a perturbing line in conversation: “Beloved Dave, do Nato and Biden have a secret plan to help us? American intelligence says that already 100 per cent of Russian troops are located on the territory of Ukraine. Do you think this information can be trusted?”

As long as there are ruthless intelligence services and lonely, gullible people in high office, honeytrapping will continue, which prompts the question of how to combat it. The most obvious way is, of course, to maintain an unforgivingly rigorous assessment of your own attractiveness relative to that of the vision gazing adoringly over the martini glasses as you expound upon the footnotes of this treaty that you’re negotiating. The other – amoral but effective – is to regard such importuning as a perk of the job.

Regrettably unprovable but persistent Cold War legend has it that during one visit to the USSR by Indonesian dictator Sukarno circa the 1950s and 1960s, special measures were taken to ensure his loyalty to the Kremlin. A bevy of comely KGB operatives were disguised as Aeroflot hostesses and deployed to the bar of Sukarno’s Moscow hotel under instruction to inveigle him to a room rigged with surveillance equipment and show him a good time. However, the Soviet spooks misjudged their mark: when they showed the subsequent good time back to Sukarno on film, he did not, as they might have hoped, cower in obeisance. Instead, he exclaimed his delight and asked for copies of the tapes.

Andrew Mueller is a contributing editor and the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio. Listen to more about Hungary’s elections on Monocle Radio’s ‘The Globalist’ here.

The AlUla Arts Festival wrapped up this week. It’s an event that’s transforming perceptions and setting the ambitious tone for art and design in its namesake town in northwest Saudi Arabia. After touching down in its desert landscape earlier this month I was whisked from the airport through dramatic stone escarpments that emerged from seemingly endless expanses of sand, occasional oases of palm trees and horizons defined by low-slung mountains. 

The region is clearly undergoing rapid development; diggers and excavators are a constant against the stunning natural backdrop. But those driving the project, the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), are establishing frameworks to ensure that change is as sensitive as it is swift. Case in point is a petrol station constructed from rammed earth by Jeddah-based SAL Architects, which rises from the desert on the town’s southern outskirts. It blends into the landscape and speaks to AlUla’s history as a cultural crossroad on the route to Medina. Even today, it remains a place for travellers to refuel.

It’s scene-setting architecture that responds to place. This ambition is also being harnessed by the AlUla Arts Festival whose programme included artist residencies, design prizes and exhibitions. Its aim is to help lay the groundwork for the region’s development in a way that’s appreciative of its past but striving toward the future. Here are five takeaways from the event, with applications that stretch far beyond the seemingly infinite Saudi desert.

Don’t be a copycat
“It’s not about mimicking the past,” says Sara Ghani, an urban planning and design manager at RCU, while explaining that it can be tempting to simply mirror the forms of AlUla’s ancient buildings, some 900 years old. Her team encourages architects of new projects to find ways of referencing place without replicating it. Take the Alula Design Centre. “The skin of the building is corten steel, not mud, but it references the city’s ancient breeze blocks – a contemporary building that reflects older character.”

Put on rose-tinted glasses
“There’s more than 7,000 years worth of continuous civilisation that have lived on this land and so we see AlUla as a place to learn from the past,” says Hamad Alhomiedan, arts and creative industries director at the Royal Commission for AlUla. Hegra, he says, is a case in point. A major archaeological site near AlUla, it features water wells and cisterns that never relied on mechanical pumps or electricity, as well as decorated tombs and inscriptions. It’s a 2,000-year-old benchmark for building better with less. “In AlUla, we see art and design excellence cascade from ancient civilisations to today.”

Build for the best
A good artist and design residency should have a legacy that extends beyond its duration. “They’re a living reference for designers working in a region,” says Arnaud Morand, the head of art and creative industries at the French Agency for AlUla Development, while moderating a panel on the AlUla Artist Residency. He articulates the importance of bringing in an international cohort of designers. “Through research, we can root future work in the land, the people and its history, so that design doesn’t land on top.”

Reframe regulation
A participant in the artist residency is Amsterdam and London-based Studio ThusThat. As part of the programme, they developed a new concrete-like material from slag (a waste-product of Saudi Arabia’s aluminium and copper refineries). And while it has the potential to play a part in a circular economy, a widespread introduction won’t be without difficulty. “Economies of scale and regulation framework are the big challenges,” says co-founder Paco Böckelmann. “But it’s about looking for opportunity: we found a factory where it was easier to mill the waste slag for us than store it.”

Look to art
Wadi AlFann, or “Valley of the Arts”, is a 65 sq m open-air, contemporary land-art destination. Set to open in coming years, it will feature works by the likes of New York-based Agnes Denys, whose ethos will be imbued in the development of buildings on the site. “We’ll be drawing inspiration from the artists that we’re going to commission,” says Iwona Blazwick, the lead curator for Wadi AlFann. “Land art is of and for the land, so we want an architecture that is made of and for the land, too.”

Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor. For more on AlUla and the movers and shakers that made waves at its arts festival, click here.

It is possibly the most comprehensive downfall of a senior British royal since the arrest, trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649. The increasingly former Prince Andrew – latterly Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – can at least console himself that the soup in which he finds himself is not quite that hot or deep. He does, however, appear out of escape routes or options, short of somehow orchestrating the Shakespearean carnage that would vault him dramatically upwards from his current position of eighth in line to the throne.

Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested today on suspicion of misconduct in public office, another consequence of his long friendship with child sex offender and people trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. This is potentially as serious as British legal jeopardy gets: the maximum sentence is life imprisonment. Mountbatten-Windsor has always maintained his innocence and he has not, as of this writing, been charged. But it has been made brutally apparent that if the matter of Rex vs his younger brother makes it to Crown Court, Mountbatten-Windsor is on his own. King Charles III’s terse statement said, in part, “Let me state clearly: the law must take its course.”

It is further ignominy for Mountbatten-Windsor, who was once described to me by a former British diplomat as, “against considerable competition for the title, the single stupidest human being I have ever encountered”. Mountbatten-Windsor does indeed seem an example, both classic and extreme, of what can occur when a certifiable dunce spends a lifetime being indulged by people whose position depends on a willingness to keep telling him that he’s wonderful and to clean up his messes. This latest development is exactly the kind of publicity that the British royal family – like any family – would prefer to avoid. But there is an argument, amid the grubbiness of the revelations thus far and the likely squalor of those to come, that this is, if you tilt your head and squint, an advertisement for the modern United Kingdom.

A British monarch, subject as they are to the scrutiny of the press and the social-media panopticon, has less choice than they once did about whether to sweep the misdeeds of a wayward relative under the carpet or throw the black sheep to the wolves. In a more servile era, Mountbatten-Windsor could have been punted off to become governor of some obscure dominion, much as Edward VIII was inflicted upon the Bahamas after the unfortunateness with Mrs Simpson and the high tea with Adolf Hitler. In the here and now, it has been demonstrated that the law’s reach does not stop, even at the palace gates.

It is difficult to miss the contrast with one former British colony – a nation that was founded in revolution against those of Mountbatten-Windsor’s forebears who believed themselves born to rule and above the law. Mountbatten-Windsor is just one of several prominent figures in the United Kingdom and Europe who in recent weeks have had their careers ended, their reputations tarnished and/or their collars felt over the latest revelations of Jeffrey Epstein’s global network of influential creeps. But in the United States, where many powerful figures – including the currently most powerful – maintained well-documented relationships with Epstein, the Feds are yet to kick any doors down.

None of which, of course, matters more than what the disgracing of Mountbatten-Windsor and others might mean to the victims of Epstein and his circle. As more of their tormentors get at least a taste of what they have long had coming, we inch closer to the justice that they have long deserved. 

Since 2007, Monocle has reported from around the world – in print, on radio and online. Over the past 19 years, our editors and correspondents have assembled a sizeable global address book showcasing the very best in hospitality, retail, culture and more.

Travel content has always been a fundamental pillar of Monocle’s offerings. Our City Guides are full of insider recommendations of where to stay, where to dine and what to see when visiting a new city. To date, we’ve checked into a London hotel spread across three Georgian townhouses; slurped thin buckwheat noodles in one of Kyoto’s most revered soba spots; sought out bespoke tailoring in Singapore; and spent a few weekends in Athens’s buzziest neighbourhoods. Our guides not only dig below the surface to show you the places favoured by locals but they are also updated frequently to reflect the changing nature of the destinations covered. Here we provide a rundown of how these guides are produced. 

Who writes our guides and why you should trust us
When compiling our City Guides, we draw upon our extensive network of bureaux staff and trusty correspondents. Though our list of destinations is varied, stretching from New York to Sydney, each one is made to reveal their true inner workings. To this end, we only use writers and editors who have known a particular city for an extensive period of time and fully understand what makes it distinct. 

Our editor in chief, Andrew Tuck, has taken care of Palma, his home away from home for quite some time. Our editor, Josh Fehnert, has transported readers around London, through the old charms of Bloomsbury to Monocle’s neighbourhood of Marylebone and beyond. Inzamam Rashid, our Gulf correspondent, has written about Dubai; staffers in our Zürich and Paris bureaux have overseen coverage of their plots; and the very best of Ginza, Tomigaya and other Tokyo neighbourhoods has been put into being by our senior Asia editor, Fiona Wilson.

Monocle has a rich history of creating travel guides. Notably, we produced The Monocle Travel Guide Series, a collection of books instantly recognisable for their black covers and playful artwork. They helped travellers to feel like a local wherever they found themselves, informing them about everything from cafés and music venues to late-night bars and museums. Today we are polishing off Thailand: The Monocle Handbook, the sixth installment in our handbook series, due for release in late spring 2026.

How we decide which cities to spotlight
There is no strict formula but we began by paying attention to the destinations that we’ve had close connections with. London and Zürich are home to our two headquarters, while bureaux in Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo expand our global presence. 

From there, we’ve branched out to cover the essentials – Barcelona, New York and Rome – as well as places that we find ourselves frequently returning to: Copenhagen for 3 Days of Design; Milan for its fashion weeks; and Dubai (our guide to Abu Dhabi is currently in the works). We’re also proud to have published reports from Istanbul, Jakarta, Singapore and Mexico City.

With plans to grow our offerings, we aim to paint portraits of even more capitals, including Seoul and Amsterdam, in addition to quieter destinations that are often overlooked by the headlines.

How we pick which hotels, restaurants, shops and other venues to include
The aim of every City Guide is to go beyond the usual tourist beats. We avoid sending you to destinations filled with camera-toting visitors. Instead, we suggest insider favourites that you won’t find in most guidebooks. Each directory also has a downloadable map that lists our recommendations, so you can easily navigate your way around whichever neighbourhood you’re in.

Our hotel selection often features grand dames but we place equal emphasis on boutique stays that champion good design and generous hospitality. We’ll help you to navigate the maze of drinking and dining options, pointing you towards the hard-to-find tables frequented by locals – perhaps a canteen-like spot in Istanbul where you’ll experience first-rate Anatolian cuisine or a Madrid tavern that has been in operation since 1854. To help you make the most of an afternoon, we’ll steer you toward architectural marvels, cultural hubs championing homegrown talent and, for good measure, a few vibrant enclaves that fully showcase a city’s inner life.

Both former vice-president Kamala Harris and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) have been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Harris’s presidential failure and AOC’s blunders in Bavaria last weekend are all the more meaningful as the two women generate 2028 hype, even being touted as a potential joint ticket. There has been some speculation that Harris will yet again vie for the presidency and AOC, currently 36 years old, will run as her VP. It’s a match made in progressive heaven – but one that many Washington watchers suggest is doomed to fail. And for good reason. 
 
This past weekend, AOC made her first major international appearance at the Munich Security Conference. In a speech heavily critical of the Trump administration’s muscular foreign policy, AOC demonstrated “a complete lack of chops about international issues”, according to New York Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. AOC’s gaffes included mistakenly positioning Venezuela below the equator and failing to answer convincingly about how the US might respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The four-term representative from Queens had hoped that her Zohran Mamdani-esque focus on affordability and other working-class concerns would gain traction with the world’s leading decision-makers. Instead, AOC merely confirmed, claims Sheinkopf, that “she’s not ready for prime time on the international stage”. 

AOC’s showing in Germany comes just as Harris – also criticised for her lack of foreign-policy experience – begins to reposition herself on the US political stage. This month, Harris relaunched her dormant social-media accounts as “an online organising project for next-generation campaigning”. The rebrand was a welcome dose of good-ish news for Harris, who was lambasted in January as she crisscrossed the American South promoting her 2024 campaign memoir, 107 Days, while courting African-American supporters. Though black people – her most crucial voting block – continue to display loyalty, influential Democratic donors insist (albeit anonymously), “Kamala hasn’t accepted [that] she’s not running yet.”
 
Both women are dependent on a declining popularity base to boost their credibility, meaning that they could actually weaken rather than aid one another. Donald Trump gained ballots across traditional Democratic demographics, such as Latinos, women, young people and African-Americans when he stood against Harris in 2024. These are the exact same cohorts that AOC has relied on for her own congressional support. Also worrisome is that AOC’s Munich moment was rife with the type of infelicities that have long plagued Harris – her infamous penchant for “word salad” – making it another potentially disastrous double whammy for the duo. The Democrats’ history of recycling failing candidates (think Hillary Clinton) has to be abandoned. 
 
So who, then, might make more sense for the Dems in 2028? Though wins by socialist-leaning Democratic mayoral candidates in New York and Seattle last year suggest that the party’s fringe is flying, the US has traditionally opted for moderates. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, initially comes to mind and he too was in Munich over the weekend to promote his internationalist bona fides. 
 
But having “run” for the presidency now for almost a decade, Newsom already feels stale and past his expiration date. He might have taken on Trump on the immigration front and reversed his views around culture-war flashpoints but despite his classic good looks, Newsom simply lacks sex appeal. His prostrating to Trump following the Los Angeles wildfires last year proved that he’s more mush than muscle, while his recent book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, barely caused a ripple among the media or party stalwarts.
 
A better bet would be a Pennsylvania double-punch pairing: Democratic governor Josh Shapiro and senator John Fetterman. Though their ticket would be complicated by the twelfth amendment, Fetterman’s ill health and their vocal support for Israel, each has demonstrated a level of verbal and moral clarity that many voters – particularly undecideds – now crave. True, both Shapiro and Fetterman are white men in a party consumed by optics and identity politics. But progressive politicking can only result in progress if its politicians actually get elected. Though the pair have famously been frosty to one another, Fetterman’s hardscrabble, working-class Pennsylvania roots complement Shapiro’s more urbane sophistication. Fetterman and Shapiro will have to move on from their current frostiness but in a country that has elected Trump twice, the improbable feels increasingly probable.

David Kaufman is a New York-based journalist. 

For more coverage of US politics, read here:
– ‘Division and dissension’: US senator Murkowski on Trump’s disrespectful Arctic policy

– Budge up JD Vance, Marco Rubio is sitting second in command

– From pageants to politics: Erika Kirk’s rise as the new face of the Maga movement

The Olympic spirit runs deep in some families. This is especially true for Marco and Valentina Marchei, an Italian father and daughter who count four Games between them. The elder Marchei ran the marathon in the 1980 and 1984 Summer Games while the younger Marchei took to the ice in the 2014 and 2018 Winter Games. “You could breathe Olympic spirit in the house”, she tells Monocle. But the family’s focus was on how sport opens doors to the world rather than achieving Olympic success at all costs.

In Marchei’s long skating career, those doors opened to opportunities of training around the globe, from Latvia to France and the US. She competed in numerous world and national competitions in singles skating before jumping to the Sochi Olympics. After those Games ended, she spun to a new discipline within the sport: pairs figure skating, which took her to the Pyeongchang Games. The shift gave her a new appreciation for teamwork. “People think of it as a compromise with the other person but it’s [actually] a compromise with yourself,” she says. It’s about “how much you let go” and trust the other person.

Marchei joined Monocle in Milan to discuss her skating career, what it was like to switch from singles to pairs skating and where she sees the sport heading. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You competed in the 2014 and 2018 Olympic Games. What was it like to represent your country at the highest level?
It wasn’t easy for me to get to the Olympics. It took me eight years to qualify, so when I walked into the Olympic Village in Sochi I was like a kid in a candy shop. I dreamt about it many times. But [I also wanted to compete] because I come from an Olympic family. My dad [marathoner Marco Marchei] did two Olympics in Moscow and Los Angeles, so I always respected the Games. 

After the 2014 Olympics, you changed from singles to pairs figure skating. How was switching disciplines?
It’s extremely different but it’s not much harder. After 20 years of singles and four years of pairs, I consider myself a pairs skater. As a single [skater], you get used to motivating yourself and holding onto your dreams alone. You have a team but in that rink, you are alone. 

In pairs you share everything. People think of it as a compromise with the other person but it’s [actually] a compromise with yourself: how much you let go and how much you can [put the] team spirit into the performance. [Being a part of a pair has given me] the best lesson: you share emotions and the hard work. You know that when you put your hand out, you will always find a hand that holds yours and carries you towards your goal.

You mentioned your father was also a competitor. Did you think you were destined to become a top athlete?
You could breathe Olympic spirit in the house. But my dad wasn’t one of those dads that wanted me to be on top. He always taught me that sport is a school of life because you’re going to travel, meet other people and learn different languages. I travelled a lot. I have lived in Latvia, France and the US, and it allowed me to experience a different type of skating as well as different identities. I have lived many different lives. Without those experiences, I wouldn’t be the person that I am now. I had the opportunity to portray different characters on the ice and tell different stories with my movements – with my jumps, my spins and with everything that goes with skating.

With skaters like the ‘Quad God’ – the American Ilia Malinin – pushing the athleticism of the sport, how do you see figure skating evolving? 
It’s evolving in a way that is very technical, but at the same time, you’re seeing a lot of great performances; ice dance proved that. There are not just the jumps – of course, it’s crazy to see all these young men doing incredible [jumps] – but let’s not forget that figure skating is art and everything that goes into it is part of the performance. It’s not just about jumps and spins, it’s also the story you portray on the ice that makes a great performance.

Read more coverage from the Milano Cortina Games
– The Winter Olympics are a hit. Not even climate change can stop them

– Not ready for the Games to end? Here are the films to keep your Olympic flame burning

– Ski mountaineering is the Winter Olympics’ newest sport. It is also its noblest

It’s January 1964. The hosts of Austria’s first Winter Olympics are facing a dire prospect as the Alps surrounding Innsbruck lack their white winter coat. The culprit? A warm, dry Foehn wind, known in Alpine regions as a “snow eater”. So the organisers get to work, enlisting the Austrian army to carve 20,000 ice blocks from the highest peaks and cart them downslope to fashion bobsleigh and luge tracks. Soldiers truck 40,000 cubic metres of snow to shore up the ski racing venues – and another 20,000 cubic metres for reserves, just in case.

The Winter Games go on as planned, with a whopping 80,000 fans packing the grandstand to watch the ski jumping (pictured). The event is so successful that Innsbruck comes to the rescue in 1976 when Denver turns down the Games after winning its bid.

This piece of Olympic lore is illustrative because it serves as a rejoinder to the naysayers who are convinced that the Winter Games’ days are numbered. Every four years, the chorus grows louder that climate change has doomed the wintry edition of the world’s greatest sporting competition. Media coverage of Milano Cortina has been particularly fond of trotting out a 2024 study, sponsored by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which found that 52 of 93 past and potential Winter Olympic hosts could still reliably stage the Games by the 2050s. The figure dips to 46 by the 2080s.

The dwindling number of reliable venues is a sad reality but it hardly means that there will be nowhere to stage the Winter Games. The French Alps – one of only four places identified by the study that could still host with natural snow by the 2050s – are already on tap for the next Games, while preparations are well under way for the 2034 Olympics to make a return visit to Salt Lake City. Buoyed by the dispersed venue approach in Italy, itself a concession by the IOC to the new landscape of winter sport, the Swiss are front-runners for 2038. Peering two decades ahead, New York state and a joint Australia-New Zealand bid are already gunning for 2042.

Will these future sites be plagued by poor weather that threatens competition? Almost certainly. Indeed, the very same happened in 1928 at the St Moritz Olympics, when another Foehn wind pushed the mercury in the Engadin to a balmy 24C. After a warm spell in 2010, Canadian organisers trucked in snow, then dumped it by helicopter onto Vancouver’s freestyle venue. The opposite also happens: heavy snow played havoc with ski racing at Sapporo in 1972.

Winter-sport devotees know that fickle weather is part and parcel of our irrational passion. Sometimes our prayers for snow are answered. Sometimes, they aren’t. If Hokkaido’s capital had hosted the Games this year, as once envisioned before an aborted bid, there would have been hand-wringing about too much snow. Utah’s ski resorts are sweating through their worst winter since modern records began. Even as such variations become more frequent, private-sector innovation is helping winter-sports facilities adapt. See, for instance, the ever-more efficient snowmaking from Bolzano’s TechnoAlpin and pioneering Finnish snow-storage technology.

Milano Cortina’s spectacle on snow and ice has given us indelible moments, from South America’s first Winter Olympic medal won by Brazilian Lucas Pinheiro Braathen in the giant slalom and Norwegian cross-country skier Johannes Høsflot Klæbo cementing his greatest-of-all-time status to the sad end that befell US alpine skier Lindsey Vonn’s comeback bid. I have no doubt that there will be many more memorable moments in the quadrennial cycles to come, even if it takes an army. 

Gregory Scruggs is Monocle’s Seattle correspondent. For more coverage of the Milano Cortina Games, check out: 

– Why the Winter Olympics are better than the Summer Games

– Skating’s solo act: Donovan Carrillo is the only Latino on the ice at the 2026 Winter Olympics

– Ski mountaineering is the Winter Olympics’ newest sport. It is also its noblest

Multi-hyphenates rarely achieve equal success across their different ventures. But not so for Verbal, a Tokyo-based rapper, music producer, saké promoter and fashion CEO who has worked with the likes of Nike, Off-White and Louis Vuitton and helped to disrupt Japanese pop music’s rigid conventions.  

To get a sense of his signature sound, listen to “Eko Eko”, a song released in June 2025 by his group, M-Flo. The track features Verbal and his groupmate, Taku Takahashi, alongside South Korean hip-hop artist Zico and Japanese vocalist Eill. They vocalise over a galloping beat, plaintive synths and guitar chords, switching between Japanese, Korean and English lyrics. 

The track – which features on the group’s 10th album, Superliminal – is typical of Verbal’s output. Genre-bending and language-crossing, it straddles cultures and musical styles. It is J-pop, K-pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music all in one. Verbal has been at it since 1999, when he and his M-Flo bandmates, Takahashi and singer Lisa, released “Been So Long”,  a song that fused R&B-style vocals, rap and electronic beats with Japanese and English lyrics. “In the late 1990s in Japan, hip-hop was hip-hop, R&B was R&B and rock was rock – you couldn’t leave your territory,” says Verbal. “We weren’t abiding by any of those rules. We didn’t even know that there were rules.” 

In addition to being a member of M-Flo, Verbal and other Japanese rappers and DJs formed the Teriyaki Boyz in the early 2000s, collaborating with talents such as Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams, Busta Rhymes and Kanye West. Even now, the hybrid sound that Verbal and his cohorts pioneered permeates the tunes of younger J-pop and K-pop musicians. And that’s only a fraction of Verbal’s recent creative output. 

When not in the studio, Verbal heads streetwear-inspired brand Ambush, which he co-founded with his partner, Yoon Ahn, the company’s creative director. What started in 2008 as a pop-art jewellery project has become a clothing, bag and accessories brand with five shops in Tokyo and Osaka. At the brand’s Shibuya office mood boards and racks of clothing samples crowd one room. Verbal shows us around, wearing a black Ambush MA-1 bomber jacket and matching turtleneck sweater with a prototype diamond-encrusted chainlink ring on his finger. He describes how he likes to obsess over details, whether it be for new Ambush releases or planning his upcoming music shows in Tokyo.   

Ambush took its first collection to Paris in 2015 and held its first runway show at Milan Fashion Week in 2022. It has collaborated with labels such as Nike, Uniqlo, Bulgari, Moët & Chandon and Undercover, and, in early 2020, it became part of the Milan-based New Guards Group, an early investor in Off-White. “We decided that we needed a global expansion partner that could help us with the retail and wholesale strategy,” says Verbal. 

Last year, amid restructurings at New Guards and its owner, Farfetch, Verbal and Ahn took back control of Ambush in a management buyout. Verbal describes the five years under New Guards as “a crash course in business, legal and finance”. He and Ahn also clarified their roles under the ownership, with Ahn serving as designer and Verbal in charge of the nuts and bolts. This includes looking at materials and liaising with factories and collaborators, while keeping an eye on trends. “As a brand, we feel so much stronger now,” he says. 

You would think that Verbal would be too busy to juggle more but in 2025 he launched Sōmatō, his small-batch saké brand. Verbal came across Takahashi Shuzo, a 141-year-old brewery in Misato, Akita prefecture, while helping an overseas fund look for distressed assets in Japan to invest in. After hearing from the brewery that it wanted to stay independent, he suggested the new saké brand, which it now produces for. “This is how you should talk to artisans around Japan: ‘We want to retain your legacy but also energise it,’” he says. “The mayor [of Misato] thanked us for bringing new life to the brewery.”

The saké project isn’t out of character for Verbal. A third-generation South Korean who was born and raised in Japan, he is a product of Tokyo’s international schools; he is fluent in English and Japanese, as well as in the musical language of US hip-hop and R&B. His ventures tend to draw on his unique status as an insider whose background means that he understands Japanese culture but isn’t constrained by it. “I think of myself as a cultural translator,” he says.