The Monocle Companion: Fifty Essays for a Brighter Future is brimming with canny, clever and upbeat ideas – modest, big and world-changing – to improve everything from our daily lives to public discourse and how to solve some thorny problems that the world faces. The second outing of this Monocle paperback format is packed with knowing nudges, inspiring ideas and positive suggestions for fixing things.

In this issue:

• How to look forward with hope and why regret can be a constructive emotion.
• How to go off-grid. Small communities share big ideas for solving the energy crisis.
• What is driving the future of architecture, the bits between buildings and some achievable ways to be greener and tread a little lighter as we go.
• Why world leaders should care more about how we feel than what we earn.
• Why climbing a tree or solving a problem could teach us more than the current curriculum.
• Why the current course of technology is boring and how building human interaction into it is cause for cheer.
• Why there isn’t an app for everything – and shouldn’t be.
• How new habits – rather than revolutions – will nudge the world in a better direction.

Plus other fresh perspectives and long reads, big thinking and perceptive titbits.

Published out of London, Monocle was launched as a magazine briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and much more in 2007.