When Prada sent braided leather sandals down a Milan runway last year, its show notes called them simple “leather footwear.” In India, the design has a name: the Kolhapuri chappal, a sandal made by hand in Maharashtra for roughly 800 years. The craft has been associated with Dalit artisan communities and has been protected by […]
Europe has been told to wake up so often that the phrase risks losing its meaning. The sovereign debt crisis exposed weaknesses in Europe’s economic architecture. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed dangerous supply-chain dependencies. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the assumption that large-scale war had disappeared from the continent. At the same time, intensifying competition between […]
On September 16, 2026, President Vladimir Putin delivered his televised address on the eve of the State Duma elections. The opening was purely administrative: which offices were being contested, and the fact that the campaign was unfolding during the “special military operation.” Then, in the same even tone, he noted that Donbas and Novorossiya would […]
