Historical Context At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the First World War came to an end. The armistice - the fourth of three armistices which had already taken Germany's three main allies out of the war - meant total victory for the Allies and the collapse of Germany. The armistice was not a formal surrender - this would come later with the Treaty of Versailles - but it ended all the active fighting.

On a balmy day in July, Eliana Tranchesi stopped by the Balenciaga showroom in Paris to scrutinize the new season's handbags. With her honeyed mane, steely mien and enduring proclivity for body-skimming Dolce & Gabbana, Tranchesi is a familiar figure among the habitués of Europe's chicest ateliers. The Brazilian bombshell is the president and owner of Daslu, Latin America's most exclusive department store. Situated in an upscale residential neighborhood in São Paulo, Daslu is a repository of Chanel jackets and Frette linens.

Natural disasters are amoral things: neither good nor bad, malign nor kind. No matter the destruction they cause, they are processes, nothing more–exercises in geology, meteorology, physics, thermodynamics. We don’t treat them that way, of course. We curse the tornado that tears up a town, the earthquake that topples a city. The people of New Orleans don’t so much say the name Katrina as spit it. The same is true for New Yorkers and Sandy, and Floridians and Andrew.

The middle passage is the movement of captured Africans through the Atlantic Ocean after which they were sold in the Americas. Death and sickness was common along the middle passage as a result of the poor ventilation, limited space, poor diet and shortage of medical supplies that the slaves had to endure. It is reported that over 50 mutinies occurred on slave ships between 1699 and 1865, the most popular of which is the one led by Joseph Cinqué on a Spanish ship.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis has a confession to make. “Sometimes I watch the footage from my speeches and I always look much taller than everyone else around,” the 6-ft. 1-in. Greek Prime Minister says with a wry smile, buckled up in the back seat of his car in a pressed blue shirt and black hoodie. “Just so you know, there’s a small platform that I climb up that you can’t see in the videos.