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Interior Designer Sumessh Menon works his craftsmanship yet again to weave upbeat, new-age materials into Masala Bar - a bar and restaurant that is touted as Pune city's best yet! Check it out here…

'Chaos' and 'confinement': 'intense emotions' and 'intimacy' is the essence that characterizes the design of this bar and restaurant - Kinoya in Montreal, Canada.

Can robots substantiate the 'real' feel? Check out the newly launched world's first robotic bartending system and leave us your valuable inputs...

Style plays s very significant contributor in actualizing a thematic décor. Check out the hospitable world of crime in a Mumbai café and bar and leave us your views…

The Orange Lane, Mumbai, brings a modern twist of typical Indian elements to vivid South Indian culture that makes for a contemporary 'udipi' restaurant by day and trendy bar by night. Find out how the integration of the concept within the design allows for a flexible space here...

Philippe Starck restores #Basil'sBar on the paradise #island of #Mustique to its legendary glory playing on the emotional connect felt, when one meets a long-lost friend. Check out the story here…

Interior designer Saheba Singh of This Is It Designs Pvt. Ltd. focuses on underplaying cultural nuances, materials and colours to create a chic bar and lounge in Tokyo. Check out how she ensures veiled Indianness to seep through…

Sergey Makhno Architects design Kofan, Ukraine's new, unconventional bar, where seating is flexible, lighting is eccentric, and the finishing is unpretentious. Check it out…

Taktik Design raises the bar of institutional interiors with this school in Canada. Check it out and leave us your views...

Customizing spaces comes naturally to the team at The Orange Lane. Their latest interior intervention for the brand Sassy Spoon is in one word: Sassy! Abundant colour, old world charm and tiny details ensure that this bar & fine dine in Mumbai will stand out! Read on to know more here

A sensuous approach to the integration of craft and decoration into design a.k.a. Ar. Josef Hoffman-style, raises the bar at Harrod's shoe salon for designer Manolo Blahnik. Feast your eyes on this European Art Nouveau approach and leave us your views...

Via Sociological Images (by way of the Economic Mobility Project) is an interesting chart showing downward class mobility among blacks and whites. Each bar represents the percentage of children who end up in the bottom fifth of income earners by race and income of the parent:

The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs.  The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why:  it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.     Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics -- and the stories --  of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness." I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We'll be posting the full interview in two parts.     "We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States," says Alexander in part one here  "In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they're trapped for life in 2nd class status."     It's not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It's about a rigged system. Sound familiar?  Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession -- the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip - despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of - you pick it - the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code - every contemporary US economic debate.     White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment.  Contrary to the conventional media version, the "Drug War" story is not a people with problems

The Land of the Free punishes or imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation. This collection of testimonials from criminal offenders, family members, and experts on America's criminal justice system puts a human face on the millions of Americans subjugated by the US Government's 40 year, one trillion dollar social catastrophe: The War on Drugs; a failed policy underscored by fear, politics, racial prejudice and intolerance in a public atmosphere of out of sight, out of mind. The United States has only 5% of the world's population, yet a full 25% of the world's prisoners. At 2.5 million, the US has more prisoners than even China does with five times the population of the United States. 8 million Americans (1 in every 31) languish under some form of state monitoring known as correctional supervision. On top of that, the security and livelihood of over 13 million more has been forever altered by a felony conviction. The American use of punishment is so pervasive, and so disproportionate, that even the conservative magazine The Economist declared in 2010, never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little. The project will unfold over a two year period, beginning with the release of this feature-length documentary and then continuing on with the release of short films and complete interviews from each of the 100 participants in the project, meant to represent the 1 in 100 Americans that are currently sitting behind bars.

[Barring unforeseen events, I'm going to leave this post at the top of the page for today and tomorrow, as I think the events it examines, rather in detail and at length, are vitally important and merit much more attention than they've received] The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is.  On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret. The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.  It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War.  The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

Khosla Associates designs High Ultra Lounge - the currently trending plush roof-top bar and lounge at a height of 420 ft atop the World Trade Centre building in Bangalore…