Cognac sales have been in decline since 2022, particularly in its two biggest markets, the United States and China. The reasons include tariffs, inflation and tequila. A recent publicity stunt to promote a collaboration between Hennessy and LeBron James fell very flat. If celebrity no longer sells, perhaps the cognac industry could fall back on an old marketing ploy: claiming it’s medicine. In 1918, the Daily Mirror ran the headline ‘Brandy for Influenza’: ‘Arrangements have been made to provide immediately extra supplies of spirits for medicinal purposes during the influenza epidemic.’ During Prohibition, one of the only legal ways to buy alcohol was on prescription.
Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) in northern Greenland, October 2023 (Ritzau/Alamy)
The US desire to annex Greenland is traceable to at least 1867 and the ambitions of the secretary of state William H. Seward, who negotiated the Alaska purchase that same year.
Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its head of state have overshadowed his less brazen but possibly more effective regime-change operation in Honduras. No one can be sure if the National Party’s Nasry ‘Tito’ Asfura really won the presidential election on 30 November, but he was Trump’s endorsed candidate and will almost certainly assume office on 27 January.
To try to make sense of the recent US military operation to capture the president and first lady of Venezuela, Chinese netizens have been looking for parallels in Chinese history. Seeing Nicolás Maduro arrive in the New York winter (the temperature in Caracas is twenty degrees warmer), some people were reminded of the war that ended the Northern Song dynasty.
This piece was written before Iran imposed an internet blackout on 8 January.
Six months ago I thought about buying a car, for reasons not of convenience but of necessity. My income as a freelance university lecturer in Iran barely pays for my daily commute. I thought I could drive at night for the ride‑hailing service Snapp! to cover my living expenses. I had enough savings to buy a hatchback Saipa Quik – but then its price went up 66 per cent.
Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another, as the US found in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the occupation did not, as Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would, pay for itself. Some people got rich, though, as untold billions went missing and unaccounted for.
A still from ‘Black Atlas’ by Edward George, from the ‘Image of the Black’ archive, Warburg Institute
Edward George’s exhibition Black Atlas, at the Warburg Institute until the end of January 2026, operates in the tradition of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas.