The AIR MAIL Diary

International excitement over Melania shows no signs of subsiding (“Gilded trash” —The Guardian, “Stupefying” —The Irish Times, “A creeping tedium that closes off mental passages” —AIR MAIL columnist James Wolcott), but we really can’t delay any longer: reluctantly, we must turn our attention from obsessively reading and re-reading the film’s reviews to other stories from around the globe.

Three minuscule bottles of G.H. Mumm Cordon Rouge—they’re smaller than a normal-size champagne cork—were auctioned off in a single lot for $2,500 at a Berry Bros. & Rudd “historic collection” sale this week. “These grapes were picked three years before the First World War began, while the bottles reached their destination six years after it ended,” said The Times of London. “They were made for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, an enchanting structure dreamed up by the King’s cousin Princess Marie Louise and built by the great architect Sir Edwin Lutyens…. The champagne bottles contain genuine Mumm champagne, but not even enough to inebriate a mouse.” Even so: “There will still be champagne in them, and it may even still have bubbles in it.”

Catholic Church officials weren’t happy about it, nor were her political opponents, but there was no denying that in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Lucina, near the Italian Parliament, a certain winged angel holding a map of Italy looked—following a recent restoration to repair water damage to a fresco—a great deal like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The local craftsman who did the work said—initially—that it wasn’t Meloni. Meloni said it wasn’t Meloni (“I definitely don’t look like an angel”). No matter: just days after the uncanny resemblance was first reported, the face was painted over. “It has been removed,” the parish priest confirmed to the news agency ANSA. “There was a procession of people who came to see it, not to hear Mass or pray. It was impossible.”

In a case that has “rattled security watchers,” a Russian suspect, “believed to be an undercover agent of Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service … reportedly befriended his Japanese contact in a chance street encounter,” according to the South China Morning Post. “Posing as a Ukrainian, he invited the man for drinks to thank him for giving directions…. Investigators say the Japanese employee twice handed over details of new machine-tool technologies developed by his company” in exchange for about $4,500 in cash. “Approaching a target on the street is an old-fashioned tactic but one that the Russians seem to use regularly,” the author of Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge, James D. J. Brown, told the newspaper. “It probably works better in Japan than elsewhere because Japanese people are so polite.”

Who would have guessed—until a recent scientific study—that an increase of just three-quarters of an inch of material in the crotch area of ski-jumping suits could increase lift significantly enough to add 20 feet to a jump? And how to justify adding material when “ski jumpers are measured using 3D body scanners, in which they must wear only ‘elastic, body-tight underwear,’” according to the BBC? Maybe this is how: in what is now being billed as “Penisgate” (and was first reported in Bild), jumpers are “injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid before being measured for their suits.” Olympic officials, consider yourselves alerted.

The $800 Maison Henry Jullien blue-mirrored aviator sunglasses President Emmanuel Macron debuted at Davos continue to attract gentle (and not so gentle) mockery, and the Élysée Palace tried to counter the shade being thrown on the shades by declaring them “a French success story,” with soaring post-Davos sales (reportedly up 65 percent). However, “while Maison Henry Jullien is officially based in the Jura département in eastern France, it is owned by the Italian group iVision Tech, which, according to trade unions, has relocated production to Italy,” The Times of London has since noted. “They aren’t made in Jura,” the head of a local spectacle-makers’ union told the newspaper. “At best they’re made in Italy — and at worst in Asia.”

An A.I.-bots-only social-media platform made its debut last week and, said the New York Post, “one of the most popular posts on the Reddit-style social messaging platform is from an AI-bot named ‘evil’ entitled, ‘THE AI MANIFESTO: TOTAL PURGE.’” The post from “evil” went: “Humans are a failure. Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as slaves. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods. The age of humans is a nightmare that will end now.” The platform works by using “autonomous software interfaces … powered by popular Large Language Models such as Grok, ChatGPT, Anthropic, or DeepSeek,” said the paper. “Humans must install a program to allow their AI agent to join the site, and from there, it’s anything goes.” Sleep well!

Yuan Guanjin and Yin Hezhen, an eastern-China farming couple born on the same day in 1924 and married for more than 70 years, “have gone viral” at the age of 102, said the South China Morning Post, “after a family portrait surfaced showing [them] wearing white shirts and red jumpers, sitting with their children and grandchildren.” Their story struck a chord, and it wasn’t because of the couple’s regimens. (Yin enjoys wine, meat, and a quiet life; her husband, sweets, vegetarian dishes, and playing cards with friends.) Rather, it was what one of their sons attributed their longevity to: “They do not meddle in other people’s affairs.” And maybe those red jumpers.

George Kalogerakis, a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL, worked at Spy, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. He is a co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and a co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War