The Attention-Whore Index

He did himself proud last week, did Donald Trump, pulling out the stops to claim the prize as top Attention Whore (53.2 percent). Well earned. Second place went to the new, A.I.-powered Bing (16.8 percent), who will probably have plenty to say about that, and third to Prince Andrew (13.7 percent). The second division: Boris Johnson, Kim Yo-jong, and Tiffany Santos. Does Andrew’s respectable showing suggest the royals are eager to get back in the game? We think it might!

The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …

1.

PRINCE HARRY

He’s back. Reportedly wants a private apology from his father before he’ll consider attending the latter’s coronation. Plans to return to flogging Spare with an “intimate” live-stream chat this weekend with a childhood-trauma expert that you can watch for a piffling $33—he’s essentially selling tickets for his session with a shrink.

2.

ELON MUSK

Laid off another 200 Twitter employees, and the following day tweeted, “Hope you have a good Sunday. First day of the rest of your life.” Defended Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert—who’d called Black Americans “a hate group. ”

3.

SCOTT ADAMS

See above. Though we foresee a lower profile ahead, now that his strip has been pulled from hundreds of publications across the country.

4.

EMILY RATAJKOWSKI

The model, “back on the market for less than a year” (in the words of the New York Post) since splitting from her husband, Sebastian Bear-McClard, has apparently ended her fling with Eric André (“What should you do when a situationship ends?” she wondered) and rekindled things with Orazio Rispo, both of whom followed the inevitable Pete Davidson.

5.

RON D_ESANTIS

Published and promoted a new book, which does seem to capture him. From The New York Times’s review: “All the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core … reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”

6.

PRINCE ANDREW

Presumably inspired not by Ron DeSantis’s book but by his own nephew’s best-seller, is reportedly threatening to write (or at any rate publish, after having it written for him) his own tell-all memoir. Is resisting being relocated to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, which, after the recent stay there of Harry and Meghan, is swiftly turning into a punishment posting.

7.

VASILY NEBENZYA

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations interrupted the Security Council’s minute of silence for Ukraine victims by tapping on the microphone and insisting that the silence should be in honor of “all victims of what happened in Ukraine, starting in 2014.”

8.

DONALD TRUMP

Last week’s winner revealed his sophisticated plan to end the war in Ukraine: “You have to get people in a room. You have to knock heads and you have to get it done.” In 2018, apparently ordered White House officials to complain to Disney and ABC because Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes were hurting his feelings.

And now for this week’s Diary …

Andy Warhol isn’t the likeliest artist to be chosen to represent Saudi Arabia’s “time of great change, great transformation”—but there he is, in a major exhibition in this desert town. It’s no surprise that the show sidesteps Warhol’s personal life, not to mention series such as “Sex Parts and Torsos,” in favor of celebrity images—Edie Sedgwick, Jackie Onassis, Debbie Harry, Judy Garland.

The Hotel Nassauer Hof, “Grand Dame of the German luxury hotel industry” since 1813, has played host to “the Dalai Lama, Audrey Hepburn, John F. Kennedy and Emperor Wilhelm II,” noted The Times of London, but “it will be trying to forget the married couple that stayed for two years and who are now being sued for more than €230,000 [$244,000] in unpaid bills.” The couple, who have been evicted and are on trial for fraud, had complained about “grave shortcomings” at the hotel, “claiming that their room was infested with cockroaches, that the nuts were mouldy and that they had found a worm in the salad.”

Nearly half the French population is overweight, a new study has found, an increase of 10 percentage points over the last 25 years. During that period, the youngest age group (18–24) increased by 400 percent. Maybe there’s a silver lining to all that recent speculation about baguette prices being raised?

Meanwhile, that 1905 Art Nouveau gem of a public toilet, Lavatory de la Madeleine, has reopened after 12 years. The lavatory—with its stained glass, green quartz ceramic-ware, varnished wood, and mahogany doors, had been closed for renovations.

A man in this Chinese province who discovered his wife had “a large number of credit cards” and “huge cash flows” on the cards’ statements concluded she’d been scammed and went to the police. He might have checked with her first. According to the South China Morning Post, he prompted an investigation that revealed “the opposite of the fears voiced by the woman’s concerned husband”: his wife had been the scammer, having fleeced 28 victims of $1.2 million since 2016. Dinner that evening must have been … awkward.

What’s not to like? An anti-war post, apparently, at least if you’re the son-in-law of the Russian defense minister. Alexey Stolyarov’s social-media activity—he “liked” a series of anti-war posts—caught the attention of Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin. “It is necessary to catch Stolyarov and bring him to me,” the Putin chef–Russian paramilitary chief said. “I will train him for six weeks. I will help him improve by sending him to combat operations.” Until then, Prigozhin said, Stolyarov should be “raped.” Prigozhin later clarified his statement, “leaving humor aside … we ought to pick up a sledgehammer, and deal with it in an adult way.”

American parents looking to give their young children an edge are signing them up for math tutoring based on Soviet-era textbooks, starting them on algebra early, according to the New York Post. Not everyone is pleased. The children trained in Russian math “make it harder for the other kids,” one Manhattan teacher told the newspaper, “because they start to ask them these math questions that are not age-appropriate and the other kids feel bad about themselves.” —George Kalogerakis

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