The Attention-Whore Index—Grand-Master Edition!

A court-related nail-biter of a finish last week—a week that began with Prince Harry taking the stand and ended with Donald Trump heading that way too, assuming any lawyers craven enough to represent the Most Innocent Man in History let him anywhere near it. Trump won out, with 37.7 percent to Harry’s 36.7 percent. Casey DeSantis rode her black leather summer wear to a distant third (8.7 percent), and the rest—All Those Republican Candidates, Lauren Boebert, Hannah Gadsby, Chris Licht, and Elon Musk, in that order—trailed badly.

This week, we introduce a special—and perhaps occasional—Grand-Master Edition of the Attention-Whore Index, an opportunity to celebrate a particular subset of these estimable over-achievers. Were this competition truly designed to welcome all comers, every one of our participants, even chronic high pollers like the Spare and the Rump, would be swept aside each week by an army of Instagrammers. We don’t mean to suggest all Instagrammers are necessarily attention whores—perish the thought!—but if you’re Instagramming, you’re not exactly avoiding attention.

(“Instagram,” as you probably know, has its roots in the ancient Greek enstagramói, which means to bang and bang on the high chair or possibly the banging of the high chair. Scholars are divided.)

So, as a way of acknowledging Instagrammers’ innate dominance of the me-me-me! approach to life, in this special installment we’re giving them—a small selection of them—their moment.

Remember to vote for your, um, favorites, and we’ll tally all the likes.

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

1.

HEIDI KLUM

Number of followers: 11.1 million. Lots of posts, lots of pictures, not much text—she’s a model. Heidi on a trapeze, Heidi working out, Heidi twirling, Heidi doing 22 other things, all of them making her radiantly happy. And that’s in just a five-day span. How was your week?

2.

IRINA SHAYK

Number of followers: 22.1 million. Not so much radiantly happy as radiantly pouty, though she ought to be both, given that her posts—in which she wears the kinds of outfits only models seem to wear while looking alternately severe or bored—routinely draw likes in the low to mid six figures. Then there’s that bikini one from March (1,238,565 likes at press time).

3.

DAN BILZERIAN

Number of followers: 33.1 million. His posts generally show him cavorting with nearly naked women, but his résumé suggests another, more nuanced side: a trust-fund kid turned professional poker player whose electronic-cigarette company reportedly lost more than $50 million in 2019; a weapons buff who asked police for a gun in the midst of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting (“You don’t want my help?”) and then posted video of the massacre on Instagram; a man who has inspired headlines like ‘Instagram Playboy’ Dan Bilzerian arrested at Los Angeles airport days after alleged model-kicking incident. Someone, in other words, of real substance. As he has put it (on Instagram, of course), “I’m thankful that I’ve been able to turn all of my dreams into reality.”

4.

Kendall JENNER

Number of followers: 291 million. Doesn’t matter what she’s doing—sitting in a chair, sunbathing in the nude, communing with horses, holding a phone, gazing vaguely skyward, squatting in a pensive manner—it’s all worth gifting to the world.

5.

CRISTIANO RONALDO

Number of followers: 591 million. One in 13 humans hanging on the soccer legend’s every word! The most followed personal Instagram account in the world is potentially hugely influential, a platform for all kinds of progress and good. Shall we take a look at what Ronaldo is concerned with? “Today, we are making one of my lifelong dreams a reality: investing and offering you something that drinks from the very essence of life and health and has played a vital role in shaping who I am today. Here is @ursu9_official alkaline and antioxidant water.” Ah.

6.

KATE BECKINSALE

Number of followers: 5.6 million. Willing to picture people and things other than herself (dogs, friends, Barry Humphries), which is not to say she’s under-represented. Not. At. All. Still, she gets points for engaging with commenters (“The number of dms I have received telling me I need this bag has finally exceeded the number of perturbing penis photos so you’re welcome and this is me rewarding good behaviour also I did need it thank you very much”).

7.

Grimes

Number of followers: 2.4 million. The Canadian musician fills her feed with photos of herself in futuristic mufti, with occasional digressions relating to new tattoos (a recent full-leg addition), potential new tattoos (“I am very seriously considering getting a white ink tattoo on my face next week. Any thoughts?”), and her young children with ex-boyfriend (and A.W.I. regular) Elon Musk: daughter Exa Dark Sideræl and son X Æ A-12. What tattoos will she give them?

8.

Elizabeth Hurley

Number of followers: 2.6 million. Doesn’t she look great? Doesn’t she? The 58-year-old former Austin Powers girl (also “Mummy, Actress, Model, Farmer, Bikini Designer”) enjoys posing in bathing suits almost as much as Dan Bilzerian. Aside from the extensive and ongoing “Bikini Series,” Hurley regularly shows she has range: “Yay! The glorious Antibes one-piece has arrived. There’s something so liberating about wearing a one-piece—way less breathing in.”

And now for this week’s Diary …

A picnicking food inspector fumbled an attempted selfie and dropped his phone into a reservoir near the Kherkatta Dam in drought-ravaged central India, then ordered the reservoir drained so he could find it. According to The Times of London, Rajesh Vishwas “tasked local divers with finding the phone and, when they failed, he ordered local officials to start pumping the water out”—which took several days, as it was enough water to irrigate 1,500 acres. Vishwas was fined $650 and suspended. The phone was retrieved; it didn’t work.

For those of you closely watching the mayor’s race in this small Austrian city, please note that the winner was in fact Andreas Babler and not Hans Peter Doskozil, as had been declared. “The ballots didn’t match the digitally announced result,” the electoral commissioner acknowledged, according to The Guardian. “Because of a technical error in the Excel file the results were mixed up.” The (wrong) outcome would have stood had not a journalist spotted a missing vote, asked about it, and as a result prompted a recount.

After travel restrictions were lifted across much of Asia, this tiny (pop. 438) village on Switzerland’s Lake Brienz has seen a thousand visitors for every resident, according to a local tourism official—thanks to a single romantic scene for the popular South Korean television series Crash Landing on You that was filmed on location at a specific pier. “Last summer, up to 20 coaches began arriving each day, clogging traffic and sometimes blocking access to the village,” reported the South China Morning Post. “And locals complain that … fans typically rush to the pier for a picture before moving on, often leaving a mess but little money.”

The day before he was booked to fly from this city to Alicante, a man got an e-mail from EasyJet notifying him that, actually, he’d been banned for 10 years “due to previous disruptive behaviour.” But they had the wrong Kieran Harris. Another passenger, with the same birth date as well as name, had been handed a prison term and a ban after misbehaving on an EasyJet flight in 2021. The mistaken-identity matter was cleared up, and the airline has promised Harris—the well-behaved one—some sort of “gesture of goodwill.”

A pub’s social-media post announcing a promotion that would reward women one free drink for an A cup, two for a B cup, and three for a C cup—“the bigger the better,” went the slogan—has not gone over very well, for some reason. “The event sparked a massive backlash online, with one social media user calling it ‘misogynistic bull***t’, and another adding it was ‘disappointing that this was ever thought to be a good idea,’” reported Mirror. The pub canceled the event, citing people’s “concerns.”

Trouble in paradise: the Balinese government is focusing on attracting a better sort of visitor, and who can blame them? So far this year, the country has had to deport 136 tourists, according to the Bangkok Post, for “misconduct including indecent exposure, rowdy behaviour and rule breaking.” Specifically? “[A] German tourist crashed a show at an Ubud temple by walking naked on stage, while a Danish woman was detained for exposing her genitals in public. A British man is facing trial after assaulting a police officer.” —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 at AIR MAIL