The Attention-Whore Index

Last week’s A.W.I. polling produced a now-familiar snapshot: Donald Trump on top (36.5 percent, for his third straight win), Nikki Haley trailing. But wait: Haley, at 15.9 percent, in fact only earned the bronze medal. And second place did not go to Ron DeSantis. No, that’s Prince Harry, the famous aviator, in the runner-up slot, airborne again with 25.3 percent of your votes. (Special mention to Jane Seymour, eminently qualified to have won this thing but for some very tough competition; she placed fourth in her first outing.)

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

1.

DONALD TRUMP

Having shrewdly continued to defame E. Jean Carroll—as many as 40 derisive posts on Truth Social in one day, according to The New York Times—even after he’d been found liable for sexually abusing her and ordered to pay $5 million in damages, he was found by a jury to be additionally liable for $83.3 million in damages. In possibly his most succinct statement during a notably addled week (“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on,” etc.), Trump was typically contrite and repentant: “Absolutely ridiculous! I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party. Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon. They have taken away all First Amendment Rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”

2.

NIKKI HALEY (OR IS THAT NANCY PELOSI?)

“This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go. And the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina.” O-kay.

3.

RON D_ESANTIS

Let’s not remember him for the fake Winston Churchill quote he used in pulling his campaign off the road (four flats!) and obsequiously endorsing his tormentor: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” is, according to the International Churchill Society, nowhere to be found in the canon. (It’s also been misattributed to Lincoln. Trump will probably tell us he said it.) Rather, let’s remember DeSantis for this gem from a few days earlier in New Hampshire: “Every booster you take, you’re more likely to get Covid as a result of it.” Stay in touch, governor.

4.

ELON MUSK

Musk’s rehabilitation tour resumed: the hate-speech-enabling mogul, having abruptly visited Israel in November, this week went to Auschwitz, where, his features arranged to convey “somber,” he put on a yarmulke, lit a candle next to a NEVER AGAIN sign, met with a Holocaust survivor, and spoke about online anti-Semitism at a conference. Came to the conclusion he was “aspirationally Jewish.” Meanwhile, Tesla profits have also fallen into the aspirational category as the stock dropped 12 percent following an apparently unsatisfying investor call with C.E.O. Musk.

5.

HARRY AND MEGHAN

It’s been a while. But—for your consideration, in this awards season—there’s this: the couple were raked over the coals in the British press for having jetted to Kingston for the premiere of the biopic Bob Marley: One Love and posed for a red-carpet photo with Jamaica’s “anti-royal” prime minister, Andrew Holness—“just as King Charles III prepares for prostate treatment and Kate recovers in hospital from abdominal surgery,” as the Daily Mail noted.

6.

BARBIE

Claiming rather a lot of our attention yet again, for the Academy Award nominations the film received (eight in all), and the two it didn’t receive (Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie). Plus all the people who weighed in regarding those omissions: Hillary Clinton, Billie Jean King, America Ferrera, and a special mention for…

7.

Ryan Gosling

“There is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie … To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.” Not disappointed enough to decline the nomination, though.

8.

Lauren Sanchez

Overdue as an A-W competitor, but with last week’s characteristically low-key 60th-birthday bash for her fiancé, Jeff Bezos, thrown at their Beverly Hills mansion, we realized we’d been denying her too long. The party was super-private, though Sanchez generously shared photos on Instagram the next day, allowing one and all to appreciate her “incredible” Laura Basci dress (“Getting ready is sometimes the best part of the night”), her $4,995 crystal-encrusted Judith Leiber bag, and much, much more. The party’s theme was “celestial space-age,” but really it was elegiac: the galactic angle was itself a nod to Bezos’s aerospace company, the McDonald’s cuisine to his first job, and there was a facsimile of his first Amazon office. And who was there? “An A-list guest list … included everyone from Kim Kardashian to Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom,” gushed the Daily Mail, a sentence we’re still enjoying.

9.

Ye

The artist formerly known as Kanye West last week revealed his new $885,000 titanium dentures, formerly known as teeth, and they are reported to be permanent. At least the Bondish stunt briefly drew some attention away from Ye’s bizarrely parading his wife around. Fine—what’s next?

And now for this week’s Diary …

The five African gray parrots removed from public view at Lincolnshire Wildlife Park for swearing at visitors in 2020 will be returned to their flock “in the hope that it will ‘dilute’ their language,” The Times of London reported. Sorry, but that sounds like a bloody pipe dream. The zoo’s head, Steve Nichols, “admitted that the park could end up with 100 swearing parrots” and “acknowledge[d] that the swearing is unlikely to be completely eradicated as ‘once it’s in their vocabulary, it’s usually there for good’.” But Nichols is philosophical: “You never tire of being told to eff off by a parrot. You can’t help but laugh.”

China’s top influencers are out-earning some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, their yearly income having “equalled or even surpassed the total net worth of some globally recognised Hollywood celebrities such as George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Brad Pitt,” according to the South China Morning Post. The influencers include: the Boss Seven (“top among female influencers … known for her comedic content,” $37 million); Austin Li Jiaqi (“known as China’s ‘Lipstick King,’ because of his ability to sell enormous amounts of cosmetics online,” $323 million); and the top influencer, Xiaoyangge (Crazy Little Yang Brother), who “creates online short-video comedies, is a well-known e-commerce sales anchor and co-founder of an e-commerce company”—efforts that have earned him 100 million followers and an income of $436 million. Show of hands: who here is in the wrong business?

The false teeth through which Winston Churchill delivered his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech to the House of Commons in 1940 can be yours for an estimated $6,000–$10,000 when the Cotswold Auction Company offers them next month. “The late prime minister had his dentures specially made to help overcome a lisp he developed in childhood, and he carried a spare pair at all times. It is believed up to four sets of teeth were made for him, with at least one buried with him,” said The Guardian. Rumors have yet to be confirmed that if you wind them up and place them on a smooth surface, they go clattering off reciting, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills … ”

The annual black-and-white Calendario Romano, which “depicts a selection of cassock-wearing hunks said to be Catholic prelates,” as the Daily Mail put it, has been popular for two decades at the city’s souvenir stands and gift shops. But it isn’t quite what it appears to be: “According to the snapper who takes the images for the A4-sized calendar seen on newsstands throughout Rome, few of the models are truly priests.” The photographer’s confession also revealed that the calendar’s regular cover boy for 20 years, Giovanni Galizia, is actually a flight attendant from Palermo. (“No, I’m not a priest. I can confirm it. I would remember it if I was.”)

Climate-change denial has found a warm (as it were) welcome among guileless teens on YouTube, their favorite social-media platform. “Almost a third of 13-17 year olds in the UK think that climate change is being ‘purposefully over-exaggerated’, according to a survey commissioned by the Center for Countering Digital Hate,” Euronews reported. The C.C.D.H. said that “old denial” (there is no global warming, and even if there were, humans aren’t causing it) has been replaced by “new denial”: “climate solutions won’t work; climate science and the climate movement are unreliable; and the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless.” —George Kalogerakis

George Kalogerakis, a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL, worked for 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