The Attention-Whore Index

Real Attention Whores don’t do well with downtime—it makes them fidgety—so it comes as no surprise that over the holidays many of our most reliable competitors simply carried on, business as usual. Rudy Giuliani remained unrepentant after having been found liable for $148 million for defaming two election workers. Donald Trump spun further out of control, invoking Vladimir Putin and Mein Kampf. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis pledged to pardon Trump if he’s convicted. No Biden-like kicking back in the sun for that bunch.

Before we present this week’s candidates, we should report the results from our most recent (mid-December) poll, which turned out to be the closest ever: Megyn Kelly edged out Elon Musk, 29.8 percent to 28.7 percent. The race for third was almost as tight: Vivek Ramaswamy 16.9 percent, Hunter Biden 13 percent.

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

1.

NIKKI HALEY

So, what was the cause of the United States Civil War? In answering, Haley mentioned “the role of government” and “rights and freedoms of the people” and “liberties,” but, as it happened, none of the 118 words she chose were “slavery” or “slaves.” Must have been the rights, freedoms, and liberties of other people that she was referring to. Later she claimed that the man who asked that simple question at a New Hampshire town hall had set her up: “It was definitely a Democrat plant.” A Republican, presumably, would have phrased it as a true-false question, or at least multiple choice.

2.

EMANUELE POZZOLO

It’s never a good day for a prime minister—Giorgia Meloni in this case—when a close ally has to deny shooting someone. Pozzolo, a member of the P.M.’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, brought a .22-caliber revolver to a New Year’s Eve party—what could go wrong?—where it duly went off. Children were in attendance at the party, which was in the village of Rosazza—pre-party population, 89—and witnesses said Pozzolo appeared tipsy (or “allegro” as La Repubblica reported) as he showed the gun around. However, according to Euronews, Pozzolo “claimed that the shot was fired by the same man who got injured, [who] he said picked up the gun from the floor after he had accidentally dropped it. But Italian news media report that it would have been difficult for the man to shoot himself in the back of the thigh.” Maybe not if you put your mind to it.

3.

JEFF KOONS

Reportedly had a story about his sculpture Bouquet of Tulips in the art journal Brooklyn Rail killed because (said his studio, according to The New York Times) of “Jeff’s concerns” and “its defamation to Jeff,” i.e., the writer “had misrepresented his sculpture as ‘a symbol of violence.’” Yes, that’s right, an opinion! And in a publication that offers “Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture.” That must have come as quite a shock to Koons.

4.

DONALD TRUMP

Merry Christmas! Or rather, “THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, LIED TO CONGRESS, CHEATED ON FISA, RIGGED A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ALLOWED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS, TO INVADE OUR COUNTRY, SCREWED UP IN AFGHANISTAN, & JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH, ARE COMING AFTER ME, AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY??? IT’S CALLED ELECTION INTERFERENCE. MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

And Happy New Year! That is, “[Biden has] attacked his Political Opponent at a level never seen before in this Country, and wants desperately to PUT ‘TRUMP’ IN PRISON. He is playing a very dangerous game, and the great people of America WILL NOT STAND FOR IT.”

5.

CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER AND BRIDGET ZIEGLER

To recap briefly the allegations against Florida’s fun couple: Christian, the state’s Republican chair, has been accused of rape. The woman who accused him was also, according to Bridget, a participant in a consensual three-way sexual encounter with the Zieglers. Bridget is the co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty group, which espouses traditional family values, and a member of the Sarasota County School Board. This week authorities said they were additionally looking into allegations that Christian had video-recorded a sexual encounter with the woman who has accused him of rape. No one’s resigning from anything, and, according to lawyers for the accused, everyone will be exonerated.

6.

BOB MENENDEZ

And then there were two (foreign governments allegedly given preferential treatment in return for remembering the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when they were in a generous, gift-giving mood). Menendez, set to go on trial in May for allegedly having accepted bribes to ease the Egyptian government’s path in Washington, was charged with doing essentially the same thing for Qatar. The new federal charges included a nice new detail: the senator and his wife (and co-defendant on the earlier charges), Nadine, are said to have tried to cover their tracks in the Egyptian matter by “attempt[ing] to repay tens of thousands of dollars worth of bribes that had come in the forms of payments for a home mortgage and toward a Mercedes-Benz convertible,” according to The New York Times. “In both cases, the couple created documentation describing the original bribes as loans they were repaying.”

7.

Claudine Gay

So many arguments and issues and lessons here, none more trenchant than this: plagiarism is best left to the students.

And now for this week’s Diary …

A group of 45 academics and doctors have signed a letter to France’s health minister urging the government to get behind Dry January. The public is mostly game, polls suggest, “but the French state health body has not promoted [it] and politicians are reluctant to get onboard,” said The Guardian, noting that France is the world’s second-biggest consumer of wine (after the United States) and that “French politicians listen closely to the country’s wine industry, which employs 500,000 people.” Further, “Emmanuel Macron is seen within France as the most pro-alcohol president since the second world war, saying he drinks wine every day, at lunchtime and in the evening, and that a meal without wine was ‘a bit sad.’”

Cold weather—which Norway has—“paralyzed” the electric bus fleet in Oslo, one of the world’s greenest cities, in December, according to some stories on social media. But a spokesman for the capital’s bus company called those claims “an extreme exaggeration,” Euronews reported. “We cancelled, on average, between 50 and 100 departures, out of more than 4,000 daily departures, for a few days.” But they did allow that there were “challenges with the range of the buses being shorter in cold weather.”

An “Almost Naked Party” tossed by Nastya Ivleeva, a Russian TV presenter and blogger, at the Mutabor nightclub was private … until it wasn’t. “Scantily clad pop stars and celebrities attended the soiree,” reported the BBC, among them the Russian rapper Vacio. “He turned up wearing only training shoes and one strategically placed sock.” Pro-Kremlin supporters of the war in Ukraine were not amused by what they regarded as inappropriate frivolity. Vacio was jailed for 15 days and fined for “promoting non-traditional sexual relations.” And a class-action lawsuit is demanding that Ivleeva pay a billion rubles—$10.7 million—“to the Defender of the Fatherland Foundation, an organisation that donates money to participants of the Kremlin’s ‘special operation’ in Ukraine.”

The cocaine bricks, wrapped in “barnacle-encrusted” packages, began washing ashore on beaches between here and Newcastle during the holidays—some $35 million worth. “The search for class-A flotsam began as a report confirmed Australia’s status as the world’s coke-snorting capital,” said The Times of London. “One in 25 (4.2 per cent) Australians aged 15 and over have used the drug over the past year.... Australians have developed an unhealthy appetite for overpriced, and often heavily diluted, cocaine.” Why? As a physician at the National Drug Research Institute in Perth explained to the newspaper, “Australians just like alcohol and taking drugs.”

In a WeChat message to a group of employees, an executive at a company wrote, “Ladies, please wear light makeup to work from December to motivate our team. Our gentlemen will crowdfund to treat ladies to afternoon tea.” According to the South China Morning Post, when this was met with silence, he wrote again: “Please do reply when you receive the message, otherwise your performance bonuses will be slashed.” Which is when it all went viral, and the executive deleted the messages, saying he’d been joking. “Stories about employers imposing ridiculous and unreasonable requests on their employees are common in China,” noted the newspaper, such as one about a woman who “quit her job as a new media specialist after being forced to clean the bathroom on her first day.” —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