The Attention-Whore Index

Last week’s voting produced a tally top-heavy with pols. Donald “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season” Trump won for the third straight week (31.7 percent), followed by those three random Republicans—the ones who, respectively, mistook the Gonzaga basketball team for unauthorized “invaders,” voted illegally nine times, and recommended turning Gaza into “Nagasaki and Hiroshima” (20.2 percent)—and the truly unbearable Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (19.1 percent). Kudos to them all. You know this game is being played at a very high level when chronically desperate attention seekers such as Prince Andrew, Tucker Carlson, and Kim Kardashian finish well out of the running.

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

1.

MARK ZUCKERBERG

Was momentarily ranked the third-richest person in the world in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $187 billion, leapfrogging ahead of his personal Moriarty, Elon Musk, who dropped to fourth (a measly $181 billion). The top two? Jeff Bezos is worth $207 billion, and that might sound like a lot, but it’s small change compared to Bernard Arnault’s $223 billion.

2.

THE MOON

Of all the nerve!

3.

DONALD TRUMP

A banner week for the Republican standard-bearer. Sued his trial judge. Received a detail-free clean bill of health (his cognitive skills are apparently “exceptional”) from an osteopath who happens to be a member of his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Said, at a rally in Michigan, “If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist.... We don’t win, I think this could be the last election we ever have.” Said, at a Palm Beach fundraiser hosted by the financier John Paulson, that he’d prefer it if the U.S. could get immigrants from “nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland?… How about Norway?” Suggested, at the same dinner, that President Biden had defecated at the Resolute desk, in the Oval Office: “It’s been soiled. And I mean that literally, which is sad.” That got big laughs from the crowd.

4.

KRISTI NOEM

The possible Trump running mate (and current South Dakota governor) was banned from the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation for her comments about Indigenous people. A few days later, a vote by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council banished her from its reservation “over recent public statements she made suggesting, among other things, that Native American tribal leaders are in league with Mexican drug cartels,” reported the Daily Beast. She had earlier been banned from the Pine Ridge Reservation by the Oglala Sioux, meaning she now can’t set foot in roughly 10 percent of the state she governs. Noem has also been sued by a consumer-advocacy group for having promoted a cosmetic-dentistry outfit “without disclosing that she has a financial relationship with that company.”

5.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The possible Trump running mate (and current conspiracy-party presidential candidate) who has made light of the January 6 attacks (“What’s the worst thing that could happen? Right?”) issued a clarifying statement: “I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection.... I want to hear every side.” In short, for Kennedy, the jury’s still out regarding January 6—a view curiously not necessarily shared by the defendants themselves, the majority of whom have already pleaded guilty.

6.

MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE

The possible Trump running mate (well … maybe not) interpreted the East Coast earthquake this way: “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.” Continued to push for the removal of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. “If these actions by the leader of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican Party—we are a uniparty that is hellbent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction,” Greene wrote in a memo to colleagues. The second half of that sentence sounds about right, anyway.

7.

ELON MUSK

Relatively quiet lately—relatively. But now comes the release of a deposition Musk gave in connection with being sued for “allegedly promoting a false conspiracy theory that a 22-year-old Jewish man participated in a neo-Nazi brawl,” said the Huffington Post. The lawsuit alleges that Musk “used his colossal social media platform to amplify a false far-right conspiracy theory linking … Ben Brody to a brawl in Oregon between the neo-Nazi group Rose City Nationalists and the Proud Boys.” Even though Brody wasn’t in Oregon at the time of the brawl, “far-right X accounts, magnified by Musk, falsely identified him as a member of Rose City Nationalists (and an undercover federal agent) and posted his personal information online. Musk amplified the conspiracy theory repeatedly to his more than 180 million followers, suggesting Brody was a fresh-faced federal agent pretending to be a neo-Nazi in a ‘false flag situation.’” During the deposition, Musk insisted: “I don’t think he has been meaningfully harmed by this.”

And now for this week’s Diary …

Residents in this town southwest of London are increasingly unhappy about the 21 brass cones installed last year on a public lawn near the River Wey, likening them to Madonna’s “Blond Ambition”-era conical bra, and are agitating to have them removed. The $25,000 sculptures, which stand as high as eight feet and have now turned gray and black, are adjacent to a retirement complex, one of whose residents told The Times of London, “They are an utter eyesore.... Half of them have dings in them. They get very hot in the sunshine — you could probably fry an egg on them. Teenagers jump on top and whirl each other around. I’m yet to meet someone who likes them.”

Japan’s requirement that married couples share the same last name could result in everyone in the country having “Sato” as their surname by 2531, according to a Tohoku University professor’s calculations. “As of 2023, ‘Sato’ is the most common surname in Japan, used by 1.529% of the entire population,” reported The Japan Times, and given that “the annual growth rate of ‘Sato’ is assumed to be 1.0083%, based on the difference between 2022 and 2023 data”—well, just do the math. However, if married couples were allowed to have different surnames, it would take until 3310 before everyone in Japan was called “Sato”—delaying by 779 years the (apparently) inevitable.

“Greek music in hotel lobbies, Greek tunes in lifts, Greek melodies in casinos, shopping malls, airport lounges and ports”—at least 45 percent of the time, if a proposed bill passes—is how The Guardian put it. “Statistics show that Greek music amounts to 30% of what is heard; 70% is foreign music,” said Greece’s culture minister, adding that the government has “a duty, under the constitution, to protect art.” The Greek recording industry loves the idea; the hotel business doesn’t. In addition, the legislation would oblige state-financed movies to incorporate Greek songs “at a minimum rate of 70% of the total musical investment of the production”—a requirement that would make any given Yorgos Lanthimos film, for example, even stranger.

Like-minded governmental impositions were announced by the culture minister in Chechnya, where music that is determined to be too slow or (especially) too fast—much of pop and techno, in other words—faces a ban. “‘From now on all musical, vocal and choreographic works should correspond to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute,’ Chechnya’s Culture Ministry said in a statement,” reported The Moscow Times. Music must “conform to the Chechen mentality,” and “local artists were ordered to ‘rewrite’ their music by June 1 to accommodate the changes.” On it! Or rather: on … it. —George Kalogerakis

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