Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary was supposed to contain the goods. At least, that’s what “The Daily Show” host Jordan Klepper seemed to hope after Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released the former White House chief medical adviser’s diary entries earlier this week.

Instead, Klepper found something considerably less scandalous: Fauci documenting what it was like to become one of the most recognizable people in America during the COVID pandemic, receiving compliments on Instagram and accidentally butt-dialing Barbra Streisand.

“Regardless, I know that Republicans remember COVID because ever since the pandemic, they’ve been calling for the arrest of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who spearheaded America’s COVID response,” Klepper said on Thursday night’s episode of “The Daily Show.” “And this week, one of his biggest haters escalated things.”

On Thursday, Fauci, a former top U.S. public health official, was questioned during a Republican-led Senate committee hearing into the origins of COVID and his handling of the pandemic. During the hearing, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights.

You can watch the full “The Daily Show” segment in the video above.

Klepper joked that if Paul had gone to the trouble of releasing Fauci’s diaries, surely they contained something incriminating. Instead, one entry had Fauci reflecting on his newfound celebrity status.

Fauci wrote, “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable.”

“Yeah,” Klepper responded. “It’s not really a secret. Everyone knew– everyone knew that.”

The diary also apparently had some celebrity gossip, too. Fauci wrote about an Instagram post featuring supermodel Tyra Banks, noting that “One person said that Tyra was very sexy but that I was even more sexy than she was.”

Klepper was delighted by the revelation.

“Are we supposed to be surprised that Fauci wrote about being called sexier than Tyra Banks?” he asked. “If someone called me sexier than Tyra Banks, I’d write that in my diary.”

Klepper suggested that the diary’s celebrity entries were less evidence of wrongdoing than a glimpse at an older man discovering the unhinged nature of social media comments. He then turned to another entry, in which Fauci mentioned receiving an eggplant and water-splashing emoji from an Instagram commenter.

“Needless to say, a great honor,” Klepper quipped.

The diary also revealed Fauci’s brush with another legendary celebrity. In one entry, he wrote, “Had great call with Barbra Streisand. I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA. She really did not know what ALEXA was. I accidentally butt called her later in the evening.”

Klepper was again amused.

“You butt dialed the Barbra Streisand, the funny girl, the Dolly Levi, the Yentl Mendel, the Esther Hoffman Howard?” he said, rattling off some of Streisand’s most famous roles.

For Klepper, the diary entries ultimately failed to deliver the explosive revelations that had been promised.

“So, basically, these diary entries didn’t reveal any shocking revelations about Fauci’s criminal negligence or intent,” he said.

Klepper then imagined Fauci’s tactic of pleading the Fifth being applied to increasingly mundane questions, joking that even a question about Fauci’s favorite Barbra Streisand song might receive the same response.

“I respectfully decline to answer,” Fauci said in Klepper’s imagined exchange.

“Damn it. He’s good,” Klepper responded. “He’s very good.”

• Playstation remains the top moneymaker for Sony as its games division brings in $1.25 billion in operating income.
• Sony Pictures, which had no major hits this past quarter, saw a 3% decrease in revenue with operating income of $154 million.
• The studio’s third quarter is likely to be far more lucrative as “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is projected for a $2 billion-plus global theatrical run

While Sony’s film division is about to see a huge windfall with the release of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” the Japanese company is still relying on Playstation as its primary moneymaker as operating profits increased 32% in its latest quarterly report while film and television continued to lag.

Overall, Sony reported operating income of 476 billion yen ($2.96 billion USD), with total revenue up 8.2% to 2.83 trillion yen ($17.66 billion). Net income attributable to shareholders was reported at 57.42 yen/share, or 36 cents per share.

Sony also increased its full year operating income forecast by 8% to 1.72 trillion yen, or $10.6 billion USD.

Once again, Sony’s gaming division was the top revenue driver, followed by the company’s imaging division. Though Sony got backlash from some customers earlier this month from the announcement that Playstation would phase out physical versions of games by 2028, the Playstation Network reached 125 million users last quarter as it reported operating income of 202 billion yen, or $1.25 billion USD.

Sony Pictures, meanwhile, saw income slip 3% to $1.9 billion (312.2 billion yen), while its operating income rose to $154.3 million, up 33% year over year. Theatrically, Sony had almost no presence at the box office in the second quarter, with the Nate Bargatze comedy “The Breadwinner” grossing just $20.2 million at the U.S. box office.

But that will change immensely in the third quarter, as the studio will release Marvel Studios’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which is looking at a global opening weekend of at least $850 million in grosses, making it the second largest in box office history. The film is likely to become the eighth to gross more than $2 billion at the worldwide box office, as Sony’s partnership with Disney and Marvel Studios on “Spider-Man” continues to bear fruit.

More to come…

The U.S. State Department acknowledged Thursday that a map of Africa used during a presentation at an international AIDS conference this week incorrectly labeled the countries it highlighted, calling the mistake “an unfortunate error.”

The map was displayed during an event at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro. It referenced Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Malawi and Cameroon, but none of the countries shown was correctly identified by the lines connecting their names to their locations. Nigeria, which has a coastline, was depicted as landlocked, while Mozambique was placed in the Horn of Africa despite being located in southeastern Africa. Côte d’Ivoire was also shown on the wrong side of the continent. Uganda and Malawi were roughly in the correct areas but had inaccurate borders, while Cameroon appeared in the map’s legend but was not shown on the map itself.

The incorrect map first went viral after being shared in a Substack post by AIDS expert Emily Bass. According to Reuters, which analyzed the images, the map also contained “an artificial intelligence watermark that ⁠signals it was made with OpenAI tools.”

“The U.S. government’s failure to catch this error before displaying the slide at the top international AIDS conference in the world, in a session that featured the Director General of Nigeria as an invited guest, is not only disrespectful to African collaborators, it’s also a significant tell,” Bass wrote in the Substack post.

The State Department acknowledged the mistake in a statement to media outlets, calling it “an unfortunate error caused by a team member who hastily altered the slide deck immediately before the presentation at the AIDS 2026 Conference.”

“We take full responsibility for ​the confusion and misrepresentation it ​caused for attendees, including ⁠our African partners,” it continued.

The speaker was later identified as Jeff Graham, a top U.S. health official who oversees an initiative known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, ​or PEPFAR.

Naturally, the mislabeling drew widespread criticism online and within the AIDS community. Kenneth Ngure, the president-elect of the International AIDS Society, shared his frustration with the error, calling the mislabeled map “disheartening.”

“African countries must be taken seriously,” he said in a statement to The New York Times. “The African continent continues to bear the greatest burden of the H.I.V. pandemic, and our focus must now return to advancing the H.I.V. response.”

The Trump administration has significantly rolled back global health funding in several areas, including H.I.V. prevention and treatment efforts. The cuts in 2025 were expected to have a significant impact, with the results expected to be presented at the conference later this week.

The State Department did not immediately return TheWrap’s request for comment.