Skip to main content

Heroes and villains

Rihanna | Bitcoin investors | Durham University

Annie Leibovitz/Vogue

Hero

Rihanna, for refusing to let parenthood be boring. The pregnant singer tells Vogue she has no interest in a sedate baby shower. “No brunch, no blush tones. And no animal-shaped nothing,” says the 34-year-old. “Don’t put me on no wicker chair somewhere with gifts at my feet where everyone is staring at me.” What she wants is a party. “I want everyone to be plastered and crawling out.”

Hero

Durham University, which is seeking to “decolonise” mathematics. About time too, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator. “For too long the subject has been dominated by racist stuff like adding things up or multiplying.” Hopefully now when students are faced with the question “what is four plus four?”, they’ll be able to “eschew the didacticism of white supremacy by answering eight”, and instead suggest a number that “they think feels intuitively right, such as 7,231”.

Villains

Bitcoin investors, who tend to be narcissistic psychopaths, according to a recent survey by Australian psychologists. The boffins discovered that many “crypto nuts” exhibit signs of the “dark tetrad”, a group of four “unsavoury traits” made up of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism, says the New York Post. It seems that the “feast-or-famine nature” of digital investing attracts some shady characters.

Hero

The former Disney star Ashley Tisdale, who’s keeping bookshops in business. The 36-year-old went viral last week after admitting she had bought 400 books in one go in order to appear more literary in an at-home photoshoot. She’s in good company. Adele once reportedly blew more than £1,000 in Daunt Books to kit out her bookcases. According to one shopper, the singer was “pulling books off the shelves without even looking at the spines or reading the blurbs”. Typical celebrities, says The Guardian. Obsessed with “shelf promotion”.