Hero
Carol Vorderman, who has revealed she has no fewer than five male lovers on the go. The 62-year-old former Countdown presenter’s love life must take formidable planning, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Does she schedule all the dates into her kitchen calendar, like council bin collections? Does she organise five separate summer holidays and birthday parties, to avoid the “special friends” meeting each other? How does she remember all the anniversaries? Thank goodness Vorderman has “a head for numbers”.
Villain
Jennifer Tejada, CEO of a San Francisco tech company, who put some hallowed words to a less-than-inspiring use. In an email announcing 7% of her firm’s 950-odd staff were going to be sacked, she said she was “reminded in moments like this of something Martin Luther King said, that ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy’”. After the inevitable backlash, she sent out an apology that was conspicuously free of quotes from civil rights leaders.
Hero
Isaac Ortman, a 14-year-old from Minnesota, who has slept outdoors in his family’s garden for 1,000 nights in a row. The tent-loving teen began the habit in April 2020 aged 11, and has amassed an array of sleeping bags and quilts to keep warm in temperatures as low as –38C. “Even in the cold, I sleep just fine,” he tells The Washington Post. “My dad says it’s hard to wake me sometimes.”
Hero
The male northern quoll, which sacrifices itself to the noble cause of procreation. The Australian marsupials typically only survive one mating season, and researchers have found that it’s because they’re having so much sex that they succumb to fatal sleep deprivation. Females, which put much less effort into getting laid, live around four times longer.
Villain
Jane Austen, whose novel Northanger Abbey has been given a trigger warning by the University of Greenwich for containing “sexism” and “gender stereotypes”. This misses the book’s entire point, says Victoria Richards in The Independent: it’s “a satire that wryly mocks gender roles” rather than upholding them. Besides, surely the joy of studying English is in investigating the subtleties of classic works? Take it from Austen herself: “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
Villain
The former head of a zoo in Chilpancingo, Mexico, who killed four of the establishment’s pygmy goats and served them up at an end-of-year party. José Rubén Nava, who was relieved of his position last month, is also alleged to have traded a zebra for some DIY tools.