Hero
Taylor Swift, who is better at due diligence than most celebrities, and indeed many investors. When negotiating a $100m sponsorship deal with the now-collapsed cryptocurrency firm FTX, the singer asked: “Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities?” Unhappy with the answer, she walked away.
Villain
A teacher at an unnamed £20,000-a-year private girls’ school, who claims she was “managed out” of her job for saying “Good afternoon, girls” before a lesson. One of the pupils used they/them pronouns, and the next day the class pointedly wrote all their names and pronouns on the board. “Before the end of the week,” the teacher told The Mail on Sunday, “I was in some sort of disciplinary process.”
Villain
Choupette, the late Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, who is much too big for her boots, says Craig Brown in the Daily Mail. The “frosty fashion designer” left his pet £1.3m when he died four years ago, and since then she has been photographed for a Vogue cover story and invited to this year’s Met Gala. Choupette’s agent, Lucas Berullier, claims she is “very sophisticated, very hard to read”. What? “How can you tell if a cat is sophisticated? Does Choupette only watch films with subtitles? Does she switch over when Gogglebox comes on?”
Hero
The singer Ellie Goulding, who says her new album is going to be “the least personal” yet. How refreshing, says Julie Burchill in The Spectator: a lot of modern music is “like a cross between a bulletin from the therapist’s couch and a ceaselessly picked sore”. Ed Sheeran, for example, frequently sings about his depression, his anxiety, and his “crushing guilt over inflicting a long string of rubbish songs on an innocent world (OK, I made that last one up)”.