Trump’s assault on Harvard

Villain
Prince Harry, who flew 6,500 miles from LA to Shanghai to deliver a lecture about greener travel. You’ve got to wonder, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, did he not pause for a moment and think: “Hang on… is there perhaps a small risk that headline-writers will try to make me look like some kind of comical hypocrite?” He’s clearly in need of a good adviser. If you’re reading this, Your Highness, I’d be happy to offer my services. “Shall I hop on the next flight to LA?”

Villain
A British two-year-old, who has put the rest of us to shame by becoming the youngest person ever accepted by Mensa – the club of self-appointed boffins that only admits those with an IQ over 132. “He’s learning Morse code, knows the Greek alphabet, and has recently gotten interested in the periodic table,” says his mother.

Hero
A Chinese paraglider who survived temperatures of less than -35C after being caught in an updraft and wafted high above the clouds. Peng Yujiang took off from an elevation of around 3,000 metres, but soon found his teeth chattering at 8,000m, in line with flight paths and roughly the same height as Mount Everest. After a video of Peng’s ordeal went viral, the Chinese authorities – rather unsportingly – handed him a six-month flying ban.

Villain
The boss of Heathrow, who slept through the first seven hours of the airport’s recent – disastrous – shutdown, because his phone was on silent. After power went down at the busy airport at around 11.55pm, Thomas Woldbye, who earned £3.2m last year, was unreachable all night, and only found out that thousands of flights had been grounded, and 200,000 passengers stranded, when he woke up refreshed the next morning.

Villain
Francesca Gino, until recently a highly paid behavioural economist at Harvard Business School specialising in honesty and ethical behaviour, who has had her tenure revoked after being caught falsifying data to get the results she wanted. Gino, whose high-profile work on cheating, lying, and dishonesty made her one of the highest-paid members of the whole Harvard faculty, is the first professor to lose tenure at the university since the 1940s.

The psychedelic countess who lobbied the UN

On a December afternoon in 1970, a then 27-year-old Amanda Feilding used a pedal-operated dentist’s drill to bore a hole in the front of her skull, says The Times. A “healthy and elegant upper-class young woman” self-trepanning, as the operation is known, raised questions about her sanity. But she insisted it was a “conscious decision” for which she had prepared meticulously. She even had a spare drill to hand, which turned out to be “prudent” after the first drill malfunctioned halfway through the procedure. Hours later, she put on a Moroccan kaftan, concealed her bandages beneath a silk turban, and attended a cocktail party with her pet pigeon, Birdie, perched on her shoulder.

Feilding, who died last week aged 82, grew up on a sprawling estate in Oxfordshire, the daughter of an earl who encouraged her to take a “contrary view to almost everything the government of the day advised”. After her drink was spiked with a dose of LSD so large it almost killed her, she devoted her life to advocating for the medical benefits of acid and other trippy drugs. She set up what she called an “NGO for psychedelic substances” which at first attracted mostly “old aristocratic hippies”. But its fate was transformed when “serious scientists” took an interest. She went on to lobby the UN and publish more than 120 books and scientific papers on the benefits of mind-altering substances, believing they could tackle the UK’s mental health epidemic. She even ran for parliament twice with the slogan “Vote Feilding: Trepanation for the National Health”.

Succession creator Jesse Armstrong is back with an “unofficial sequel”, says Danny Leigh in the FT, this time training an acid eye on the new power elite: “the kings of tech”. Mountainhead (a pun on Ayn Rand’s ultra-libertarian Fountainhead) follows four American tech plutocrats across an isolated, poker-filled weekend in a luxurious Utah ski lodge, while they grapple with the fact that their “latest bright ideas” seem to be bringing about the “total collapse of human civilisation”. The result is a “frantic ping-pong of four-sided one-upmanship”, clunking name-drops of great philosophers, and waspish humour, “even if the joke might soon prove to be on all of us”.

One hour 52 minutes, Now TV, available from 1 June.