Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• What Can Ron DeSantis Do Now? - It isn’t that the Florida governor is charmless—or it’s not only that. It’s that his career has been spent on a charmlessness offensive. - link

• E. Jean Carroll Discusses Trump’s Comeuppance - Since losing a civil case to the journalist, who accused him of sexual abuse and defamation, Trump has doubled down on his attacks. - link

• What Is a Weed? - The names we call plants say more about us than they do about the greenery that surrounds us. - link

• E. Jean Carroll on Defamatory Trump, and Rob Marshall on “The Little Mermaid” - Carroll and her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, on their next move against Donald Trump’s campaign of defamation. Plus, the director of Disney’s new film on bringing the mermaid to life. - link

• How Andy Warhol Turned the Supreme Court Justices Into Art Critics - Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent reads as strenuously as a vintage piece by, say, Clement Greenberg, slamming Harold Rosenberg. - link

From Vox

• Reality, starring Sydney Sweeney, is unsettling, vital viewing -

  

  The HBO film adapts the FBI transcript from Reality Winner’s interrogation into a stunning thriller.

  When the play that would one day become the extraordinary drama Reality premiered off-Broadway, its whistleblower protagonist was still in a federal prison.

  Back then, in February 2019, the show was called Is This a Room, an enigmatic quote from the show itself. An FBI agent looks into the place — it’s definitely a room — where two of his colleagues are interrogating the diminutive 25-year-old woman who lives there, and he makes the inquiry. He seems to be asking if the space needs to be searched. But it’s a strange, off-kilter query, one nobody would really know how to answer. Of course this is a room; what else would it be? It’s like asking where “here” is. Or whether reality exists.

  There’s an ironic vigor to Reality’s narrative, a practically allegorical sense that it was constructed by a lightly ham-fisted author with something to prove. It’s a story about truth and twisted facts, about shadows and subterfuge, and the woman at its center is literally named Reality.

  What makes it so strange, and so chilling, is that nobody wrote it at all.

  The text of Reality, like the play it’s based on, is a verbatim replica, including redactions, of the FBI’s transcript of its interrogation of Air Force veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner on June 3, 2017. Playwright and director Tina Satter pulled the transcript onto the stage, and now she and co-screenwriter James Paul Dallas have moved it — to incredible effect — onto the screen, starring Sydney Sweeney as Winner and Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis as the agents interrogating her.

  HBO

  Reality is, quite literally, the kind of movie where people just talk the whole time. But that’s precisely why it works. The dialogue (unaltered, with a key exception, from the stage production and thus the FBI’s transcript) has that greatest of theatrical qualities: Nobody is ever saying quite what they mean, and you are riveted, trying to figure out what they’re thinking, the balance of power shifting back and forth. That it works so well on screen is a tremendous testimony to both Satter’s directorial chops and the actors’ performances.

  The real Reality Winner, you may recall from the headlines, was accused and convicted of leaking an intelligence report regarding attempted Russian hacking of voter rolls during the 2016 election. “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she told the agents. Later, she told the media that she felt the government was intentionally misleading its citizens about Russia’s attempts to upend the election, and so she printed out a file and mailed it to the Intercept, which promised its sources anonymity.

  The government found out and arrived on her doorstep even before the Intercept published the reports. For the crime of “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” she was sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison — the longest ever imposed for this crime. And, incredibly, she was repeatedly denied bail, ultimately remaining there for just shy of four years, even as Congress and other government officials spoke about what she’d revealed publicly. Though she was transferred to a transitional facility on June 2, 2021, Winner never saw the show about her when it opened on Broadway that October — because she was still under house arrest.

  Translating play to screen results in subtle changes. When the show was still on stage, redactions in the transcripts were staged visually, the audience briefly plunged into blackness, a switch flipped that left you disoriented in the audience. As a medium, film has a little more to play with visually, so instead we see Sweeney’s image fuzz out and disappear, then reappear every time the redaction ends.

  There’s also context-setting by way of news clips; at the start, we see Winner in her cubicle, Fox News coverage of FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress blaring from a TV on the wall. (Later, she’ll tell the agents that she repeatedly asked for the TVs to be switched to anything other than Fox News — Al Jazeera, or just pictures of people’s pets — and it greatly upset her.) Sometimes events and dates about which the characters are speaking are cut together with the real Reality’s images or Instagram posts; once in a while we see a waveform of the tapes, or hear some static, or see the transcript being typed, a way to remind us that what we are watching is not fiction.

  Or not exactly, anyhow.

  HBO

  Most significantly, some of the redactions in the play have become un-redacted in the meantime. Many of them concerned the news outlet to which Winner leaked the document; the film eventually starts saying “the Intercept” out loud, and it’s a bit shocking at first. The reasoning seems clear. In November 2021, just after the Broadway show closed, Winner blasted the Intercept for its handling of the documents, the handling of which may have been responsible for her identification by the FBI (and which became a huge problem for the publication). Visually, Reality makes the case that the Intercept screwed up. Small wonder.

  The question at the center of Reality is complex. When it was a play, it was an inquiry into Winner’s motives. Why would a young woman who wants, as she repeatedly tells the agents, to be deployed — to get out of her dead-end position as a Farsi translator and actually use her extensive language skills — do something she knows is illegal? What “pushed her over the edge,” as one of the agents asks?

  But as a movie, with the attendant close-ups on faces the medium provides, the question grows. Emotional complexity, the manifold feelings her character is experiencing, and her well-trained attempts to stay cool, flash across Sweeney’s face. We start to really see what she’s thinking, and that leads to a bigger, more unnerving demonstration of the abject failure of the systems meant to protect us to do anything like that. Winner’s military record can’t save her. The fact that she speaks three languages spoken in the Middle East is called “impressive” many times by the agents, but each time the repetition is more loaded — it’s going to be used against her, we realize, to suggest her sympathies lie elsewhere (and so it was). The FBI isn’t on her side; they don’t even bother to read her Miranda rights. Well-worn gender dynamics suddenly become a factor, with Winner seemingly forced into joking about her cat being obese to pacify the men, sickeningly recognizable to women who’ve ever felt the need to play along for self-protection.

  After her arrest, media reports — stitched into the film, lest the journalistic outlets conveniently forget — include people saying that, for instance, Winner is “a person who had taken a key interest in the Middle East, with suspicious motives,” that she “claimed to hate America,” that she was a “quintessential example of an inside threat.” Even the news outlet that was supposed to protect her, that provided such careful instructions for leakers who wish to remain anonymous, screwed it all up, and she paid the price.

  Watching Reality marks the third time I’ve seen Satter’s adaptation of Winner’s interrogation. Each time, I’m left angry and unsettled. Like many Americans, especially white middle-class women, I was raised to believe that my government messes up sometimes but is essentially on my side. That we are the good guys, a government by the people, for the people, and that we don’t imprison people here just to make sure nobody ever dares to do something like making sure we’re told the truth about our own elections. We lionize the brave person who speaks out. When we get older, and wiser, and maybe more skeptical, that bedrock belief remains: that the truth will protect us.

  To that, Reality pulls out a sledgehammer, and a host of institutions failing to fulfill their own lofty promises. Is anyone doing what they’re supposed to do? If the US government is willing to impose a harsh sentence on someone like Reality Winner, what are we supposed to think? What else is false? Is reality real?

  Is this a room?

  Reality premieres on HBO on May 29 at 10 pm ET and will stream on Max.

• In defense of flies. Yes, really. -

  

  From “fluffy flying narwhals” to maggots that snorkel in trash, welcome to the wonderfully bizarre world of flies.

  Flies are annoying, especially on warm weekends spent outdoors. They land on us and our food, they buzz in our ears, and some of them bite. Mosquitos are a kind of fly and they transmit some of the world’s deadliest pathogens.

  But consider for a minute that you may not really know flies. Or rather, the flies you likely do know — the house flies, the mosquitos, the gnats — are just a tiny, tiny fraction of an enormous group of insects that is, on the whole, quite wonderful. It also supports our very existence.

  No, a fly didn’t write this. Flies do, however, have advocates among humans, and recently, one got to me.

  Last fall, I met Emily Hartop, a scientist who studies flies at a natural history museum in Berlin. A lifelong bug lover, Hartop told me the world is home to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fly species. And they fill pretty much every ecological role imaginable. Flies are superb pollinators, shrewd parasites, and exceptional janitors — they literally clean up our shit.

  Flies are also anatomical marvels, Hartop said. In addition to a pair of wings, they have special balancing organs called halteres that function like gyroscopes, allowing flies to turn sharp corners, hover, and land upside down. “They’re called flies for a reason,” Hartop said. “They are amazing aerial acrobats.”

  Some flies are bioluminescent and glow in their larval form. Others can get “pregnant,” hatching larvae in their bodies that feed on a milk-like substance, according to Erica McAlister, a fly expert at London’s Natural History Museum. (Nearly all insects lay eggs instead.)

  None of these facts make the flies we encounter in our homes and at our barbecues any less obnoxious. But this insect group — which is still largely unknown — comprises far more than just pests. Flies help us, and they can even inspire wonder.

  Let’s meet some of them.

  The flies that decapitate ants

  The world’s coolest group of insects, Hartop argues, is the family of flies she studies, known as Phoridae. (She acknowledges her bias.) Phoridae contains tens of thousands of species that exhibit every behavior imaginable, making it perhaps the most ecologically diverse group of organisms in the world.

  Many species, for example, are parasites — they live at the expense of other creatures.

  A parasitic fly in the genus Pseudacteon is particularly savage. It lays its eggs inside an ant, and when they hatch, the larvae migrate into the ant’s head. There, the larvae release hormones that kill the ant and cause its head to fall off. The larvae then pupate in the ant’s detached head (as you can see in image F below).

  Li Chen and Sanford D. Porter/Insects

  Female flies in a different genus, meanwhile, will hunt down injured ants and then, using specialized mouth parts, manually saw off their heads, into which they’ll lay their eggs, Hartop said. You can see this in the video below, showing a small fly (on the left) removing an ant’s head.

  

  The flies that don’t look like flies

  Then there are flies that look more like spiders, bees, and other insects, in some cases to avoid being eaten. (Predators are more likely to avoid insects with painful stingers.)

  The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

  A parasitic fly called the bee fly, for example, looks like a bumblebee, an insect that is not at all a fly. McAlister calls them “fluffy flying narwhals.” I prefer “wanna-bees.” The pointy structure sticking out of its head isn’t a stinger, it’s a proboscis, a straw-like mouth part that flies use to feed.

  Female bee flies spray their eggs “like a machine gun” around the nests of ground-dwelling bees, McAlister said. The larvae then hatch, worm their way into the nest, and eat the bee larvae.

  Valter Jacinto/Getty Images

  A large number of other flies mimic the appearance of bees, likely so they look threatening to birds and other predators. These include hoverflies, which people often call sweat bees. They really do drink sweat, but they don’t bite or sting.

  New Zealand Arthropod Collection

  Gilles San Martin

Many bat flies, on the other hand, look like spiders, such as those in the images above. They spend most of their lives nestled in the fur of bats, subsisting on their blood. Some of these flies have evolved to be wingless, whereas others ditch their wings and have bats fly for them. (These are the flies that don’t lay eggs like other insects but rather give birth to a single live larva.)

Another impressive spider-lookalike is a rare fly in Kenya known as the terrible hairy fly, shown below. Their larvae are known to live in and eat bat poop.

R. Copeland/International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology

One more: Females in a genus of Phorids called Vestigipoda mimic ant larvae. Their disguise is so convincing that ants feed the flies as if they were their own young. “They look like things that you would never recognize as flies,” Hartop said.

The flies with weird appendages and body parts

Other flies just look totally bizarre.

The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

My favorite? The stalk-eyed fly. In males, the eyes are on the ends of thin stalks that can be longer than their bodies. These eyes function a bit like moose antlers or sheep horns; the flies likely use them to assert dominance, according to the Natural History Museum, London.

Flies in the family Pipunculidae also have remarkable eyes. They’re enormous. Their whole head is basically just eyes. Unlike humans and other mammals, flies have compound eyes made of multiple light-detecting parts; those eyes see in low resolution but are exceptionally good at detecting sudden movements.

Getty Images

Another fly, called Moegistorhynchus longirostris, also has an impressive body part: a proboscis that can be longer than 8 centimeters, or about 3 inches. The fly itself, meanwhile, is only about 1 centimeter long. The flies use these appendages to reach the nectar in tube flowers.

David Barraclough and Rob Slotow/African Invertebrates (Image by C. Patterson-Jones)

Perhaps even more wonderful (and ingenious) are a handful of cave-dwelling gnat species in the genus Arachnocampa. As larvae, they glow to make their own bug traps. Their luminescence draws in moths and other insects, which then get ensnared by sticky threads that the gnats produce, McAlister said. The larvae then eat them.

Moritz Wolf/Getty Images

Flies pollinate our plants and clean up our shit

Flies are cool, yes. But are they important? Also, yes.

It’s true that some flies are extremely harmful to humans, including female mosquitos in the genus Anopheles. They transmit malaria, which kills several hundred thousand people each year. Other varieties, like tsetse flies, also carry parasites that can be painful and sometimes deadly. These are very serious concerns.

Getty Images

Yet only a tiny fraction of the world’s flies harm us. We depend on many of the rest.

For example, flies are fundamental to the production of many of our favorite foods, such as chocolate, McAlister said. While roughly two dozen insects are known to pollinate cacao plants — the seeds of which are used to make chocolate — nearly all of them are flies, she said. So no flies, no chocolate.

Altogether, more than 100 cultivated crops are largely dependent on flies for pollination, including mangos, cashews, and avocados.

Some flies can also help farmers and home gardeners deal with pests. The larvae of some hoverflies, for example, have a voracious appetite for aphids, small insects that infest crops. (If you buy organic produce, chances are you’ve encountered, or accidentally eaten, aphids.)

“We massively underestimate the impact these tiny little creatures are having,” McAlister said.

Gross as they look, fly larvae also help clean the world of waste — they eat our garbage, our roadkill, and our feces. None is perhaps more impressive than rat-tailed maggots, the larvae of certain kinds of hoverflies. On one end of their body, they have an extendable “breathing siphon” that functions like a snorkel, allowing the maggot to feed in a pile of waste even if it’s deprived of oxygen. “These things scuba dive,” McAlister said.

The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

Yet we know very little about them

Considering flies are fascinating, important, ubiquitous, and in some cases cute, you might think everyone would be jumping at the opportunity to study them.

They are not.

Aside from pathogen-carrying mosquitos, flies are a massively under-studied group of organisms, in part because science tends to focus more on conventionally charming insects, Hartop said, like bees and butterflies.

“So much attention is dedicated to charismatic groups like pollinators and pretty things,” she said. “Flies take a bit more time to get to know and love.”

That’s one reason why fly science still has enormous gaps. In the genus Hartop studies within the family Phoridae, known as Megaselia, it’s unclear, for example, if there are 20,000 species, 100,000, or closer to 1 million. In other words, large sections of the fly family tree have yet to be filled in.

This is a problem, Hartop said.

Because flies occupy so many different habitats and roles within those habitats, the status of their populations is a useful indicator of how the environment is doing — i.e., whether it’s healthy or not. Even baseline numbers are missing. That makes it challenging to understand how ecosystems and the services they provide are changing due to threats like climate change.

“I’ve been to so many talks on things like bees and butterflies where they’re described as a proxy for how an environment is doing as a whole,” Hartop said. “I think that’s a really broken way to look at things.” Studying bees is useful for understanding how pollinators are doing, she said, but not the broader environment.

Scientists like Hartop are helping fill these gaps, such as by surveying different landscapes and streamlining the time-intensive process of sequencing fly DNA to describe new species. She has come across hundreds of new species, about 60 of which she’s formally described.

Emily Hartop and Brian Brown/Biodiversity Data Journal (Image by Kelsey Bailey)

That’s what’s so exciting about studying flies, she said: There’s so much opportunity for discovery. You don’t have to travel to the deep sea to find a new species; there could be undiscovered species of flies in your backyard, perhaps even in a place like New York City, Hartop said. Each discovery is a chance to understand an influential member of the ecosystem.

“We really need to shift our thinking and we need to look at some of these groups that we’re not paying attention to,” Hartop said. “I don’t expect people to relate to very small flies in the way that they relate to a butterfly. But understanding the role that they play, understanding their importance, I think that is critical.”

• Succession ends exactly how it needed to -

  

  Everything you need to know about that stunner of a finale.

  Note: This article contains spoilers for several Succession episodes, particularly season four, episode 10, “With Open Eyes.”

  In a way, we knew how Succession would end. We’ve been pre-grieving the show’s wrap-up for months now — and many of us perhaps knew from the pilot on that the Roy family was bound for a deeply tragic denouement.

  “With Open Eyes,” the series finale of Succession, which aired Sunday, certainly delivered. The finale showed the Roy family in their truest form: destroying one another better than any outsider could. Like Saturn devouring his son after hearing a prophecy that one of his children would overthrow him, Logan Roy has consumed his children for good.

  None of the siblings took the crown in the end, though they tore each other down till the bitter end. As the board votes to either approve or block the sale of Waystar to streaming service GoJo, Shiv (Sarah Snook) lives up to her namesake, inserting the knife into her brother’s back by voting yes on the sale. Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) will not run Waystar-Royco, and her estranged husband, Tom Wambsgans, a nobody from Minnesota, will instead become the American CEO of the newly merged company.

  It was a classic Succession surprise. (Well, maybe not a surprise to all: A fan theory from a viral Tiktok video surmised that Tom would emerge victorious because he sort of shared a last name with a famed baseball player, Bill Wambsganss, who made an unassisted triple play in the 1920 World Series, taking out three players at once. In the end, Tom did the same with the Roy siblings.)

  This episode saw the siblings viciously duking it out over who should be CEO at their mother’s house in an idyllic seaside location (later revealed to be Barbados), never realizing GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) is secretly plotting to betray Shiv and crown Tom instead. Roman (Kieran Culkin) — who has been missing for some undetermined amount of time — is at Caroline’s, and Shiv and Ken have rushed over not out of concern of their brother’s well-being, but to secure his vote to block the sale of Waystar to GoJo. The day of the board vote comes, and after painstakingly gaining the loyalty of other shareholders, Kendall faces a defector he hadn’t foreseen but probably should have: his one and only sister, Shiv.

  Showrunner Jesse Armstrong announced early this year that the fourth season would be the last, ending the show before it lost even a bit of its luster or overstayed its welcome. Now that we’ve reached the end, it’s fair to ask, what did Succession set out to do? On the most surface level, it wanted to turn the corporate boardroom fight into an intimate, intense family drama about the cycle of abuse. It meticulously captured the ambience of privilege, employing a host of wealth consultants to ensure every detail rang true. It cleverly toyed with the headlines and anecdotes about real-life business deals and billionaires, creating a decoupage of references that grounded the show’s at-times-unbelievable drama in reality. So much of its crass, biting dialogue was irresistibly quotable, and viewers even grew fond of these terrible, petty characters. And oh, yeah, Succession wanted to crown Logan’s successor, eventually. But it also set out to show how brutish and humiliating the ascendency would be — and how hollow the victory.

  “It’s saying human beings are basically ludicrous,” Brian Cox, the actor who played Logan Roy, told the Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “They’re ludicrous in their desires, they’re ludicrous in what they get and don’t get and, in the end, they never even know what they want.”

  The Roys only knew what they didn’t want: They didn’t want to be beaten, sidelined, or have someone else’s foot on their neck. In the end, the three Roy siblings, having permanently shunted eldest son Connor to the side, destroyed one another. They gave in to their desire for revenge for a lifetime of slights at each one another’s hands; keeping their father’s legacy in the family mattered far less.

  After feeling run over by her brothers all season, even as they promised to include her in all the major decisions as interim CEOs — in the election episode, she called them Pontius Pilate — Shiv finally got her revenge. But it’s a bittersweet revenge; she has enough power to ruin someone else, but not enough to ever become the one who holds the reins. She makes a calculated play to ensure that none of her siblings would become CEO, only once it became clear that she would never get the title.

  The pleasure of stepping on someone else’s neck outweighed the pleasure of helping someone else take power, even if it means they all fall. “I love you,” Logan said the last time the whole gang was assembled. “But you are not serious people.” The patriarch was proven right: His children were hapless, incompetent little creatures who all caught themselves in the bear trap of their thirst for power.

  The final fate of Kendall Roy

  Kendall has been a bulldozer throughout this last leg of the season; he convinces his brother and sister that there is no other logical choice for CEO. When Roman, who is in a fragile state of mind since the death of his father, eyes the wounds he suffered in a recent scuffle with protesters self-consciously and expresses anguish at never being a serious contender for the heir, Ken’s basest instinct is to crush him in an intentionally painful hug that reopens the wound on Roman’s face, making it bleed anew. Later, Kendall tries to browbeat Shiv into backing away from the edge of her betrayal, but it’s no use.

  In clumsily trying to rewrite his own history, he claims he didn’t actually kill a cater-waiter in season one and that he was always the unequivocal successor to their father’s seat. Kendall, spouting his delusions and lies about the hideous things he did on the way to ascend the throne, only manages to push his siblings further away. Instead, Shiv throws her lot in with Tom.

  The last scene in Succession’s finale features Kendall, for a long time the presumptive heir of the Waystar-Royco empire, staring dead-eyed at the gently rolling waves of the Hudson River. Water has been a constant symbol dogging Kendall since the beginning of the series, often portending danger and darkness, but occasionally proving invigorating, as it did in the season four episode “Living+.” After the board vote is over, Kendall stares at the unfathomable waters, at once tranquil and treacherous. He’s truly “twin track,” as he told his old friend Stewy earlier this season: both dead and alive.

  In the pilot episode, which aired in 2018, Kendall was introduced to viewers in the back seat of his car, listening to his emotional support hip-hop as he prepares to close an important acquisition. Throughout the show, Kendall used rap music to boost his confidence before an important moment; the artists have a swagger Kendall wishes he could muster. He’s a trembling ball of anxiety, lighting up a cigarette just to take one nervous, unsexy puff. This scene told viewers almost everything they needed to know about him: Kendall wants to be the Man, like his father, Logan, but it doesn’t come naturally and never will for him. In his eulogy for his father, three seasons later, Kendall recalls that Logan was comfortable in this world. What he doesn’t say is that others never were. Only Logan could waltz around in these cutthroat settings and thrive.

  After a harrowing few years of peaks and plunges, Kendall went into the series finale poised to become CEO of Waystar-Royco — but only after Logan has died, and only after Kendall has come close to death, too. Throughout the show, Kendall showed a magnificent talent for fumbling the ball at the one-yard line. The finale only affirmed this pattern. It began with Kendall confident and bombastic, trying to bully shareholders into coming over to his side but with a put-uponness that’s never quite convincing. Stewy, his long-time frenemy, is still on the fence.

  Among the four Roy children, Kendall was most like Logan; at times he displayed a good instinct for business, and there was a hard kernel of ruthlessness in him. Logan once told his son that he wasn’t a killer, but that’s not true. Kendall has killed, and by the series finale, he had transformed himself into a butcher. In the process, it has stamped out his nerve endings, the soft, human uncertainties that spilled out of him especially in his lowest moments. He was the only one of his siblings who wondered, from time to time, whether he was doing The Right Thing — whether he was a good father or a good person. He has consciously and methodically consumed that crucial part of himself, swallowed it up so that he might be his father’s son.

  Strong, in last week’s Succession podcast episode, noted that Logan’s funeral was also Kendall’s coronation. Sitting on the throne, however, is a lonely place to be. His wife and children are now distant figures — even his seemingly steadfast assistant Jess (Juliana Canfield) is gone. After his complicity in the election, and having no one left by his side, Kendall is gritting his teeth and going all-in. There’s no road back from what he’s done and who he’s become.

  Toward the end, begging Shiv not to renege on their agreement to tank the deal and ensure that he’s the lone CEO, Kendall sums up who he is. He admits in the finale that Logan promised the successorship to him at the tender age of 7; he was raised all his life to take the mantle. Kendall doesn’t know what he would be for otherwise. He admits that if he’s not CEO, he might die. The water that’s been threatening him all his life might finally swallow him up. “I am like a cog built to fit only one machine,” he says. “I mean, it’s the one thing I know how to do.”

  How it started vs. how it ended for the rest of the Roys

  The Roys, who were full of absurd hubris, believed that they were smart and capable and the rightful heirs to the company that their father had built from scrap. But at every move that inched them closer to holding the reins of ultimate power, they were sabotaged by a vindictive meagerness — the thing that was their true inheritance from their father — which, in the end, turns their high-handed ambitions into mere dust. And they never quite recognize what their failings and fatal flaws were. Each season’s last episode takes its title from the John Berryman poem Dream Song 29. “With open eyes, he attends, blind,” the poem reads. So blinded were they by their internecine struggle that they didn’t even see the interloper Tom as a threat to the line of succession.

  In this episode, Shiv is still under the illusion that once Matsson gets the deal, she’ll be announced as the new American CEO. The trouble is that Shiv has never been respected among her siblings, despite being roughly equally incompetent. Instead, she’s constantly overlooked and undermined.

  Matsson has dinner with her husband Tom, with whom Shiv has been on the rocks for the entire season. Tom thinks he’ll have to prove that he should stay on as ATN head or get the ax; it turns out Matsson is actually feeling him out to run everything once the acquisition goes through. Part of Matsson’s motivation for counting out Shiv is that he sees her as an object of sexual desire; he wants to fuck her, he tells Tom, so he metaphorically fucks her desire to be named CEO. It would be too messy otherwise. Tom eagerly agrees with the plan, even as he’s disturbed by the thought of being cuckolded by the mercurial Swedish tech founder and even though he knows it’s an incredible betrayal of his wife, who all but created the role for herself.

  When we first met Shiv, she wasn’t even attempting to follow in her father’s footsteps. She has her own career as a political strategist, and anyway, she’s never been taken seriously in the family business. Kendall knows his father has high expectations of him, and he’s a nervous wreck about it, while Shiv is painfully aware that her father expects almost nothing from her. Logan, as Shiv said in her eulogy, simply couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head. Turns out, no one could — not her brothers, not Matsson, not even Tom.

  By the finale, we see Shiv launching a full-court press to become CEO. Her brothers, and perhaps the Waystar executives as well, were never going to take her seriously as a contender. Shiv would have to claw her way in and steal what she wants — even if it means promising to neglect her soon-to-be-born child. In the final episode, she talks with Tom about where they stand. They’ve been through the wringer, saying the ugliest things to one another just a few episodes ago, Shiv called Tom “striving and parochial,” but now she seems to sense a subtle shift in power between them. She’s reluctant to divorce. Tom quips that she’s finally fallen in love with her husband, but the fact is, Shiv has always been in love with power, and by the end of the series, Tom is the one who sits on the throne. He’s the man that Shiv has chosen to anoint, and that’s more power than any of her brothers ever gave her.

  For all their marriage, Shiv has enjoyed the fact that Tom is “fathoms” beneath her, as Logan once put it, and so would never dare betray her. Now, after Tom has indeed betrayed her and told her choice harsh truths about the nature of their unequal relationship, she demurely takes his hand after he’s appointed CEO, like the trophy wife of a powerful politician.

  Then there’s Roman — or, as Logan called him, Romulus, the boy raised by wolves: He’s always been directionless and fueled mainly by masochism, which is why he seems to regularly blurt out the most disgusting things imaginable. It’s as though he wants people to recoil and call him a dog. Roman isn’t really motivated by the same force and vitality of his father the way Kendall is. He’s in awe of it like everyone else, sure, but what Roman craves most in life is for someone to take control — to tell him what to do and how to be. In the fourth season, he has somehow failed up into being co-CEO with Kendall, and the sincerity of his desire to screw over GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson is palpable. But he’s still not driven by a desire to be an impressive media mogul — he’s spurred by a need to defend his dead father’s honor, which Matsson spat all over early this season. It’s unclear where he’ll be left when the revenge is finished.

  Connor (Alan Ruck) is the oldest Roy sibling, the always-forgotten half-brother who’s odd, awkward, and corny. As the eldest, he has more memories with their father than the other kids, but also has terrible trauma around his mother, whom Logan forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital.

  Connor boasted declaratively in the karaoke scene earlier this season that he didn’t need love. But by the end of the series, is he happy? He married Willa (Justine Lupe) the day Logan died — after acknowledging that their relationship is somewhat transactional. But the admission of the fact that Willa is, in part, with him for his money has brought about a level of mutual support and respect. Connor knows that Willa doesn’t love him the way he loves her, and he’s made his peace with it for now. They’re making plans to move to Slovenia for the ambassadorship that Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk) promised Connor just as ATN declared him the winner of the election a few episodes ago. But is a fraction of love enough to sustain someone forever? If Succession has shown us anything, it’s that human nature yearns for one morsel, and then one more, and then eventually wants the whole world.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Wrestlers yet to meet after release from police detention, will soon contemplate next move - Vinesh Phogat, Bajrang Punia, Sangeeta Phogat, Sakshi Malik and several others were detained by Delhi police on Sunday when they attempted to move towards the new Parliament building

• This league will be an inspiration for organisers all over the world, says Humpy - HYDERABAD

• Handball impasse ends, Digvijay Chautala elected President of HAI - HAI requested affiliation with the Indian Sports’ apex body and appreciated the IOA for its part in helping to resolve the problem

• Ponting’s views on pay disparity in Test cricket was a discussion point but not taken forward: ICC - To ensure that cricketers from less developed nations get paid well to play the five-day game

• Why Shubman Gill loves Spider-Man: The IPL 2023 star on his favourite superhero - The 23-year-old fast-rising cricketer talks about voicing the Indian Spider-Man in the upcoming animated film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

From The Hindu: National News

• K. Narayanasamy appointed V-C of Tamil Nadu Dr. MGR Medical University -

• Case of moral policing in Karnataka, youth questioned for dropping off classmate - A group of persons questioned a paramedical student for dropping off his classmate who belongs to another religion

• Andhra Pradesh power utilities to discuss fixation of pay scales with employees’ JAC on May 30 - It will be the third such meeting in over a month aimed at reaching an amicable settlement on the Revised Pay Scales, which are supposed to come into effect on April 1, 2022

• CMDRF: Kerala HC adjourns hearing on plea against Lok Ayukta order -

• Minister Dharmendra Pradhan meets Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong; discusses deepening cooperation in skill development - Dharmendra Pradhan, who is on a three-day visit to Singapore, also deliberated on ways to strengthen bilateral engagements in the field of skill development with Lawrence Wong

From BBC: Europe

• Turkish election victory for Erdogan leaves nation divided - Turkey’s president wins five more years, but his rival condemns “the most unfair election in years”.

• Turkey elections: What to expect from newly emboldened Erdogan - Voters in the strategic Nato country opted for a seasoned autocrat - rather than an untested democrat.

• Ukraine war: Fresh attacks on Kyiv after intense drone barrage - Ukraine’s capital has been attacked 16 times this month - the latest, unusually, came in daytime.

• French Open 2023: Grand Slam using AI to protect players from online abuse - As the French Open introduces a new technology to help players filter out social media abuse, BBC Sport looks at the issues tennis players encounter online.

• Tourist boat sinks on Lake Maggiore killing four - reports - Italy’s fire service says the boat capsized when a storm developed over the lake.

From Ars Technica

• Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem? - Ars chats with law philosopher Scott Shapiro about his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing. - link

• The lessons of a wildfire that destroyed a town and burned for 15 months - Until it hit, the local firefighters couldn’t conceive of something that ferocious. - link

• Inner workings revealed for “Predator,” the Android malware that exploited 5 0-days - Spyware is sold to countries including Egypt, Indonesia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Serbia. - link

• No A/C? No problem, if buildings copy networked tunnels of termite mounds - “For the first time, it may be possible to design a true living, breathing building.” - link

• HP printers should have EPEAT ecolabels revoked, trade group demands - Complaint to EPEAT organizers spells out why Dynamic Security, HP+ suck. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• If girls with big boobs work at Hooters, where does girls with one leg work? -

  IHOP.

  submitted by /u/Wannabe__geek
  [link] [comments]

• My friend caught me sniffing his sister’s panties -

  He was so mad, maybe because she was still wearing them.

  It made the rest of the funeral pretty uncomfortable.

  submitted by /u/El_Pepsi
  [link] [comments]

• I am sad. My friend said Cheer up, things could be worse. You could be stuck in a hole in the ground underwater… -

  I knew he meant well.

  submitted by /u/GhostIsItsownGenre
  [link] [comments]

• Boss: “I can clearly smell alcohol on somebody’s breath!” - One of the staff: “Um, boss, this is a Zoom meeting.” -

  • One of the staff: “Um, boss, this is a Zoom meeting.”

  submitted by /u/Historical_Mind_2590
  [link] [comments]