Dominic Tierney

Updated on May 29, 2023, at 1:48 a.m. ET

This article contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Succession.

Talk about a ludicrously capacious feast. After the Roy siblings finally agreed to back Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong) as their leader in the series finale of Succession, they commemorated the call with “a meal fit for a king”: a vomit-colored (and likely vomit-flavored) smoothie that included, among other unappetizing ingredients, bread, raw eggs, Branson pickles, and spit. Kendall gamely drank until he couldn’t, and then had the rest poured over his head like a slimy crown.

I felt as if I’d been gulping the meal down myself as I watched the episode—an equal parts hilarious, repulsive, and sensational end to one of the most enthralling series of our era. Sure, the eleventh-hour boardroom battle was to be expected for a show that has thrived off cutthroat corporate tactics, but the dramatic developments along the way kept me guessing—not only about who would end up leading Waystar Royco, the company Logan Roy (Brian Cox) left behind, but about who among these ruthless point-one-percenters could ever escape the vicious cycle instilled by the late patriarch. In the end, none of the Roy siblings won the throne Logan vacated. Shiv (Sarah Snook) schemed to stay close to power without guarantees of wielding any, forcing Kendall and Roman (Kieran Culkin) to exit the company. All three are left adrift, traumatized once again by the world in which they were raised, and the choices made by their late father—but perhaps more free.

Dear Therapist,

My stepdaughter is 35 years old and has been in a relationship with a 38-year-old man for five years. He is an only child with odd parents and is a bit odd himself. It takes so much patience to deal with his idiosyncrasies—such as his food habits, for example.  

He comes to our house for holiday meals and never brings anything, but comes with containers to take food home. He never buys gifts for my stepdaughter. They have been going to weddings of her friends, but it doesn’t occur to him to think of marriage or making a commitment to her.  

She bought her own condo three years ago, but he seems content with a tiny apartment. She is sort of resigned to this dead-end relationship, but I need a good way to convince her that she can move on. Help.

This story contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Barry.

After everything he’d somehow survived—the stash-house shoot-outs, the brushes with law enforcement, the prison beatings, the time he’d found himself tied up in a chair opposite someone who was absolutely ready to kill him—even Barry wasn’t surprised by his own death. In the series finale of Barry, which aired tonight, the hit man turned actor turned unconvincing family man (played by Bill Hader) reacted to being shot in the chest by his former acting teacher, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), with total resignation: “Oh wow,” he flatly declared, blood spreading through his shirt. The kill shot arrived a split  second later, and Barry’s head snapped back from a bullet to the dome—an unglamorous yet definitive ending.

Forty-year-old Josh Epperson works 10 to 15 hours a week and makes about $100,000 a year. After more than a decade in the corporate world and seven years working at a global brand consultancy, he has spent the past three years running what he calls “The Experiment.” The Experiment has three precepts. First, Epperson accepts only work that he finds meaningful. Second, he accepts only work that pays well (his rate is $130 an hour). Third, he never works more than 20 hours a week. Rather than leverage his expertise for more money, as is customary for most ambitious professionals, he’s chosen to leverage his expertise for more time.

For much of human history, the more wealth an individual accumulated, the less time they spent working. But in the past 50 years, a strange trend has occurred: Despite gains in wealth and productivity, many college-educated Americans—and especially college-educated men—have worked more than ever. Instead of trading wealth for leisure, American professionals began to trade leisure for more work.

“The language of escalation is the language of excuse.” That’s how Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, dismisses anxiety that assistance to Ukraine could provoke Russia to either expand the war to NATO countries or cross the nuclear threshold. The country most concerned about Russia expanding its aggression beyond Ukraine is the country least likely to be the victim of it: the United States.

The Biden administration has been unequivocal in its policy declarations. The president has said, repeatedly and in public, that the U.S. will provide Ukraine “whatever it takes, as long as it takes.” The president wants the political benefits of heroically assisting the good of Ukraine against the evil of Russia, but his administration’s policy is much more hesitant than its bold declarations would suggest.

This poem is dedicated to all the men and women, regardless of faith, who made the ultimate sacrifice for this nation.

I have stood before the crosses
as we laid a soldier down.
They cast a simple shadow
upon the upturned ground.

The bugler sounds taps
as each cross its witness bears
to the journey of a soldier
released from earthly cares.

I have stood before the crosses
and prayed a lonely prayer,
in hopes of some redemption
as I struggled to compare

My life of long contentment
with the soldier’s hallowed call
to warrant with his dying breath
a better world for all.

I have stood before the upturned ground
and struggled to compare
my courage and my character
with the man or woman there.

Would I have died a valiant death
in a foreign land,
upon a distant battlefield,
to save my fellow man?

As Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Stewart Rhodes yesterday to 18 years in prison—the longest yet for a defendant involved in the January 6 insurrection—he explained why the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers needed to be behind bars for a long time. “You pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes.

Mehta was right about that. At his sentencing, Rhodes was unrepentant. In a 20-minute speech before the court, he portrayed himself alternately as a character in Kafka’s The Trial; as an “American Solzhenitsyn,” after the Soviet dissident writer who was sent to the gulag; and as a misunderstood advocate for peace. This monologue was standard fare for Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate who likes to align himself with literary heavyweights and historical leaders.

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“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her final collection of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s words, reflecting on the challenge of them: “All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world / begging to be noticed.”

For those of us working to slow down, to smell the roses, to look one another in the eyes rather than in the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is a perfect guide. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.”

During peak wedding season, the junk drawer of someone with a large family or wide circle of friends might look like the inside of a swag bag from a newlywed-themed business conference. Sunglasses, koozies, matchbooks, bottle openers. A golf ball. A deck of playing cards. Items branded with various dates, names, and cutesy slogans (“Two of a kind!”). Small thank-yous from couples whose nuptials this person has attended, customized to reflect the day they shared together. It’s a nice thought. Right?

“The spoiler alert is that no, guests do not want them,” Jane Handel, a wedding planner in New York, confirmed to me over email. I reached out to her suspecting that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t find much use in, for example, a single piece of glassware emblazoned with someone else’s wedding date. (She encourages people to choose something consumable.) Now that I’m planning my own wedding, and inundated with ideas for what to provide to my guests, I’m stuck on the question of why couples seem to think their guests will want a commemorative tchotchke from their wedding taking up space in cabinets and drawers for years to come.

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12,167 hours of washing our bodies.

That’s how much life you use, if you spend 20 minutes per day washing and moisturizing your skin and hair (and you live to be 100, as we all surely will).

That adds up to nearly two entire years of washing every waking hour.

Not to mention water usage and the cost of cosmetic products—which we need, because commercials tell us to remove the oil from our skin with soap, and then to moisturize with lotion. Other commercials tell us to remove the oils from our hair, and then moisturize with conditioner.