Lifestyle
In Season 3, ‘Industry’ got pulpier, nastier, and better
Ken Leung as Eric.
Simon Ridgway/HBO
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Simon Ridgway/HBO
This piece contains spoilers for Industry Season 3.
Even by the standards of an inherently stressful show like HBO’s Industry, Sunday night’s Season 3 finale was an absolutely diabolical doozy, the kind of conclusion that makes you sit up in your seat and yell at the screen, “Holy ****!!!”
Scrappy and utterly ruthless trader Harper (Myha’la) managed to claw her way into a partnership with a mega-powerful and equally unscrupulous financier while scratching everyone in her path. Try as she might’ve to avoid it, socialite Yasmin (Marisa Abela) stepped fully into her fate by getting engaged to the man-child tech billionaire Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington, aka Jon Snow), breaking Robert’s heart in the process. And time was finally up for managing director Eric (Ken Leung), as he was told by Pierpoint & Co.’s CFO that “there’s no business need” for him now that the company’s been bought by Egyptian investment firm Al-Mi’raj.
Robert (Harry Lawtey) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela).
Simon Ridgway/HBO
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Simon Ridgway/HBO
From the beginning, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s Industry has explored familiar – though no less enticing – prestige-TV themes around survival in a cutthroat workplace and ever-compromised morals among the filthy rich and those aspiring to be filthy rich. It’s often somewhat lazily compared to Succession, and has sometimes courted or at least acknowledged the comparison. (Eric to Rishi in Season 2: “Any particular reason you’re dressed as Kendall Roy?”)
But Industry is in its own lane, pulpier and seedier than the classical overtures of the Roy family, and Season 3 really leaned into the muck for the better. In the sixth episode, frenemies Harper and Yas engaged in a scathing war of words which climaxed in a ferocious exchange of slaps; it was a long time coming, and the daggers they hurled at one another were top-notch, Dynasty-esque, worthy of a primetime Shonda Rhimes melodrama.
And in the finale, Rishi (Sagar Radia), the uncouth Alpha-male trader who’s emerged from the show’s periphery, suffered the bleakest of consequences, for an out-of-control gambling addiction: His estranged wife was murdered right in front of him by the loan shark he’s indebted to.
In fact, death loomed over this season in several ways. The most protracted and melodramatic among them was the ripped-from-the-headlines plot concerning Yas’s repulsive dad Charles, whose character appears to be drawn from the bios of both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s media magnate father Robert Maxwell. The series cultivated an air of suspicion surrounding Charles’s disappearance from the party yacht, doling out the details of what occurred in piecemeal flashbacks over the course of several episodes.
Yas was on the yacht with him that day, despite claiming to want “nothing to do with him” at the end of Season 2 once she learned about his pattern of inappropriate affairs with younger women. (Including her childhood nanny, a teen at the time.) Maybe, as she very guiltily “joked” to Robert at one point, she killed him; or maybe, like the British tabloids suggested, she’d helped him hide out to avoid dealing with the consequences of his embezzlement. In the end, Yas didn’t push Charles overboard that yacht, but she did watch him drown without trying to save him. That’s dark.
This is the kind of sweeps-week storyline (remember those?) that could elicit groans for seeming cheaply manipulative, but Industry is a show where everyone and everything is connected and no relationship, no matter how unhinged, is superfluous. Harper’s presence aboard the yacht and her knowledge of what went down adds color to their rocky history as former adversaries at Pierpoint and on-and-off again friends; it’s meaningful that one of the show’s most unabashedly opportunistic characters cared enough to keep Yas’ secret.
Which is why it’s poetic (and disappointing) that Yas ultimately wound up getting engaged to a version of her father – Henry, like Charles, was accused of sleeping with his employees. The continuous comforts of material luxury and guaranteed financial security proved too alluring to relinquish. One of Industry’s most engrossing recurring subjects is generational divides – and their limits. The show is an early depiction of Gen Z in the corporate space, and characters’ actions show that for all the relatively progressive ideals of youth, the influence of elders (and capitalism) is strong.
Myha’la as Harper.
Simon Ridgway/HBO
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Simon Ridgway/HBO
Meanwhile, Eric spent much of this season lecturing the younger cohort in his orbit – former mentee Harper, Yas, and even millennial Rishi – about “ethics” and the very dangerous risks they were taking in the business. Yet this is the same guy who intimidatingly carries a baseball bat around the sales floor, does coke with his direct reports (he hooked up with Yas’ lawyer!), and on more than one occasion has exploited and sabotaged his colleagues to stay afloat at Pierpoint.
When he admonished Harper for treating everyone, including Yas, as collateral on her road to domination, it was refreshing to hear Harper make plain Industry’s M.O.: “Everything you do on the floor communicates an ideology that people are a means to an end! I enact your philosophy and you have the nerve to come into my office and call me a bad person?”
They’re both right, of course. And that’s the beauty of Industry, which has been mercifully renewed for a fourth season. It’s a show less concerned with characters who are easily “likable” or “despicable.” What matters is they are individuals with clear ambitions and unique strategies for getting what they aim for – and this makes them endlessly watchable.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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