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I have been obsessed with dinner parties since I was eight or nine. At this age my greatest desire was to get my mum to let me stay up for the ones she threw for her friends. Once I even succeeded. It was amazing. and yes; it involved a hostess trolley. As an adult I have therefore made it a priority in my life to throw a lot of dinner parties.

The problem with dinner parties, from the point of view of a hostess, is that so much is always going on and once and you can only be in one place at a time. The starter needs plating, you have to check on the main in the oven, one of the guests is being left out of the conversation, another is getting a little too het-up about politics, another still needs a top-up of wine, and you really want to hear what those two over there are saying about your other friend who’s not here, and also where did you leave *your” glass of wine… It’s a problem.

I have also now written a book called The Dinner Party: A Book About Love . It contains a longish poem about a dinner party, also called “The Dinner Party.” As might be expected, this poem describes the sort of dinner party I also throw a lot of.

The problem with dinner parties, from the point of view of a writer, is also that so much is always going on. So many characters, so many dynamics, so many conversations and actions, and they after all going on at the same time. How to catch that spirit, and still keep it comprehensible? And what is it, exactly, that you are trying to catch?

I am being facetious, but I stand by my point: if we look to the Symposium for an orderly or convincing abstract account of what we commonly mean by love then, we will not get it.

When I asked myself this question, the first place I looked for an answer was to probably the most famous piece of writing about a dinner party in western literary history: Plato’s Symposium . Relevantly, this is a literary dinner party that is themed around love. Also relevantly, it is extremely gay.

Accounts of Plato’s symposium have typically focused more on the philosophy of love part than the dinner party part, as if what matters is the content of the various speeches, and not their context. This is even true of George Steiner’s famous essay “Two Suppers,” which so usefully locates the form as being not a dialogue but a genre Steiner calls the “banquet.”

I think this approach is a misapprehension. For one thing most (all?) of the characters have terrible opinions.

One (Aristophanes) maintains (with however amusing a frame) that we are all searching for our one soul-mate. Like, okay twin flames, simmer down. Another (Pausanius) essentially says “Ugh, people who have sex with women are stupid, the only attractive people are approximately-13-year-old boys.” Whilst we can feel sympathy for Pausanius’ historical position as a middle-aged man who was scorned by his contemporaries for still being in the gay relationship he got into as a teenager (and, presumably, therefore for still taking it up the arse) this is not a serious claim. As for Socrates, the wisest, the hero… his speech is the most thrilling, granted, but his final position is that the true goal of love is not having sex or even making a life with the person you adore but (of course) getting really into philosophy instead.

I am being facetious, but I stand by my point: if we look to the Symposium for an orderly or convincing abstract account of what we commonly mean by love then, we will not get it. No, the value of the speeches, if not in intention then certainly in practice, is not to explain love in the abstract, but to offer a convenient means of diagramming the tangle of social relations of attraction and hostility and competition that make up the dinner party.

Each character gets up in turn, casts shade on some people, flirts with others, establishes who they are and how they relate. They tell us their personal metaphysics, granted, but those metaphysics are interesting because they are theirs , not because they are right .

In a normal dinner party everyone would be doing this too (we are all always going around announcing our metaphysics) but simultaneously, in a confusing welter. Plato uses the device of “speech competition” to make the characters themselves insist on talking turns to speak, thus making the party comprehensible without destroying the appearance of naturalism.

What this social diagramming builds to, appropriately, is not a final convincing conclusion to the love discussion, after which everyone can go home possessed of the clarity of philosophical understanding, but instead the interruption of the party by an evil twink with an agenda:

A moment later they heard Alcibiades shouting in the courtyard, very drunk and very loud. He wanted to know where Agathon was, he demanded to see Agathon at once. Actually, he was half-carried into the house by the flute-girl and by some other companions of his, but, at the door, he managed to stand by himself, crowned with a beautiful wreath of violets and ivy and ribbons in his hair.

“Good evening, gentlemen. I’m plastered,” he announced. “May I join your party?

If you know the history of Athens, and the general esteem in which Alcibiades was held, you will know this is a bit like it would be if vengeful drunk twink version of Maréchal Petain suddenly showed up at a dinner with Swann and Odette. It is a true chaos move. But it only works because the dinner party has, up until this point, been constructed in such an orderly fashion, because the social matrix into which Alcibiades is crashing is so clearly established. So it is with all good dinner parties in real life too. They should start in clarity and order, and end in mess.

This is not just any dinner party, it is legendary.

In fact, I would go further still, and argue that the true climax is not even what Alcibiades says, as such, but its aftermath, the way he sets the cat among the pigeons:

Alcibiades’ frankness provoked a lot of laughter, especially since it was obvious that he was still in love with Socrates, who immediately said to him: “You’re perfectly sober after all, Alcibiades. Otherwise you could never have concealed your motive so gracefully: how casually you let it drop, almost like an afterthought, at the very end of your speech! As if the real point of all this has not been simply to make trouble between Agathon and me! You think that I should be in love with you and no one else, while you, and no one else, should be in love with Agathon—well, we were not deceived; we’ve seen through your little satyr play. Agathon, my friend, don’t let him get away with it: let no one come between us!”

Agathon said to Socrates: “I’m beginning to think you’re right; isn’t it proof of that that he literally came between us here on the couch? Why would he do this if he weren’t set on separating us? But he won’t get away with it; I’m coming right over to lie down next to you.”

“Wonderful,” Socrates said. “Come here, on my other side.”

“My god!” cried Alcibiades. “How I suffer in his hands! He kicks me when I’m down; he never lets me go…. It’s the same old story: when Socrates is around, nobody else can get close to a good-looking man…”

This arrangement of bodies, is, I submit, not an abstract but a concrete account of what love is like, and what it is about, which is bodies, particular bodies, and their positioning. It is hilarious and solid and real and vivid and gorgeous. Socrates claims that what we want, what we love, truly, is the move away from particulars and towards the general, the ideal, the good. But that is not where the Symposium goes. On the contrary, it is in the detail of human physical relation that it ends, and it is this, I submit, that we keep reading it for.

I am not suggesting that Plato sat down and wrote the Symposium with an intent to refute Socrates’ views on love, and I don’t want to be a deconstructionist either, to “read the text against itself”. All I am saying is: there is a tension. The form Plato writes in, perhaps invents, of the dinner party with speeches, Steiner’s ‘banquet’ form, pulls against the intellectual content its characters express. Philosophy may be spoken about at a dinner party, but that the content of whatever is said in this line is necessarily belied by the actual fact that the characters, by necessity, are not depicted engaging in the pursuit of wisdom. On the contrary, they are in pursuit of joy.

At the same time, we must concede there is something a little transcendent about the Symposium . Within the diegesis, the story is recounted long after it happened, by people who were children when it occurred. This is not just any dinner party, it is legendary. And then, the artificiality of the Symposium ’s structure, the completeness with which each character lays out their metaphysic, the finality with which the bodies move into place, and above all the unruffledness of Socrates himself, his own capacity to resist exhaustion, all combine to give this party, for all its messiness, a feeling of perfection. Indeed, if I were to imagine perfection, it would not come in any abstracted vision of the good, of truth such as other Platonic dialogues often reach towards, but in the specific form of staying up later than everyone else, intoxicated not only by wine but talk, refusing to quit:

He woke up just as dawn was about to break; the roosters were crowing already. He saw that the others had either left or were asleep on their couches and that only Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates were still awake, drinking out of a large cup which they were passing around from left to right. Socrates was talking to them.

He seems like he could go on for ever.

Steiner, in that essay about banquets which I keep mentioning, pairs Socrates with Jesus, the Symposium with the Last Supper. My own trajectory is a little different. I turn instead to a more immanent figure: John Wilmot, the wicked Earl of Rochester, and his poem ‘Timon’.

If the Symposium is a depiction of a good dinner party, so that our feeling afterwards is “God I wish I had been there, I wish I was always,” then Rochester’s ‘Timon’ is a very bad dinner party. We think “I do not want to go there, and in fact get me out.” But we do want to hear about it, as long as it’s from a safe distance.

In fact, more than just an individual bad dinner party, ‘Timon’ is a representative of a whole tradition of bad literary dinner parties: it draws on Boileau’s Satire III, which in turn draws on Horace’s Satire II.VIII. However where Horace, and to a lesser extent Boileau, focus primarily in how bad the food is, Rochester turns the focus firmly to the social elements.

Compare, for instance, the moment in Boileau when it turns out the other promised guests are not going to be there:

À peine etois-je entré, que, ravi de me voir,

Mon homme, en m’embrassant, m’est venu recevoir ;

Et, montrant à mes yeux une allégresse entière,

« Nous n’avons, m’a-t-il dit, ni Lambert ni Molière ;

Mais, puisque je vous vois, je me tiens trop content.

Vous êtes un brave homme ; entrez, on vous attend. »

À ces mots, mais trop tard, reconnoissant ma faute.

[As soon as I arrived, ravished to see me,

Mine host, embracing me, came to receive me;

And, performing for my gaze complete delight

“We have,” he told me, “neither Lambert nor Molière;

But, now I see you, I’m excessively happy.

You’re a brave fellow; come in, we’re all awaiting you.”

At these words, but too late, I recognize my mistake.]

with the same moment in Rochester

But this was not the Worst; when we came home,

He ask’d, “Are Sidley, Buckhurst, Savile come?”

No; but there are above, Halfwit, and Huff,

Kickum, and Dingboy. “Oh! ’tis well enough;

They’re all brave Fellows, cryes mine Host, let’s dine:

I long to have my belly full of Wine.

They will both Write and Fight, I dare assure you;

They’re men tam Marte quam Mercurio .”

I saw my error; but ’twas now too late:

What we gain in Rochester’s version is his unforgiving ear for the stupid and (self-)deceitful things people say. The host’s pretentious Latin tag, his rhyming cliche, his feigned “oh!” of surprise, all these are so vividly social, so animated with disgust. They put before us, not just a plot development, but an interaction, with all its absurd specificity.

What this ear of his allows, along with his cruelty in using it, is a drastic condensation of the Platonic method for depicting a dinner party.

In comes my Lady strait; She had been fair,

Fit to give Love, and to prevent Despair;

But Age, Beauty’s incurable Disease,

Had left her more desire than pow’r to please:

As Cocks will strike, altho their Spurs be gon;

She, with her old blear eyes, to smite begun:

Tho nothing else, she in despight of Time

Preserv’d the affectation of her prime.

How ever you began, she brought in Love;

And hardly from that Subject would remove:

We chanc’d to speak of the French King’s success;

My Lady wonder’d much how Heav’n could bless

A man that lov’d two Women at one time;

But more, how he to them excus’d the crime.

She askd Huff if Love’s flame he never felt:

He answer’d bluntly, “Do you think I’m gelt?”

She, at his plainness, smil’d; then turn’d to me:

“Love, in young minds, precedes ev’n Poetry;

You to that Passion can no Stranger be:

But Wits are given to Inconstancy…”

Here are at least two character’s speeches on love (three if you count the narrator) given in 20 lines. Rochester’s degree of contempt for these people speaks in the concision itself. Huff gets only a single line, but, Rochester implies, that’s enough: that’s really all there is to him.

Another way to say this is that, in place of the extensive self-announcements Plato allows his characters, Rochester substitutes his own summary judgements, his sarcastic imitations. What he gains is a greater degree of naturalism: he is able to outline the dynamics, to cut through the noise and confusion, without resorting to having the characters stand up one by one and make speeches because he places us so firmly inside the point of view of one (extremely sarcastic) speaker. What he loses is a certain objectivity.

There is an irony here: in Plato’s more schematic, abstract arrangement, in which each character explains their ideas at length, what we end up getting is not a philosophical argument but a deeply convincing and moving spreading-out of the intricacies of the social involvement of a group of people with each other. In Rochester, by contrast, amidst a naturalistic welter of satirical details and overlapping conversations, what we get is something much more like an argument about human nature. He is making a point at us, providing evidence, and the point is, as he would later develop it, that:

Were I (who to my cost already am

One of those strange prodigious Creatures, Man)

A Spirit free to choose for my own share,

What case of flesh and blood I’d please to wear,

I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear.

Or any thing but that vain Animal

Who boasts so much of being Rational.

In this passage from ‘A Satire Upon Reason and Mankind’ we see in miniature what is perhaps the key development in all of Rochester’s work – a turn from contempt for others to self-contempt.

Although he seems at first view frivolous, it is possible to view Rochester as a sacramental figure, one who underwent an ordeal. If I were making a strong case, I might say I do not know of any other writer who hated themself like Rochester learned to hate himself. He hated himself, not in the modern “woe is me” sense, or in the religious “compared to god we are all sinners” sense either, but analytically and specifically: having looked at his life and the things he did he judged himself to be a bad person who had done bad things and did not forgive himself for it:

I’ve Outswill’d Bacchus, sworn of my own make

Oaths wou’d Fright Furyes and make Pluto quake:

I’ve swiv’d° more Whores, more ways then Sodoms Walls

E’re knew, or th’ Colledge of Romes Cardinals….

Frighted at my own Mischiefs I have fled,

And bravely left my Life’s Defender dead:

Broke Houses to break Chastity, and dy’d

That Floor with Murther which my Lust deny’d;

Pox on’t, why do I speak of these poor Things?

I’ve Blasphem’d my God, and libell’d Kings.

‘Timon’, I am fairly sure, is from before all this. It opens with Rochester’s interlocutor asking “What, Timon, does old Age, begin t’approach?” but this implies that he is, or should be, still young. And contextually it is clearly from a time from when Rochester was still full of his own brilliance, still industriously doing his bad deeds, a time in which his capacity for contempt was still primarily directed outwards. But it is nevertheless a depiction of a person suffering, of a pursuit of joy gone horribly wrong and, as his friend’s observation tells, us, all this being a man is costing him something.

When I came to my own ‘Dinner Party’, I had in mind these two models of particularity: the model of the schematic diagram of a social set, and the model of the person undergoing the ordeal of other people. What is at stake in the choice, or balance, between these is the sense of time passing.

The Symposium , for all its specificity, has a feeling of timelessness about it. These characters, these arrangements, are not changing. Everyone announces themselves but no-one becomes different. To attend this dinner party would be to never die. In Timon, by contrast, everything is a rush, everything is broke-off and confused, everything is hurtling through suffering towards oblivion. Both of these, notably, are feelings I have often had at many dinner parties.

What I tried to do was to have my cake and eat it, to put a narrator like Timon in a narrative structure like that of the Symposium . By containing both these impulses, the one towards persistence, the other towards destruction, I hoped to find a way to write about how the bonds between people can keep surviving and overcoming the forces that pull us apart: to resist both Socrates’ idealism and Rochester’s cynicism.

My previous book, The Call-Out , was, in however comic a register, about destructiveness, about the ways marginalised communities can tear themselves apart. It ends, however, with a character asserting that her community had survived the events of the book, and that they’re “all still here, still ready to love.” She is certainly not right, exactly, but it was this sense of love, of love as whatever impulse brings people together in a time and place, that I wanted to write about in more detail. It is an understanding of love which definitely includes as one of its forms the very desire to throw dinner parties:

The ’Rona being now at last abated

(Or so I thought, in fact the plague was not

Quite gone, but biding time) I went and got

It in my head that by this point I’d waited

For long enough, and that I should invite

Some friends, acquaintances, and even one

Or two newfound unknowns who seemed like fun

To come around my house one Friday night,

Where I would open for them fancy wine

(That they would drink but not appreciate)

And see what kind of food I could create,

And generally, in short, we all would dine

Together, as we had in days gone by…

This essay has been, as you may have noticed, gently ghosting George Steiner’s essay ‘Two Suppers’ . My epigraph is the assertion Steiner makes at the start of his essay: that “the sharing of food and drink… reaches into the inmost of the socio-cultural condition.” This is not, I think an assertion Steiner makes good on. Instead his conclusion reaches for “the problem of the final sources of the poetic-philosophic.” Steiner’s method of reading his suppers is to make them bigger, seeing them as historic, emblematic, symbolic, eventually allegorical.

But I think the joy of the Symposium is not that it tells us some abstract idea about love but that tells us a lot of very real things about what it was like to get trashed and flirt with a bunch of gay guys in classical Athens. I think the joy of ‘Timon’ is that it shows us how a Restoration London dinner party could actually get so bad it made you want to destroy yourself completely. In much the same way, if I am writing about transsexuals having dinner and kissing and holding it together in New York in 2021, it is because that is what I care about, and that is what I want to try to find some way to hold on to.

The epigraph to my “book about love” is from the Symposium , from Socrates’ account of his conversation with Diotima:

“In a word then, love is wanting to possess the good forever.”

“That’s very true,” I said.

“This, then is the object of love,” she said.

“Now, how do lovers pursue it?”

Love is wanting to possess the good forever. Fine, I buy it. It’s an impossible aim, but that is how it is. But the real question is not what love is, nor what its sources are. The real question is: how is it pursued?

__________________________________

The Dinner Party by Cat Fitzpatrick is available from Seven Stories Press.

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As of a few days ago, Anthropic deployed its Claude Fable 5 AI model after the US temporarily restricted access. Now it has already been used to port the 2003 video game Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour to iOS. It seemingly needed the source code, previous ports, and some human tweaking to get running.

This is according to the lead of product and design at Google AI Studio, Ammaar Reshi, who announced the port on X on July 4. Reshi says this specific port "had a chain of giants to stand on" because it used previous port efforts and modernisations. It is a direct fork of The Super Hackers' Linux and macOS build of the game .

I used Fable 5 to port Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour to the iPhone and iPad!This is the actual 2003 engine compiled for ARM64 natively, no emulator.Campaign, skirmish, Generals Challenge all work with touch controls built for an RTS.Open sourcing it all below! pic.twitter.com/Vi9SbKyVPI July 4, 2026

What is unique about this specific port is that it gets the game running on iOS specifically, and even comes with unique touch controls like tap to select, drag to create boxes, and long press to deselect. Even though it uses plenty of work by other teams, it seems like an impressive effort in itself.

If you're looking to play the game for yourself on iPhone or iPad, you can do so with the GitHub page now. You will need your own copy of the game, though. Notably, it runs in the real engine and runs natively on Apple devices, so it's not a glorified emulator.

Reshi talks about the porting process on GitHub. He argues that this is a human + AI collaboration, and not simply someone pointing an AI model at something and saying 'go'. He says the code and debugging were done by Claude, but the playtesting was human. Reshi described problems like 'the minimap is black' and 'I hear chirping,' and the model would fix them. Reshi says, "Neither half ships this alone: one of us can't write C++, and the other can't hear the chirping."

So how replicable is this for other games? As of right now, we don't know. Reshi seems sceptical of being able to port Red Alert 2 , as EA appears to have lost the source code for that game, so that's already a pretty big hurdle to jump over. Even if companies manage to find their source code, many won't willingly give it up to vibe coders to create ports, especially if that makes it less likely that gamers will buy future remasters or remakes.

And that's before mentioning that AI models can scrape any information fed to them, and some game developers may not want to give that information away for free.

Reshi also claims to have fully exhausted a Claude Max sub in just 2 days , which means this project seems to have cost somewhere between $100 and $200 in tokens alone. And it seems like Fable 5 is the only model Reshi thinks can do the work. He reportedly tried it with Opus 4.8 and, even using Ultra Code, it couldn't do the task. Perhaps tellingly, they made no mention of whether it had even been attempted on Google's own AI vibe coding platform.

So if you have a few hundred burning a hole in your pocket, the source code for a game, and previous porting efforts to look at, it might only take a weekend to get the game running on your iPad. Simple, ey?

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Damd built two new body kits for the tiny Suzuki XBee crossover.

Little D. package gives the XBee a boxy Land Rover Defender face.

Bemore takes the other route with a round, retro Alto Lapin look.

The Suzuki XBee has always tried to be two things at once, rugged and cute, and mostly gotten away with it. Now Japanese tuner Damd has pulled those two impulses apart and handed each one its own styling kit. The Little.D package borrows the upright, squared-off attitude of the Land Rover Defender, while the Bemore package heads in the opposite direction toward soft retro charm.

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The XBee Little.D follows the example of similar kits for other Japanese models including the Jimny and the Every, all borrowing from the iconic British off-roader.

More: This Kei Car Looks Like A Baby Mitsubishi Pajero From The ’80s Now

The highlight is the boxier grille and hood with Little.D lettering, combined with black garnish for the LED headlights. The rugged treatment also includes a redesigned front bumper with a heavier dose of plastic cladding, side decals, and darker trim for the taillights and the tailgate. The pictured model is fitted with an optional roof carrier and rides on beadlock-style alloy wheels wrapped in grippy tires.

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Suzuki XBee Little.D by Damd

The XBee Bemore takes a different route, drawing on the round lines of the Suzuki Alto Lapin kei car . It gets a bespoke bumper with a larger intake, three slits replacing the grille, and a pronounced body-colored chin. Damd also added vintage side decals with a checkered pattern and matching quarter window decals.

Those looking for the ultimate vintage flair can also opt for the wood-infused roof basket and the chrome wheels. As for the interior, the tuner is offering special covers for the front and rear seats that look like brown leather with checkered inserts.

The Suzuki XBee might look like a kei car, but it is actually larger, measuring 3,760 mm (148 in) long. Under the skin lies the Heartect platform, which also underpins the Swift hatchback and the Ignis crossover, among other Suzuki models.

Suzuki XBee Bemore by Damd

Damd doesn’t offer any performance upgrades for the standard mild-hybrid 1.2-liter engine which is good for 81 hp (60 kW / 82 PS) and 109 Nm (80 lb-ft) of torque. Depending on the trim, power is transmitted to either the front (2WD) or all four wheels (4WD) via a CVT gearbox.

More: This $880 Kit Turns Suzuki’s Boxy Kei Car Into A Retro Off-Roader

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Sales of the Damd kits for the Suzuki XBee will start on July 10. The company does not accept reservations and will only ship the packages to body shops or dealers in Japan .

As for pricing, the Little.D retails for ¥299,200 ($1,850) not including installation. The Bemore kit costs ¥154,000 ($950) for the face swap and ¥65,780 ($400) for the decal set. Finally, the seat covers cost ¥66,550 ($410). Buyers who want the full treatment will need to pay extra for the alloy wheels, the grippy tires and the roof rack.

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The standard Suzuki XBee

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For thirty years, the hardest part of a sophisticated cyberattack was the human labor behind it. Finding the vulnerability. Writing the exploit. Chaining the access. Staying quiet long enough to matter.

That work required teams, time, and tradecraft. It’s the reason nation-state operations looked different from criminal ones, and why most organizations could plan around the gap between them.

That gap is closing.

We are entering what I think of as the Mythos era, in which machines can do in minutes what used to take skilled human operators months. Cybersecurity defenses are improving, but the layer where final decisions are made, the human one, is now the easiest to exploit.

The advantage that protected most organizations, most of the time, is going with it. Precision at scale is no longer a contradiction. It’s a feature.

The Human Stack: what it is and why it matters

Most of the conversation about this shift has focused on what these systems do to vulnerabilities. That conversation is accurate, but incomplete. The harder problem is what machine-speed attacks do to the systems those vulnerabilities ultimately route through: systems that depend on human decisions.

That’s a layer most security programs don’t explicitly own. I call it the Human Stack, the point where every system finally comes down to a person deciding whether a wire transfer goes through, whether an email is trusted, or whether a voice on a phone call is real. We have spent a generation hardening everything above it, and almost nothing on the layer itself.

For most of cybersecurity's history, that was a tolerable bet. Attackers had to choose between going wide and crude, or narrow and precise. The Human Stack held because precision didn’t scale, and scale didn’t achieve precision.

That tradeoff is gone.

What the next wave of attacks looks like

The next wave won’t arrive as malware . It’ll arrive as evidence. A voicemail that sounds exactly like the person it claims to be. A video call with a face you have known for ten years. An email thread that picks up a conversation you actually had, in the cadence you actually use, referencing a project that actually exists. The technical indicators will be clean, and the social indicators will be perfect. The only thing that will be wrong is the conclusion the human is being led to.

Last year, I spent time with the team behind Midnight in the War Room, a documentary premiering August 5 at Black Hat USA. It brings together over 50 experts, from global CISOs and military strategists to reformed hackers and victims of cyber conflict. The conversations were about something that has been happening for a long time and is about to be accelerated: the industrialization of social engineering, and the steady weaponization of the behavioral attack surface.

That surface doesn't stop at your perimeter. It extends through every vendor, managed service provider, and cloud services administrator your business depends on. Your operations going offline may have nothing to do with your own people, and everything to do with someone three vendors deep making a decision under synthetic pressure.

What this means for enterprises

For businesses, this isn’t theoretical. Financial risk is direct. We're already seeing fraudulent wire transfers, manipulated approval chains, and finance chiefs impersonated so convincingly that payments clear before anyone notices.

Operational disruption can come with no malware on your systems. The behavioral attack surface doesn't stop at your perimeter. It extends through every vendor, managed service provider, law firm, auditor, and cloud administrator your business depends on.

A compromised third party, manipulated through a perfectly constructed social engineering campaign, can take your operations offline without leaving a fingerprint anywhere near your network. Most organizations scrutinize their own security posture far more rigorously than the human decision-making environments of the third parties they rely on, leaving that exposure largely unmanaged.

Regulators and insurers are starting to ask harder questions about that exposure, and most organizations don't yet have good answers.

The shift from prevention to resilience

There's a second shift that boards need to start preparing for, and it's bigger than any single control or technology. We're leaving the era in which security success is measured by attacks prevented. We're entering one in which the realistic measure is how quickly an organization recovers when belief fails.

Prevention still matters, and the investments organizations have made in it have been the right ones. But in a world where attacks will sometimes succeed because they're indistinguishable from legitimate activity, prevention alone is no longer a coherent strategy. Resilience is.

What resilience means at the human layer is different from what it means at the technical one. Technical resilience is about systems that fail gracefully and recover quickly. Human resilience is about decision-making environments that can absorb a successful deception, recognize it, and contain it before it compounds. Most organizations have invested in the first. Very few have invested in the second. That's the gap the next decade will judge us on.

What leaders should do

The security stack remains necessary, but this era exposes that even the best systems hand their hardest decisions to humans, and we haven't invested in that layer with the same rigor. Here’s where to start:

Measure recovery, not just prevention

When belief fails, how fast can your organization catch it, contain it, and get back up? That has to be designed into your operating model now, not figured out after an incident.

Design for decision-making under deception

Training people to spot phishing isn't sufficient when the phishing email is indistinguishable from a real one. Build institutional processes that don't rely on a single person making the right call under pressure.

Treat people as operational infrastructure.

Human judgment is a critical system. It needs redundancy and failure protocols, just like any other.

Extend your security culture to your vendor ecosystem

The behavioral attack surface runs through your entire supply chain. Your third-party risk program needs to account for the human layer, not just the technical one.

The window is closing

Midnight in the War Room will make this visible in a way an op-ed cannot.

The Mythos era did not create this problem. It revealed it. The cost of exploiting human decision-making precisely was high enough to keep most attackers out. That barrier is collapsing now.

What comes next will not announce itself. It’ll arrive looking like someone you trust, asking for something that feels completely reasonable, right up until the moment it isn't.

The question is no longer whether your systems can withstand attack. It's whether your people are prepared to make decisions in a world where the evidence itself can no longer be trusted, and whether your organization is built to recover when those decisions go wrong.

We've reviewed and ranked the best cloud antivirus .

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives , our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

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Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The resulting map reveals how galaxies have evolved since the universe's infancy around 13 billion years ago and how they fall together in a vast structure called the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is the largest known structure in existence, home to countless galaxy clusters and clusters of clusters. It is the framework of the universe, a scaffolding of gas filaments, stars, voids and sheets of dark matter that trace the entire large-scale organization of the cosmos.

In a paper published May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal , an international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), utilized a treasure trove of JWST data to reveal how the universe has evolved.

How to sculpt a universe from scratch

The new research shows how intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence the formation and death of stars — and, therefore, galaxies and galactic clusters — throughout vast swathes of cosmic time.

Yet in what may seem like a wistful twist, the peak era of star formation is many billions of years behind us . The new research offers additional evidence of how the universe's structural framework facilitated this transition.

"We show how the cosmic web helped shape galaxy growth before, during, and after that peak era," study co-author and UCR astronomer Hossein Hatamnia told Live Science via email. "At earlier times, dense regions appear to be sites of rapid galaxy growth, while at later times dense environments are associated with the shutdown of star formation."

Such revelations come courtesy of COSMOS-Web , the grandest JWST survey yet: a 255-hour program spanning a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full moons .

Compared with the previous COSMOS2020 survey, shared in 2021 and conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and other facilities, the JWST-derived COSMOS-Web boasts better redshift precision and includes more galaxies — including fainter, lower-mass and more-distant objects. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance and time based on how light shifts to redder wavelengths as it crosses the universe.)

Compared with the JWST-derived image below, which shows a slice of the cosmos as it appeared 11.5 billion years ago, previous cosmic maps were sparser, more diffuse, and lacking in cosmic structures.

Data from the new COSMOS-Web survey (left) compared to the previous iteration (right). JWST's sensitivity and depth has allowed scientists to map the cosmic web in unprecedented detail. (Image credit: Hatamnia et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 2026) Additionally, the older COSMOS2020 survey tended to overestimate the depth in especially dense cosmic regions, where galaxies grow earlier and larger, and underestimate the depth of the least-dense spatial regions, the researchers said.

Revealing celestial birth and death

Yet JWST's cosmic map preserves the relative contrast across cosmic regions. It also shows that "massive galaxies in dense environments are more likely to be quiescent" — dying and quenched of their star-forming potential.

This may be because those galaxies are too massive, the team theorized. Once the dark matter halos that anchor galaxies grow to 1 trillion solar masses, they energize gas and prevent it from forming new stars. Additionally, active supermassive black holes quench star formation by energizing gas with their lethal, near-light-speed jets .

Such "mass-related" star-killing mechanisms dominated up to around 7 billion years ago — around half the age of the universe, the team found.

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In the more recent universe, star formation is dominantly quenched by the environment around galaxies, which may strip them of material or prevent cold gas from accumulating and coalescing into stars.

Thanks to JWST's capabilities, the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe have been made clearer than ever, resolving blurry blobs into dim, ancient galaxies.

"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," co-author Bahram Mobasher , a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, concluded in a statement .

The catalog of 164,000 galaxies used to build the map of the cosmic web is publicly available.

This article was first published May 18, 2026.

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House of the Dragon season 3, episode 3 entirely revolves around the newly ascended Queen Rhaenyra attempting to rule the Seven Kingdoms, though she's faced with a myriad of problems, from the big (the treasury is empty), to the small (the Red Keep is overrun with rats).

Across the runtime, we see the queen's grip on her composure slackening as the reality of ruling sets in – especially when, in one moment, she mistakes a servant for her son Jacaerys, who perished in the Battle of the Gullet .

While this is a standout episode of House of the Dragon season 3 , some fans think we should have seen something like it earlier in Game of Thrones season 8.

"Great episode. My biggest problem with the character arc of Daenerys in the final season of GoT was how abrupt and poorly paced it was, and I couldn't help thinking that an episode just like this one tonight (S3E3) is exactly what Daenerys needed," says one fan on Reddit . "The pans and flashes to rats roaming around unchecked, the music playing all through the episode with small sharp violin/piano notes, all awesome small details to convey sanity and good decision making eroding. If an episode focusing on all the things weighing on Daenerys' mind in the final season of GoT had aired, I think the conclusion to her arc would have felt much better executed"

One of the biggest criticisms of Game of Thrones season 8 is that Daenerys's Mad Queen arc was incredibly rushed, culminating in the Mother of Dragons burning down King's Landing for no real reason at all.

"Daenerys needs this and much, much more in that final season," agrees another person. "Her character felt so well and truly fucked over it broke my heart."

"Daenerys should have overthrown Cersei in the season 7 finale so that the entire season 8 could be dedicated to the White Walker conflict and her Mad Queen arc. Would've been so much better," says another person.

"Yes absolutely this is what she needed in Mereen," agrees another fan. "The whole point is that Rhaenyra is slowly descending into madness. We needed more of an arc for Dany to do that. People point to moments of 'madness' in earlier seasons but she didn’t do any worse than any other male ruler," says someone else.

Not everyone agrees, however. "I'm not sure why people think Rhaenyra is descending into madness. You can be stressed out without going mad," points out one person.

"I don't think the story should have ended with Daenerys losing her mind at all… it means the only female rulers of Westeros were 'mad queens,' which is an unfortunate implication," says another fan.

Emma D'Arcy, who plays Rhaenyra in the show, has previously teased that a downfall might be on the cards , explaining that they and showrunner Ryan Condal were interested in exploring "a movement towards tyranny," adding, "but in particular making that journey legible."

House of the Dragon continues weekly on HBO in the US and HBO Max, Sky, and NOW in the UK. Keep up to date with our House of the Dragon season 3 release schedule .

For even more, check out our House of the Dragon season 3 review or our guide to all the upcoming Game of Thrones movies and TV shows .