| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a cephalopodic companion to Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. No Leg (or Tentacle) Up to the Middle | Two years ago, Andy Mukherjee wrote a column — summed up here — about the dominant 200,000 Indian families (or about 1 million individuals) whose financial tentacles linked them to each other and produced a class of global citizens beloved by the booming wealth-management industry. That kind of abundance, Andy says in his latest column, has dire consequences for the rest of the country's population. First of all, he says, the octopi focus their ambitions and wealth overseas or on passive income, not the 800 million adults at the bottom of the economic pyramid who depend on government handouts. This enormous cohort is literally stuck on the farm — mostly women — or has migrated to cities for low-level work, which remains limited by caste. Says Andy: "Like their fathers before them, a majority of male workers remain trapped in low-productivity, low-income occupations, such as guards, chauffeurs, gardeners, and handymen." They have few stepping stones into the middle-class, which numbers a little over 100 million adults. In contrast, the equivalent income group in China is more than 600 million. Says Andy: "Folks at the top of the ladder don't see the teeming masses as a meaningful market, except for utilities, soap, short videos, and personal loans. Meanwhile, those at the bottom of the pyramid lack the education and skills to manufacture things for the wealthy at home and overseas." "The social change that can fill the gap is nowhere on the horizon," says Andy. It's a dispiriting prospect for the world's most populous nation. "The social change that can fill the gap is nowhere on the horizon." The announcement came by night and had all the feeling of a coup d'etat. On Wednesday evening, BP Plc, the British oil giant, dismissed its chief executive officer immediately and announced the appointment of Meg O'Neill as his successor, starting in April. She was immediately hailed as the first woman to head a Big Oil company, a category that includes only five others: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies and Eni. Women aren't novelties at giant, if less "Big," oil concerns. Vicki Hollub has been CEO of Occidental Petroleum since 2016. Magda Chambriard took over as president of the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras in 2024. But O'Neill — a veteran of Exxon who's been running Australia's Woodside Energy since 2021 — is inheriting a mess at BP. "Over the last five years," Javier Blas points out, "it has named three CEOs and produced four major strategy shifts." He adds, "Bringing in some of Exxon's methods is good. The US company is known for running operations like clockwork; BP is known for, well, doing the opposite." Apropos of the British company's ethos, Javier asks, "Why BP didn't hire her two years ago, when it had the chance, and wasted so much time in between"? Anyway, she's got the job now. Congratulations? "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by the small French studio Sandfall Interactive, was developed on a shoestring budget of just $10 million. Last week at the Game Awards in Los Angeles, accepting the closest thing the industry has to a Best Picture Oscar, director Guillaume Broche singled out Hironobu Sakaguchi, the Japanese creator of Final Fantasy, who inspired him to become a game developer. The student may have surpassed the teacher. Sakaguchi's successors at Square Enix Holdings Co. are struggling. Clair Obscur easily outsold 2023's Final Fantasy XVI, the latest installment in the long-running series, in just a few months." — Gearoid Reidy in "Legendary Gamemaker Seems Trapped in a Final Fantasy."  "Rolling Covid-19 lockdowns in China transformed the way people think about their health. As a result, many are starting to run, hike, or play tennis, influencing the way they live and dress. The country is in the midst of a wellness boom, offering a rare bright spot in an otherwise struggling retail sector — and lessons for luxury players trying to reconnect with their most important market." — Juliana Liu in "China Is Now an Outdoors Nation." How not to prevent another Bondi Beach tragedy. — David Fickling AI's getting good at politics, and that's a danger. — Parmy Olson Make America great again by copying the People's Republic. — Minxin Pei Trump replaces strategic clarity with obfuscation. — Hal Brands Europe hasn't yet recovered from the China shock. — Lionel Laurent And guess who else is suffering China shock: China! — Juliana Liu The Bank of England can't deal with the ugly truth. — Marcus Ashworth Walk of the Town: Marshalling History | I've been fascinated by the work of Kerry James Marshall since I first saw one of his canvases in 2016. The setting was austere but with a pedigree: an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's brief takeover of the Marcel Breuer building, a Brutalist monolith on Madison Avenue that was once home to the Whitney Museum. The severity was in contrast to Marshall's art. His paintings engage you instantly with vivid, polychromatic splendor before sweeping you into untamed histories. It's fitting that Marshall is enjoying a majestic showcase in London's Royal Academy of Arts. Its mashup of neoclassical arches, Georgian aesthetics and contemporary minimalism is an apt mirror of his mastery of a centuries-long range of techniques and his allusions to Giotto, Holbein, Ingres, Picasso and other giants of art history.  At the Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Royal Academy, London Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg One cheeky early work — from 1980 — was executed in egg tempera, a medium used since the early Renaissance to enhance blondness and to provide a golden glow to white skin tones, as in Botticelli's Birth of Venus. What Marshall produced was A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, which made me laugh out loud when I read how it had been created.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) at the Royal Academy Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Blackness and visibility are central to Marshall's work — and you can write endless essays on the subject. I simply submitted to the sensuality of Marshall's often monumental compositions and let them pull me into his perspective on history. It's a complex experience — often disturbing and multivalent, even while ravishing to the eye. You come away with different, often conflicting conclusions — which is why the plural in the retrospective's title, The Histories, feels exactly right.  Marshall's School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) at the Royal Academy Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg There's also a historical wrong "degree of separation" that makes Marshall's show at the Royal Academy fascinating. For a while, Joshua Reynolds — the first president of the RA — was credited with what some scholars believed was a portrait of the 18th-century abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, a gorgeous painting now at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Devon. It turned out not to be a Reynolds, nor is it a depiction of Equiano, whose autobiography helped popularize the anti-slavery movement in Britain. In any case, Marshall sort of makes up for that at the RA: Equiano is a central figure in several paintings in The Histories. The show runs through Jan. 18, 2026, before heading to Switzerland in the spring and eventually Paris. Flattery might get you flattened.  "Have I pointed out that you're gorgeous when you're angry?" Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Notes: Please send soft answers to turn back wrath and other feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and find us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. | 
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