George Lowe, voice actor of the cult favorite Adult Swim series Space Ghost Coast To Coast, has died, a representative confirmed to The A.V. Club. Friends reported Lowe had been suffering from illness for some time before his death on Sunday. He was 67 years old.
“George Lowe’s family has been grief stricken and unable to respond regarding his passing, on March 02, 2025, until now,” the actor’s family shared in a statement to The A.V. Club on Wednesday. “George Lowe had elective heart surgery and as he recovered, was met with many challenges. Over the past few months, his family and friends have been by his side in support and care for him. The family will honor his wishes and his exceptional life with a private celebratory service.”
Lowe was a voice actor best known for his role as the titular Space Ghost on the Cartoon Network (and later, Adult Swim) series. The talk show spoof revived the ’60s-era Hanna-Barbera superhero to conduct interviews with live-action guests, including the likes of David Byrne, Michael Stipe, Jim Carrey, Tyra Banks, Sarah Jessica Parker, and many more. The influential cult comedy ran for more than 10 years and spawned various spin-offs, including The Brak Show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Perfect Hair Forever, and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Lowe reprised the role of Space Ghost on many of those programs, further lending his voice for projects like Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters and Robot Chicken.
Space Ghost writer and voice actor mc chris shared on Twitter/X in 2023 that Lowe had been suffering from health issues including an aortic dissection that required intubation twice. On Tuesday, Florida radio DJ Marvin Boone posted a tribute on Facebook, writing, “I’m beyond devastated. My Zobanian brother and best friend for over 40 years, George Lowe, has passed away after a long illness. A part of me had also died. He was a supremely talented Artist and Voice actor. A true warm hearted Genius. Funniest man on Earth too. I’ve stolen jokes from him for decades. He stole some of mine. He was also the voice of Space Ghost and so much more. Pweeloto.”
This story has been updated to include a statement from George Lowe’s family.
A leading French university is inviting American scientists who fear their research on subjects like climate might be censored by Donald Trump’s administration to do their work in France.
“The program is called ‘safe place for science,’ and will provide 15 million Euros in funding for some 15 researchers over a 3-year period,” Clara Bufi, a spokesperson for Aix Marseille University, told me in an email. “It targets, but is not limited to, climate and environment, health, and human and social sciences.”
A press release from Aix Marseille University today said that the program is for American scientists who “may feel threatened or hindered in their research,” and is “dedicated to welcoming scientists wishing to pursue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom.”
In an interview with AFP, University management said that the invitation is in the “DNA of Marseille” values, and that it has previously invited researchers from Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Palestine as part of a program that supports researchers and artists forced into exile.
Aix Marseille University’s press release doesn’t mention Trump by name but is obviously referring to his administration’s unprecedented dismantling of the federal government and specifically its withdrawing of support for any research that even mentions “climate.”
The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in particular have already frozen federal grants and loans for the National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundations, and fired thousands of workers across the federal government, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, critical for weather forecasting for natural disasters. The language of many of his executive orders is also so broad, researchers at public universities and other research institutions worry they’ll lose funding for their work if they even mention climate, gender, race, or equity, terms that the Trump administration has been trying to wipe off any federal site and program.
Generously, Aix Marseille University is offering a kind of lifeboat to scientists that will not only help them earn a living, but also continue to do presumably important research on some of the greatest environmental, technological, and medical challenges facing humanity. More cynically, another developed nation is perhaps seeing an opportunity to benefit from an imminent braindrain in the United States because of the rise of an anti-science authoritarian regime.
Either way, the offer is a dire sign of the situation in the United States. Historically, scientists and artists defected to America and other democracies from places like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, not from America.
The long-running text-based zombie MMO Urban Dead is shutting down on March 14, 2025, after nearly 20 years. The reason: compliance concerns with the UK's Online Safety Act. Games Radar+ reports: "The Online Safety Act comes into force later this month, applying to all social and gaming websites where users interact, and especially those without strong age restrictions," [writes Kevan Davis, the solo British developer behind the game]. "With the possibility of heavy corporate-sized fines even for solo web projects like this one, I've reluctantly concluded that it doesn't look feasible for Urban Dead to be able to continue operating."
"So a full 19 years, 8 months and 11 days after its quarantine began, Urban Dead will be shut down," Davis writes. "No grand finale. No final catastrophe. No helicopter evac. Make your peace or your final stand in whichever part of Malton you called home, and the game will be switched off at noon UTC on 14 March." The original website is still online if you want to play the game before its shutdown later this month.
David Johansen, one of history’s most consequential New York rockers, died yesterday, and his absence will be felt throughout the Five Boroughs for some time to come. Few could verbalize what Johansen brought to popular music better than New York City spokesperson Martin Scorsese, and he’s been generous enough to share a few words about his fallen friend. Scorsese, who used Johansen’s music and visage in his tribute to New York rockers of the 1970s, Vinyl, and directed a documentary on Johansen, recalled, “the energy was New York, 100% pure and uncut, right off the streets.” Scorsese would know. As the New York Dolls burst onto the scene, Scorsese put the Dolls’ atmosphere on-screen with Mean Streets. Additionally, Scorsese highlights the impressive understanding of music history, inspiring all of Johansen’s output, from the New York Dolls through Buster Poindexter to his own collaboration with Johansen, Personality Crisis: One Night Only. Here’s the statement in full:
“With David Johansen, it started with the music, of course. Actually, with a New York Dolls song, “Personality Crisis.” I heard that song, I can’t remember when or where, and it stayed with me. I listened to it obsessively. The sound was rough, the playing was raw, the voice was wildly theatrical and immediate. And the energy was New York, 100% pure and uncut, right off the streets. After the Dolls broke up, I kept watching and listening to David. He never stopped growing as a songwriter and a singer, always exploring, always staking out new paths. There was the Buster Poindexter alter ego. And the radio show ‘Mansion of Fun,’ which amazed me and which I listened to obsessively. That was when I understood just how wide and deep David’s knowledge of music history was—all of music history, from Debussy to the Cadillacs to Loretta Lynn to the Incredible String Band to Gregorian chants to David’s beloved Maria Callas, all of it mysteriously connected. And then there were the cabaret performances at the Carlyle, which David Tedeschi and I were lucky enough to capture with our film Personality Crisis: One Night Only. As the years went by and David became increasingly fragile, he would always be there for screenings and gatherings, with his beloved Mara and Leah by his side. He would sit quietly, preserve his energy, but he was always fully there, right up to the end. What a remarkable artist. What an amazing man. I was so lucky to have known him. I just wish there had been more time.”
Johansen died shortly after his family made his illness public, revealing that the singer had been suffering from stage four cancer for most of the past decade. The family also launched Sweet Relief, a non-profit organization to help professional musicians needing medical or financial assistance.
Apple users noticed a change in 2023, "when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot," noted the film blog Screen Slate:
At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer. The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there's no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change...
For PC users, this story takes a different, and happier, turn. With the use of Snipping Tool — a utility exclusive to Microsoft Windows, users are free to screen grab content from all streaming platforms. This seems like a pointed oversight, a choice on the part of streamers to exclude Mac users (though they make up a tiny fraction of the market) because of their assumed cultural class.
"I'm not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is," tech blogger John Gruber wrote this weekend, "but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware..."
These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can't capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don't think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by "protecting" their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can't screenshot it; if it's not, you can.
On the Mac, it used to be the case that DRM video was blacked-out from screen capture in Safari, but not in Chrome (or the dozens of various Chromium-derived browsers). But at some point a few years back, you stopped being able to capture screenshots from DRM videos in Chrome, tooâ — âby default. But in Chrome's Settings page, under System, if you disable "Use graphics acceleration when available" and relaunch Chrome, boom, you can screenshot everything in a Chrome window, including DRM video...
What I don't understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platformsâ — âthere is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a timeâ — âand even if they tried, they'd be capturing only the images, not the sound. And it's not like this "feature" in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content.
Gruber's conclusion? "This 'feature' accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they're watching."
David Johansen has died. Although best known and celebrated for his work as lead singer of formative American punk band New York Dolls, Johansen was an unabashed artistic chameleon, who also achieved mainstream chart success under his Buster Poindexter pseudonym, and worked frequently as an actor. (Including a memorable turn as the cab-driving Ghost Of Christmas Past in 1988 Christmas Carol riff Scrooged.) Per Deadline, his death this week was confirmed by his daughter, Leah Hennessy, and comes just a few weeks after Johansen revealed that he was suffering from Stage 4 cancer. Johansen was 75.
Born in New York City in 1950, Johansen joined New York Dolls not long into its existence, after guitarist Johnny Thunders decided he no longer wanted to be the band’s frontman. After achieving some early success while playing in the U.K. in the early ’70s (and auditioning new drummers after their founding one, Billy Murcia, died following an overdose while partying in the country), the band was signed to Mercury Records, where they’d ultimately release two albums, New York Dolls and 1974’s Too Much Too Soon. Although financially unsuccessful, both albums achieved cult success, propelled in part by Johansen’s distinctive, raw vocals. Mercury dropped the band in 1975, leading to its dissolution, but Johansen would continue to perform with its surviving members—especially guitarist Sylvain Sylvain—for the rest of his life, including a New York Dolls reunion that ran for several years in the 2000s.
In the aftermath of the band breaking up, Johansen embarked on a wide-ranging solo career, which steadily evolved—across four studio albums, released between 1978 to 1984—from the punk sound of the Dolls to something more mainstream and up-tempo. That trend reached an apotheosis in 1987, with the release of the jump blues-inspired, swing-ish Buster Poindexter, the most commercially successful album of Johansen’s long career. In some ways, the Poindexter character—who favored tuxedos, gelled-up pompadours, and sipping martinis—was no more invented than the previous glam-esque sexuality that had defined Johansen’s Dolls era; even so, Johansen admitted that he adopted the name in part to defy expectations fans of his earlier work would bring to his latest interests. In a 2015 interview with Brooklyn Vegan, Johansen noted that, “The Poindexter thing, though, there’s so many songs that I hear that I wanna sing, and there’s really no place for me to sing them unless I’m making a special kind of show where this is a show where I’m gonna sing whatever I wanna sing, so people don’t come expecting to hear preconceived ideas about what I’m gonna do.”
Although the Poindexter songs were undeniably more kitschy than Johansen’s earlier work—especially his massively successful cover of Arrow’s “Hot Hot Hot,” which he later called “the bane of my existence” after it achieved cultural ubiquity—they’re united by the strength of Johansen’s voice, which remained as powerful belting out old standards like “Hit The Road, Jack” as it did bemoaning teenage heartache on “Personality Crisis.” Johansen would ultimately release four albums under the Buster Poindexter persona, before returning to his own name—and a more traditional folk and blues sound—with 2000’s David Johansen And The Harry Smiths. In 2004, he reunited with Sylvain (and, briefly, bassist Arthur Kane, who died of leukemia shortly after) as New York Dolls for the first time in 30 years. The reunited band would ultimately stick together for nearly a decade, releasing three albums, including the critically celebrated bluesy rock offering One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This. In a 2011 interview with The A.V. Club, Johansen was unpretentious about the band’s resurgent success: “When we started back up again, we were just going to do play some shows. There was no grand scheme to gear up and make a record and hit the road and all of this kind of stuff. It kind of took off, as opposed to us trying to achieve some prescribed outcome. Essentially, we weren’t trying to achieve anything, which wound up being a lot more pleasant. It was more like, ‘We’re a good band. Let’s play. Let’s see what happens.’”
Outside music, Johansen also worked as a painter, a radio host, and, most notably, as an actor, where he capitalized on his distinctive appearance and thick, gravelly voice. Scrooged remains his most memorable part, playing a nigh-malevolent take on the Ghost Of Christmas Past, but he also (like many underground music superstars) had a guest stint on Nickelodeon’s The Adventures Of Pete And Pete, and appeared in a three-episode turn on HBO’s Oz. In 2020, Johansen teamed up with Martin Scorsese for a documentary about his life: The resulting film, Personality Crisis: One Night Only, explored Johansen’s various personas, as well as showing off his gifts as a storyteller.
In early 2024, Johansen revealed that he was suffering from Stage 4 cancer, launching a fundraising effort through musician aid organization Sweet Relief. The campaign was updated on Saturday morning with a notice announcing his passing: “David Johansen passed away peacefully at home, holding the hands of his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers… David and his family were deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support they’ve experienced recently as the result of having gone public with their challenges. He knew he was ecstatically loved.”
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