Tony Todd has died. A veteran actor with a deep, resonant voice that matched his towering frame, Todd racked up nearly 250 credits across a 40-year film and television career. But while he played superheroes, supervillains, Klingons, soldiers, jazz men, preachers, cops, killers, doctors, monsters, mobsters, generals, aliens, Transformers, and more, Todd will inevitably be remembered best for one role: His title turn in 1992 horror hit Candyman. (Referred to, in mock-hush tones, as "the motion picture" when Todd discussed his legendary career in interviews.) It was the film that catapulted Todd into the blood-streaked limelight, putting him on first-name basis with fellow horror icons like Kane Hodder and Robert Englund; it's the film that most widely showcased his twin gifts for charisma and menace. It was also just a portion of a career that stretched from the jungles of the Philippines for Oliver Stone, to the far reaches of space for his many turns in the Star Trek franchise, and to a hundred other points in between. Per Deadline, Todd's death on Wednesday was confirmed by his representatives this evening. He was 69.

Born in Washington D.C., Todd pursued acting from an early age, achieving a Masters degree in his craft and working as an acting teacher in the early days of his career. A stint in New York theater caught the eye of casting directors working for Oliver Stone, and Todd was offered his first film role in the mid-'80s: A small part in Platoon, which saw Todd travel across the planet to film in the Philippines with a cast of soon-to-be-massive stars. A starring role in Tom Savini's Night Of The Living Dead remake a few years later elevated his profile further, and he became a mainstay doing single-episode stints on TV—including the rare distinction of a guest star turn on Stephen Bochco's deeply bizarre Cop Rock. ("Failed to get the numbers," Todd reminisced with us in a 2010 interview about his career. "Failed to get the ratings. But boy, was it fun!") Notably, this period saw Todd pick up the first of what would eventually be several appearances in Star Trek; after auditioning again, and again for the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, he eventually landed the role of Kurn, the Klingon brother of Michael Dorn's Worf. Down the line, Todd would go on to appear in different roles in three of the Trek series, including in Deep Space Nine's "The Visitor," generally held up as one of the franchise's finest hours—not least of which because of Todd's performance as an aging, grief-afflicted Jake Sisko.

Back in 1992, though, we come to the dividing line of Todd's career; it's all pre-Candyman, or post-Candyman. Todd had to fight like hell to get the part, despite initially being unsure about what the film even was. ("I get a call from my agent saying 'This director wants to see you, wants to just meet you about this movie called Candyman.' I thought he was fucking joking. I mean, what is that? A Sammy Davis thing? What is that?") But director Bernard Rose was convinced that Todd was the man to play murdered vengeance-seeker Daniel Robitaille, a role that required an actor as seductive as he was terrifying, a figure of sympathy as much as outright horror. (Todd, acknowledging the influences: "I was heavy into the whole Dracula, Phantom Of The Opera thing.") The resulting film was only a modest hit at the box office, but it penetrated deep into the American psyche, driven on by its unique take on urban legends, the rarity of a Black icon in the horror field, and Todd's own on-screen power. (Also, the bees.)

From then on, Todd was "Candyman's Tony Todd," making the rounds of the horror convention circuit, appearing in dozens of small-budget horror films, and returning to the franchise three more times. (Most recently with Nia DaCosta's update of the franchise in 2021.) But he also refused to allow himself to be reduced to a caricature, continuing to offer up performances in need of his gravitas, warmth, and professionalism in everything from micro-budgeted horror movies to giant Michael Bay blockbusters. (It's not surprising Todd became a prolific voice actor in his later years; only that a man with a voice like that took so long to get into the field.) He picked up memorable parts on shows like The X-Files, had a regular stint on 24, and, in what was probably his most famous recurring role outside Candyman, appeared in most of the Final Destination movies as the only guy who usually didn't get knocked off by Death's various Rube Goldberg methods of murder.

As an actor with his stake planted firmly in the world of horror, we'd never argue that Tony Todd wasn't in a lot of movies of the B-grade or lower, low-budget offerings that probably spent more on, well, casting Tony Todd than they did on visuals or scripts. But we would argue that he rarely, if ever, gave a B-movie performance. Even in something like Tubi Original Hellblazers—one of his final screen credits—you can see a man taking his craft seriously, creating characters and imbuing them with dignity and power. You never got anything less, when you brought in Tony Todd.

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In the days following Donald Trump’s presidential victory, we have seen a larger-than-normal number of people canceling their subscriptions to 404 Media. Alongside these cancellations, many people have explained that they are canceling not because they do not like our articles but because they feel a general sense of depression, that nothing matters, or that they can no longer bear reading the news. 

There were many media outlets who wrote notes to their readers in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s shocking victory in 2016. Some of these notes said that their publications would position themselves as a resistance force against Trump, or made grand, sweeping pronouncements about what their work would be able to do. We cannot and will not make false promises to you about the power of journalism—especially at a small publication—to stop the country’s knowing march into authoritarianism. But we can explain our approach to the work and we can demonstrate to you why it matters. 

In 2016, the four of us were at Motherboard, doing work that is very similar to the work that we’re still doing today. We have covered technology through one Trump term and intend to continue covering technology through the second Trump term. What we found to be true during Trump’s first term, remained true during Joe Biden’s presidency, and will remain true as long as we do this: we cannot set the bar for our success at the systemic saving of democracy. Instead, we have found that our work can and does make incremental positive change at the local, state, and federal level, and that, over time, these small improvements become increasingly important. 

The way that we have always done this and the way we will continue to do this is by fearlessly reporting on the ways technology and the powerful people and companies who own these technologies wield it against normal people, but especially against society’s most vulnerable people. Over the years, we have been called anti-technology or too cynical. But we are not anti-technology. We want technology that benefits people, and in order to do that we also have to expose how it can invade people’s privacy, surveil them, steal their work, steal their bodily autonomy and harass them, destroy any sense of a shared reality, value robotic plagiarism over human creativity, and undermine workers. We will hold companies, people, and politicians who accelerate towards this future to account. But there is another side to this coin. We have, and will continue to champion and amplify people, groups, movements, and ideas that use technology to make our lives better, are fighting back against anti-human uses of technology, and serve to challenge, decentralize, or redistribute power from concentrated big tech companies to the masses.

We’ve called this perspective, which we hope shines through in most of our work, two things over the years: “Tech populism,” and “local reporting from the internet.” These are very similar but slightly different things. It is not—or should not be—a radical idea to report stories with the core assumption that technology should make life better for the people who use it and for society as a whole. And it should not be radical to believe that the immense amount of wealth and so-called progress being created from technological progress should be spread evenly and thoughtfully among its users, not tech CEOs and an oligarch class. That “progress” so far has instead brought us more intensive surveillance capitalism, the widespread theft of artists’ and writers’ work, the ransacking of natural resources, and the subjugation of workers in the United States and around the world. Our work is populist in that we recognize that many of the problems plaguing the United States today and which are factors that have laid the groundwork for Trump’s return—income inequality, a lack of affordable housing, unstable work, the widespread inability to tell what is real and what is fake—are being at least partially driven by technology and/or the immense wealth of the people who own tech companies.

“Local reporting from the internet,” meanwhile, means telling stories from the perspective of users and often lower-level tech employees, not by begging company communications professionals for access to executives or exclusive new features. Most of our articles tell the stories of hyperspecific communities of people who are using technology or are impacted by it in some way. By focusing on how technology impacts people, we have found that we can impact technology and make the world slightly better, regardless of who the president is.

This reporting strategy worked in Trump’s first term and it will be even more salient in a second term in which he has sought and created an even closer relationship with big tech CEOs. Trump has formed an alliance with Elon Musk and many of Silicon Valley’s worst people, the richest and most powerful of whom actively helped him get elected or immediately kissed the ring after he won the election–including Jeff Bezos, who demanded the newspaper he owns kill its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and then immediately congratulated Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” Trump and especially, Musk, have campaigned on the false idea that mass deregulation and corporatism will somehow help normal people rather than further immiserate them. 

All of this may sound vague or like empty platitudes. So, let’s make this concrete. 

In Trump’s first term we saw the widespread purging of government science and climate data. We also saw nonprofits, decentralized communities, and random people on the internet form collaborative efforts to successfully archive and share this data. We saw government workers risk their jobs and their freedom to leak critical information about purges happening within their agencies, and expect to see the same in Trump’s second term. We filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests with federal agencies—which may be hamstrung in Trump’s second term—but we also filed hundreds of public records requests with state and local agencies that uncovered the creation and spread of surveillance systems, revealed that Apple was ordering recyclers to shred perfectly good iPhones MacBooks into zillions of pieces and showed Utah was contracting with a company turning the state into a surveillance panopticon (the CEO of that company was later fired, lost contracts, and had to rebrand). Under Trump, we reported on the widespread sale of cell phone location data to data brokers and bounty hunters, which led companies to stop the practice and ultimately led to multi-hundred million dollar fines from the FCC. Under Trump, we saw tech companies monopolize repair but the beginnings of the right to repair movement, the end of “Warranty Void if Removed” stickers, and the first pieces of legislation that would ultimately become fair repair laws passed over the last few years. Under Trump, we saw the end of net neutrality but our reporting helped kill big telecom lobbying campaigns and accelerate the rise of independent locally owned government ISPs that are faster, more reliable, and cheaper than the likes of Comcast and Cox. Under Trump, we reported on the use of Predator drones to surveil Black Lives Matter protesters and, because of our reporting, we saw Senators fight back against this practice. Under Trump, we saw and reported on the rise of the first workers unions in the tech industry, broad protest against the gig economy and algorithmic bosses, and worker rebellions at Amazon, Google, Amazon, Facebook, video game companies, and other major tech companies.    

In the early days of Trump’s first term, we reported on the ways the average person (and even hackers) found their own ways to protest, how scientists reacted and fought back against the threat of a science-denier administration, and how Trump’s team approached transparency online–including the efforts of archivists to preserve digital history. 

We started reporting on the impending fallout of FOSTA/SESTA long before Trump signed it into law in 2018: Sex workers told us that instead of saving any sex trafficking victims as part of its stated purpose, it would put more people at risk of exploitation. We listened, we reported on those worries and fears, and when they came true, we kept reporting on it. When platforms and site sections shuttered out of fear of legal retaliation from the Trump administration’s war on porn, we talked to everyone from site operators, users, sex workers, and hosting providers to try to understand how they were affected. Through the years we have covered the ways bodily autonomy, educational institutions, and marginalized people are threatened by leaders that align with and promote extremist ideology. We have covered the ways that the data broker industry specifically allows for the targeting of women seeking abortions and sells data to the military about Muslims—and has led to both corporate and government action that have made doing this type of surveillance more difficult. 

At 404 Media, we’re continuing this work, as we’ve promised to do from the beginning. We’ve covered how the incoming vice president spurred hate in a small town. How AI boosters helped cheerlead Trump back into office. And how advertising, funded by tech billionaires, micro-targeted and lied to voters on the biggest social media platforms in the world, using divisive rhetoric. Not every story we do leads directly to positive impact, but many of them do. Our work has led to new moderation policies that make it more difficult to make nonconsensual AI porn (and child abuse imagery), a lawsuit against Nvidia for building AI models on the back of other peoples’ labor and creative work; fixes in the New York subway system to preserve privacy; Google kicking a company that claimed to be targeting adverts based on what people said near their smart devices from its platform (and Google booting a global surveillance tool from its ecosystem too); YouTube removing 1,000 videos that were involved in an elaborate Medicare scam; Amazon taking down dangerous AI-generated misinformation; and shutdown a tool that used for harassment that was scraping Discord en masse. We’ve reported on what surveillance technology U.S. government agencies have purchased, and will continue this work as the Trump administration carries out its explicit plans for mass deportations.

We’re faced again with an administration made up of people who explicitly want to ban porn, restrict women’s healthcare, demolish reproductive rights and make it harder still to access sexual education. We followed these stories in Trump’s first term, and in Biden’s, too—and we have no intention to slow down or stopping now that Trump’s headed back to the White House. When Trump won in 2016, we weren’t sure if our work mattered. Now we are sure that it does.

Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" greeting, has died at age 74 following a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC. "He worked at 3News for many years as graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades, yet it was a somewhat random opportunity in 1989 that earned him international fame." From the report: That year, Elwood received $200 from the then-unknown America Online, merely because his wife worked at a predecessor company. He was asked to simply record four voiceover lines: - "Welcome" - "You've Got Mail" - "Files done" - "Goodbye" Of course, the company better known as AOL blew up, and millions around the world would hear Elwood's voice telling them "You've Got Mail" every time they logged on to the internet. Despite his face not being visible, Elwood still achieved minor celebrity status. In 2015, he even appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" to utter the famous greeting as well as other audience-suggested phrases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'G/O Media’s management is once again punishing workers for its own bad decisions'

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As Never Look Away, this year’s documentary about camerawoman Margaret Moth, reminds us, it wasn’t long ago that the main barrier to the world at large understanding the human cost of geopolitical atrocities was how hard it was to actually see them. Now, of course, it’s never been easier to access damning footage, but it’s the understanding that’s not catching up. Social media is flooded with on-the-ground videos observing the death and destruction coming out of the occupied Palestinian territories, but they’re easier to ignore—to just scroll past—than a more cohesive and pointed piece of nonfiction. And yet, the main barrier for No Other Land, the harrowing first-person account documenting five years of home demolitions and forced displacement in Masafer Yatta, is once again how hard it is to see.

Co-directed by two Palestinians (Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal) and two Israelis (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor), No Other Land boils your blood for 95 minutes until you're not sure there's any left. It’s both a potent cry of resistance and desperate proof of existence. The film has played film festivals around the world, and has distribution plans for a theatrical run in Spain, the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. But not the U.S. Rather, No Other Land is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center for a one-week qualifying awards run, and then…? Maybe a company will pick it up, allow it to find its audience. Maybe it simply fades away.

Due to its subject, No Other Land finds itself ironically homeless. Its future is uncertain, but the reason it’s in this predicament is not a mystery. There have been plenty of great recent films covering ongoing global conflicts. One, 20 Days In Mariupol, won an Oscar in March. That film was made by AP journalists, struggling to survive a Russian siege that bombed a Ukrainian maternity hospital into rubble.

One must ask themselves what, then, is different about No Other Land’s crystal-clear condemnation of the war crimes unfolding before its cameras. Perhaps it’s that a snapshot of war, encapsulated in the hours or even days of battle, is easier to look at than decades of apartheid. Many would like to quietly pat No Other Land on the back and shove it into the shadows, some preferring to skip even that first step. This contradictory reception is best encapsulated by a now infamous moment of ass-covering surreality at the Berlin International Film Festival. After No Other Land won its Documentary Award, the German culture minister, Claudia Roth, was caught applauding the festival’s prizewinners during their speeches. She then said that, actually, she was only clapping for the Israeli directors. Right.

Before that surprisingly flexible and shameless display of political gymnastics (a 10 from the American judges!), Roth’s first reaction was correct. No Other Land is the political documentary of the year, riveting and infuriating as Adra and Abraham follow these villagers’ resistance to forced transfer. Adra, son of an activist, has been fighting for his home his whole life. Abraham, a journalist who lives half an hour away in Be’er Sheva, becomes close with Adra. Together, they rebuild homes and smoke, roast each other’s taste in music and fantasize about the future. Hope exists in their friendship, though it never overshadows the inequality. This is a place where the color of your license plate reflects your ability to move freely through the world, where you are either a “yellow man” or a “green man.” Adra and Abraham sweat over the same cinder blocks, but only one can leave them behind.

As they film, side-by-side, Masafer Yatta’s demolished homes, ruined elementary schools, chainsawed water lines, and cement-filled wells, all destroyed to make way for an Israeli military training ground, the directors’ professional relationship blooms into a bittersweet friendship. 

There’s still resentment. How could there not be, when one filmmaker drives back to the city every night, leaving those he spent the day with to return to their makeshift cave dwellings? Co-director Ballal, frustrated, even lets off steam about Abraham’s privileged position to his face. But slowly, solidarity builds from shared sweat spilled and threats weathered. Adra is beaten mercilessly by Israeli soldiers. His father is arrested without warning. An Israeli settler gets in Abraham’s face with his iPhone. “Here is a Jew who is helping them,” he says, filming. “You’re on Facebook, people will know you, and pay you a visit.”

And these are the lucky ones. Initially, it seems that the team’s handheld cameras might act as a preventative—a bit like how Barbara Kopple helped keep some striking coal miners alive in her groundbreaking 1973 doc Harlan County, USA. But, like in that film, the illusion of safety and the empty threat of accountability quickly vanishes. At least one casualty is caught on film, blown away by some soldiers attempting to steal a village’s generator. Another comes right at the end: In the final footage of No Other Land, captured in October 2023, an Israeli settler shoves Adra’s cousin, then shoots him point-blank in the stomach with a rifle.

The difference between No Other Land and the barrage of carnage shared every day online is that the film is bilingual, cross-cultural activism that is inextricable from its context but not reliant on it. It’s not a graphic image of a dead child, nor a dry history lesson. It is a Palestinian lifetime, a lifetime of repetition and rebuilding and struggle, condensed to an hour and a half. No Other Land does not need to give a crash course on the cruelties of the occupation. It’s plain to see, as bright and blunt as a bulldozer. The doc makes a conflict so often dismissed as “too complex” unavoidably simple.

But simplicity is still not enough. Things were simple in Never Look Away, the war journo doc, when it recalled a past we’ll never return to. A past when snippets of visceral footage were all it took to shape the opinions and emotions of nations. In our numbed present, the idea that a single piece of footage could enact change feels like a pipe dream. The violence hasn’t changed, but the bar for accountability has. No amount of evidence seems satisfactory to stop genocide, to stop war crimes. As No Other Land reaches the frayed tail end of its nervy account, its central pair discusses the outcome of their activism. “People need to figure out how to make change,” Abraham says. “Somebody watches something, they’re touched, and then?” 

Then…what, exactly? Abraham and Adra don’t have the answers—they can’t force those watching their footage to vote, to call, to protest, to pressure, to divest, to raise hell—but they can at least film what’s happening to them. But if people never get the chance to watch it? To be touched by it? And then?

No Other Land is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center.