
Mike Peters, Frontman of the Alarm, Is Dead at 66
His death was confirmed in social media posts by his wife, Jules Jones Peters, who did not say where or when he died or specify the cause.
Mr. Peters was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1995 and twice with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, in 2005 and again in 2015. Both are forms of blood cancer. Last year, on the eve of a 50-date U.S. tour, he discovered that he had Richter's syndrome, a more aggressive form of lymphoma.
Starting in the 2000s, Mr. Peters took on a second career as a prominent spokesman in the fight against cancer. He helped found the Love Hope Strength Foundation, which has staged concerts in dramatic locations like Mount Everest and Mount Fuji to raise funds for cancer research and treatment. The Alarm in 1982, from left: Nigel Twist, Mr. Peters, Eddie Macdonald and Dave Sharp. Emerging from Britain's punk underground of the late 1970s, the group was known for its electric-shock hairstyles as well as its righteous fury. Credit... Erica Echenberg/Redferns, via Getty Images
Emerging from Britain's punk underground of the late 1970s, the Alarm, known for their righteous fury and electric-shock hairstyles, fused the high-octane energy of punk with a distinctive twin-acoustic-guitar attack while firing off musical fusillades like 'Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke?,' 'Spirit of '76' and 'The Stand.'
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Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Eileen Fulton, ‘As the World Turns' soap star, dies at 91
Actor Eileen Fulton, known for her long-running role as Lisa Grimaldi on the CBS soap opera 'As the World Turns,' has died at 91. Fulton died July 14 in Asheville, N.C., after a period of declining health, according to an obituary posted by Groce Funeral Home in North Carolina. She would become one of the longest-serving soap opera actors, playing Lisa with only a few interruptions from 1960 until the show's end in 2010. Fulton played the character as a villain, telling The Times in 1990 that Lisa was initially 'a conniving, screaming witch' who 'lied and wanted everything her way,' a characterization that led fans to scorn her. Throughout the course of the show, Lisa was married eight times. But over time, Lisa evolved and 'matured and learned from her mistakes.' Fulton said she began to receive 'love letters' from fans who admired the character's spunk. Fulton was inducted into the Soap Opera Hall of Fame in 1998 and received a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. Fulton was born Margaret Elizabeth McLarty on Sept. 13, 1933 in Asheville. The daughter of a Methodist minister and a public school teacher, she graduated from Greensboro College in 1956 with a bachelor's degree in music and performed in an outdoor drama in North Carolina before moving to New York to pursue a career in acting, according to her obituary. She later adopted the stage name Eileen Fulton, and in 1960, she was cast in the drama 'Girl of the Night.' In addition to her soap opera career, Fulton had a cabaret act for years in New York and Los Angeles. She retired in 2019 and moved to Black Mountain, N.C. She is survived by her brother, Charles Furman McLarty, a niece and other family members.


Vox
15 hours ago
- Vox
Superman is a socialist
In a recent interview with The Times, Superman director James Gunn said that his new blockbuster tells the story of 'an immigrant.' He also explained it was a story about 'basic human kindness.' But that first comment — about Superman's foreign origins — is the one that set off some pundits on the right. Fox News commentator Jesse Watters joked on air: 'You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.' Ben Shapiro blasted Gunn and the Hollywood left for being out of touch with everyday American audiences: 'The reality [is] that Hollywood is so far to the left that they cannot take a core piece of Americana and just say it's about America.' But, Grant Morrison — author of the seminal comic book series All-Star Superman — said the conservative backlash ignores the leftist origins of the world's most famous superhero. Not only was Superman created by the sons of Jewish immigrants, but those very first comics portrayed their character as a 'socialist figure.' Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer, plus the most compelling stories of the day. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In one comic published in 1939, Superman is seen shielding young thieves from police because he figured the kids were victims of poverty, then tearing down slums and forcing authorities to build low-rent housing. Before becoming the 'Man of Steel,' Superman was 'The Champion of the Oppressed.' Gunn has said that All-Star Superman was a big influence on his new film. Morrison sat down with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram to talk about where Superman came from, how the character has evolved, and why he will endure. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. How did you get into Superman? What did this character mean to you? I grew up on the west coast of Scotland next to an American naval and nuclear base. My parents were anti-nuclear activists. My father was a World War II soldier who became a peacenik. So, my big fear in the world was the atom bomb, and I associated it with the Americans, but the Americans also brought the comics. Then I discovered Superman. And although I knew no real Superman was coming to save me from an actual atom bomb, metaphorically he really solved a lot of problems for my head when I was a little kid. Those are the primal roots for me, and they're quite deep. So yeah, getting a chance to do that character, sitting here overlooking that same stretch of water where we did the protests…To write All-Star Superman kind of defies the forces of entropy. If anything survives in my career, it will be that one book. Who was the Superman that you created in that series? We went for an older Superman. The basic idea was: What if Superman was dying and he had a year to live? Basically, it's a part of Lex Luthor's scheme to send Superman to the sun, and the solar radiation overcharges Superman's cells, so they begin to decay and die. Basically, Superman's dying of cancer. What would this man do in the last 12 months of his life to leave the Earth a better place than he found it? Were you surprised to find out that James Gunn wanted to relaunch this character and relaunch an entire cinematic universe with your story about a dying Superman? James didn't necessarily take the dying part. His is a younger Superman. But I think he certainly took the character as we decided to define it, and he saw something that he could work with. Instead of Superman having flaws, let's present a fictional character who doesn't have flaws. You know, he has problems of his own. He still can't get the girl. He still works for a boss in an office, but he's Superman. He's a kind of everyman whose life happens at a much higher scale. He's got an unruly dog, but his unruly dog can laser his own dinner and cook a steak. His unruly dog can fly through buildings, but he's still dealing with an unruly dog. In previous attempts people have asked: What would Superman be like if he was in the real world? Which to me is an absurd question. The only existence Superman has in the real world is as a comic book or movie character, and that's where he is most useful and most functional, as far as I'm concerned. He's a metaphor. He is an allegory. He stands for everything that is good in us. It sounds like there have been at least some iterations of this character throughout his near-century of existence — from your dying version to this ideal version, to this all-powerful version. But I believe Superman even started as a bit of a tough guy, a headbasher, and maybe even a left-wing revolutionary. Can you tell us about the non-Kryptonian origins of this character, and how he came to be on Earth? Well, he arrived in Cleveland, Ohio. He was created by two teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who'd met at school. Jerry was the writer and Joe was the artist. They wanted to work for newspapers. Newspaper syndication was the place to go for cartoons back then. They were working on this notion called 'The Superman.' The original version was an evil bald guy who eventually became Lex Luthor in the Superman story. But after a few tries, they hit on this fabulous notion of: Let's give him a wrestling costume with a cape so that we can track his movement across the panels, and make him very colorful so that he's memorable. The greatest addition to the design was to put his monogram on his chest so that the character's entire identity was summed up in this very simple advertising motif that people can remember and people can also wear and partake in being Superman. It was created by two young kids who were the sons of immigrants — European immigrants, Jewish boys — and this was their vision. Superman was a do-gooder. He was here to help people. He'd come from a distant world, but thought the only use for power and strength was to help the downtrodden and the oppressed. Early issues of Action Comics depict a Superman who's very much an outlaw. He goes after corrupt union bosses. He goes after mine owners. He goes after politicians who are corrupt. Superman later was seen as a messianic figure of hope, which I don't really like, because I think he's a fighter, he's a scrapper. He gets into fights on behalf of the little guy. He gets bloodied up and he gets up again. You shoot him [with] a tank shell, and he gets up again. Through the years, that changed quite radically. The socialist figure of the early years hit 1942 and suddenly it was war, and Superman became incredibly patriotic, and that's where the 'Truth, justice, and the American way' thing first appears. Then, in the 1950s, Superman changes again completely. You're dealing with guys coming home from the war, domestication, and living in suburbia. So Superman becomes a family drama, but on a titanic scale. He has friends from the future who visit and cause trouble. He has a cousin who survived the destruction of Krypton, he has a dog, and he has a monkey. So Superman then, to me, was probably at his peak, but he was representative of post-war masculinity trying to adjust to a world of relatives and not being married. Those stories were obsessed with the relationship with Lois [Lane]. In the 1960s, he becomes a cosmic seeker. He almost goes back to his roots, and we have stories where he is fighting for Native American land rights, he's up against polluters, and very much back to the activist Superman. And so it goes. In the 1980s, he's a yuppie. In the 1990s, they kill him in order to make it interesting, then bring it back as a soap opera set around the fictional newspaper, the Daily Planet. And into the 2000s, you get the work that I did. It's funny to hear you lay out this history in which Superman at one point is something of a socialist warrior, because all of these pundits who are mad about James Gunn saying that Superman's an immigrant, if they really knew the history here, there's so much more they could be mad about. Absolutely. As you say, if anyone had bothered to look at the history of Superman, they'd see that he was always an immigrant created by immigrants. He represented that experience, but he was assimilated. I mean, he was an American. He'd been raised by American parents. So that was very important as well. And I think the combination of these two qualities is what maybe drives people mad, because they want it to be either one thing or another, but Superman's trying to embody everyone. It's funny, a thing that we talk about the first half of the show is that depending on how tuned into the news you are, you can see a lot of what's going on in the world today in this movie. But of course, this movie wasn't made this week. It was made a year ago. Yeah. The meetings about this movie probably started five years ago. Do you think there's something about the nature of Superman that makes him timeless? I definitely believe that. I mean, we are talking about the history of Superman, which goes back to 1938. Superman has outlived his creators. He's also outlived the people who took over from his creators, and the next generation of the people who took over from his creators.


Los Angeles Times
a day ago
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How the TikTok algorithm created new words like ‘unalive'
Adam Aleksic has somehow managed to make linguistics cool. His rapid-fire videos have attracted an audience of millions across the social media universe. In them, the Etymology Nerd explores linguistics topics like the semiotics of dating websites, the social science of emoji usage and how we are naming our children after influencers. A Harvard graduate with a linguistics degree, he has now published a book called 'Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,' which explores in depth some of his more fanciful and fascinating theories. We chatted with Aleksic about edutainment, brainrot and President Trump as influencer in chief. (Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to whose fees support independent bookstores.) Did you get into linguistics because you wanted to explore online language? I don't think you can actually hope to fully be caught up with online language itself, as it's mutating by the minute. The book is more of a road map of the general patterns we're seeing. I personally got interested in etymology in ninth grade. I didn't know I would be going into internet linguistics. How do algorithms shape and change language on the web? You can't avoid talking about algorithms if you're talking about modern language change. I'm looking at my own videos thinking, 'Wow, I can't say this specific word because of the algorithm. I have to say it another way.' I use the example of the word 'unalive' as a replacement for 'kill.' That developed in English-language mental health spaces to circumvent platform community guidelines that were enforced by an algorithm used by Chinese government, which was then retooled for TikTok. Suddenly, 'unalive' was all over the internet. Algorithms are creating new words. In the book, you talk about context collapse, the notion that effective videos are designed to appear as if they are addressed directly to the user, even though they are, in fact, bringing in disparate users to a single focal point. When you're looking at a video on your For You page, you really think it's for you. But it never is. As a creator, I never think about individual people. I think about what's going to go viral, but also, what do I want to make? I make the video first for myself, then I make it for the algorithm. Never do I consider the actual people that end up seeing the video. Your phone is an extension of yourself. You perceive a message coming from your algorithmic version of yourself. The algorithm doesn't actually align who my intended audience might be with who the actual audience is. It just sends my video to whatever makes the most money. What about brainrot — the notion that the internet is damaging young people's ability to think and reason. Does this apply to online language? I think there's no such thing as 'brainrot' with words. They've done neurological studies. No word is worse for your brain than other words. Now, the other stuff, culturally, is another conversation. It probably is bad that these platforms are monopolizing our attention to sell us things. So I can say, linguistically, we're fine. Do you think the internet makes us smarter? It's an interesting question. What is 'smarter'? I know that's a hard thing to define. I think like with any tool, it can be true. Every tool has good and bad, right? You talk about rage-baiting and hyperbole, or hype, as a tool to gain virality online. Our president is quite proficient at this tactic. I think Trump's language uniquely lends itself to virality. He has these phrasal templates, like 'Make X Y Again,' or 'This has been the greatest X in the history of Y.' People use his sentence structures as these skeletons, which they can remix. He coined 'sad' as an interjection, which I regularly see my friends using. I don't know how much of it is intentional. Maybe he just stumbled into it. But the fact of the matter is, I think we have Trump in office because he is uniquely suited to the internet. Chris Vognar chats with Michael M. Grynbaum about his book 'Empire of the Elite,' a history of Condé Nast during its '90s heyday. Hamilton Cain calls 'The Aviator and the Showman,' Laurie Gwen Shapiro's joint biography of Amelia Earhart and her husband, 'a vibrant account of the courtship and union of the famous pilot and her publisher husband whose intrusive management of his wife's career may have cost her life.' According to Ilana Massad, Kashana Cauley's novel 'The Payback,' a satire about student loans, of all things, is a 'terrifically fun book that made me laugh out loud at least once every chapter.' Valorie Castellanos Clark thinks fan fiction writer turned novelist Brigette Knightley's debut novel 'The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy' is 'proof positive that writing fan fiction is an excellent training ground for building a novel.' Today we are chatting with Carlos Chavez, a bookseller at Hennessey + Ingalls, a sprawling space in downtown L.A. that specializes in books about art, architecture, graphic design and all things visual. What's selling right now? Because we are a speciality bookstore, sales are really across the board. Everyday it can be something different. Someone came in yesterday and bought a bunch of books featuring art from the painter and sculptor Claes Odenberg, for example. We also sell a lot of books on industrial design, and fashion designers have been buying books about shoes. The other day a prop designer came in and purchased books with red covers. It's a mixed bag. Art books can be very expensive. Why do you think there is still a market for them, despite the plenitude of images online? There are still plenty of book lovers who want to hold a book, and they want to see it before they buy it. For many of our customers, books are a great source of artistic inspiration of the kind you just can't find online. This is the kind of store where customers are free to linger for hours if they want to. There has been a lot of social unrest downtown this year. How is the store coping? Business has been up and down. Some days are better than others. I think people were scared to come out, but yesterday was a good day, for example.