George Lowe, a longtime voice actor who lent his talents to shows like “American Dad!” and “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” died Sunday, a representative confirmed. He was 67.
A cause of death was not shared.
Born in Florida in 1958, Lowe got his start at WWJB, a local radio station when he was just 15. Honing his swooping vocal style and ability to bring life to characters without ever being seen, Lowe appeared sporadically on the Cartoon Network and TBWS throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, according to Deadline, before landing his big break on “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” in 1994.
Starring as the Hanna-Barbera character Space Ghost, the host of a late-night comedy show parody, Lowe interviewed real-life celebrity guests like “The Nanny” lead Fran Drescher and “Taking Heads” frontman David Byrne. The program ran from 1994 to 1999 and was revived in 2001 for another three years by Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s programming block aimed at an older audience, and GameTap, TBS’ online video game service, from 2006 to 2008.
Lowe’s voice also appeared in “Robot Chicken” and “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” both popular Adult Swim programs in their own right. He also voiced Cyrus Mooney on “American Dad!”
In a post to Facebook, longtime friend and Florida-based radio DJ “Marvelous Marvin” Boone mourned Lowe’s loss.
“I’m beyond devastated. My Zobanian brother and best friend for over 40 years, George Lowe, has passed away after a long illness,” Boone wrote. “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.”
Artist, artistic director and architect Alexandre de Betak first started travelling to Mallorca in his 20s, irresistibly drawn to the island’s rugged shoreline and remote mountaintop villages. The unhurried existence of the locale provided a counterpoint to the frenetic pace of life as fashion’s consummate showman – which saw de Betak conjure catwalk spectacles, exhibitions and events, and design lighting and furniture for everyone from Raf Simons to John Galliano. Working collaboratively with designers to bring their vision to life on the runway, until recently de Betak would design, creative direct and live-produce fashion shows, choreographing the lights and music. When Simon Porte Jacquemus took over the Palace of Versailles – or a Provençal lavender field – to show his collection, it was de Betak who made it happen.
It was de Betak’s earliest client, the Spanish fashion designer Sybilla, who introduced him to the Balearics, and in 2008 he set about designing and building an otherworldly Flintstones-style property on the north-west coast. “I got hooked,” he says of the experience, which spurred de Betak and his wife, Sofia Sanchez de Betak, to embark on the next chapter of island life. After selling a majority stake in Bureau Betak, the company he founded in Paris in 1990 (to a group where he serves as creative chair), he has stepped back from live production and turned his attention to focus on interior architecture and design. His company, Takbe Studio, which has offices in Paris, draws on his conceptual, and highly creative, approach to spaces. Having produced more than 1,500 shows, it is something of a seismic shift in pace for de Betak; although if things started low-key, the company is growing. “I decided to quite drastically change from one life to another,” he says of his career pivot, which is driven, to some degree, by a desire to create something more permanent and environmentally aware, as well as a more harmonious life balance. “I’m very happy to be working on things that last longer than the few minutes of a fashion show.” Not your average interior designer, he says: “I love doing houses. But I work for others as though it’s for myself, I don’t compromise.” Not that it’s deterred the handful of high-end (anonymous) clients who have already hired him.
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Each of de Betak’s interiors projects – whether a 17th-century hôtel particulier in Paris or a stripped-back SoHo loft – has been radically different. His latest, a light-touch renovation of a four-bedroom mid-18th-century finca in the foothills of the Tramuntana mountains, where he occasionally spends time together with Sofia and their six-year-old daughter, Sakura, is no exception. (De Betak also has two sons, Amaël and Aidyn.) Though secluded – there is little around but ancient olive groves and grazing sheep – it’s accessible; Palma is 30km to the south. “We’d been looking for a project that’s something different for a while,” says the peripatetic designer. “I’m always dreaming of untouched places, but it’s so hard to find somewhere authentic.” Although Mallorca is brimming with old farmhouses, most have been unsympathetically modernised and overly polished, or are simply not for sale.
After a long search, Sofia spotted this rare gem – raw and unrefined with a timeworn limestone façade – while out driving. Once they had met the owner, an elderly woman whose father had spent time restoring the place during the 1930s and who had no family to pass it on to, it was theirs. Typical of these rural dwellings, it was originally built as much for animals and agriculture as for people, with the entire ground and top floors given over to grain storage. It had precisely the crumbling, uninhabited patina de Betak is drawn to. The walls were cracked, the plumbing and electricity minimal (water still comes from the well) but, he says, “we loved it as it was”.
De Betak’s goal, partly to circumnavigate the lengthy process of permissions, was to design a temporary fix for the interior to make it more workable. As he is a self-confessed “light freak”, sorting the electrics to better illuminate the interior was of primary concern. Rather than working in stages, he tends to picture a finished space almost instantaneously and in totality, from the furnishings he will source, pulled from his vast archive, to the design and build, right down to the curtains and the cutlery. His vision for the finca was enacted to the extreme: to dress almost the entire interior – walls, ceilings, windows, upholstery and detailing – in pure white antique “marriage” linen from the 19th and 20th century. “These old fincas are beautiful but I wanted to warm it up,” says de Betak, who collected hundreds of sheets (half from the local market, half from Marché Vernaison in Saint-Ouen), then worked on the elevations, carefully measuring the space before commissioning a local seamstress to stitch each sheet together piece by piece, like an enormous textile puzzle.
Guided both by necessity and playful aesthetics, the result is a series of rooms that are conceptual yet womb-like, calming and comfortable. “It’s like camping but not camping,” he says of the transitory, yet transportive, atmosphere. The linen skin that dresses the interior is hung in a makeshift manner, using dog clips and hooks. Its fabric drapes cleverly conceal a multitude of sins – and enabled de Betak to swiftly rework the plumbing and electrics without ever touching the surface of the walls.
Surprisingly chic, the textile treatment has been applied to all the bedrooms (Sakura’s room is cherry-blossom pink) as well as the sitting room. Here, the painted floors are layered with unusual milky-white Turkish carpets sourced from Istanbul. At the far end of the room is a row of Sarfatti chairs by Marcello Piacentini, each loaded with books on everyone from James Turrell to Madeleine Castaing and bound in white. Even the once black bungee cords on the René Herbst tubular metal Sandows dining chairs from 1928 have been customised with white elastic cords. “I design in a childlike way,” says de Betak. “I like places to be alive and fun and relaxed.” Buried beneath the linen are LED lights that softly illuminate the space by night, and along the entire length of the wall is a broad, pillowy, modular daybed that he custom-created. “It’s not just about preservation,” he says. “I like things to evolve.”
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
The entire living space is an idiosyncratic assortment of objects and furnishings; a turn-of-the-century Fortuny lamp, a brutalist glass table, a Frank West 1990s light, retro-futuristic Elipson speakers and the snaking form of a 1970s Boalum light from Artemide. Suspended above the dining room table is a pair of large, bell-shaped light shades, each covered in delicate dried leaves, sourced from the Paul Bert Serpette flea market in Paris. “It’s a weird mix,” says de Betak, who is less preoccupied by objects’ provenance than with creating the right balance. Similar to a fashion show, making memorable spaces is for him all about evoking a feeling. Here, the intention was to summon a pared-back style that’s visually inspiring but also restful. The overriding emotion is one of wonder. “It shows you can have this very lovely historic house but inhabit it in a very natural way,” he says.
The atrium, however, is another story. A shiny lacquered black box, the floor is daubed with the high-gloss resin yacht paint. Only the original mustard-yellow frames around the doors, and the 1980s disco lights stacked on the stairs (a throwback to his teen days of arranging lights and music at “boum” parties) punctuate the alien atmosphere.
If there is a synchronicity between the experience of creating a catwalk show (although short-lived) and creating homes for clients, it’s that de Betak is a master of the atmospheric environment. “There was never time to change things,” he says of the intense tempo of the showspace renovation, which he is now, very deliberately, dialling down. “I don’t want to call it temporary,” he says, pondering where the space sits on the scale between ephemerality and permanence. “It’s a real sanctuary.”
For de Betak, this more fluid way of designing interiors offers him freedom – one that reaches its apex in the attic: a den-like hideaway. Looking out towards the shaded canopy of a pine tree that’s perfect for picnics, its exposed wooden beam-and-bamboo ceiling and chalky floors are part-desert encampment, part-celestial cave. But it is within the stripped-back interior that de Betak from time to time engages in his own form of creative thinking. The space is a blank page.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is the FT’s architecture and design critic
For a few months after the fire in 2017 that killed 72 of its residents, Grenfell Tower loomed like a charred skeleton over London. It cast a shadow over the city’s inequities in housing, a reminder of lax building regulations and the fire brigade’s tragic response, advising people to stay in their homes and wait for help that never came.
First as a blackened frame and then as a white-tarp-clad slab bearing a giant green heart, the tower has stood as a ghostly tombstone haunting every journey west out of central London, by road, rail or Tube. Its presence condemns the inadequacies of British construction and our seeming inability to accelerate the building of social — or any — housing at scale.
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, said last week, after what now looks like rather cursory consultation with survivors and families, that the remains of the burnt-out tower would be dismantled. It was followed by an inevitable clamour about lack of consultation and disrespect. But the structure is deteriorating.
When the 24 storeys of the tower were completed in 1974, it joined a smattering of other high-rises on the west London skyline. The nearby Trellick Tower, once the city’s tallest residential building, was designed by Ernő Goldfinger and completed two years earlier. At the time, each tower contained only council housing. They came towards the end of a massive spurt of construction by local authorities — in part to replace second world war damaged or decrepit stock.
That era now looks almost impossibly distant. The fire (which followed a shoddy refurbishment in 2015-16) led to a public inquiry laying bare the shocking state of the UK’s construction industry and its wholly inadequate regulation. The Building Research Establishment, which should have been responsible for ensuring the safety of materials, had been privatised in 1997 and was now in effect dependent on the manufacturers for business. Contractors and suppliers took full, cynical advantage. Architects were lazy and compliant. The local authority, Kensington and Chelsea, was criticised for cosmetic changes undertaken in part to make the concrete tower look more acceptable to increasingly wealthy neighbours. And somewhere at the bottom of the priorities were the residents who might, before the tragedy, have been seen as a lucky few, having secured subsidised housing in a mixed and lively central London neighbourhood.
A block in which dozens have died is a sensitive thing. Alongside whatever physical proposal is mooted for the site — which must surely include public housing — perhaps a green space might be nurtured, an echo of that green heart on the tarpaulin. Late modernist high-rise council housing suffered from a notorious neglect of the public space around it; parking, bin storage and indeterminate zones that belonged to no one. The value of land is clearer today than it was in a city still perforated with bomb-sites. We should reflect on the real value of public space: a playground, a park, a pond, a piazza, each a sign of life to counter the memories of death.
At present, Grenfell Tower stands like a marker of a particularly British inability to rebuild. Of course it will be painful for survivors and neighbours, but it is also toxic for a city to constantly contemplate its own tragic failures — while neglecting the dearth of decent housing. Cities change and evolve but their streets and spaces do not have to forget: names, places, walls and memorials can be inscribed to prevent that.
The real memorial to those who died would be a complete rewriting of the building regulations, which remain open to abuse, and a kick-start to social housebuilding. If the headstone is to go, something needs to replace it. But this might be more widespread, more able to facilitate good, thoughtful architecture and construction and far more effective in ensuring it can never happen again.
Letter in response to this comment: Grenfell Tower fire tragedy has broader lesson about regulation / From Michael Romberg, London W1, UK
When we think of refugee camps we probably imagine rows of tents, rapidly erected responses to crises. We might envision those seemingly ubiquitous UN tarpaulins in blue and white. But the problem with emergency temporary shelter is that it usually stays around.
These rapidly-built settlements may endure for generations, becoming townships, developing their own urbanity, their architectural infrastructures of education, community and healthcare. The informal becomes institutionalised, the ad hoc concretised.
The problem, of course, is precarity. These camps are intended to be temporary, the residents often dependent on aid and the hospitality of their hosts, stripped of much of their agency. Often located where the local population faces extreme hardship, the issues around these camps can be exacerbated by resentment of the aid received by refugees.
Yet somehow camps are built and people manage to maintain and build lives in them — Cooper’s Camp in Nadia, West Bengal, a temporary refugee camp established after the Partition of India in 1947, is still home to thousands. There are vast camps such as those around Dadaab in eastern Kenya, housing more than 300,000 refugees in minimal conditions of basic shelter. At the other end of the scale is Kilis in southern Turkey, where there are sophisticated new shelters. Syrian refugees have repopulated a city centre that had been almost abandoned by local residents who had moved to more modern accommodation outside the historic core.
Refugee settlements are a necessity in response to crises, which are increasingly climate as well as conflict driven, but can they evolve and be made better? And what is their future?
“Many refugee camps were established in the 20th century without much planning,” says Nerea Amorós Elorduy, an architect, researcher and founder of Creative Assemblages (a “think-and-do tank”). “Those older parts were more organic and people tend to prefer that. The default plan, though, is the grid. It’s odd because in urban studies we learn how cities develop organically, how they respond to topography, about the nuances and the routes, and then, when we plan for refugee settlements, we make them like military camps.
“Things like walkable cities . . . or how we should make a city good for children to live in [so it becomes] better for everyone — we forget this when we plan for refugees,” she adds. “It would be great if we started with more exchange between urban studies and humanitarian urbanism.”
The UNHCR is advocating alternatives to camps. We hope they should be a last resort
There have been repeated attempts to create more hospitable, liveable and communal places but they often fail. One frequent proposal has been the communal kitchen, an attempt to foster community, share resources and labour and encourage interaction, particularly among women. “I have worked in 11 countries . . . and I have never seen one that worked,” says Roupen Alexandrian, an operations director at UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. “When people are in crisis, they don’t associate with communal spaces and [consequently] don’t take care of them. People make kitchens in their shelters, their homes. That is their refuge.”
Rama Nimri, an architect who is a settlement planning officer at UNHCR, says approaches are shifting. “The UNHCR is advocating alternatives to camps,” she says. “We hope they should be a last resort. It is true they provide safety but they also isolate refugees and foster dependency on aid, and they can create friction with local communities. Instead we hope for . . . a ‘settlement approach’, where refugees can live alongside local residents.”
This depends on the policies and approaches of host nations but it has significant advantages, she says. Both Nimri and Elorduy point to Brazil and Colombia, where millions of refugees, most notably from Venezuela, have been absorbed into communities with remarkably little hostility, and often positive economic outcomes for host communities.
“When refugees are allowed the freedom to work, it creates development,” says Nimri, pointing to Kenya’s attempts to foster a settlement approach at Kalobeyei, just outside the huge Kakuma refugee camp. In part, this is an understandable effort by a host country to capture some of the investment made by the UN and other non-governmental organisations in building “temporary” camps. If some of that investment can be used to create hospitals, schools and other civic infrastructure that can also benefit local residents, everybody wins.
In Kilis in Turkey, the 120,000 Syrian refugees who arrived during the civil war exceeded local residents — though some of the former have since dispersed. The two communities, initially wary, have begun to adapt to each other’s traditions, even down to the colours used to paint their shelters and modest civic buildings. The influx has transformed the once downtrodden town into an active, busy metropolis, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.
Big name architects have been keen to be involved, including Norman Foster, Shigeru Ban and Zaha Hadid Architects. While there is some scepticism about starry interventions, the architects Yasmeen Lari and Marina Tabassum have attracted widespread attention.
Lari has worked with refugees from Pakistan’s catastrophic floods to create resilient and beautiful structures using local materials, both domestic and civic (she calls it “barefoot social architecture”). Some of the refugees, particularly women, have learnt to make the materials and structures, providing a living for the future.
Tabassum, meanwhile, has been involved in the creation of small “Khudi Bari” houses for the Ganges flood plain in Bangladesh — resilient housing adapted to climate change. She has also worked in Cox’s Bazar in south-eastern Bangladesh, the world’s biggest settlement, housing nearly 1mn Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar. The buildings of local materials and modest means could not be further from the ubiquitous UN tents.
The “paradox of permanent temporariness” is hauntingly captured in a provocative work by architects DAAR, Andy Hilal and Alessandro Petti. “Concrete Tent” is an installation, originally built in 2015 in the Dheisheh refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, which has since become a roving artwork.
Described as a “space for collective mourning and solidarity with Palestine”, the tent-shaped structure, reimagined in a more permanent form, embodies the gap between the tent and the monument, the ephemeral and the eternal. That almost 2mn people were recently displaced by war in Gaza reminds us that the work’s subject remains painfully urgent.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
LAUNDRY DAY debuts USA TODAY Acoustic with ‘Damn Shame’
USA TODAY Acoustic launches with LAUNDRY DAY’s heartfelt performance of “Damn Shame.” Don’t miss this special moment.
USA TODAY
NEW YORK ‒ Laundry Day, the pop-rock band of four musicians who met at their Manhattan high school, revealed exclusively to USA TODAY that the group’s sixth studio album is coming this summer.
“We’re working on a ton of music right now,” vocalist Jude Ciulla-Lipkin says. “We’ve been putting out like a song a month, which has been incredible. We’re trying to make the album of the summer, so we’re excited.”
Laundry Day also includes vocalist/instrumentalist Sawyer Nunes, guitarist Henry Weingartner and bassist Henry Pearl. The group is the first act to perform on USA TODAY Acoustic, a new series that provides a stage for notable and rising talent across the USA TODAY Network. The band’s combination of boyish charm, big-city energy and catchy tunes has not only cultivated a following but also landed the group on several big stages. In recent years, Laundry Day has opened up for The 1975, Ed Sheeran, Teezo Touchdown and Clairo.
Ciulla-Lipkin immediately recalls an interaction with The 1975 as a seminal moment for the group.
“We were working on this EP (‘Light Up’) and we were like, ‘Can we play it for you guys?’ ” the singer recalls the 2019 interaction. The 1975 agreed and invited Laundry Day onto its tour bus, which is also outfitted with a studio. “They just loved it so much. Matty (Healy) was just like, ‘If you guys keep this up and lean into the “poppiness,” you guys are gonna be so big.’
“Hearing that from one of our heroes was pretty incredible.”
Laundry Day talks ‘Big Time’ inspiration and collaborator
Laundry Day’s latest music video is for the song “Damn Shame.” The group uses several props in the piece, including a vintage cover of The Journal News when the New York Yankees won the World Series in 2000. The Journal News is part of the USA TODAY Network.
There’s also a familiar voice at the start of the video: Big Time Rush star Kendall Schmidt.
The 1975’s Matty Healy inspired pop band Laundry Day with these words
Before performing for USA TODAY Acoustic, pop-rock band Laundry Day reveals to Ralphie Aversa that the group will release a new album this summer.
“(Schmidt) was one of the first celebrities to interact with our videos,” Ciulla-Lipkin says, noting the band “grew up on Big Time Rush.” “Then he just stayed around, like he would find other videos. I guess we were just in his algorithm.”
Schmidt is far from the only celebrity who interacts with the group online: through TikTok and Instagram, the group has racked up tens of millions of views while garnering co-signs from Drake, Olivia Rodrigo and the aforementioned Matty Healy.
“My favorite part of (the band) is the live show,” Pearl says. “When you’re in front of so many people and they’re singing back to you, that’s really fun.”
“Going viral on TikTok is pretty fun too,” Ciulla-Lipkin adds. “The dopamine from that is kind of unmatched.”
Simply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
There is a drawing in the new exhibition at London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum of the rear of his country home, Pitzhanger Manor, dating from 1810. It is, frankly, a little shocking. Not in its extravagance, or its fancy Regency flourishes, but for its minimal modernity. Soane designed an extension entirely in glass that looks not a million miles from the designs of the Bauhaus more than a century later. All that gives it away is the delicate cast mouldings in the ironwork mullions.
The exhibition, Soane and Modernism: Make It New, posits Soane as a proto-Modernist, an architect who foreshadowed the aesthetics of the 20th century from the beginning of the 19th. Certainly Soane’s incredible house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields always feels oddly relevant. You could argue that you can find in Soane almost whatever you like: minimalism; proto-postmodern detail and theory; incredible clutter. His house contains all the contradictions of humanity, its urges to collect and remember, the tension between display and domesticity, between theatre and comfort.
Soane (1753-1837) was a man from a modest background, the son of a bricklayer, who rose against the odds to become the greatest and most inventive architect of his era, designing the Bank of England, major interventions at the Houses of Parliament and the Law Courts, Britain’s first public art gallery in Dulwich and working on more than a hundred country houses. But he is best known today for his own house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which he spent three decades rebuilding and revising from 1792 and which he bequeathed to the nation as a museum through an act of parliament in 1833.
One of the exhibits in the new show is a drawing of the familiar red phone kiosk by architect Giles Gilbert Scott (best known as the designer of Battersea and Bankside Power Stations, the latter now Tate Modern). The reason it is here is that it was inspired by Soane’s design for his wife’s tomb, still standing in St Pancras Old Church Gardens. The resemblance is obvious in the two architects’ designs, shown here side by side. It eloquently illustrates how a 20th-century architect working in a (more or less) modern idiom turned to Soane to inspire an entirely new type of building for a modern type of communication — and found it. You can find anything in Soane, if you look hard enough.
“We wanted to show Soane as a forerunner of Modernism, a maverick,” says the exhibition’s curator Erin McKellar. “Influence can be very hard to prove but we can see how Soane was doing [Modernist] things in architecture well before Modernism.”
One of Soane’s innovations was his use of interconnecting spaces, which now looks very modern indeed. He created complexity in intimate spaces, so that there were always glimpses of other rooms. Perhaps the most famous works in his home are the “Picture Planes” of the Picture Room, a series of pages that open out like a book to display his canvases and which finally open out on to the atrium. It is like peeling layers of art until you reach the ultimate work of art itself — the house.
His house contains all the contradictions of humanity, its urges to collect and remember, the tension between display and domesticity, between theatre and comfort
The exhibition juxtaposes drawings by Soane with those of modern architects including Aldo Rossi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Álvaro Siza, Alison and Peter Smithson and Le Corbusier. British architect Tony Fretton’s sketchbook shows his designs for London’s Lisson Gallery (1992), one of the absolute great small London buildings. In it you can see how Fretton drew the oculus at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in thinking how to display and illuminate art.
Soane became a little forgotten in the 19th century, but since the 1920s, architects have been irresistibly drawn back to him. The house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in particular — with its densely packed interior landscape of art and fragments of earlier civilisations, cornucopia of plaster details and stone busts, classical sculptures and archaeological remains — creates a vertical section not only through space but through time.
His modernity stems from an attitude to the interior as an expression of a life lived with books, ideas and things. That his house would have once been a kind of showroom is in itself an extremely modern-day conceit. This house, seemingly made for an age of social media moments, with its photogenic fragments and complex layers, is both highly intimate and perfectly formed for showing off. Few architects can embody the preoccupations of their time and transcend them so fully. Soane is modern now, and, I suggest, he always will be.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
Letter in response to this article: North-South divide / From Ronald Hall, Liverpool, UK
Anticipation of a potential showdown between the “Daily Show” host and the SpaceX CEO has been brewing ever since Musk last week signaled his willingness to appear for an interview.
Jon Stewart agrees to do ‘unedited’ interview with Elon Musk
Jon Stewart criticized Elon Musk after highlighting a contradiction in the billionaire’s claim of political neutrality. Musk said he would appear on “The Daily Show” if the interview aired “unedited.”
unbranded – Entertainment
Jon Stewart has made it clear: Tech billionaire and White House ally Elon Musk has a formal invitation to appear on “The Daily Show.”
Anticipation of a potential showdown between the “Daily Show” host and the SpaceX CEO has been brewing ever since Musk last week signaled his willingness to appear for an interview – on one condition. Answering calls from his supporters to go head-to-head with Stewart, a frequent critic, Musk said on social media site X he’d do it, “if the show airs unedited.”
Stewart then began his monologue Monday night by addressing Musk’s terms for coming on Comedy Central’s flagship satirical news program.
“After thinking about his offer, I thought, you know, hey, that’s actually how the in-studio interviews normally are – it’s unedited – so, sure,” Stewart said, followed by a round of applause from the audience.
The potential showdown between Stewart and Musk would come after the “Daily Show” host delivered a tirade last week of the richest man in the world’s efforts to slash federal spending under President Donald Trump’s administration. Were Musk to accept Stewart’s invitation, the two would discuss cuts made under the Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk unofficially leads.
“I am game,” Stewart declared. “I think it’ll be a very interesting conversation.”
‘We’d be delighted:’ ‘The Daily Show’ accepts Musk’s terms for interview with Stewart
Musk appears to cast doubt on whether he’d go on ‘Daily Show’ after all
But Musk, who recently sat down with Joe Rogan on an episode of his popular podcast, appears to be throwing cold water on an interview with Stewart, even after he accepted the challenge one week ago.
In recent posts on X, which Musk owns, he called “The Daily Show” host a “propagandist,” and claimed Stewart “used to be more bipartisan.”
Stewart addressed Musk’s claims Monday night, theorizing that the tech mogul was setting the stage to back out of an interview. Unconvinced by Musk’s argument, Stewart poked fun at Musk’s “Dark MAGA” hat and the hundreds of millions of dollars he spent on Trump’s campaign.
“Look, Elon,” Stewart said. “I do have some criticisms about DOGE … If you want to come on and talk about it on the show, great. If you don’t want to, sure.”
He continued, “but can we just drop the pretense that you won’t do it because I don’t measure up to the standards of neutral discourse that you demand and display at all times?”
Musk, Trump, tout DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts
Musk’s supporters and fans of “The Daily Show” have been clamoring for the showdown ever since Stewart railed against Musk and DOGE in an episode that aired Feb. 24.
During the segment, the comedian slammed the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees across multiple agencies and levels of importance before slicing his hand open on a prop mug.
After Musk agreed to do an interview, “The Daily Show” responded from its official X account, “We’d be delighted!”
A staunch ally of the president, Musk has routinely defended his efforts to reduce the federal workforce – an initiative that included a controversial email for employees to outline their accomplishments or risk termination. Trump has also defended Musk’s efforts, arguing his administration is seeking to downsize government by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse.
Democrats and other critics, however, have noted the potential benefits Musk’s companies stand to gain under some of his targeted cuts.
Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]
The FT commenting names of readers have been given in bold type at the end of each entry. Where readers gave details about what they love about a particular place, that has been included as a quote.
“The Eero Saarinen-designed chapel at MIT is otherworldly. It’s based on circles (the structure is a circle) with the only light coming from a circular skylight that creates a columnar shaft of light that reflects on an extraordinary installation of suspended reflecting pieces. This is what spiritual contemplation probably looks like in another galaxy.” Early sitting Foodie
Sitting on a promenade of ornate white buildings, The Golden Temple in Amritsar stands out like a gleaming gold tooth. It has four entrances, one on each side, signifying that people from all walks of life are welcome. Textex
Basilica, Weizberg, Austria
“There are so many old churches in Austria and Bavaria that are located in beautiful locations that hold a strong sense of spirituality, history and connection to another world. This church in Weiz Styria [Austria], the Basilica at Weizberg, took my breath away as a child.” Mon_2021
“In a city with many far more opulent churches, this ninth-century building tucked away on a side street still manages to surprise and inspire with its vibrant mosaics and side chapels. The last time I visited, in 2019, you still had to put a coin in the meter to illuminate them. Well worth it!” Occasional Observer
San Josemaría Escrivá Church, Mexico City, Mexico
This church, built in 2008 over a landfill site in the southern outskirts of Mexico City, is formed primarily of two huge curving plinths designed to evoke the Christian Ichthys symbol. Judge_Holden
This non-denominational chapel in Sonoma County, California, was built by a local couple in honour of Kirk Ditzler, an artist, zoologist and navy aviator who inspired architect James Hubbell’s design. The structure appears like something from a fairy tale, with a roof shaped like a witch’s hat, a ceiling inlaid with shells, redwood benches and stained-glass windows in shades of fuchsia and sea green. Professor Scott Talan
Everything in the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, found in the hills above Nice, was designed by French artist Henri Matisse. It features a simple white interior, line-drawn murals depicting biblical scenes and geometric stained glass windows, which cast dappled light across the floor. “I’m irreligious but it brought tears to my eyes.” JMF
Twenty seven wooden beams driven into the cliff face work to support the Hengshan Hanging Temple, built 1,500 years ago on a rock face in Shanxi province, northern China. “Stunning, and certainly very memorable.” Claudius Donnelly
This church, with its elegant yellow brick pillars inspired by Gothic architecture, was designed by the famed Danish architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint in honour of the Danish priest, poet, and reformer NFS Grundtvig. Jensen-Klint died before he could see it completed, so the project was finished in 1940 by his son, who also designed the simple wood and wicker chairs used for the congregation. It is “beautifully plain inside”. Jimmy Jones
The fire inside this temple, a place of worship for those who follow the ancient Zoroastrian religion, has been burning continuously since AD470, making it the longest running fire temple in Iran. Fire has long been an important symbol for Zoroastrians because it symbolises truth and purity. Lapras
This “confraternity church”, established in the 15th century by a group of middle-class Venetians who wanted to play a part in civic life, is home to the remains of its titular saint, St Roch, as well as paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Tiepolo. It features “wildly bizarre wood-carved figures in the main room along with famed paintings”. Professor Scott Talan
This mosque features a “clever plan that swings you around from the east-facing entrance (iwan) to the Mecca-facing mihrab of the chamber, and the handling of its faience-lined space whose origins can be traced back to the simple four arched kiosks (chahar taq) of the early fire temples to be found in the mountains around”. Pause for a moment
St Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral, London, England
“Very beautiful. It was consecrated as the Church of the Holy Wisdom on 5 February 1882 and has superb late-19th-century iconography”. aegian
Die Wieskirche bei Steingaden, Oberbayern, Germany
This rococo confection, adorned with gilded stucco and trompe l’œil frescoes, was built in the mid-18th century and all but bankrupted the Steingaden abbey that funded it. Certankile
The conjoined octagonal structures that form the San Vitale Basilica in Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, offer a clue to the artistry of the mosaics found within. Decorated with different marbles and mosaics depicting scenes from the Old and the New Testament, it will “blow you away”. Fredaugust
The oldest temple in Kyoto, dating to AD603, is said to have been founded by Korean immigrants to the city. It is best known for an elegant wooden sculpture of the Miroku Buddha in half-lotus position, which is thought to have been gifted to the Japanese regent Taishi Shōtoku by the Korean court. International Economist/Observer
Founded in AD324, this is the oldest public church in Rome and the oldest basilica in the western world. “This is where even the Pope goes as a humble priest to pray in the most spiritual of churches.” JHK2
A church was first built on this site in Toledo, central Spain, in the 6th century. It later became the city’s central mosque, before being converted back into a church in the 11th century, and then destroyed. The version we see today dates to the 13th century, and is considered “a stunning example of Spanish gothic”. TheDubliner
Begun around 1175, Wells Cathedral is home to the second oldest clock mechanism still in use in Britain and one of the finest examples of medieval stained glass: a huge window depicting a Jesse tree and Christ with his family in shades of green and gold. “By accident it has a wonderful central tower buttress in the crossing, put in because it was thought the tower was in danger of falling. An example of anxiety becoming inspiration.” Cassandra and Iphigeneia
St Thomas Aquinas church, Berlin, Germany
Built in 1999 from granite and glass, the St Thomas Aquinas church is “modern, sparse, true to its materials but profoundly settling and open to the immanent”. Hillgate26
“A Baroque façade stuck on to the end of Gelon’s Temple of Athena, which still forms the bulk of the main body of the church. It is a stunning survival, and has a remarkable atmosphere.” Al MacBee
Though the outside appears almost austere, having been designed by a military engineer, the interior of this church is fabulously ornate, gilded and decorated with frescoes depicting the life of John the Baptist. The floor is made up of around 400 marble tombstones commemorating the Knights of Malta, the order who built the church. Window dressing
When it was constructed in the 1670s, the Badshahi Mosque was the largest in the world. Rather than being adorned with intricate mosaic tiling as some Lahori mosques are, this design uses red sandstone inlaid with white marble patterns as decoration. Rightoutofhand
“Have lunch in Cafe 1901 afterwards. A beautiful and peaceful place with a very interesting history, 30 minutes’ walk from the Forbidden City”. Huntington was right
“An early-18th century Balinese Hindu temple. Not so much for the beauty of the building but for the way Balinese Hindus worship. The combination of gamelan music, the reading of Vedic text and the trance-like Balinese dancing mesmerised me. I never thought spirituality could be so visually and aurally breathtaking. There is a spring within the temple complex that is also considered holy by followers of the local Muslim sect, and once a year Hindus and Muslims have a festival together.” 97% human
Found seven miles outside of Edinburgh, in rural Midlothian, the 15th-century Rosslyn Chapel is home to many mysteries and myths. Some say that the Holy Grail was once held here. Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code described a crypt beneath the church where the body of Mary Magdalen was thought to be held. The stonework and decoration also contain their own folklore: visitors are invited to spot the carvings of green men, a figure symbolising good, evil and the fecundity of nature (there are said to be 100). “A little gem.” TheGreenMachine
St Leopold am Steinhof, Vienna, Austria
St Leopold am Steinhof was originally built as a church for a psychiatric hospital in Vienna when it was constructed in the early-20th century. The architect, Otto Wagner, a leading figure in the secessionist and art nouveau movements, placed the building on a hill overlooking the facility, and designed a beautiful white marble façade and golden mosaic dome. It’s now considered one of the first ever modernist churches. “Ranks near the top for its unmatched aesthetic simplicity inside and out.” Robert and iamalwaysright
Jake Bongiovi married Millie Bobby Brown in ‘small family wedding’
Jon Bon Jovi has confirmed his son Jake Bongiovi married actress Millie Bobby Brown in a “small family wedding” and revealed the bride “looked gorgeous.”
Bang Showbiz
Millie Bobby Brown is fighting back, once again, against hateful comments on her appearance.
The “Stranger Things” star issued a public service announcement about the “bullying” comments she has gotten about her appearance. In an Instagram video posted Monday, the 21-year-old actress slammed comments about her “aging badly,” calling the issue “bigger than me” and “something that affects every young woman who grows up under public scrutiny.”
Brown has grown up working on the sci-fi series, which wrapped filming its final season in December. She was 12 when the first episodes hit Netflix, which she said has made people have unrealistic views on how she “should” look.
“I grew up in front of the world, and for some reason, people can’t seem to grow with me,” she wrote in the caption. “Instead, they act like I’m supposed to stay frozen in time, like I should still look the way I did on ‘Stranger Things’ Season one. And because I don’t, I’m now a target.”
The actress previously called out people who claimed she looked older than she is. Brown seemed to respond to the brash negativity in her comments with a since-expired post on her Instagram story to kick off the New Year. At the time, she succinctly wrote in black text over a white background: “women grow!! not sorry about it :)”
Millie Bobby Brown gives defiant response to criticism of her looks: ‘Women grow!’
Millie Bobby Brown hits back at Daily Mail writers: ‘This isn’t journalism’
Now, the “Enola Holmes” star has time. She called out writers of Daily Mail headlines like “Why are Gen Zers like Millie Bobby Brown ageing (sic) so badly?” and “Millie Bobby Brown mistaken for someone’s mom as she guides younger sister Ava through LA” for their “horrible” and harmful coverage.
She called out the writer of a Daily Mail article dubbed “Little Britain’s Matt Lucas takes savage swipe at Millie Bobby Brown’s new ‘mommy makeover’ look” for “amplifying an insult rather than questioning why a grown man is mocking a young woman’s appearance.”
Brown continued: “This isn’t journalism. This is bullying. The fact that adult writers are spending their time dissecting my face, my body, my choices, it’s disturbing. The fact that some of these articles are written by women? Even worse.”
USA TODAY has reached out to the Daily Mail for comment.
She continued: “We always talk about supporting and uplifting young women, but when the time comes, it seems easier to tear them down for clicks.”
The Florence by Mills founder, who has previously opened up about being a feminist, emphasized her agency over her appearance.
“Disillusioned people can’t handle seeing a girl become a woman on her terms, not theirs,” she said. “I refuse to make myself smaller to fit the unrealistic expectations of people who can’t handle seeing a girl become a woman. I will not be shamed for how I look, how I dress, or how I present myself.”
Brown ended with a call to action: “Let’s do better.”
She added: “Not just for me, but for every young girl who deserves to grow up without fear of being torn apart for simply existing.”
