Legendary actor Tim Curry died late Tuesday night after suffering from several health issues over the last decade. He was 80 years old. Entertainment site TMZ reported that Curry passed away at his Los Angeles home. Police arrived on the scene just before midnight. The outlet also reported that foul play is not suspected in the actor’s death. The British-born actor had been dealing with a series of health complications since suffering a stroke in 2012. Curry, whose last appearance was in the 2024 slasher film “Stream,” got his first acting credit in 1968 but became a household name after his turns in cult classics like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975) and “Clue” (1985). He went on to terrify a whole generation of children with his performance as Pennywise the clown in the adaptation of Stephen King’s “It.” His acting career spanned almost 60 years, including voice roles in two projects that had not yet been released at the time of his death. The character actor worked consistently over the years, taking numerous guest roles in popular serial shows like “Criminal Minds,” “Monk,” “Roseanne,” “Will & Grace,” and “Psych” — and dozens of movies, from the “Scary Movie” franchise to “Muppet Treasure Island.” His voice was heard across generations in dozens of animated series like Disney Channel’s “Phineas and Ferb” and Nickelodeon’s “The Wild Thornberrys.” On Broadway, Curry was nominated for three Tony Awards: “Amadeus” in 1981, “My Favorite Year” in 1993, and “Spamalot” in 2005.

It is so easy to feel anxious, worried, overwhelmed, or just out of control in our lives. Many things around us cause us to stress or fear, and everywhere we turn, it seems like more bad news pops up. However, in times of anxiety and stress, the Bible can offer us a way of escape. We have collected some of our favorite Bible verses to turn to when we feel anxiety rise. It is in Scripture that we are reminded of God's promises and His care over us - from big anxieties to little. In my own times of stress or anxiety, I've found the Word of God to be the one true place I can find peace. I know that it is only in him that I can remember my true identity and can be restored to new life again. How do we live in this world, but not be of it, like Scripture tells us? How do we open ourselves up to love ourselves, our neighbors, our world, and our God well without becoming burdened by all the hurt and the brokenness? How do we continue to seek Christ when everything seems to be crashing down or falling apart? We memorize Bible verses that speak power over anxiety and recall God's protection.It's tempting when fear arises to run to things we think will comfort us, but nothing in the world will be able to bring us the comfort that Christ can. He can feel distant at times, especially when I'm feeling the anxiety begin to overwhelm me, but reading the truth of the Bible reminds me that he is always near to the brokenhearted and close to those in need. When I read Scriptures about anxiety and fear, I am reminded that he has always been faithful, that he will still be faithful even now, and that he will be faithful in the future, no matter what might arise or come my way.Let's dive into my favorite Bible verses from throughout both the Old and the New Testaments that I've personally found to be comforting in my own anxious moments, and I pray that they are a balm to your soul as you read them. I encourage you to meditate on these Scripture quotes individually, to pray through their words several times, and to sit with them long enough to truly let the words seep into your soul. Don't rush through these words, but savor their truth and worship Christ as you read his words of love and comfort.Image Credit: ©GettyImages/KeiferPic

He suffered from illness prior to his death

‘root out fraud and abuse’

Featured Essays Cyberpunk The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI Looking for answers — and finding hope —in the cyberpunk of the past, present, and future. By Joanna Nelius-Free | Published on August 26, 2026 Image by Steve A Johnson [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Image by Steve A Johnson [via Unsplash] A year after I left tech journalism to pursue a full-time career in education, I taught a class on cyberpunk. I’ve been teaching creative writing and literature courses to high school students for nearly a decade now, so this was actually my second time teaching cyberpunk, but my first seeing the same material in a way that was haunting and prophetic—this time around, I couldn’t ignore the disquieting connections between my reasons for leaving tech journalism, my students’ bleak views on the future, and the tech-obsessed world we now inhabit, all driven by the feeling that big tech is gradually destroying humanity instead of saving it, as it once promised. I also couldn’t ignore what Lewis Shiner, one of cyberpunk’s founders, said about the genre in his 1991 New York Times op-ed: it was dead. “Cyberpunk in its new incarnation had turned technology into an end in itself and lost its original impulse,” Shiner wrote. It became a cliché. Its aesthetics became tropes. If a story had neon lights, hackers, and characters who never took off their sunglasses, then it was “cyberpunk.” While I agree that plenty of surface-level literature and media has easily made its way into the mass market, I don’t agree that cyberpunk is dead. Therein lay my challenge, or so I thought: how would I teach my students about the history and meaning of cyberpunk while equipping them with the tools to analyze the stories they read? But my real challenge was keeping my students—and myself—from getting lost in the hopelessness many cyberpunk stories carry through their pages. It can be a jarring experience seeing multiple reflections of the world you’re living in texts that were written 10, 30, or even 100 years ago. So, I needed to find at least one story that did the opposite—a story that took our fears of the future and reflected them back to us as hope. Victorian-era Cyberpunk Most of the stories I had my students read have little or none of the flashy cyberpunk aesthetics we’ve seen jam-packed into movies and video games for the last 30-plus years. There are some bio-mods, an AI-powered computer, and the odd hallucination, but these elements are woven into the stories instead of simply accessorizing it. One of those stories is E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” Published in 1909, this was Forster’s only foray into science fiction. What makes it a classic piece of dystopian literature is that it was the first to explore technology as the creator and controller of humanity. It gave sci-fi the concept of the “hive mind.” Its technological elements and themes aren’t often recognized as cyberpunk, yet their resemblance is strong; Forster feared the Industrial Revolution would strip humanity of its curiosity, creativity, and agency. In Forster’s story, everyone lives alone underground, each in their own small rooms, each of which is shaped like a honeycomb cell. Every room is equipped with a machine that can literally do anything. If someone feels unwell, it can take their temperature. If someone wants to socialize, they can call a friend by pressing one of the machine’s buttons. If someone needs ideas or inspiration, it will generate literature. My high school students, the majority of whom were born between 2011 and 2012, found the similarities between Forster’s imagined technology and the real technology of today unnerving. The isolation of the honeycomb-shaped dwellings reminded them of being quarantined during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Characters speaking through a mirror-like device reminded them of Apple’s FaceTime. The machine’s ability to generate art on demand reminded them of ChatGPT. As central to the story as the machine itself is what Forster dubbed “The Book of The Machine,” a tome over 1,000 pages long that explained how to use the machine in every possible scenario: “If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss of a word, she went to the book, and it told her what button to press.” I asked my students if the book reminded them of anything. One of my students raised his hand. “Google,” he answered. All search engines are designed to do the same thing: find information on the internet. Forster’s Book of The Machine is our internet. We use it when we’re sick, to get directions, to find the lyrics to our favorite song, or learn how to unclog our shower. With the advent of AI search summaries, the Internet has grown even closer to Forster’s Book of The Machine: one text, same information (usually) available to all at the press of a (few) buttons. This story made me realize that my time as a tech journalist made me surprisingly receptive to certain traditional Victorian reservations about technology: Like Forster, I began to question how the technology I wrote about was affecting our social and spiritual needs, our personal autonomy, and the ability to think for ourselves. I saw something of myself in Kuno, one of the two main characters in the story, desperate to escape a system of control, and all too aware that the techno-optimistic publication I wrote for didn’t like the questions I was asking—especially when it came to questioning generative AI. Broken Promises of the Future William Gibson’s first professional publication, “The Gernsback Continuum,” was a call for science fiction to take a new direction—to stop hoping that mid-20th century promises of space exploration and perfect futures would come true. It’s a “coolly accurate perception of the wrongheaded elements of the past,” as Gibson’s contemporary Bruce Sterling notes in his 1986 cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades. This story paved the way for the genre that would later be christened cyberpunk “The Gernsback Continuum” is unlike the bio-chipped, street-wise characters living in the high-tech, low-life worlds of Gibson’s later works. Most of Gibson’s story is set in ’80s Burbank, California, and centers around a photographer taking pictures of old, chrome-wrapped buildings and winged statues—much like the cover art on many of the magazines Hugo Gernsback edited or published. The editor he works for is putting together an illustrative history book called The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was. Before reading this story, I posed a question to my students: “Is it possible to have nostalgia for a broken promise of the future?” “I think you can be fascinated with the past,” one of my students said. That’s certainly true. I’m fascinated with early 20th-century tech, but I also go out of my way to collect ’90s gadgets, the tech of my childhood. I’m not sure if Gibson intended “The Gernsback Continuum” to read like this, but the class discussion that followed explored what we saw as a both a fascination with and nostalgia for the past, and the key difference between the two. Anyone can be fascinated by the past, but nostalgia requires an emotional connection to a personal, past experience. But is it possible for someone to feel both at the same time for the same thing? Absolutely. I used Disneyland’s Innoventions Dream Home as an example. It was an attraction in Tomorrowland from 2008 to 2015 that envisioned what a smart home could look like. The kitchen talked and suggested recipes. You could play card games or look through photographs on the dining room table’s touch screens. A bedroom mirror showed you what you’d look like in different outfits without physically putting them on. Then the smartphone caught on, and suddenly everyone could do all that from a pocket-sized device. The Innoventions Dream Home still tickles the part of my brain that is fascinated with the past, but being 45 years removed from the setting of “The Gernsback Continuum,” I can’t help but feel like my present is in some ways worse than the story’s ending. It’s why that long gone Disneyland attraction makes me feel nostalgic for the same past. It promised something better than what exists now. Techno-colonialism In Bruce Sterling’s aforementioned anthology is the story from which it takes its name: “Mozart in Mirrorshades,” written by Sterling and Lewis Shiner. Unlike “The Gernsback Continuum,” a quiet reflective admonishment of bygone techno utopia ideals, “Mozart in Mirrorshades” channels the chaotic, unfiltered commentary of ’80s punk music—and the era’s obsession with Amadeus Mozart. Set in Salzburg during the 1700s, Sterling and Shiner’s story follows two main characters: Rice, a higher-up at a company that time travels into the past to take works of art and geological resources into the present; and Mozart himself, who by the end of the story is nothing like the historical version of the Classical composer (and that includes his music). The story drips with political satire, thinly veiled commentary on colonization and exploitation—the dark side of capitalism and materialism. My students were particularly amused with an ironic appearance by Thomas Jefferson, furious with Rice: “You granted us liberty of equality and the freedom to pursue our own happiness. Instead we find your machinery on all sides, your cheap manufactured goods seducing the people of our great country.” As recompense for taking the culture of the past, Rice’s company had given Jefferson’s era radios, magazines, cassette tapes, and sequined tubed tops. One of my students exclaimed, “He’s saying the future has no culture!” Another chimed in, “It’s like AI! They’re stealing from artists!” They made a connection between the machine-controlled future dystopia of Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”: when we look to the future and see no hope, we have to look to the past to find hope in the future—but not colonize or appropriate it. History is an amazing teacher if we truly listen to it. Tech: The Great (Un)Equalizer Moving from the ’80s and into the 2010s, Cat Rambo’s “Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars” digs deeper into the materialism mentality explored in “Mozart in Mirrorshades.” It explores how inequitable access to technology affects social status, interpersonal relationships, and a personal sense of freedom through the use of bio-mods. When we first meet the main characters, teenagers Jonny and Grizz, they are in an electronic recycling yard unwinding coils of computer memory wire and pressing them into each other’s backs. Grizz wants the upgrade to do well on her exams. If she does, she’ll be placed into a good job. Jonny gets the same upgrade, but his anti-establishment sentiments come across loud and clear early on in the story. While Grizz downloads entire databases of information in the library, Jonny numbs his grim view of reality with drugs instead of studying for his exams. The rich kids get most of the jobs, he says. It’s like a skill-based job market from a deeper level of hell, but instead of needing five years of experience for an entry level job you need a bio-mod that you can’t afford: “They tell you you’re the dregs, just like everyone else, but sometimes your mods and someone’s listing match up and you find yourself with a chance. The more mods you have, the more likely it is.” Jonny’s not willing to “play the game” to get ahead in life. He wants to do things his way, on his terms, even if the world around him makes him feel hopeless. It’s a sentiment that some of my students relate to, but especially myself. Every time someone told me I should learn to code instead of learning to write, it steeled my resolve to prove them wrong, and I did. When I first became a journalist, I felt like I was able to make real emotional and intellectual connections with others through my articles because I was given the freedom to do so. Then came the restrictions: Don’t ask too many questions, and only write about things that could get the publication a high Google Search ranking. It’s the complete opposite of what I teach my students to do with their own writing—writing is about putting humanity first, and thoughtfully exploring questions that matter. Hope for Humanity Shiner closes his Times op-ed by remarking that the cyberpunk of the late 20th century doesn’t answer existential questions. “It offers power fantasies,” he writes. I don’t disagree, but the four cyberpunk stories above, and many others, don’t answer existential questions either. There’s hardly any guidance on how to exist within or fight back against systems of oppression. It’s a big ask for every sci-fi writer to come up with solutions to the world’s problems in their stories. Injecting hope into the abyss, however, is much more do-able. That’s exactly the feeling my students and I got from reading Donovan Hall’s “A Sunken Memory,” the first story in Milton J. Davis’ 2021 Cyberfunk! anthology. Hall’s story is set hundreds of years in the future, after 99% of humanity succumbed to war, nuclear radiation, and earthquakes. 1% of the 1% that survived were able to upload their consciousness into mind banks until they could be downloaded into a new body. But with each download, data gets corrupted. The main character, CJ-1844, is a cyborg who’s sustained so much data corruption he doesn’t remember his human life. One of the most refreshing things about “A Sunken Memory” is the opening scene: CJ is singing the Earth, Wind & Fire classic “September,” and enjoying every second. He’s also in the middle of a dangerous, AI-powered submarine journey to find the last remaining mind bank—the last remnants of humanity—even though one hasn’t been discovered in 200 years. It isn’t his first time searching for this mind-bank, either, but hope against impossible odds drives CJ to conduct these missions alone. He refuses to believe that he and the rest of humanity, especially in their current state, are all that’s left. Hall’s story is not a power fantasy, nor does it necessarily have answers on how to navigate today’s tech-obsessed world. But it stresses the importance of persistence, hope, the immeasurable value of humanity, and sacrifice for the good of all. The Future Is Not Inevitable I agree with this part of Shiner’s op-ed: we still need literature that shows “the price that must be paid for solutions to our problems; it would see the computer neither as enemy nor god but as a tool for human purposes.” There was a time when I thought technology would be the cure-all for the problems of the modern world. I was taught to have that mindset from an early age, and it followed me into a career where it took center stage. I started doing things like switching notetaking and calendar apps every few months, buying up smart gadgets and faster laptops—anything that promised to make me more organized or less forgetful. Nothing did. Then I bought a “dumb phone” and an e-ink tablet—those actually helped. I realized what I was told to believe was right technological tool for the job was the wrong one, and had only served to alienate me from myself. I realized the cyberpunks were right, and had been right all along. But if cyberpunk can start from a rebellion against classic sci-fi’s obsession with conquering and colonizing space and a tech-filled but inhuman future, and stand against mega-corporations, materialism, capitalism, and the exploitation of other countries, it can rebel against the watered-down version of itself—something I try to do in my own way, by embracing “dumb” tech, asking inconvenient questions, and pushing back against the idea that critical thinking and creative endeavors are better handled by machines than people. Some of these newer stories might be labeled cyberfunk, solarpunk, or another kind of punk, but they should all do their best to remind us how important it is to be in touch with our humanity in a world that wants to sell us computer imitations of ourselves. So I hope you’ll read the stories I’ve mentioned above, and seek out others—read everything you can, then go be punk—fight back against the parts of technology you don’t like in the best way you know how. Don’t accept that one kind of future is inevitable. Offer hope of a way out.[end-mark] The post The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI appeared first on Reactor.

THE CENTER SQUARE—In a state where election security has been scrutinized since 2020, Georgia gubernatorial candidates are expressing different views about the upcoming election on the campaign trail. Election security was one of the questions asked of Democrat nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms at a campaign event held Saturday in Ringgold.  “We can’t have a 12,000 vote difference in this state,” Bottoms said. “These numbers have to be so high that there is no question about how voters turned out to vote.” Georgia’s elections have been in the national spotlight since 2020, when current President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recorded a call with Trump in which Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”  The Center Square was unsuccessful prior to publication getting comment from Republican Rick Jackson, the opponent of Bottoms. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said that audio obtained from a Jackson campaign rally held in Columbus on Aug. 13 suggests that Gov. Brian Kemp would use the National Guard to monitor the election.  In a response to an unidentified supporter, Jackson said on the audio, “Yes, he’s going to get the National Guard,” referring to Kemp.  “We’ve proven for multiple cycles now that it’s easy to vote and hard to cheat in Georgia elections,” a spokesman for Kemp said. “The same will be true this cycle. We are approaching this upcoming election the exact same way we have in the past.” Bottoms criticized Jackson’s statement referring to the National Guard.  “Rick Jackson is once again telling Georgians how he will be Trump’s favorite governor—this time by spreading election lies and threatening our elections,” Bottoms said in a statement. “Jackson has stood with Donald Trump as the president orchestrated a raid of Fulton County’s election hub and went after Georgia’s election workers.” The FBI and the Justice Department are continuing an investigation into Georgia’s 2020 elections, focusing on Fulton County. The FBI raided the Fulton County Elections Office in January, and the Justice Department has subpoenaed the county for personal information about the poll workers in that election. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday approved an order from the Trump administration that allows the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to curate lists of eligible voters in each state.  The U.S. Postal Service will check the lists before sending out mail-in ballots, according to the order.  “This internal directive does not regulate the states’ voter registration processes,” justices on the high court wrote. “Nor does it impinge on the states’ authority ‘to create and enforce a legal code’ for elections.'” Raffensperger created a bipartisan election integrity task force that will host a series of regional roundtables on election security.  Former Gov. Roy Barnes and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, both Democrats, and former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson, both Republicans, are part of the nine-member task force. The four are part of the Democracy Defense Network, a bipartisan nonprofit that says its mission is to restore “faith in the transparency, safety, security, and validity of our election process.” Other members are election law expert Ben Ginsberg; former state Sen. Don Balfour; Joseph Kirk, Bartow County elections supervisor and immediate past president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials; Nancy Boren, Muscogee County Elections and Registration director; and Terry Norris, executive director of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association. The group will “push back” on election misinformation, Raffensperger said in an interview with The Center Square. A panel of state lawmakers is discussing a new voting system that uses hand-marked ballots. The General Assembly passed a bill in 2024 that would eliminate the use of QR codes to count ballots, but it included no funding or guidelines. The Joint Election Equipment Specifications and Standards Committee meets again on Sept. 3.

THE CENTER SQUARE—A database of automated license plate reader abuses shows 57 out of 170 incidents happened in Georgia.  The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, is regularly updating incidents that range from the arrest of law enforcement officers who have used the technology in some cases to stalk romantic partners to innocent people being held at gunpoint by police because the camera misread a license plate.  In middle Georgia’s Bibb County, three sheriff’s deputies were arrested for stalking people they were in a relationship with, according to reports and the database. Three Fayetteville police officers were arrested for using the technology to search for information on themselves, family members and friends. Georgia has the highest number of abuses because its law enforcement agencies were among the first to use the technology. Flock Safety, the manufacturer of many of the cameras in question, is headquartered in Atlanta.  “Flock recently has rolled out some new guidelines and tools, particularly an auditing tool to try to find this misuse as it’s happening,” said Christopher Ingraham, an investigative reporter for the Institute for Justice, in an interview with The Center Square. “And I believe, just looking at the data, it was rolled out first to Georgia, which is why we see so many police departments, you see these headlines, eight officers, six officers, many officers at a time being fired or arrested for misuse of these systems.” Law enforcement agencies defend the use of the cameras, saying they are a tool for capturing criminals.  The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said use of automated license plate reader technology from Georgia helped the agency find a 1-year-old child taken from Tennessee.  “ALPR information has helped the bureau and its partner agencies locate missing and endangered children and vulnerable adults, identify vehicles associated with wanted fugitives, and develop leads in investigations involving violent crime, drug trafficking, and organized criminal activity,” the agency said in a statement. Ingraham said the fundamental question is whether the crimes would have been solved if the cameras weren’t there.  “We don’t know,” Ingraham said. “The thing that I get concerned about is our law enforcement agencies crediting a camera with the entire case when it’s really just a small piece of a case.” The cameras also raise privacy concerns. The new technology is different from speed cameras or red light cameras, Ingraham said.  “They are on all the time. They are not just capturing violators,” Ingraham said. “They are capturing the information of every single person who drives past them.” Sen. John Albers, R-Roswell, who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee, said while the arrest of law enforcement officers warrants “serious attention,” law enforcement is addressing the issue. “We must preserve the legitimate investigative value of these systems while preventing abuse,” Albers said in an editorial provided to The Center Square on Monday. “Public safety and privacy are complementary responsibilities of good government, and responsible oversight of these cameras ensures we do not have to sacrifice one to achieve the other.”

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