East meets West in the pop arena in this new music competition series. Western chart-toppers from across the decades—including Kesha, the Spice Girls, Boy George, and Patti LaBelle— team with such top K-pop acts as Itzy, Ateez, and Billlie to put a K-pop spin on the Westerners’ hits. The teams then deliver the songs in a performance battle before a live audience in Seoul. Friday, Aug. 29, Apple TV+.

by Tom Zeller Jr.

“Roughly 40% of the global population, or 3.1 billion people, suffer some kind of headache disorder,” said Brandy Schillace in The Wall Street Journal. Yet because the source is unknown and invisible, the pain is often brushed off, “or worse, considered imaginary.” Tom Zeller Jr.’s new book about migraines and other debilitating headaches can’t solve the mystery of their cause. But he provides “ample and vivid evidence of the all-consuming pain that headache sufferers endure” and, using a tour through medical history and his own experiences of excruciating cluster headaches, argues powerfully that researchers and their funders must direct more attention to relieving the afflicted. 

“Why are migraines such a common part of human experience?” asked physician Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker. Other mammals don’t seem to suffer chronic headaches, which suggests that they’re produced in the interaction of the most primitive and the more advanced parts of the brain. Headaches were taken seriously by the medical profession up through the 19th century. But even though 40 million of today’s Americans suffer from migraines, costing the economy as much as $1 trillion a year, research into the cause has been feeble ever since, leaving doctors divided about whether the root trouble lies in abnormal functioning of blood vessels or in an abnormal flux of ions in the brain, mimicking epilepsy. Like many other migraine sufferers, I now use several medications to manage the challenge, after chasing a medical solution for years. “Reading Zeller’s book, I was reminded that there is a kind of uneasy fellowship in this condition—a vast, involuntary community of people mapping out their lives between attacks, haunted by uncertainty but sustained in part by accounts like his.” 

The reasons that so little progress has been made are “highly contested,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Migraines afflict three times as many women as men, suggesting that some blame lies in gender bias. But cluster headaches, which are more painful but far rarer, afflict mostly men. Fortunately, there’s been progress in the past 35 years on treatment options, including the one I depend on, sumatriptan, which stimulates serotonin receptors. “While the medical explanations in The Headache occasionally made my eyes glaze over,” Zeller’s accounts of feuds among headache researchers and potential federal funders “present a delectable blend of dish and substance.” And such fights matter. After all, “for millions of people, headaches are a literal torment.”

The British actor who made audiences swoon

Terence Stamp soared to stardom in the 1960s on the strength of his piercing blue eyes and artfully tousled hair. Named “the world’s best-looking man” when he was in his 20s, the British actor made viewers swoon with his turn as a naïve seaman in Billy Budd (1962), quickly followed by roles as a menacing psychopath in The Collector (1965) and a sinister swordsman in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). Billy Budd earned him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe statue, and he won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival for The Collector. Having become almost as famous for the starlets he dated as for his talent, he left the movies for a long sabbatical throughout his 30s and returned, more seasoned, to take such roles as the villainous General Zod in Superman (1978) and a transgender nightclub performer in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). “I had transmuted myself,” he said. “I no longer saw myself as a leading man. I just decided I was a character actor now.” 

The son of a tugboat captain, Stamp grew up in a poor East London neighborhood. His school recommended he become a bricklayer; instead, he got a scholarship to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. With Billy Budd, “the cockney Stamp” was suddenly a darling of swinging ’60s London, “enjoying all the accoutrements that went with celebrity,” said The Guardian. That included high-profile romances with actress Julie Christie and supermodel Jean Shrimpton, and he developed a reputation with the ladies. But he “famously failed to get on” with his directors, said The Times (U.K.). “Intense, brooding, and enigmatic, he was never an easy man.” After meeting an Indian mystic, he decided to chuck stardom and stop chasing hunky roles. He took up vegetarianism and yoga and moved to India to study under Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. 

Stamp came back to acting because he wanted to work with Marlon Brando in Superman, said The New York Times, and he arrived “with a seriously receding hairline, devilish facial hair, and a newly mature persona.” For the next four decades, he worked steadily in character roles, appearing in over 50 movies. His final performance, in the horror thriller Last Night in Soho (2021), was praised as “a master class in minimalist menace.” He also published four volumes of memoirs and a cookbook for those with wheat and dairy intolerances. “I don’t have any ambitions,” he said. “I’m always amazed there’s another job.”