Fred Schwaller in Nature:
Andrea West remembers the first time she heard about a new class of migraine medication that could end her decades of pain. It was 2021 and she heard a scientist on the radio discussing the promise of gepants, a class of drug that for the first time seemed to prevent migraine attacks. West followed news about these drugs closely, and when she heard last year that atogepant was approved for use in the United Kingdom, she went straight to her physician.
West had endured migraines for 70 years. Since she started taking the drug, she hasn’t had one. “It’s marvellous stuff. It’s genuinely changed my life,” she says.
For ages, the perception of migraine has been one of suffering with little to no relief. In ancient Egypt, physicians strapped clay crocodiles to people’s heads and prayed for the best. And as late as the seventeenth century, surgeons bored holes into people’s skulls — some have suggested — to let the migraine out. The twentieth century brought much more effective treatments, but they did not work for a significant fraction of the roughly one billion people who experience migraine worldwide.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Black Women Are The Mules Of The Earth is a quote from Zora Neale Hurston who spoke through the heroine Janie Crawford in her 1937 book, ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. I began to grapple with the imagery that statement elicited, whether I should interpret it as praise for our strength or a derogating description that is symbolic of victimization and bondage. African Americans are faced with the psychological challenge of reconciling with an African Heritage and an European upbringing and education, thus bringing about a multi-facetted conception of self. W.E.B DuBois called this double consciousness, which is a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of another. Based in popular culture, the black female iconography has been the saviors, cooks, cleaners, caretakers of their children and other people’s children, the ones responsible for making things better that we didn’t mess up in the first place, the sex objects, superheroes, the magical negro, the ones that are everything to everyone while operating under a public gaze that has constructed this superhuman stereotype. Without being conscious of it, our culture’s imagination is eager to distort black women and dehumanize us.
RD said:
DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are arranged into sequences — words, paragraphs, chapters, perhaps — in every organism, from bacteria to humans. Like a language, they encode information. But humans can’t easily read or interpret these instructions for life. We cannot, at a glance, tell the difference between a DNA sequence that functions in an organism and a random string of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s.
Over time, as knowledgeable elders pass away, the original rationale for a taboo might be entirely forgotten. In such cases, the origins of a rule might be recoverable only through inference or imaginative reconstruction. Similarly, many widely recognised superstitions, such as those involving black cats, have historical roots that are scarcely remembered today. In medieval Europe, black cats were associated with witches and seen as omens of evil. Today, the belief that crossing a black cat’s path brings bad luck persists as a cultural remnant, entirely disconnected from its original association with witch trials.
By the turn of the 21st century, however, a renegade group of plant physiologists had had enough. They argued that it was past time to bring existing theories of plant behavior into line with the avalanche of new observations enabled by late 20th-century advances in molecular biology, genomics, ecology and neurophysiology. Perhaps they weren’t reading anyone’s mind, but it sure started to look like plants had (some version of) their own.
According to legend, the ancient Greek poet Philoxenus wished for a throat as long as that of a crane so he could protract the time he spent swallowing. Another formulation of this desire, writes literary critic and historian of ancient Greek literature Pauline LeVen, comes from the third-century BCE poet Machon, who claimed Philoxenus wished “
During the high point of Hollywood’s studio era, when motion pictures made their storied transition from silents to talkies, no studio was more glamorous, more lavish, more star-studded than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (“more stars than there are in heaven” was its apt motto). It boasted such directorial luminaries as King Vidor, Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch; its contract writers included Lenore Coffee, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos; and its roster of A-listers was seemingly endless—Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire were among its brightest talents.
In the summer of 2023, Oxfam launched an initiative called 
Not since the muzak corporation
A pair of landmark studies, 
Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, none but the most stubborn could deny that the leading cultural institutions in the United States remained under the dominance of the self-styled progressive left. Circa 2019, prominent progressive scholars such as Corey Robin could be found imploring their peers to wake up and to take stock of just how much ground the left had gained. At the same time, astute readers of online discourse were warning of subterranean rumblings from the manosphere — which in fact began much earlier and for some years seemed to be contained within the same virtual space as what was then a gestating proto-wokeism. I can remember as early as 2014 or so, the most perspicacious of my friends telling me I should really be paying attention to Gamergate if I wanted to understand the future of US politics. I did check in briefly, saw that it was all just a bunch of kids fighting over kids’ stuff, and checked right back out again.
Like every episode of “Saturday Night Live” since 1975, Sunday’s three-hour anniversary special was a confusing, celebrity-packed, occasionally funny grab-bag. And we have some thoughts.