Friday, April 3, 2009

I don't know who writes Will Saletan's headlines, but (a) it's probably a single person, maybe Saletan himself, going by their stylistic consistency over a period of two years or so, (b) aren't they stunningly awful?

Shades of Gay [The heterogeneity of homosexuality]
Dish Respect [The political crackdown on IVF embryo screening]
Brainchild Abuse [Bad uses of good technology]
Vaginal Innard Course [Donating a kidney through your vagina or rectum.]
Night of the Living Dad [Software, soldiers, and the future of ghosts.]
Tip of the Juiceberg
No Chubby for Old Men
Miss Conceptions
Original Skin
Crap and Trade, Revisited
Denial of Cervix
Fetal Subtraction

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5 comments:

zbs said...

Sorry, "Tip of the Juiceberg" is brilliant.

Grobstein said...

Entirely possible, but you may consider having a look at Slate headlines generally before you leap to conclusions.

Grobstein said...

Actually I really like some of these. Hmm. "Crap and Trade" is basically brilliant. "Denial of Cervix"??? "Night of the Living Dad" is good on its own but seems a poor fit.

Grobstein said...

Shades of Gay are okay, too

Zed said...

Well, I think many of the titles would be brilliant rather than awful if they were relevant to the articles. (Or if there were more than one kind of wordplay...) On the other hand, the formula exemplified by "Night of the Living Dad" -- 1. take a catchphrase, 2. change a random word to a similar-sounding word that appears somewhere in your article, 3. rinse, wash, repeat -- doesn't always give you a title that has anything to do with the article. "Denial of cervix" for instance is about correlations between genital cancer and divorce rates.