Titles R Hard

Do Cartels Exist? A revisionist view of the drug wars. It's a super bad title for the piece for a LOT of reasons. It currently has five comments, which I didn't expect to see. The last time I looked at it, there was only one comment and it starts off "The cartels certainly think they exist..." The title makes it sound like "drug dealing in Mexico doesn't really exist" and that's clearly the interpretation of the person who left that first comment: That person apparently thinks the piece is saying "There are NO DRUG DEALERS in Mexico. It was completely fabricated by corrupt governments, a fairytale to cover up their own corruption." which isn't at all what it says. It is saying that, yes, drug dealers exist and illicit drugs are big business in Mexico but characterizing them as cartels is misleading and most likely is done to serve the needs of the people making such characterizations of activities that are, by their very ...

The title of this post is what my mind got out of this title: A respected psychiatrist paid a Playboy model’s rent. Then he turned up dead in the desert. If you read the article, it isn't so cut and dried. The headline is emphasizing the lurid, but it isn't actually 100 percent clear if this is a sex scandal. The psychiatrist had a history of helping people with sob stories. The details in the story actually make me skeptical of the insinuation that this was a sexual relationship. The details given in the article don't actually sound to me like Kelsey Turner was a "kept woman" and Thomas Burchard was the man keeping her. I think the story that he was just a generous guy who helped out a lot of people is plausible. He paid her rent for some time for a house that provided shelter for her, her two children and her mother. The house was apparently about twenty miles from where he lived, a little inconvenient for dropping by for sex regularly without his gi...

I posted this article to Hacker News with the title A viral photograph of "ironic hatred" and the deafening silence that followed . It's a well-written and even-handed piece, but the title is basically clickbait that tells you nothing. The actual title is: The Baraboo Nazi Prom Photo Shocked The World. The City’s Response Shocked Its Residents. It is essentially designed to have you read the article just to find out what shocking thing the city did. I'm not sure why it was titled that way. I think the most charitable explanation is that it's a surprisingly even-handed piece on a very difficult topic. This makes it even harder to title than usual, and titles are already hard. I will note that the original title also did not make it clear to me what was meant by "city." I kept looking for some official response from the city government. The piece is more about the city generally -- various residents involved in this unfortunate debacle, school st...

The title of this post is what my mind got out of this title: The intersection of biology and transportation No, the piece is not actually about organo-tech vehicles. It's actually about taking lessons from human blood flow and applying them to traffic engineering. (eyes cross -- they so missed on the title). I liked the piece and wanted to post it to Hacker News, but HN is a tough crowd and they are very picky about titles. You need to not offend their sensibilities when titling a piece there. It can live or die based largely on the title. On Hacker News, you have an 80 character limit for titles. Generally speaking, you are also supposed to use the original title. These two things sometimes clash. Additionally, they don't like click bait. When the title doesn't really work for Hacker News, a common practice is to grab something from a subtitle or a descriptive phrase from the content. I initially pulled these two pieces, both of which exceed 80 characters, ...

The title of this post is what my mind got out of this title: In developing world, an expensive push to reduce cooking fire deaths falls short In reality, the article is about three things: The negative health effects of smoke inhalation due to cooking over open fire, which shortens lives in the developing world. Concerns that the practice of preparing meals using cook fires contributed to global warming and threatened the sustainability of forests. The fact that trying to solve the problem hasn't exactly gone swimmingly. My suggestions: Pricey "Clean" Stoves Campaign Falls Short of Health And Environmental Promises Developing World "Clean" Cook Stove Campaign Meets With Array of Disappointments In practice, biomass stoves fail to adequately mitigate health and environmental impacts of biomass cook fires in developing world In Ironic Twist, "Clean" Cook Stove Campaign Moves To Fossil Fuels To Up Its Environmental Game Cook...

The title of this post is what my mind got out of this title: 50 underage girls in four states mailed creepy packages at school, putting parents, FBI on alert My impression on reading the title was that 50 different underaged girls had sent packages that were deemed both creepy and somehow not unrelated events, enough so that it put the FBI on alert. When you read the article, what actually happened is that 50 different girls received creepy packages, apparently all from the same guy. That makes much more sense, but I would have never guessed that was what the title meant. Additionally, to me underage suggests maybe 16 or 17 years old. It is the sort of thing that signifies jail bait a la "Ossifer, I swear, I thought she was 18!" (Ossifer = how drunk people say (police) officer in jokes.) Although no ages were given in the piece, these girls received their packages at their elementary schools. They are likely no more than 12 years old. The person doing the maili...