The job of a headline is to draw attention to the article beneath it. When a headline instead draws attention to itself, it feels as wrong as a carnival barker cursing out passersby.

The New York Times, which remains among the world’s load-bearing newspapers, has published plenty of stories in 2025 with that rogue carnival barker vibe. “Why is someone screaming this at me?” would be a natural response to headlines like “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” which NYT ran earlier this month, inspiring an apoplectic backlash that forced editors to change it to the only-slightly better “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”. Since that controversial header is one of many quickly corrected misfires from the Paper of Record this year, maybe something else is going on beyond avant-garde attention-

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