Parapoetica

“I don’t know what they were thinking,” moans school president

CAMBRIDGE — Susan Hockfield, MIT’s president, vowed to re-examine the way that MIT’s scientists interact after allegations of bullying and cliqueishness surfaced.

Hockfield was shocked to discover this level of bitterness, she said. “These are supposed to be adults. I just don’t get what’s going on in their brains,” said the neuroscientist. According to Hockfield, department leaders frequently act out, throwing tantrums and disrupting classes. “They’re totally mental,” she exclaimed. But the researchers had complaints of their own. “This is a competitive field. How else does she expect us to act?” asked a senior neuropsychiatrist. “If she wants change, she’ll have to lay out specific rules of engagement. We can’t read her mind.”

Like many Americans, I now read my newspapers on the Internet. Six years after leaving D.C., my “home” paper is still the Washington Post; it’s free, it’s national, and while it’s sometimes painfully liberal (even for me!), I know what to expect.

But in order to fit their headlines into the tiny three-column front-page format, they have to do some shortening. A lot of shortening. Four words, maybe five if they’re short. They’re not headlines anymore; sometimes they’re not even coherent. For a day or two, I was convinced that the editors had been replaced by some type of automated thesaurus, so bad was the misuse of pseudo-synonyms.

And sometimes, that gets pretty funny.

Like many Americans, I now read my newspapers on the Internet. Six years after leaving D.C., my “home” paper is still the Washington Post; it’s free, it’s national, and while it’s sometimes painfully liberal (even for me!), I know what to expect.

But in order to fit their headlines into the tiny three-column front-page format, they have to do some shortening. A lot of shortening. Four words, maybe five if they’re short. They’re not headlines anymore; sometimes they’re not even coherent. For a day or two, I was convinced that the editors had been replaced by some type of automated thesaurus, so bad was the misuse of pseudo-synonyms. It gets better, because throughout the day, someone’s constantly tweaking the headlines—whether for fit or meaning, I don’t know, but they don’t always succeed.

And sometimes, that gets pretty funny.

The rules: The “headblips” are real. The subheads are fictional. Unless otherwise cited, they are from today’s Washington Post.

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