One: please rescue Slate from the self-parodying obsession with "provocative contrarianism"; when you constantly run articles along the lines of "The Sun--could it actually be cold?" and "Actually, poor people make too much money", you're demonstrating that your fetish for counter-intuitivity has replaced writing good articles and telling the truth as top priority. Being contrarian isn't always, in fact, a method to discover hidden truths, and it's not nearly as entertaining as you at Slate seem to think it is. It's like you've got some quota for the number of times a day you need to tweak those liberal elites and their mores. Every attack on liberalism isn't always standing up to orthodoxy. Very often, around here, it's just empty noise, attempts to undercut sound principles because of who holds them, independent of any actual critique of the principles themselves. What I'm asking you for, in other words, is finally an editorial maturity that the magazine has always had. You've had enormous success. Stop acting like you'll only get attention if you constantly undermine liberal dogma. It's unbecoming, it's self-defeating, and it's time to move on.

Two: no more ridiculously over-the-top fawning from yourself and Jeffrey Goldberg about the Sopranos, or anything else, for that matter. Seriously, reading a dialogue between you two about that show is like reading copy from one of Will Ferrell's Inside the Actor's Studio sketches. It's embarrassing.

The "contrarian gimmick" seems to lie more in the article titles than in the articles themselves.

As if somebody submits an article to the editors, and it is then "processed": "Hey, what contrarian title can we give THIS one?"

Then the title is affixed and the desired result is hoped-for: hits and Fray responses ("Whaddya mean the sun is COLD!") to show to the advertisers.

Hard to see how they will get rid of the marketing hook of the whole enterprise, irritating though it is...

Unfortunately, "Man Bites Dog" remains the Holy Grail for editors all over. Console yourself with the fact that it's at least better than the strained pun. I mean, he could have used "Slate Gets Plotzed" for this article's hed.

I gotta say, the misleading headline is a hard impulse to check. It's pretty much impossible to reduce a thousand word article to a four-word headline without introducing some distortion. And, of course, those four words have to be enticing or provocative enough that interested readers will know to click the link.

I don't think anyone's under orders to write contrarian or misleading headlines - it's just an inevitable byproduct of a condensed TOC/flyout menu.

That said, it's pretty hard to miss an institutional bias towards snark.

Don't ever change, Slate.

We wouldn't have it any other way.

ha! lucabrasi, that was snarkily perfect.