The stupid, it burns

You might think that an article with the headline "Pill That Eliminates the Period Gets Mixed Reviews" would be about women who have used hormonal contraceptives to stop menstruation, and how their experiences with doing so range from positive to negative. Instead, we have precisely one "review" ... and it's of Seasonale, a product which reduces periods to four a year. Moreover, the review is wildly enthusiastic:

“I had some months when I couldn’t get out of bed unless I popped 600 milligrams of Motrin,” said Marcella O’Neal, a department manager for Nordstrom in Atlanta. Ms. O’Neal, 36, said Seasonale had eliminated many of her symptoms — cramping, hot flashes and depression. “I love it, actually,” she said.

Now, the article itself is pretty terrible. But even bad articles deserve accurate headlines. Perhaps "Pill That Eliminates the Period Provokes Anxiety, Excitement"? Words have meanings, folks.

(As for why I think the article is terrible: it completely elides the distinction between whether suppressing one's periods is a bad idea and whether the means to do so should be legally prohibited by the government; moreover, it's written as if women hadn't been taking control of their periods without the FDA's blessing for decades. It's a great example of two of the worst tendencies in NYTimes journalism: the lazy substitution of unrepresentative anecdotes for data, and the unwillingness to question the Authority Paradigm: the worldview wherein all decisions must be mediated by some appropriately authoritative institution. Ugh.)