"The headline is finding relevance far beyond news media as it becomes a key weapon in fields like politics and business. No longer the exclusive province of copy editors, it is now the cornerstone of emailed political appeals, the fulcrum of crowdsourcing capital on Kickstarter, and arguably the basis of an entire communications medium, the all-headlines microblogging system Twitter…. New York-based Upworthy is part of a gamble by founders from Facebook, Reddit, and BuzzFeed that headlines can advance political change and profits at the same time. The aggregator, whose seed round closed this past October, makes editors write at least 25 different headlines for each post, then plugs top [...]

As you likely know, pine mouth is a hideous, prolonged, somewhat rare, random response to having eaten pine nuts. What's it like? Here's our first-person report: "You're terrified that you are going insane. Everything tastes like you are choking on lemon zest." Now, a new publication by the Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry finds esteemed scientists literally throwing up their hands. They learned a lot about pine nuts and their composition! But nothing useful: "An etiological agent for pine mouth has not been identified either for the cases reported in Europe or for those reported in the United States. Suggestions regarding causality range from the [...]

.bbpBox{background:url(http://a0.twimg.com/profile_background_images/192236530/new_york_ny_2008_01.jpg) #ffffff;padding:20px;}

Anonymous should really make Ticketmaster their next target. #radioheadMon Sep 26 14:21:52 via webMichael Neffheyneff

Everyone in the Radiohead demographic hates Ticketmaster so much right now. MACHINES SAY: SCALPING IS GOOD BUSINESS.

Celebrating Halloween is like going to the opera: some people hate it, some love it, some people hate it but pretend to love it, and everybody’s dressed like an Italian swashbuckler. Halloween and the opera are also alike in that they’re both journeys that couples seldom embark upon separately. (Who spends girl's night out savoring the libretto in Don Giovanni?) The couples who enjoy Halloween tend to do so because it’s a chance to show off bilateral creativity while hanging with friends and maybe getting wrecked. At this very moment, legions of couples are anticipating this coming weekend with greater fervor than the Snickers-craving rugrats for whom the holiday [...]

So maybe this is how it ends for humanity: nibbled to death in your beds. New York City will release a very stern report today about how the bed bug epidemic is going out of control. We're all going to look like our pal Molly in the future! So, we've always said that New York City was a propagator of viruses that then spread throughout the world-mostly we meant intellectual ones, but now we can lay claim to being an incubator and exporter of aggressive, life-ruining insects too. Don't worry. In the year 2400, we'll have achieved a symbiotic melding with the bed bugs; they'll talk [...]

The delightful Pret A Manger sandwich shops which have taken Manhattan by storm in the last decade—in the days when they were backed by McDonald's—began in London. When Pret first showed up here, they went a bit screwy: apparently there was just too much mayo for New Yorkers and they overextended themselves and had to close stores. But they recovered—with new financial partners—quite nicely, and are a happy addition to New York City's lunch options. And back home, in London, Pret is more omnipresent than Starbucks is in New York. Why, sometimes you can see three Prets from a roundabout!

And inside the Prets of London… uh, WE AMERICANS [...]

"For a while, we tried faithfully to reproduce the backward 'R' in Toys 'ᴙ' Us, but it went rogue and ran loose on the page every time we turned our back." ——And that's why the New Yorker can't have nice things.

Rumors on the Internets put the Facebook IPO as coming early next year, which, BOOM, BANG, EVERYTHING BLOWS UP, CONFETTI, DEATH, BOTTLE SERVICE, THE FOUR HORSEMEN, INVISIBLE RICHES, CHINA BUYS BRAZIL, CATS AND DOGS HAVING SEX, THE END OF TIME, ALL THE LIGHTS GO OUT EVERYWHERE, THUNDERDOME, STERILITY, A NAKED OLYMPICS AGAIN, WE ALL TRY TO MOVE TO THE MOON, A SELECT FEW LIVE FOREVER BUT MOSTLY EVERYONE DIES. But first in IPO-landia comes Zynga (who? The makers of FarmVille) and Pandora. And Avaya ("a global leader in business communications")! For one billlllion dollars! One billion dollars. One billion dollars. (One billion dollars.)

Big changes, civic-minded cheeseheads. We hope you're planning to vote, even if you're one of the 20,000-odd out-of-state students at UW-Madison. The polls are open-and they'll remain open until 8 p.m. (For all you coasties, that's 9 p.m.!) Vote your peer-pressured conscience! You can find your Wisconsin polling place here. Not registered? Not to worry, you can register at the polling place. The ballot you receive will be in English-only, because this isn't the frickin' U.N. And now: to the candidates.

Sad news (for wild animals that eat out of dumpsters): "The McRibble," as glorious and end-of-the-empire and probable as it may sound, is a hoax, McDonald's tells Consumerist. Sure it is. The truth is out there, etc.