Today I clicked on an article about how Stephen Hawking says black holes don’t really exist. It attracted my attention because black holes are cool, Stephen Hawking is smart, and he’s one of the people who got everybody interested in them in the first place.

Unfortunately, Hawking didn’t really say black holes don’t exist. He said we need to understand the event horizon a little differently. Or, IOW, something far less dramatic.

But “Stephen Hawking says we need to understand the event horizon a little differently” wouldn’t have attracted my attention, therefore I wouldn’t have clicked, and therefore the site wouldn’t have earned 1.37 cents from pointing ads at my eyeballs.

Have you noticed? Everything is “dramatic” and “amazing” and superlative in some way. It has to be to grab your attention.

So no, I’m not going to tell you 25 astonishing ways about anything. That’s just a good headline.