[Deimorz]

It's a very common style of headlines recently, and a lot of the time you can remove the "How" without changing the meaning. For example, if I look down The Verge's recent posts, the first one starting with "How" is "How sampling and streaming are changing the future of music" [1]. Titling that "Sampling and streaming are changing the future of music" works fine.

I don't know that it's particularly useful most of the time, it's usually just unnecessary. An example where it actually should have been removed that I remember was this article on The Guardian a while back: "Suburb in the sky: how Jakartans built an entire village on top of a mall" [2]. There's nothing in the article at all about how they built it. It's just a trendy headline style for some reason, and gets used even in cases where it doesn't apply, like that one.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/17/20870347/sampling-streami...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/aug/05/suburb-in-the...

[thom]

Perhaps this cheapening of the word 'how' explains the prevalence of the academic literary tic 'the manner in which' in its place.