[mannykannot]

This has become a pervasive journalistic practice, and I am mildly curious as to why. Has it been found to encourage a subset of readers to keep on reading, and maybe become subscribers? Maybe some readers routinely scan these teasers to decide whether they will read the article. Is it a form of SEO? (I would guess not, but it's not my field.)

It is almost as if some junior editor (or LLM, though I think this practice predates them) has been given the job of dividing the article into sections with headers, but can't be trusted to use their own words for the headers (though they can still, of course, both divide and quote out of context.) Here, this appears to have been applied after someone else (the author, perhaps?) had already divided it into sections with traditional summaries for headers.

That said, I felt this article is much more engaging than the average university press release, and presents a genuinely significant discovery without, as far as I can tell, another now-commonplace annoyance: the excessive exaggeration or misrepresentation of that significance (though one might quibble over "...and could rewrite our timeline of complex life on Earth altogether.")

[Keysh]

Pull quotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote) have been used in magazines for decades; they’re not exactly new.

[mannykannot]

I should have known that, as I have been reading magazines for decades, so the question now (for me) is why I have only recently found them to be intrusive - is it me that's changed?

[Tarsul]

I think it's more annoying when the quote is (more or less) directly before the actual same text (like here). As such, it has no helpful function for the normal reader - it's only annoying (but might help the skim reader or rather only the "scroller" who doesn't really read). Whereas in magazines it was that you opened the page and looked at those few quotes and decided whether you wanted to read the text, in that way the quotes are not really annoying imo.