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The author retorts “I really have an issue with the word hoax.” He regards himself as a performance artist. His response – “It’s the people who reported it who are deceiving their audience.”

Why is fake news so popular on newssites? Here are two reasons: first, it provides emotional “buzz.” Second, because it can make a lot of money. As the Washington Bureau chief of the Pulitzer winning Huffington Post lamented, “If you throw something up without fact checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”Especially when, as at places like Bloomberg, remuneration is based on the number of hits an article receives. But incentives are wrong not just for news gathering organizations.

Americans continue to believe important historical “facts” that are untrue. After 9/11, Americans were incensed to hear that the many in the Middle East thought Osama bin Laden’s horrifying attack was the product of a CIA-Mossad plot. To this day, large majorities in countries like Pakistan think the massacre of 9/11 was created in Washington or Tel Aviv.

Yet close to a majority of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein, tyrant of Iraq, was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, especially before the 9/11 attack. The Bush administration told them so.Which people in the Middle East rightly regard as preposterous.Saddam Hussein was the leader of a boldly secular, Arabist tyranny. Sunni fanatics like Al Qaeda were his regime’s blood enemies. That they would work together rather than murder each other was just insane. Welcome to the world of fict and faction.

What can we learn from this? Plausibility is not truth; when something is “too good to be true” it generally isn’t; institutions increasingly do not back up what they proclaim and sell.And the “free informational marketplace” of the Internet is a wonderful site for fraud, scams, lies, plausible lies, and pleasant, beautiful untruths. So we all need our own truth detectors.

Indeed, when the Martu and other desert foragers were forced to leave their lands between the 1950s and 1970s, surveys showed that 10 to 20 native mammal species went extinct and the numbers of 43 others dropped sharply

The research compellingly argues that “small-scale human societies can actually exist in an ecosystem without damaging it over a very long period of time,” says archeologist Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “It’s just wonderful science.”

Eventually Brad Katsuyama came to realize that the most sophisticated investors didn’t know what was going on in their own market. Not the big mutual funds, Fidelity and Vanguard. Not the big money-management firms like T. Rowe Price and Capital Group. Not even the most sophisticated hedge funds.

The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became

Technology had collided with Wall Street in a peculiar way. It had been used to increase efficiency. But it had also been used to introduce a peculiar sort of market inefficiency. Taking advantage of loopholes in some well-meaning regulation introduced in the mid-2000s, some large amount of what Wall Street had been doing with technology was simply so someone inside the financial markets would know something that the outside world did not. The same system that once gave us subprime-mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock-market trades involving fractions of a penny that occurred at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand.

The trouble with the stock market — with all of the public and private exchanges — was that they were fantastically gameable, and had been gamed: first by clever guys in small shops, and then by prop traders who moved inside the big Wall Street banks. That was the problem, Puz thought. From the point of view of the most sophisticated traders, the stock market wasn’t a mechanism for channeling capital to productive enterprise but a puzzle to be solved.

As they worked through the order types, the Puzzle Masters created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called electronic front-running — seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing ahead of him to the next (what had happened to Katsuyama when he traded at RBC). The second they called rebate arbitrage — using the new complexity to game the seizing of whatever legal kickbacks, called rebates within the industry, the exchange offered without actually providing the liquidity that the rebate was presumably meant to entice. The third, and probably by far the most widespread, they called slow-market arbitrage. This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges before those exchanges were able to react. This happened all day, every day, and very likely generated more billions of dollars a year than the other strategies combined.

IEX had made its point: That to function properly, a financial market didn’t need to be rigged in someone’s favor. It didn’t need payment for order flow and co-location and all sorts of unfair advantages possessed by a small handful of traders. All it needed was for investors to take responsibility for understanding it, and then to seize its controls. “The backbone of the market,” Katsuyama says, “is investors coming together to trade.”

If an investor as large as T. Rowe Price, which acted on behalf of millions of investors, had trouble obtaining the information it needed to determine if its brokers had acted in their interest, what chance did the little guy have?

The stock market really was rigged. Katsuyama often wondered how enterprising politicians and plaintiffs’ lawyers and state attorneys general would respond to that realization. (This March, the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, announced a new investigation of the stock exchanges and the dark pools, and their relationships with high-frequency traders.

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. It is no mere chance that our older universities developed from clerical schools. Both churches and universities — insofar as they live up to their true function — serve the ennoblement of the individual.”

Don’t structure your encounters with them the way people do today, through brainstorming sessions (those don’t work) or through conferences with projection screen

Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions.

this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding

Instead look at the way children learn in groups. They make discoveries alone, but bring their treasures to the group. Then the group crowds around and hashes it out. In conversation, conflict, confusion and uncertainty can be metabolized and digested through somebody else.

66 percent of workers aren’t able to focus on one thing at a time. Seventy percent of employees don’t have regular time for creative or strategic thinking while at work.

Many of us lead lives of distraction, unable to focus on what we know we should focus on.

I wonder if we might be able to copy some of the techniques used by the creatures who are phenomenally good at learning things: children.

Language used throughout the center is artfully neutral, and each specimen is accompanied by only a few basic facts and a brief story highlighting a social issue. One display shows dried leaves from a transgenic American chestnut, engineered with a wheat gene to resist the fungal blight that nearly eradicated wild populations of the tree. An audio guide recounts how researchers decided to use the wheat gene instead of one from frogs, for fear of controversy.

The museum’s approach could frustrate science enthusiasts when social and ethical questions push interesting scientific details into the background.

She identifies herself as having just started her second postdoc in the lab of the adviser trying to look down her shirt. A postdoctoral researcher already has a Ph.D., and frequently has her own funding, but does not yet have a permanent position or the institutional affiliation and (relative) job security that goes with it

Postdocs rely on the forbearance of an adviser who gives them lab space (and usually some other resources), an institutional affiliation, and, one hopes, some mentoring in how to succeed as a member of their scientific community.

terrible advice

postdoc wants an adviser that engages her as a scientist, someone committed to helping her gain both the competence and the confidence to become a full-fledged colleague in the scientific community. These are not goals that are fostered when the adviser regularly tries to look down the postdoc’s shirt.

Huang’s column suggested that, because workplaces are part of life, they are also places where we ought to expect people’s libido to influence their behavior. She wrote, “the kind of behavior you mention is common in the workplace.”

postdoc may have more power than a graduate student, she has significantly less power than her adviser, especially given the importance of networking in building one’s scientific reputation, establishing future collaborations, and locating a permanent position.

Huang offered her opinion that the adviser in question had not crossed that legal line. On that basis, Huang argued that even though leering is inappropriate workplace behavior, the postdoc should “put up with it, with good humor if you can.”

It matters not a whit whether the behavior rises to the level of unlawful sexual harassment. It

Telling this early career scientist to grin and bear unprofessional behavior from her adviser, rather than doing something to mitigate it, leaves her stuck in a professional relationship where it may never be possible to engage the adviser’s scientific interest without concerns about engaging his carnal interest

It will be hard to get mentoring without wondering if there are unspoken strings attached.

It will be hard for the postdoc to believe her adviser sees her as a colleague — or for her to see herself as one

So “Bothered” probably doesn’t want to confront her adviser in a way that comes across as accusing, and she should almost certainly have back-up from someone else in her scientific community with enough power to protect her

If it doesn’t look like there’s a reasonable way to ask the adviser to stop without repercussions, the postdoc’s confidants can help her develop an escape plan so “Bothered” can receive the mentoring (and salary and benefits) she needs without the hassle of an adviser’s unprofessional behavior.

The result: reassurance and relief. Everything was in the normal range for her age, and she registered as superior on the ability to perform tasks and solve problems.

Simple tests done in eight to 12 minutes in a doctor’s office can determine whether memory issues are normal for one’s age or are problematic and warrant a more thorough evaluation.

more than half of older adults with signs of memory loss never see a doctor about it

“Early evaluation and identification of people with dementia may help them receive care earlier,”

“It can help families make plans for care, help with day-to-day tasks, including medication administration, and watch for future problems that can occur.”

Both tests measure orientation to time, date and place; attention and concentration; ability to calculate; memory; language; and conceptual thinking.

its score can be skewed by a person’s level of education, cultural background, a learning or speech disorder, and language fluency

rituals change the way we pay attention as much as — perhaps more than — they express belief.

ritual isn’t about expressing religious commitment at all, but about doing something in a way that marks the moment as different from the everyday and forces you to see it as important. Their point is that performing a ritual focuses your attention on some moment and deems it worthy of respect

rituals work, if by “work” we mean that they change people’s sense of their lives. It turns out that saying that you are grateful makes you feel grateful. Saying that you are thankful makes you feel thankful. To a world so familiar with the general unreliability of language, that may seem strange. But it is true.

In a study in which undergraduates were assigned to write weekly either about things they were grateful or thankful for; hassles; or “events or circumstances that affected you in the past week,” those who wrote about gratitude felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the coming week. There have now been many such studies.

Religion is fundamentally a practice that helps people to look at the world as it is and yet to experience it — to some extent, in some way — as it should be

Much of what people actually do in church — finding fellowship, celebrating birth and marriage, remembering those we have lost, affirming the values we cherish — can be accomplished with a sense of God as metaphor, as story, or even without any mention of God at all.

they analyzed the diversity of existing H5N1 strains and found that many wild viruses are already tantalizingly close to becoming potentially contagious among humans.

we know very little about the actual receptors in human airways that are relevant for flu viruses.” Even the so-called “human” receptors can vary significantly, and it’s unclear which ones are found in different parts of the airways, or how common they are.

identified should be tested in ferret experiments to see if they genuinely are more efficient at spreading between mammals. However, given the controversy surrounding the development of potentially contagious flu strains, Fouchier wonders “whether we would be allowed to empirically test this newly acquired knowledge in animal models.”

if one person can think he’s hooking up while the other feels she’s being raped, it makes sense to have a law that eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding. “You shouldn’t be allowed to make the assumption that if you find someone lying on a bed, they’re free for sexual pleasure,”

About a quarter of all states, and the District of Columbia, now say sex isn’t legal without positive agreement,

And though most people think of “yes means yes” as strictly for college students, it is actually poised to become the law of the land.

But criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores.

Should we really put people in jail for not doing what most people aren’t doing? (Or at least, not yet?)

It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. Colleges are entitled to uphold their own standards of comportment, even if enforcement of that behavior is spotty or indifferent to the rights of the accused. It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication.

Most people just aren’t very talkative during the delicate tango that precedes sex, and the re-education required to make them more forthcoming would be a very big project. Nor are people unerringly good at decoding sexual signals. If they were, we wouldn’t have romantic comedies.

“If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”

The example points to a trend evident both on campuses and in courts: the criminalization of what we think of as ordinary sex and of sex previously considered unsavory but not illegal.

Some new crimes outlined in the proposed code, for example, assume consent to be meaningless under conditions of unequal power. Consensual sex between professionals (therapists, lawyers and the like) and their patients and clients, for instance, would be a fourth-degree felony, punishable by significant time in prison.

most of these occupations already have codes of professional conduct, and victims also have recourse in the civil courts. Miscreants, she says, “should be drummed out of the profession or sued for malpractice.”

It’s important to remember that people convicted of sex crimes may not only go to jail, they can wind up on a sex-offender registry, with dire and lasting consequences.

We shouldn’t forget the harm done to American communities by the national passion for incarceration, either. In a letter to the American Law Institute, Ms. Smith listed several disturbing statistics: roughly one person in 100 behind bars, one in 31 under correctional supervision

the case for affirmative consent is “compelling,” he says. Mr. Schulhofer has argued that being raped is much worse than having to endure that awkward moment when one stops to confirm that one’s partner is happy to continue. Silence or inertia, often interpreted as agreement, may actually reflect confusion, drunkenness or “frozen fright,” a documented physiological response in which a person under sexual threat is paralyzed by terror

To critics who object that millions of people are having sex without getting unqualified assent and aren’t likely to change their ways, he’d reply that millions of people drive 65 miles per hour despite a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, but the law still saves lives. As long as “people know what the rules of the road are,” he says, “the overwhelming majority will comply with them.”

He understands that the law will have to bring a light touch to the refashioning of sexual norms, which is why the current draft of the model code suggests classifying penetration without consent as a misdemeanor, a much lesser crime than a felony.

This may all sound reasonable, but even a misdemeanor conviction goes on the record as a sexual offense and can lead to registration

An affirmative consent standard also shifts the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which represents a real departure from the traditions of criminal law in the United States. Affirmative consent effectively means that the accused has to show that he got the go-ahead

if the law requires a “no,” then the jury will likely perceive any uncertainty about that “no” as a weakness in the prosecution’s case and not convict. But if the law requires a “yes,” then ambiguity will bolster the prosecutor’s argument: The guy didn’t get unequivocal consent, therefore he must be guilty of rape.

“It’s an unworkable standard,” says the Harvard law professor Jeannie C. Suk. “It’s only workable if we assume it’s not going to be enforced, by and large.” But that’s worrisome too. Selectively enforced laws have a nasty history of being used to harass people deemed to be undesirable, because of their politics, race or other reasons.

it’s probably just a matter of time before “yes means yes” becomes the law in most states. Ms. Suk told me that she and her colleagues have noticed a generational divide between them and their students. As undergraduates, they’re learning affirmative consent in their mandatory sexual-respect training sessions, and they come to “believe that this really is the best way to define consent, as positive agreement,” she says. When they graduate and enter the legal profession, they’ll probably reshape the law to reflect that belief.

Sex may become safer for some, but it will be a whole lot more anxiety-producing for others.

that there’s no way to rule out this possibility ahead of time. We have no reason to think our society has achieved moral perfection, and we’d have no obvious way of knowing if it had. It’s even possible that we’re not making progress at all.

what we think of as truth, including moral truth, is nothing more than a product of the current power regimes of our society. It’d be no wonder, then, that the past seems backwards to us, because we’re judging it from standards that are designed to justify and perpetuate the system we have right now.

But that is exactly what Mr. Grinda did. He moved out of the Bedford house in December 2012, ditched the city apartment and got rid of the McLaren. He donated clothes, sports equipment and kitchen utensils to the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Lower Manhattan. He gave his furniture to Housing Works and he packed a Tumi carry-on suitcase with 50 items, including two pairs of jeans, a bathing suit and 10 pairs of socks.

Once he realized his days as a roving houseguest were numbered, Mr. Grinda decided to shift his approach: He kept traveling, but now he was renting apartments on Airbnb or staying in luxury hotels.

Born in suburban Paris in 1974, Mr. Grinda graduated from Princeton in 1996 with a degree in economics. He worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company for two years before moving back to France to found an online auction start-up funded by the business magnate Bernard Arnault, which Mr. Grinda sold in 2000.He returned to the United States, where he co-founded Zingy, a mobile phone ringtone and game maker, which fetched $80 million in a 2004 sale. After that, he was a founder of OLX, a Craigslist-like service that has become one of the largest global classified websites.Now he is an entrepreneur and angel investor, with more than 200 investments to date, who visits start-ups in Berlin, Paris, New York, San Francisco and other cities.

He looks (and acts) something like Sheldon Cooper, the oddball science geek played by Jim Parsons on “The Big Bang Theory,” an observation Mr. Grinda himself has made.“Friends, who knew me in my late teens and early twenties, would tell you I had exactly the same delusional sense of self-worth and condescending and arrogant self-centered worldview,” he wrote in a blog post that noted his similarities to the sitcom character.

In all, Mr. Grinda said, he stayed with about 15 friends and family members in the first months of 2013. “Everyone was, like, ‘It’s a great idea. Come over,’ ” Mr. Grinda said. “The problem is, the idea of ‘Great, come over’ and me there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is very different. Especially when their lives are not in sync with mine.”

“When I looked back at the things that mattered the most to me,” he said, “they were experiences, friendships and family — none of which I had invested much in, partly because I was too busy, and partly because I felt anchored by my possessions.”

He hatched a new plan: His friends and family members would come to him.“Rather than me going to them and disrupting their routine,” he said, “getting everyone together in a setting of vacation makes more sense.”

He invited his parents, his friends, their partners, children and nannies for a two-week stay in Anguilla, an island east of Puerto Rico, where he rented two conjoining houses, at a cost of $240,000, with chefs and full house service (and a total of 19 bedrooms).

Mr. Grinda forgot to consider that not everyone lives as he does.For one thing, he had scheduled the Anguilla vacation during the school year, which meant friends with children couldn’t make it. The island’s remoteness, furthermore, meant some guests were forced to endure a tangle of flight connections, leaving some of them exhausted by the time they arrived.And many of the people he invited, who had jobs and other obligations, could stay only for a long weekend.

Mr. Grinda said he has learned a lot from his very big downgrade. He reconnected with old friends, even if it meant annoying them a little, and he rekindled his relationship with his father.“We spent time talking about his life,” he said. And he is no longer against the idea of having a fixed address; he said he is now in negotiations to buy a two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, which he plans to rent out when he is not in town.

Still, the experiment has taken its toll. “The philosophy is interesting,” he said. “But how do you put it into practice? How do you make it real?”

He recently split up with Otilia Aionesei, a former model who works at technology start-up, whom he had been dating, off and on, for two years. The sticking point was their lack of a shared home.“If you want to be his girlfriend, this is the life you have to lead,” Ms. Aionesei said. “I like simple things, to watch movies on the same couch.”Mr. Grinda had a different view. “We went to the Galápagos,” he said. “We went to Tulum. To St. Barts. We have these wonderful experiences and memories together.”

“My home is where I am,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter if it is a friend’s place or a couch or the middle of the jungle or a hotel room on the Lower East Side. But I realize that most of humanity, especially women, don’t see it that way.”

nd this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South.

But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy.

The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues.

The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?”

Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People:

you might wonder if things have changed since then. Unfortunately, the answer is that they haven’t, as you can see by looking at how states are implementing — or refusing to implement — Obamacare.

states were being offered a federally-funded program that would provide major benefits to millions of their citizens, pour billions into their economies, and help support their health-care providers. Who would turn down such an offer?

The answer is, 22 states at this point, although some may eventually change their minds. And what do these states have in common? Mainly, a history of slaveholding

it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy.

Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking; we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin

“Each negative event a person faces leads to an attempt to cope, which forces people to learn about their own capabilities, about their support networks — to learn who their real friends are. That kind of learning, we think, is extremely valuable for subsequent coping,” up to a point.

A subset of the participants, 194, reported that they had experienced not one of the fairly comprehensive list of 37 events on the survey. “We wondered: Who are these people who have managed to go through life with nothing bad happening to them?”

Dr. Cohen Silver said. “Are they hyper-conscientious? Socially isolated? Just young? Or otherwise unique?” They weren’t, the researchers found. Stranger still, they were not the most satisfied with their lives. Their sense of well-being was about the same, on average, as people who had suffered up to a dozen memorable blows.

It was those in the middle, those reporting two to six stressful events, who scored highest on several measures of well-being, and who showed the most resilience in response to recent hits.

For constrained domains the GOFAI approach is a winning strategy.

there is nothing intelligent or even interesting about the brute force approach.

the dominant paradigm in AI research has largely “moved on from GOFAI to embodied, distributed intelligence.” And Faustus from Cincinnati insists that as a result “machines with bodies that experience the world and act on it” will be “able to achieve intelligence.”

The new, embodied paradigm in AI, deriving primarily from the work of roboticist Rodney Brooks, insists that the body is required for intelligence. Indeed, Brooks’s classic 1990 paper, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” rejected the very symbolic computation paradigm against which Dreyfus had railed, favoring instead a range of biologically inspired robots that could solve apparently simple, but actually quite complicated, problems like locomotion, grasping, navigation through physical environments and so on. To solve these problems, Brooks discovered that it was actually a disadvantage for the system to represent the status of the environment and respond to it on the basis of pre-programmed rules about what to do, as the traditional GOFAI systems had. Instead, Brooks insisted, “It is better to use the world as its own model.”

although they respond to the physical world rather well, they tend to be oblivious to the global, social moods in which we find ourselves embedded essentially from birth, and in virtue of which things matter to us in the first place.

the embodied AI paradigm is irrelevant to Watson. After all, Watson has no useful bodily interaction with the world at all.

The statistical machine learning strategies that it uses are indeed a big advance over traditional GOFAI techniques. But they still fall far short of what human beings do.

“The illusion is that this computer is doing the same thing that a very good ‘Jeopardy!’ player would do. It’s not. It’s doing something sort of different that looks the same on the surface. And every so often you see the cracks.”

Watson doesn’t understand relevance at all. It only measures statistical frequencies. Because it is relatively common to find mismatches of this sort, Watson learns to weigh them as only mild evidence against the answer. But the human just doesn’t do it that way. The human being sees immediately that the mismatch is irrelevant for the Erie Canal but essential for Toronto. Past frequency is simply no guide to relevance.

The fact is, things are relevant for human beings because at root we are beings for whom things matter. Relevance and mattering are two sides of the same coin. As Haugeland said, “The problem with computers is that they just don’t give a damn.” It is easy to pretend that computers can care about something if we focus on relatively narrow domains — like trivia games or chess — where by definition winning the game is the only thing that could matter, and the computer is programmed to win. But precisely because the criteria for success are so narrowly defined in these cases, they have nothing to do with what human beings are when they are at their best.

Far from being the paradigm of intelligence, therefore, mere matching with no sense of mattering or relevance is barely any kind of intelligence at all. As beings for whom the world already matters, our central human ability is to be able to see what matters when.

But, as we show in our recent book, this is an existential achievement orders of magnitude more amazing and wonderful than any statistical treatment of bare facts could ever be. The greatest danger of Watson’s victory is not that it proves machines could be better versions of us, but that it tempts us to misunderstand ourselves as poorer versions of them.

he is planning a possible trip to Mauritania and has used Twitter to query his million-man follower group in search of expertise on the country — with good results.

He has used it also for something that blogs and columns just aren’t appropriate for, he said: publishing a hunch.

Twitter also enables writers to super-publish their work. A piece may be destined for NYTimes.com or the newspaper, but that doesn’t stand in the way of tweeting out a link to it.

If the item is really popular, Twitter is effectively pushing a cloud of links far beyond the reach of The Times’s Web site and print edition.

But there is more to it than gathering, understanding and publishing. Twitter, to hear Times staffers talk about it, is an environment. Inside, Mr. Carr said, “you can see what is getting heat and what is not.”

I have made an effort to create a persona out of what I report,” he said. “I am always looking for articles, interesting quotes and things that center around my domain. I think people expect that of me, and that is why they follow me on Twitter.”

Twitter, it seems apparent, enables journalists to report and publish actively in digital space. It allows them to create their own community. But this can become a self-limiting hive or, as Brian Stelter noted, “an echo chamber.”