“I’ve lost the capacity to gauge the opprobrium—what’s irrational versus what’s a reasonable amount of Internet outrage these days,” said James Bennet, editorial-page editor of The New York Times, and someone talked about as a future contender for the Times’s top newsroom job. “Look,” he went on, “we’re recruiting different types of writers than we have traditionally, and I’ll make some mistakes. It’s just gonna happen.”

It was early Thursday afternoon, February 22, and Bennet had just finished the second in a trio of internal town-hall meetings that he was hosting to quell brewing discontent over the Opinion section. The previous week, Bennet had announced the hiring of a new Opinion writer and member of the editorial board, Quinn Norton, a tech journalist with a distinctly un-Timesian background. Norton was a provocative recruit, the kind that Bennet had been brought on board to make. But as frequently happens in the current combustible era, the provocation produced epic blowback. Norton was quickly doxed, with Twitter sleuths publicizing her well-documented friendship with a neo-Nazi, and surfacing old tweets in which she tossed around racial and sexual epithets. (It appears those terms weren’t used in the spirit of hate-mongering, but still.) In what may go down as the shortest Times career in history, Bennet announced just several hours later that Norton and the organization had “decided to go our separate ways.”