It’s a climate of fear, and it’s infected the top brass. Whether staff at the Times are in earnest about their fears or whether it’s a tactic to rid the paper of those they don’t want around (or both) doesn’t really matter; people operating from a place of fear make terrible choices. They’ve become scared of their own shadows, of the person in the next cubicle, of unknowingly saying or doing something that will end their careers. Better to join the crowd, to claim to be in pain, to turn pain into a shield and then into a weapon used to intimidate others. After all, pain brooks no questions.

It’s a blood sport: career cannibalism. And it’s on steroids at the New York Times, once the nation’s top paper.

McNeil did not blame the teens on the 2019 trip for his ignominious end; they were kids, trying on ideas and ideologies they did not yet understand and might not still believe as adults. “I’d love to talk to you again 40 years from now and see if your thinking has changed at all,” he’d told one student on the trip. “But I can’t—I’ll be dead.”

In a way, he was right: It wasn’t the children on the trip who ended his career. It was his colleagues, his bosses, when they acted like children.