PARIS — A dark and spectacular volcanic cloud shrouded much of northern Europe on Thursday, forcing airlines to cancel thousands of flights as it drifted at high altitude south and east from an erupting volcano in Iceland. The shutdown of airspace was one of the most sweeping ever ordered in peacetime, amid fears that travel could continue to be delayed days after the cloud dissipates.

The cloud, made up of minute particles of silicate that can severely damage jet engines, left airplanes stranded on the tarmac at some of the world’s busiest airports as it spread over Britain and toward continental Europe.

The disruption extended all the way to the Asia-Pacific, where major carriers like Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines and Qantas, the Australian airline, were among those that canceled, delayed or diverted flights to and from Europe on Thursday and Friday.

The volcano erupted Wednesday for the second time in a month, forcing evacuations and causing flooding about 75 miles east of Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital. Matthew Watson, a specialist at Bristol University in England in the study of volcanic ash clouds, said the plume was “likely to end up over Belgium, Germany, the Lowlands — a good portion over Europe,” and was unlikely to dissipate for 24 hours or more.

Even then, any resumption of flights would not be immediate, said John Lampl, a British Airways spokesman in New York. “For several days you’ll have crews and airplanes in the wrong places,” he said. “It will take a few days to sort it out.”

British aviation officials extended the closing of British airspace at least through 1 p.m. local time on Friday, meaning that only authorized emergency flights would be permitted. About 6,000 scheduled flights use British airspace in an average day, aviation experts said.

Deborah Seymour, a spokeswoman for Britain’s National Air Traffic Service, said the closing of the country’s airspace was the most extensive in recent memory. “It’s an extremely rare occurrence,” she said.

Eurocontrol, the agency in Brussels that is responsible for coordinating air traffic management across the region, said disruptions to air traffic could last an additional 48 hours, depending on weather conditions, and could extend deeper into continental Europe.

The ash from the volcano, Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl), was reported to be drifting at 18,000 to 33,000 feet above the earth. At those altitudes, the cloud is directly in the way of commercial airliners but not an immediate health threat to people on the ground, the International Volcanic Health Hazard Network, based in Britain, said on its Web site.

According to the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center in London, as of 1 p.m. local time, there was still “significant eruption continuing,” with the plume reaching 15,000 feet, but “occasionally” as high as 33,000 feet.

On Thursday, 5,000 to 6,000 of the 28,000 daily flights across Europe were canceled as a result of the ash plume, said Lucia Pasquini, a Eurocontrol spokeswoman.

The closing of British airspace disrupted the great majority of trans-Atlantic flights, including those on the New York-London route, the second busiest international route in the world after the Hong Kong to Taipei, Taiwan, route, according to the International Air Transport Association. Eurocontrol said roughly half of the 600 daily flights between North America and Europe would probably face cancellations or delays on Friday.

“It is a significant disruption,” said Steve Lott, a spokesman for the air transport association. “What presents more of a challenge is that we don’t know the end date.” He added, “If this closed airspace continues to grow larger, the airlines will have fewer route options.”

As the cloud made its way high across the English Channel, French aviation officials said the main Paris airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, would close at 11 p.m. About 20 other French airports shut down earlier. The Paris airports will remain closed until at least 10 a.m. Friday.

Major American carriers that fly to Britain were allowing their passengers to rebook flights without penalty on Thursday. Eurocontrol said areas of airspace in northern Germany and Poland closed late Thursday. Ute Otterbein, a spokeswoman for Germany’s civil aviation authority, said airports in Hamburg, Bremen and Hanover were closed until at least 8 a.m. Friday, and Berlin’s airports — Schönefeld and Tegel — were due to close at 2 a.m. Airports in Frankfurt and Munich were still open, however, and were able to accept diverted flights from other European airports, Ms. Otterbein said.

The potential economic effect of the closings is “virtually impossible” to determine at this stage, said Peter Morris, chief economist at Ascend, an aviation consultancy in London.

“A ballpark estimate would be that half a million to a million people’s travel will be disrupted in the U.K. over a couple of days, assuming things start to clear up soon,” he said. “For the long-haul players, especially those headed to the other side of the world, it’s a nightmare.”

Inside Terminal 4 at Heathrow, where flights leave London for Houston, New York and Paris, among many other destinations, all check-in counters were closed. Arrival and departure boards listed all flights as canceled. Some of the travelers seemed stoic about their fate.

Jai Purohit, a manager from Leicester, England, who had planned fly to the United States to join his wife on vacation in Florida, said: “It’s very sad. I bought some nice presents for my wife and was looking forward to spending some time with her. She’s naturally upset, but there’s nothing we can do.”

An American traveler, Anne Evans, who had arrived in London from San Francisco, said she had been on her way to take up a teacher training position in Sri Lanka when she learned that her connecting flight was canceled.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “You can either smile or cry, and I decided to smile.”

Although volcanic ash clouds sometimes limit pilots’ visibility, their most serious safety threat is the harm they can cause to engines in flight. In recent decades, more than 90 aircraft have suffered damage from volcanic plumes, according to the International Civil Aviation Authority, an arm of the United Nations.

Volcanic ash is primarily made of silicates, or glass fibers, which, once ingested into a jet engine, can melt, causing the engine to flame out and stall.

It was impossible to predict how long the delays might last or the extent of the flight cancellations, since the volcano was still erupting, said Ms. Seymour of the National Air Traffic Service.

The perils of volcanic ash are well known to pilots and airline operators. After the 1982 eruption of the Galunggung volcano in Indonesia, for example, a Boeing 747 flying to Australia from Malaysia lost power in all four engines because of ash and descended to 12,500 feet from 36,000 feet before pilots could restart the engines and make an emergency landing in Indonesia.

In Iceland, hundreds of people fled their homes to avoid flooding after the eruption early on Wednesday melted the Eyjafjallajokull glacier. But Icelandic airports remained open because they are west of the volcano and wind was blowing the ash away to the south and east.

Copyright 2010. New York Timesw Company.

Berlin

IT wasn’t so many years ago that Europeans loved to moan about American culture overrunning homegrown art forms. In the 1990s and early 2000s some in Europe were arguing for regulatory barriers to hold off the New World barbarians, particularly from Hollywood. In France, President Jacques Chirac’s culture minister, Jacques Toubon, warned about how the United States entertainment industry was trying “to impose domination by any means,” and Régis Debray, among other French intellectuals to hop on the same bandwagon, predicted that “the American empire will pass, like the others.”

“Let’s at least make sure,” Mr. Debray continued, “it does not leave irreparable damage to our creative abilities behind it.”

That was then. The other day President Nicolas Sarkozy was reiterating the virtues of what the French call “l’exception culturelle,” a modern policy of government protection and promotion of French culture, particularly the film industry. Mr. Sarkozy’s poll numbers have been plummeting, and l’exception culturelle feeds into his current strategy to identify himself with whatever, in the midst of an increasingly diversified, fractious and disapproving French society, French people say makes France French.

But Sarko l’Americain, as the French used to call him, is also the friendliest French president the United States has had in a while, and in America last month he stressed that rarely in history had “the community of views been so identical” between his country and the United States. Complaints about the American cultural juggernaut still arise across Europe, of course, but their intensity doesn’t seem as fierce. Something has changed, and it’s not just that Barack Obama has replaced George W. Bush or, in France’s case, that the film industry is doing O.K.

It’s a widening realization, I think, that globalism, beyond banking, climate change and warfare, has always been a dubious concept, a misleading catchall for how the world supposedly works, to which culture, in its increasing complexity, gives the lie.

The integration of markets and the Internet have certainly brought billions of people into closer contact. Everybody has access to the same American movies and music now, and not just American, also Indian, Romanian, South African and Chinese. But far from succumbing to some devouring juggernaut, culture — and Europe, with its different communities and nations living cheek by jowl, is a Petri dish to prove the point — has only atomized lately as a consequence of the very same globalizing forces that purportedly threaten to homogenize everything.

That’s been my own subject over here for the last couple of years, and will regularly be this column’s. Nationalism, regionalism and tribalism are all on the rise. Societies are splitting even as they share more common goods and attributes than ever before. Culture is increasingly an instrument to divide and differentiate communities. And the leveling pressures of globalization have at the same time provided more and more people with the technological resources to decide for themselves, culturally speaking, who they are and how they choose to be known, seen, distinguished from others.

Culture means many things in this context, but at heart it is a suite of traits we inherit and also choose to disavow or to stress. It consists in part of the arts. It is something made and consumed, in socially revealing ways. When Mats Nilsson, a Swedish product-design strategist for Ikea, not long ago told The New York Times that he loves to browse for handmade baskets in Spain, bird cages in Portugal, brushes in Japan and hardware on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he was creating his own cultural identity out of the bric-a-brac of consumer choices made available by the globalizing forces of economic integration. Bricolage, it’s called. Anyone may now pick through the marketplace of global culture.

This may sound like the essence of globalization, but the fact that everybody from Yerevan to Brasilia, Jakarta to Jerusalem, knows songs by the Black Eyed Peas or wears New York Yankees caps doesn’t mean that culture is the same everywhere.

The common denominator of popular culture — which these days encompasses so many things that you could even include all sorts of high culture — seems to have just intensified the need people now feel to distinguish themselves from it. And global technology has made this easier by providing countless individuals, microcultures and larger groups and movements with cheap and convenient means to preserve and disseminate themselves. Years ago a language like Cimbrian, a Bavarian dialect today preserved by just a few hundred speakers in northern Italy, would have been doomed to extinction; now Cimbrian speakers, according to a recent German newspaper article, turn out to be getting their own online newspaper and television show. The language is being sustained by the same global forces that might promise to doom it.

Partly the problem with globalization has always been that the term, culturally speaking, is so vague. In one respect, it’s another word for empire, or at least its effects are as old as empire. What’s new is the power available to wide swaths of the populace, thanks above all to cheap travel and the Web, to become actors in the production and dissemination of culture, not simply consumers. A generation or more ago, aside from what people did in their home or from what’s roughly called folk or outsider art, culture was generally thought of as something handed down from on high, which the public received.

Today it’s made and distributed in countless different ways, giving not just governments and institutions but nearly everyone with access to the Web the means to choose and shape his or her own culture, identity, tribal fidelities — and then spread this culture, via Youtube or whatever else, among allies (and enemies) everywhere, a democratizing process. The downside of this democratization is how every political niche and fringe group has found a culture via the Web to reinforce its already narrow views, polarizing parts of society despite the widened horizon. Neo-Nazis across borders now bond around cultural artifacts available over the Internet. Democrats and Republicans move further apart, digesting news from their own cable network shows.

There are other consequences of this democratization. Generally speaking, culture operates within the mainstreams of power. The myth of an avant-garde serves the same market forces avant-gardism pretends to overthrow. Art may challenge authority; and popular culture (this includes clownish demagogues like Glenn Beck) sometimes makes trouble for those in charge, the way Thomas Nast’s cartoons did for Boss Tweed in Tammany Hall. But art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself, and never has, not in 19th-century France or 20th-century Russia or 21st-century China or Iran. Even when it manages to tilt popular thinking, it still ends up within the bounds of existing authority, and there has never been a true “outside” that really stayed outside: public consumption, by definition, adapts to the change, co-opts and normalizes all culture.

Instead culture (often unconsciously) identifies crucial ruptures, rifts, gaps and shifts in society. It is indispensable for our understanding of the mechanics of the world in this respect, pointing us toward those things around us that are unstable, changing, that shape how we live and how we treat one another. If we’re alert to it, it helps reveal who we are to ourselves, often in ways we didn’t realize in places we didn’t necessarily think to look.

Shortly after I moved to Berlin from New York, for example, I noticed there were bookstores all over town. They were on nearly every other street in my neighborhood. There was one just below my bedroom window, next to the high-end pet-supply store, specializing in New Age and self-help literature, and there was another one, a biography bookstore, around the corner. Shakespeare & Company (Berlin’s version) was beside the church square where the neighborhood children played when the weather was warm. And I began to stop into Marga Schoeller’s bookshop at Savignyplatz, which has a nice English-language section, en route to the subway, where a large art bookstore sprawls below raised tracks.

Berliners looked nonplussed when I asked them to account for all the bookshops. Along with currywurst and nude saunas, bookstores have long been such a banal fact of life here, as they are across Germany, that only an outsider might bother to think their number was remarkable. The proliferation turned out to derive from a very conscious decision after the war to restore civilization in West Germany by supporting a kind of ecosystem of small publishers and small bookstores to which, in certain small towns, trucks that delivered books to the bookstores overnight also delivered drugs to the drugstores: drugs for the body, books for the mind, a metaphor of recovery.

This was more than just a system of distribution and sales; it was a cultural as well as economic affair. It influenced civic life and social relations in ways that browsing books on Amazon or Google can’t. So what was to me as a clueless foreigner an urban curiosity, noticeable just because it wasn’t my usual experience — it was for me a cultural rift or rupture — ended up suggesting some larger truth about the country’s history and ambition. Culture is something we propagate but also something naturally there, existing in and around us, which makes us who we are but which may rise to the level of our consciousness only when one of those ruptures or rifts appear — when some little psychic clash happens between it and our more or less unconscious sense of the everyday world.

I also went to Gaza before the last Israeli incursion a couple of years ago. Naturally, the stories that tend to come from there revolve around one crisis or another: the rocket attacks, the border closures, clashes between Hamas and Fatah, Hamas and Israel. But what was life like, I wondered, under Hamas? What were the limits to Gazans’ freedom? The effects of isolation? How did Gazans see themselves in relation to everybody else?

These seemed to me cultural questions. The people I spoke with there said that culture was not just an escape for them from the everyday hardships from deprivation and a repressive regime, but that it was essential to survival, a lifeline, their steady connection to an outside world, a glimpse of what was beyond the conflict.

It represented normalcy, in other words, a precious commodity in that place. In the garden of a restaurant in Gaza City where a sign on the front door said, “No weapons, please,” I joined families of Gazans one evening watching episodes of “Friends” and a wildly popular Turkish soap opera, “Noor,” on a big screen. And in a video store nearby I thumbed through shelves of pirated Jennifer Lopez CDs and copies of “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Adam Sandler’s comedy about a Mossad agent-turned-hairdresser in a New York City salon run by a Palestinian woman. There were also the predictable audiotapes extolling Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Some Gazans spoke sadly and nervously about their fears that extremists within Hamas, whose factional split was revealed by this cultural divide, had begun to crack down on local theaters and on art and the Web in Gaza, even as these same people spoke about culture being a fragile but essential link to the West. Via satellite dishes and the Internet, the West meant something to them other than guns and territory: culture was a potential bond, they suggested, through which some dialogue might yet arise.

Not incidentally, Gazans, like that Swedish Ikea designer, made their own culture from the bricolage of global choices. I thought most of what passed for art in Gaza wasn’t very good, truth be told, but quality seemed beside the point. We miss much about how culture works today — including how what might be called local standards of quality vie with the global aesthetic of sensationalism and fashion — if we stick only to seeing it as critics and consumers through our own aesthetic lens.

Hollywood and Broadway, the major museums and art fairs and biennials and galleries, buildings designed by celebrity architects and the music business are all the traditional focus of big media, and they tell us a lot about ourselves. They constitute our cultural firmament, the constellation of our stars. But scientists say most of the universe is composed not of stars but of dark matter. It is the powerful but invisible force that exists everywhere and requires some leap of imagination on our part, some effort, to identify.

Most culture is dark matter.

Put another way, whether in Berlin or Gaza or New York City, there’s a universe of life and death affairs beyond globalism. And culture is our window onto it.

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”

Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.

Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.

The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.

The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”

Although federal regulators have resumed granting approval for controlled experiments with psychedelics, there has been little public money granted for the research, which is being conducted at Hopkins, the University of Arizona; Harvard; New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and other places.

The work has been supported by nonprofit groups like the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.

“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”

THE Times introduced a regular video newscast on its Web site late last month. “TimesCast” shows scenes from the morning meeting where planning starts for the next day’s paper, and it features editors and reporters discussing the top stories that are developing, often with compelling video and photography from world hot spots.

“A quick bravo to you folks,” wrote Stephen Beaumont of Aurora, Ontario. “I’ve already become addicted.”

It is one of many ways The Times is trying to use technology to showcase its journalism and journalists for a larger audience. Twitter and other social media are also being used to promote The Times and are turning out to be powerful reporting tools as well.

But several stumbles in the past few weeks have demonstrated some of the risks for a print culture built on careful reporting, layers of editing and time for reflection as it moves onto platforms where speed is everything and attitude sometimes trumps values like accuracy and restraint.

On just the second day of “TimesCast,” Bill Keller, the executive editor, misspoke about a sensitive story involving Israel. A week later, a business reporter in Japan, unhappy over common reporter frustrations — lack of sleep, bad coffee, bossy press handlers and a newsmaker who did not take her question — lost her patience and tweeted, “Toyota sucks.” And, on April Fool’s Day, two Times bloggers fell for hoaxes.

“What ties them together is the acceleration of the news cycle,” Keller told me. “We’re always on, which increases the danger that things will not get checked as they should.” He said news organizations have always had times when they have had to work quickly on deadline, and they know there is more danger of mistakes on those occasions. “The difference now is the deadline is always.”

Another difference is that The Times is opening more of its news process to public view. It once did not matter if editors had all of their facts straight at the morning news meeting; there was plenty of time for reporting and editing. But with the world looking over their shoulders, things are different. Editors are dressing better, speaking in complete, sound-bite sentences, and mistakes are embarrassing.

Paul Iredale, a veteran Reuters reporter, said he watched “TimesCast” on its second day and was unhappy to see Keller say that Britain had expelled “the head of Mossad,” the Israeli intelligence service, “in retribution for the Israelis’ having assassinated a Hamas militant in Dubai.” The British had not accused Israel of the assassination. Nor had The Times established that the person sent home was the Mossad station chief.

“Agh,” wrote Keller when I sent him Iredale’s message. “This is why I went into print rather than TV.” Because “TimesCast” is taped and edited, Keller said he should have said, “cut,” and given a more careful summary of the story then in progress. Ann Derry, the editor in charge of the paper’s video operations, said, “Several pairs of eyes view every segment — and the entire show — before it goes up.” She said they all missed Keller’s errors and will “‘button up’ our procedures going forward.”

Nobody edits Times reporters on Twitter, and its prevailing style — fast, chatty, personal — can lull a user into opening up far too much. The Times has written guidelines for social media. As Philip Corbett, the standards editor, put it, they boil down to a warning that Times staffers on Facebook and Twitter “can’t think of it as a personal activity. Like it or not, they are seen as a representative of The New York Times.”

Hiroko Tabuchi, who said she knew the guidelines, nonetheless let frustration get the better of her on March 29, when she attended a news conference by Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota. Her string of tweets about the event was first reported by The Nytpicker, an anonymous Web site that focuses on The Times.

With less than three hours of sleep, Tabuchi wrote, she had to get up at 6 a.m. “We love you Mr. Toyoda!” After the news conference, she wrote that Toyoda took few questions and “ignored reporters, incl me who tried to ask a follow-up. I’m sorry, but Toyota sucks.”

Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor, said reporters have always complained to one another, about irritations at work, sometimes vividly, but when they do it “to the world, live, I think it’s unacceptable.” I would have pulled Tabuchi from the Toyota story, but Ingrassia said he decided not to because what she wrote indicated she was upset with the company’s press arrangements, not prejudiced against it or its products. He said he saw no bias in her reporting and had received no complaints about it.

Tabuchi said: “The banter on Twitter is often very casual and forces us to economize on words. That can be perilous. But the last thing I’d want is collegial banter and humor to affect perceptions of our coverage.”

Tabuchi said she regards Twitter as an invaluable way to connect with readers and to get sources for stories. Jennifer Preston, the social media editor, said The Times has used it successfully on major breaking news like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and the shootings at Fort Hood.

But using the new tools without old-fashioned reporting can get you in trouble. Two writers for the City Room blog found out the hard way on April 1.

David Goodman, who writes New York Online, an aggregation of news from many sources, bit on a claim by Eric Turkewitz, a personal injury lawyer and blogger, that he had been appointed official White House law blogger. Goodman tossed in a short item at the end of his April 1 post. Turkewitz wrote the next day that he had been hoping to catch political bloggers, “whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it,” but instead bagged “the vaunted New York Times.”

Goodman, who said he knows he should have checked it out, especially on April Fool’s Day, said that because several prominent legal blogs also had the item, he gave it more credibility than he should have. What he did not know was that the other bloggers were in on the hoax. Corbett said the episode pointed up the risks of news aggregation and the need to rely on trustworthy sources.

Andy Newman thought he had a trustworthy source when he wrote the same day about a supposed project of a street theater group: more than 1,000 people riding subway trains nude from the waist down. The troupe’s leader had been a guest City Room columnist for a week in January, answering readers’ questions about performance art, and Newman said he thought the man was reliable. When a Times Web producer asked the source directly and repeatedly if he was pulling an April Fool’s joke, he denied it.

When further reporting established that the police and subway officials knew nothing about naked riders that day, red flags should have gone up. Newman said he did not check Twitter or Facebook to see if there was any chatter about the naked riders. One would think that 1,000 people without pants, skirts and underwear would have attracted some public attention — even in New York.

The technology may be new, the speed faster, the culture different, but in journalism, the old rules still apply: be skeptical, check it out.

“Bondage-gate,” as it’s been called — the unfortunate convergence of Republican Party donors and a Hollywood sex club with a lesbian theme — has led to the dismissal of a party staffer, an inquiry into the use of donor money and gleeful late-night television jokes (“Me likey,” Jon Stewart quipped), but, really, is it such a big deal?

Yes, the venue, Voyeur, was somewhat kinkier than your father’s topless joint and, yes, the men in question were not convention-going salesmen. Still, to discover Republicans at an adult establishment? Who knew?

“Politicians and business people have been taking clients to adult-entertainment clubs for decades,” said a baffled Angelina Spencer, executive director of the Association of Club Executives, which represents 3,800 strip clubs around the country. “Unfortunately, due to the nature of the entertainment — i.e., scantily clad ladies — people get up in arms.”

Nudity and politics have never mixed well in America — George Ryan, a former governor of Illinois, once returned a check to a man who merely used to own a strip club — but the current storm, which has battered Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, left those in the industry (perhaps self-servingly) thinking we were past this.

Gentlemen’s clubs are not only legitimate businesses, they say, but profitable businesses. High-end clubs, in Atlanta or New York, might take in as much as $300,000 a week. All told, Ms. Spencer said, the industry in the United States earns a “respectable” $15 billion a year.

“It’s big,” said Eric Langan, president of Rick’s Cabaret International, which runs 19 clubs and trades on the Nasdaq under RICK. “You’d think in this day and age nobody would care. We’re a legal enterprise. It’s not like they hired call girls.”

When asked to describe his preferred clientele, Mr. Langan drew a demographic portrait that either party might be pleased to have among its supporters.

“We cater to males, 25 to 55 years old, with high disposable income,” he said. “Businessmen, business owners, corporate executives. That’s who we market to. Our clubs are set up with the same decorations and customer service as any major steakhouse.”

The operative difference being, of course, those scantily clad ladies. And, in this case, their proximity to members of a party with a family-values brand.

Responding to the scandal-ette last week, Doug Heye, a Republican spokesman, said the visit to Voyeur — where the party dropped $1,946 — was improper “because of the venue.” But club executives countered that the impropriety had less to do with g-strings than with perceptions of the party itself.

“The whole situation here is the image of the Republican Party, which seems to view itself as a group with extremely high standards of morality,” said Steve Karel, the marketing director at Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club in New York. “The problem is not that strip clubs are risqué environments.”

Don Waitt, the publisher of Exotic Dancer Magazine, went so far as to suggest that strip clubs were a classic piece of Americana: Norman Rockwell in a pair of Lucite heels.

“The analogy I always use,” he said, “is to the ‘smoker rooms’ our grandfathers went to. They’d have cigars, drink some drinks, maybe play gin. That’s what gentlemen’s clubs are today. Guys go there. So the entertainment happens to be girls dancing on a stage rather than TV’s showing football.”

“It’s just the mentality in the United States,” Mr. Waitt added. “Anything that’s lascivious, people are quick to judge. It’s surprising there would be any consternation at all about this in the year 2010.”

After all, he said, “Demi Moore made ‘Striptease’ almost 15 years ago.”

MOSCOW — A plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders crashed in a heavy fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing everyone aboard.

Television showed chunks of flaming fuselage scattered in a bare forest near Smolensk, where the president was arriving for a ceremony commemorating the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police after the Red Army invaded Poland.

The governor of Smolensk region, Sergei Antufiyev, said the plane did not reach the runway but instead hit the treetops and broke apart. His spokesman later said that air traffic controllers had recommended the president’s jet land at another airport because of bad visibility, but that the crew decided to land anyway. The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, wiping out a large swath of the country’s leadership, including the commanders of all four branches of the military, the head of the central bank, the president and many of his top advisors. In the numb hours after the crash, leaders in Warsaw evoked the horror of the massacre at Katyn, which stood for decades as a symbol of Russian domination.

“It is a damned place,” former president Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24. “It sends shivers down my spine. First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk, now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.”

“This is a wound which will be very difficult to heal,” he said.

Former president Lech Walesa, who presided over Poland’s transition from communism, cast the crash in similarly historic terms.

“This is the second disaster after Katyn,” he said. “They wanted to cut off our head there, and here the flower of our nation has also perished. Regardless of the differences, the intellectual class of those on the plane was truly great.”

The flag at the presidential palace in Warsaw was lowered as a crowd gathered, laying down flowers and lighting candles. According to Poland’s constitution, the leader of the lower house of parliament — now acting president — has 14 days to announce new elections, which must then take place within 60 days.

The plane was a Tupolev Tu-154, designed by the Soviets in the mid-1960s. Russia halted mass production of the jet roughly 20 years ago, and roughly 200 of them are still in service around the world, said Paul Hayes, director of accidents and insurance at Ascend, an aviation consultancy in London. He said the Polish president jet is one of the youngest of them.

Officials in Poland have repeatedly requested that the government’s aging air fleet be replaced.

Former Prime Minister Leszek Miller, who survived a helicopter crash in 2003, told Polish news he had long predicted such a disaster. “I once said that we will one day meet in a funeral procession, and that is when we will take the decision to replace the aircraft fleet,” he said.

A press secretary for Mr. Antufiyev, the governor of Smolensk, said the landing took place under very bad visibility, and Russian air traffic controllers advised the crew to land in Minsk, but the crew decided to land anyway. The Polish news channel TVN24 reported that moments before the crash, air traffic controllers had refused a Russian military aircraft permission to land, but that they could not refuse permission to the Polish plane.

The crash site was cordoned off, but Russian media reported that the airplane’s crew made several attempts to land before a wing hit the treetops and the plane crashed about half a mile from the runway. Correspondents reporting from the scene said the plane’s explosion was so powerful that fragments of it were scattered as far as the outskirts of Smolensk, more than a mile from the crash site itself.

For Poland, the losses raise the question of how a country of 38 million can replace a whole political class. Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski – one of the highest-ranking Polish leaders not on board the plane – told Poland’s Radio Zet that he was the one to inform Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who “was in tears when he heard about the catastrophe.”

Among those on board, according to the Web site of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, were Mr. Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; former Polish president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski; the deputy speaker of Poland’s parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski; the head of the president’s chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczyglo; the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrzej Kremer; the chief of the general staff of the Polish army, Franciszek Gagor; the president of Poland’s national bank, Slawomir Skrzypek; the commissioner for civil rights protection, Janusz Kochanowski; the heads of all of Poland’s armed forces; and dozens of members of parliament.

A spokesman for Poland’s ministry of foreign affairs said 88 people were on the plane. Russian emergency officials said the total number killed, including crew members, was 96.

Mr. Kaczysnki, 61, was elected president in 2005 just as his identical twin brother, Jaroslaw, became head of the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice government, often putting Poland on a collision course with Russia. Mr. Kaczynski forged close relationships with Ukraine and Georgia and pushed for their accession into NATO, arguing passionately that a stronger NATO would keep Russia from reasserting its influence over Eastern Europe.

The president’s death on Russian soil is bound to open old wounds in the relationship between Russia and Poland.

He had been due in western Russia to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II.

The ceremonies were to be held at a site in the Katyn forest close to Smolensk, where 70 years ago members of the Soviet secret police executed more than 20,000 Polish officers captured after the Soviet Army invaded Poland in 1939.

The two countries had been making strides in recent months to improve their ties, which had been strained since the days of communism, when Poland was a Soviet satellite. After the collapse of communism, its leaders embraced the West and snubbed Russia.

The Katyn massacre was one point of tension. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin took a major step to address improve relations by becoming the first Russian or Soviet leader to join Polish officials in commemorating the anniversary. He was joined there by Mr. Tusk.

At the ceremony, Mr. Putin cast the executions as one of many crimes carried out by the “totalitarian regime” of the Soviet Union.

“We bow our heads to those who bravely met death here,” he said. “In this ground lay Soviet citizens, burnt in the fire of the Stalinist repression of the 1930s; Polish officers, shot on secret orders; soldiers of the Red Army, executed by the Nazis.”

Mr. Kaczynski, who is seen by the Kremlin as less friendly to Russia, was not invited to the joint Russian-Polish ceremony on Wednesday. Instead, Mr. Kaczynski decided to attend a separate, Polish-organized event in Katyn on Saturday.