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One Thursday morning, days after an article I had written for The New York Times’s Arts section had run, I received a message from a contact in Doha, Qatar, alerting me to a haunting image circulating the web. The image showed The Times, opened to the Culture section. But beneath the Culture heading, where my article was supposed to appear, there was instead a large, white, empty box. Most of the page was blank.

I stared at the image; I had never seen a newspaper with a big blank box in place of an article. And as my eyes scrolled to the bottom of the big white box, they widened. There, in small type, was a note: “The Opinion piece, ‘A Fire Killed 32 at a New Orleans Gay Bar. This Artist Didn’t Forget,’ by by Shannon Sims, is exceptionally removed from the Doha edition of The New York Times International Edition. It is available on the web at NYTimes.com.”

The note seemed strange for a variety of reasons. For one, I hadn’t written an opinion piece, but instead a reported article about an art show. There was the accidental use of “by” twice. But, above all, the note stood out because it seemed to suggest that my article had been censored.