David Groover first saw Joey Cusumano at a distance back in the early 1980s, and he saw him the way police officers are trained to see certain men: with suspicion, with patience, and from behind the glass of an unmarked car. It wasn’t personal. It was the job. As a detective in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Intelligence Bureau, assigned to the Chicago squad, Groover and his partner Gene Smith spent long hours keeping watch on Cusumano and an entire mug book of other figures connected to Anthony Spilotro’s criminal crew. Those were dangerous days in Las Vegas, when…

Misinformation has become one of the defining concerns of the digital age, but for all the public worry, there is surprisingly little agreement about what the term actually covers. In a recent effort to map the expert landscape, researchers surveyed 150 academic specialists across political science, psychology, communication, sociology, and computational science. They asked how misinformation should be defined, why people believe and share it, what works against it, and where the field should go next. The results paint a picture of broad consensus on some points, sharp disagreement on others, and a clear sense that the conversation needs to…