Taking this into consideration, the spike may just be from the holiday lull and the fact that we are collectively reading more NYT articles and/or we are reading more of everything and submitting more of everything, but the NYT name makes the articles more readily clickable for us.

Would be interesting to dig deeper into the single submission users' user behavior too.

Btw I find it humorous that user name the_economist is one of the top NYT submitters over the last week.