This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “What do you think about meat grown in a lab? Would you eat it? Will your grandchildren?”

Matt expects a species-defining shift:

Evolutionary leaps in our development have been marked by the development of tools, farming, domesticated animals, and sadly and tragically, industrial farming and food processing. Lab-grown meat is the next evolution of our meat consumption as a species.  

I.S. is excited.

“Heck yes, I’ll eat it!” she wrote. “If it tastes like the real deal and is safe, absolutely! I stopped eating factory-farmed meat two years ago, and I miss it so much! Especially bacon. Oh boy, do I miss bacon!”   

Meredith believes the technology will be widely embraced:

I stopped eating meat after being profoundly moved by an article in The Atlantic about nonhuman species having consciousness (“A Journey Into the Animal Mind,” by Ross Andersen). Meat grown in a lab is, so far as I can tell, ethical and humane. It can be produced in a more sanitary environment and saves animals and meat-production workers from the horror of meat slaughter. That is likely to encourage skeptics to try it. Given the choice between cruelty and kindness, I believe most humans will choose kindness.

Ruth reminds us that some vegetarians won’t want to consume lab-grown meat:

Lab-grown meat is a wonderful idea if it can prevent billions of animals being brought into existence merely to be tortured and die. I would not eat it. I am a vegetarian and I do not like the taste and texture of flesh or of substances that try to imitate flesh. I’m sorry to find that many restaurants have replaced their veggie and bean burgers with the Beyond Burger that I find repulsive. However, all of these substitutes are great for people who like the taste and texture of flesh. I applaud it and hope it succeeds worldwide.

Victoria expects her own attitude to change:

Would I eat lab-grown meat?

Right now, I might, in the way I’ve eaten escargot: skeptically. I suspect there is something lost in the bland sameness of a petri dish, and nothing can capture the nuances of diet and environment that impact an animal’s growth. But I also expect it will become commonplace and I’ll eat it without a second thought, because anyone with the slightest conscience can see that flooding animals with hormones to get them to grow unnaturally large—while keeping them in tiny cages and filthy, crowded conditions—is cruel.

John is a skeptic:

My spidey senses are telling me this is much ado about nothing. I doubt that the human population of Earth can be supported by lab-grown meat. If it tastes like chicken and costs a similar price, yes, I would eat it. But generally, I think putting our food in the hands of engineers, chemists, and industrialists is a bad, if unavoidable, plan. I’ve always been jealous of my friend who feeds his family with wild harvested game. Just last night, I made dinner from fish I caught. I’d have to spend a lot more time outdoors to pull that off in my household, but I could do it. And animals would live their lives free and wild, not confined to cages barely bigger than their oversize, genetically engineered bodies. Factory farms are a moral catastrophe, but feeding this many people practically requires [them].

Lavina opposes lab-grown meat:

The promise of lab-grown meat rings hollow. It will lead to new problems. It ignores the concept that food is life and replaces the normal processing of food with fake, lab-created food.

Our food is not a commodity; it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Fake meat ignores the diversity and cultural aspects of food. Its use of genetically modified ingredients to give it that “fake meat taste” will lead to disease and alter the gut biome. Why would we continue in this direction when diseases and poor health are at an all-time high? Instead of finding ways to improve our biodiversity and ecosystems by using regenerative farming techniques to improve climate change, the goal is to force people to consume fake meat and fake food products under the guise of [fighting] climate change regardless of local cultures, climates, and ecosystems. It is about control and profits. These fake foods are being promoted by billionaires who have no knowledge or consciousness of how food satisfies the soul and connects people.

I heard from several readers who believed that lab-grown meat was something billionaires wanted to foist on everyone else––and from many non-billionaire readers who are enthusiastic about lab-grown meat to spare animals or in hopes that it would be better for the planet.

J. doubts that nature can be improved upon:

Chickens are precisely optimized by evolution to make more chickens efficiently. Every part needed to make another chicken from cheap feed is right there. Growing chicken-muscle cells in an expensive, controlled artificial environment is destined to be inefficient by comparison. Using lab-grown meat won’t free up cropland used for animal feed; we will be increasing demand for the same foods, only now they will be fed to cells in the lab. It’s like charging an electric vehicle with a coal power plant, then claiming it’s a zero-emissions car. Anything can look green if you close your eyes tightly enough.

Zachary wants to hasten the arrival of lab-grown meat:

We need a Project Manhattan–level commitment toward getting the clean-meat industry past its growing pains and up to scale as soon as possible. This would solve a massive contributor to climate change. Most people will never become vegans. The world’s middle class is swelling, and with it, a demand to eat meat that the market will try to meet one way or another. A Project Meathattan is also politically palatable as it would demand no personal sacrifice from people. It’s a win-win for virtually everyone but the industrial livestock industry. I think once clean meat is at a competitive price point and taste, our culture’s attitude will flip like a switch overnight and it will become regarded as significantly more unethical to eat slaughtered meat. We will ask ourselves why we didn’t try to get this technology up to scale even sooner once we see it was possible.

Mark doesn’t want lab-grown meat forced on him:

People already eat highly processed food. This is usually not healthy. Artificial meat is another processed food. If people want to eat artificial meat, let them eat it. Just don’t create legislation that forces me to eat what you’ve decided is best for you. It’s not all-or-nothing. Not everyone has to eat the same thing. I’m going to keep eating what I have evolved to eat over the last million years. I’m going to continue to eat fresh vegetables, meat from chickens, cows, etc., and grains preferably grown in the United States.

MC anticipates a class divide:

Lab-grown meat is a trend most of us will participate in, perhaps unknowingly. Similarly to the GMO debate, I imagine a scenario where we’ll see restaurants priding themselves on being “lab-free.” The scalability of the industry seems likely to move lab-grown meat into fast food. Again, we will have another class demarcation. McDonald’s and Taco Bell will be able to fatten margins (as long as it scales) by replacing farm-grown meat with lab meat. Those on the lower echelons of society will be the mass market for “new meat.” Until it gets out of the Uncanny Valley, lab-grown meat will be a fad. But eventually it’ll be common. I don’t imagine future generations will care whether their Big Mac is real or not. Just if it tastes right. Ultimately, I don’t think anyone likes to see the sausage being made. Our industrial food complex feeds the world, and fewer people suffer due to technology. We have to improve, or the future will starve.

Mina can’t imagine killing animals if there is a real-meat alternative:

This is one of the most exciting discoveries man has made. I have always been a person who hates the idea of sentient creatures being slaughtered to please our tastes. Hypocritically, I have continued to eat meat after multiple attempts to stop. The substitutes at that time bore no resemblance to the real thing, by taste or texture. I couldn’t stand them.

I’m not sure if people can grasp what a game changer this would be for our planet. Between the environmental blessings of no more livestock destroying lands, water, and air with their living by-products, we can have a more respectful and peaceful approach to living creatures (which studies have shown leads to more positive feelings for others, both human and animals). No matter how hardened they might be to meat production, the workers in slaughterhouses and meat-packing facilities have high rates of family dysfunction and substance abuse, and also live mostly poverty-stricken lives. Imagine the toll this would take on you, to kill these animals one after another while they scream and fight to get away … I’ve seen it up close, and it is a sight you never get over.

I can’t wait for the day when I can finally access this new meat and live without guilt. Would I ever eat meat from living creatures again? Absolutely not. What would be the reasoning, when you have the same product on your plate without taking lives in the process?

Carolyn believes that “cultivated meat is critical to our global fight against climate change.” She writes:

I was raised vegetarian, so I’ve never knowingly eaten meat or understood the desire for it, but I’ve grown to understand that meat is deeply visceral, emotional, and cultural for billions of people. Despite telling folks how bad meat is for the planet, for animal welfare, for slaughterhouse workers, and for their health, global meat consumption is at an all-time high. Instead of focusing on changing people’s ingrained behaviors and habits, we should focus on changing meat itself. While I’m content eating tofu and chickpeas, for most people, nothing can beat the taste of meat except for, well, meat. And that’s what cultivated meat is.

I ate cultivated chicken from GOOD Meat (which currently sells it in Singapore) at COP27 in Egypt late last year. While l can’t tell you that it “tasted like chicken” (because I have no idea what chicken tastes like), it was fleshy and kind of grossed me out—so I’m thinking we’re on the right track? Plus, the meat eaters at my table fully approved. I think we are a ways off from cultivated meat going mainstream, but I am hopeful that what I tasted that day is part of the future and that the next generation looks back at the way we raised and slaughtered animals and thinks, Why did they do it that way?

Patrick runs a commercial cattle ranch with his family on the central coast of California. He writes:

Commercial cattle ranches focus on cattle headed for consumption. I grew up on the ranch then moved away for about 15 years to work in engineering. About six years ago I moved back to the area with my family to get more involved in the ranch. Since I’ve come back, I’ve been surprised to discover that the Meat Utopia is here. The United States is producing more beef than ever, with fewer cattle, and at a higher quality. I see these changes both in the national numbers and also in the way we do business on our own ranch.

The reasons are myriad. Genetic testing and performance monitoring has helped producers select for better-performing animals. Improvements in vaccination have reduced waste, illness, and death. A greater percentage of cattle have higher-quality carcasses. And North American cattle markets are optimizing international trade to match the desired cuts to the appropriate markets. These advancements have real-world implications to reduce the environmental impact of beef while improving the consumer product and keeping costs down. And by acreage, nearly all of the grazing is done on so-called marginal lands: land that is too arid or too steep to support farming.

Erin is in the same business:

My husband and I are cattle producers on a farm in rural west Alabama. Pretty obviously, I do not have moral qualms about eating meat. I’m an omnivore. I am biologically designed to convert meat into the vitamins, minerals, and proteins that sustain me. And I like it. Even so, I can envision a day when vat-grown meat is a primary source of protein. It will have to be ramped up to scale and it will have to get a lot cheaper, but it will be a significant source of protein for a growing world population. That doesn’t mean there will not be a niche market for the uber-wealthy to purchase beef.

For the record, there are a lot of misconceptions about animal agriculture. Cows spend all but the last six weeks of their lives eating grass. They may get mineral supplements as well, especially in winter, but very little grain, if any. Cattle can convert grass to protein. Humans cannot. We cannot digest cellulose. Perhaps in the rain forests of Brazil, the pastures could, and should, be restored to forest. But you are not going to grow a forest just anywhere. There will not be forests in west Texas or even in Kansas.

There is a lot of land in the world not suited for crops or forests that will grow grass. And one of the most efficient converters of grass into usable protein is a cow. Cows provide more than meat. There are hundreds of products produced from cattle: marshmallows, leather, gelatin, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, and more. Just Google “products made from cattle” and you will be astounded. Vat-grown meat? It’s coming, but not in my lifetime. We’ll keep on growing cattle like we have for 40 years. And that is all I have time to say, because I need to move hay out of the barn for the cows before the rain comes.

Kathleen hopes lab-grown pork is delicious:

The only meat I will consume comes from local hunters, whose practices I know—quick, clean kill, full harvest and usage. The animal has had a full and healthy and natural life. And as my dear husband told me years ago, “Honey, nothing in nature dies of old age.” I would buy lab-grown meat in a heartbeat, as soon as it became available and was proven to be environmentally healthy and healthy for human consumption.

My primary motivation for [this] is animal cruelty. Breeding, raising, transporting, and slaughtering “food” animals is monstrous. In Canada, there are the farm lobbies, fishing-and-hunting lobbies, and vendor lobbies—all with massive clout—opposing any significant change. Seeing covert videos taken within animal “businesses” did it for me. And there’s the hideous environmental damage and the damage to human health caused by this “industry.” Altogether, inexcusable. I’m already buying and consuming “artificial” meat but would greatly welcome more variety. (I REALLY miss pork, and there are no pork substitutes available where I live … yet, I hope.)

Claire feels queasy about lab-grown meat:

I tend to be wary of chemically simulated foodstuffs …… so “chicken” fashioned from a sort of ooze during a process that the company prefers not to describe and that was also described as “gray” and “stringy” sounds atrocious. I’m unsure I would be brave enough to try that, nor would I serve it to an enemy. I hope restauranteurs in Singapore at least place an asterisk next to chicken on menus, with a corresponding footnote. Marketing euphemisms seem more likely: “ethically derived chicken,” etc. In spite of the “Utopia” marketing angle, I wonder if the cost to simulate chicken would be a net positive or if it would better serve Singapore to allocate some land for agricultural purposes.

Skya thinks artificial meat has promise for feeding pets:

Personally, I am a vegan and will remain so for health reasons. My cats, on the other hand … While humans are dragging their feet for various reasons, all the domesticated animals of the world could be eating laboratory meat right now, making a large dent in the damage that our passion for pets and other captive carnivores causes to the planet.

Karl gives two cheers for lab-grown meat … but not three:

I’ve been a vegan for ethical reasons since the end of college, so I welcome any developments that help usher in a future where we slaughter fewer animals just because their taste makes us happy. Based on animal-welfare laws (which largely protect animals such as cats and dogs), it’s clear that, collectively, we believe that animals should be treated humanely and their suffering should be minimized. However, we generally don’t extend these protections to the billions of farm animals living today. So reducing their consumption reduces their numbers and thus reduces their collective suffering. I think the reduction of suffering should be an easy position to support.

The environmental benefits have the potential to be incredible as well. A transition away from the inefficient practice of raising animals for food would lower our carbon footprint, reduce our water consumption, and save millions of acres of natural land from destruction. But I wouldn’t suddenly change my diet to match the 200-plus lbs of meat the average American consumes each year, regardless of the ethics. In the developed world, our level of meat consumption is unhealthy and is an immense contributor to disease burden. This is in terms of mortality, morbidity, health-related quality of life, and cost. Maybe we could all eat occasional lab-grown meat. It does taste good. But I don’t think it should be a regular thing. We should all cut back on our meat consumption.

For years, as Joe Biden has sought to assure the American public he deserves their trust, he's relied upon a go-to phrase meant to underscore his credibility: "I give you my word as a Biden."

A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years:

When C. Michael Curtis pulled my short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I was in my first semester in graduate school at Madison. In the years since I’d graduated from college, I’d been a bartender and administrative assistant and had worked my brain and fingers raw, trying and mostly failing to write well on my own. In that time, I finished three and a half apprentice novels and countless short stories, none of which was very good. Finally, with the story that The Atlantic took, I had at last written a story that was not only good enough but good enough for Curtis’s sharp eye and exacting standards.

Groff went on: “My entire life as a writer unfolded from that moment of acceptance from C. Michael Curtis and The Atlantic, and the sheer luck of that snip in time feels holy to me.”

Mike Curtis, who died last week at the age of 88, was a member of The Atlantic’s staff for 57 years. The American literary empyrean is thickly populated with writers Mike discovered or nurtured. For good reason: Over his long career as an Atlantic editor—and as a teacher of writing at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington College, and, most recently, Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he co-occupied the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities with his wife, the novelist Betsy Cox—Mike was a tireless champion of short fiction who loved nothing more than discovering new talent. “The best part of my job,” he once said, “is turning over all those rocks and finding a silver dollar now and then.”

During his long tenure at The Atlantic, Mike turned over a lot of rocks, and found a lot of silver dollars. Among the writers whose work that Mike was the first, or among the first, to discover and publish in a national magazine were Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Lee, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jay McInerny, James Alan McPherson, Tim O’Brien, John Sayles, Akhil Sharma, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Tobias Wolff. Mike also worked with plenty of established masters: A. S. Byatt and Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver and Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and Richard Ford, John Updike and Philip Roth, Richard Yates and Paul Theroux and Walter Mosley, Barth and Barthelme and Borges, and many, many others.

In 2002, Nic Pizzolatto, then a student in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arkansas, submitted two stories to The Atlantic. He came home one day to find a message on his voicemail—it was Mike Curtis saying that he liked the stories and was accepting them for publication. “I think at first I thought it was one of my friends, being an asshole,” Pizzolatto recalled. But the magazine published “Ghost-Birds” in the October 2003 issue and “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” in November 2004, and Pizzolatto embarked on a successful career as a novelist and television writer, eventually creating and writing the acclaimed True Detective series for HBO.

Ann Beattie recently described the role Mike played in her career:

When I first started to write fiction in the early 70s, the name C. Michael Curtis was interchangeable with Shining Star. He was one: someone to look up to because of his ability to spot emerging talent; an esteemed editor among editors; a man who shaped taste and followed through with writers, encouraging them in significant (and also thoughtful) ways. He really loved short stories, and he was responsible for helping along—really, for determining—the early careers of many young writers, in a genre that, pre-mass-MFA, had been faltering. I knew him as a person determined to re-energize the contemporary American short story—a dedication that was indispensable to its resurgence. He was such an astute reader, and, in his interactions with writers, a listener. Watchful. Helpful and kind. He just assumed that reading and writing were important, essential pursuits, and that it was his role to encourage things along, spreading the good word. In many senses, he was a true believer.

One of the first people Mike brought into The Atlantic after arriving at the magazine was a writing student at Syracuse University who, in the early 1960s, was contributing violent, bloody, sex-and-booze-saturated stories to a variety of university-affiliated publications. Mike pictured the writer, who went by “J. C. Oates,” as “a scruffy garage mechanic with a sour view of humanity, someone I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.” But he admired the writing and accepted one of Oates’s submissions, contingent on the author allowing Mike to cut the story by one-third. “In the Region of Ice,” whose author had dropped the initials and was now going by Joyce Carol Oates, was published in The Atlantic in August 1966, and was deemed the best story of the year by the O. Henry Collection, then the most prestigious garland in short fiction. In the ensuing decades, Mike published many stories by Oates, now one of the most influential voices in American fiction and herself a dedicated teacher.

Across six decades, Mike and his team of interns and editorial assistants sifted through thousands of stories each month. His correspondence was immense and never-ending, scrawled in the white space of the letters he received in a tight, nearly indecipherable hand. As Jane Rosenzweig, now the director of the writing center at Harvard, remembered:

When I started working as Mike’s assistant, in 1994, his first compliment was about how fast I could type (on the electric typewriter in my office)—not because he didn’t value my reading and critiquing skills, but because my typing speed allowed me to keep up with the enormous number of letters he wrote to authors who submitted their short stories to the magazine. Mike read everything with the same attention and interest—stories submitted by literary agents, stories sent directly to him by authors, stories pulled from the “slush” pile by interns. His personal replies to authors were legendary; I still meet writers who can quote verbatim what he said to them 25 years ago, both the praise and the criticism. He may have thought the story was “too long for what it accomplishes,” or “small,” or “engaging, but not for us,” but he encouraged those writers to try again, and many did—for decades. The letters were usually brief—just a sentence or two—but enough to remind an aspiring writer that someone was out there, waiting for their next story.

Tobias Wolff recalled Mike’s shrewd relentlessness in a task that required both judgment and endurance:

How many manuscripts came pouring through Mike’s mail slot every day? In the course of a week? A month? Hundreds, for sure. Yet whenever I spoke to Mike about writing, almost always on the phone, during editing sessions (we met only twice, and briefly), he warmed to the subject with the freshness of youth. And he brought that same freshness to our editing sessions. In truth, I couldn’t wear the man down, hard as I often tried, in my defense of a word or phrase or passage that I thought indispensable to my story, and that Mike did not. He wasn’t always right, but he was right most of the time.

Mike’s path to becoming an influential figure in American fiction was far from foreordained. He was indeed hard to wear down. Born in 1934, he experienced a Dickensian early childhood—a tumultuous and disrupted family life; stints in foster homes; boarding school starting at age 4; and high-school classmates who beat him up, at an Arkansas school from which almost no one went on to college and where he played on a basketball team that never won. Ralph Lombreglia, one of the writers Mike worked with for decades, recalled getting a rare glimpse into Mike’s past:

I first met Mike in the mid-1970s when I wrote to ask his advice about becoming a fiction writer. He invited me to the Atlantic offices where I arrived in a suit, tie, and London Fog raincoat with epaulets on the shoulders. I’ll always be grateful to him for not remembering that meeting. Later, whenever he bought one of my short stories, we had lunch together on Newbury Street, concluding with his favorite dessert, chocolate-covered ice cream bonbons. One of those lunches was particularly memorable. The story he was publishing concerned a woman raised in an orphanage despite having had two living parents. “You know,” he said, “your story is remarkably similar to my own life,” and went on to tell me that he was the illegitimate son of the prominent architect Ely Kahn. Mike’s mother had had a passing affair with him in the 1930s, but she “didn’t want a son around,” as he put it, and so he was abandoned to various boarding schools and foster homes. For years he’d known his father’s identity but never revealed it, even when he first met members of the man’s family. I told Mike that my own mother’s life was the basis of that story, and that I intended to expand it into a novel someday. My last letter from Mike, in 2018, began, “Finished your novel, all 576 pages of it.” His unsurprising advice was to cut it by half and send it back to him. I’m still in the middle of that rewrite. I assumed that Mike would be around forever.

From his inauspicious Arkansas high school, Mike eventually escaped to Cornell’s School of Hotel Management, in 1952. Browsing in the university library, he discovered the works of Franz Kafka. No more hotel management—he wanted to transfer to the liberal-arts college and become a literature major. He had to apply several times before administrators realized he was serious enough to admit. Soon, he was editing the literary magazine and working for the newspaper and rooming with an engineering major and aspiring writer named Thomas Pynchon. His other roommate was the folk singer and novelist Richard Fariña, who would go on to write the 1966 cult classic Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me. (Fariña would later marry Joan Baez’s sister Mimi; Pynchon served as best man.)

After graduation, in 1956, Mike briefly worked at the Ithaca Journal and at Newsweek before returning to Cornell for a doctorate in political science. He was unsure whether he should pursue a career at the CIA or as a journalist. But he kept his hand in literature, writing fiction for campus literary magazines and composing poems, one of which won an American Academy of Poets Prize. In 1961, when Peter Davison, The Atlantic’s longtime poetry editor, came to Cornell with Anne Sexton to do a reading, Mike pressed some poems into his hands. Davison ended up accepting three of them for publication. He also offered Mike a summer job reading the fiction slush pile. This led to a phone call in the spring of 1963 from the magazine’s top editor, Edward Weeks, asking if Mike would come to Boston and take a job as a junior editor. Mike was about to take his comprehensive exams en route to securing his Ph.D. But, as he recalled in a 1984 interview with The Missouri Review, “I had been in grad school for four years and my wife was about to have a baby and I’d been in Ithaca for twelve years and it was time to leave. So I said yes, took a leave of absence from grad school, and came to The Atlantic.” That leave of absence never ended. “In those days The Atlantic had no masthead and we really didn’t have titles in any formal way. I came as an assistant to the editor. I was there for five weeks before I ever saw Mr. Weeks. In fact, I feared he might not even know I was there.” An older editor, Charles Morton, took Mike under his wing, and he soon developed a portfolio editing both fiction and nonfiction, especially pieces on sports, religion, and the social sciences.

In 1966, Weeks was succeeded as editor in chief by Robert Manning. In his memoir, The Swamp Root Chronicle, Manning recorded that among the editors he inherited was “a young Cornellian named C. Michael Curtis [who] had a sharp ear and a clear eye for promising new short story writers as well as a good grip on the many social issues with which the magazine concerned itself. Mike was a shy and complicated fellow whom the vicissitudes of childhood had afflicted with a stutter that magically disappeared when he taught creative writing at nearby colleges … or when he held a good hand at the poker table.”

In time left over after editing, teaching, and family, Mike applied himself to pickup basketball. He played at YMCAs and writers’ conferences all over the country. He wasn’t tall, and after age 50 he wore rec specs and a bulky knee brace that he used as a weapon when posting up in the paint. But he was an ardent competitor—nickname: “Bear”—who could score layups over taller defenders using crafty spin and whose passing was crisp and creative; unalert teammates were liable to take a hard no-look pass to the nose or the back of the skull. He refused to let advancing infirmity keep him off the court, playing regularly deep into his 80s. The writer Ethan Canin remembered those games:

He pretty much gave me my start as a writer, picking me out of a slush pile that only a person like him would have bothered to read, let alone conscientiously. And then for the next thirty years fighting the good fight, always pushing literary fiction, always pushing young writers. But what I remember most about Mike was the way he played basketball. Rumor had it that in his prime he’d been a Golden Gloves boxer, and he certainly played that way. He showed up on the court with a piece of hardware around his knee that looked like the spurs from a Roman chariot. And it turns out he was in basketball as he was in life—always pushing, always pushing.

Mike possessed both stoicism and a sly wit. The wit emerged from what appeared, deceptively, to be a placid and dry demeanor, and it made itself known like an ambush in his letters and lectures. A mischievous tone sometimes took on an edge. For years, a letter Mike wrote in 1989 hung on the walls of The Atlantic’s offices. A frustrated aspiring contributor who had had his submissions rejected many times had written in to say that he’d heard rumors that the magazine used five different forms of rejection letters for different situations. Mike responded:

The persistent rumors are quite true, though modest in their assessment of our protocols. We have, in fact, many more than five different kinds of rejection slips. One slip, for example, is sent in response to all stories about household pets. Another is used to reject stories about troubled academic couples traveling in Europe (still further distinction is made between stories in which the warring couple is restored in their affection for each other by the spectacle of alien hearts at play and stories in which the more justifiably aggrieved of the pair comes at last to his/her senses and cuts short what promises to become a damaging drift into self-degradation).

Other slips are used for war stories, for stories about adolescents involving college (or high school) chums who finally realize the truth of their relationships, or any story in which one character is a fish. We have a special stock and ink for stories about children who have been abandoned or abused by one or both parents, and for whom the memory has become particularly acute as the child, now an adult, reflects upon the neediness of his/her own child/children. Still other rejection slips are earmarked for stories which make use of anthropomorphism, women who suddenly develop male sexual characteristics, or automobiles that talk back.

We have rejection slips for retired professionals, for children under the age of 14, for writers who hold political office, and for academics who have been told by friends they ought to submit manuscripts to The Atlantic.

We have rejection slips for stories sent simultaneously to more than one magazine, for writers who use only one name (usually a vegetable or mineral), for fiction manuscripts sent as proof that anyone can do better than the author of a recent Atlantic story, and for writers who say they will renew their subscriptions to this magazine only if we will publish their fiction.

We also have a special rejection letter for writers who are more wedded to the possibilities of language than to the niceties of convincing narrative. That is the letter you are reading at this moment.

When The Atlantic was based in Boston, Mike and his family would host lively annual softball games and picnics at their home in Concord and then in Littleton, Massachusetts, where children of staff would play alongside the sheep he kept in the summer, in lieu of having to mow the lawn. Inevitably a basketball game would also break out at the hoop on the garage or across the street. Those were family occasions, and children were never shy around Mike. Tobias Wolff remembers:

One day my wife heard my then-5-year-old son, Michael, talking to someone upstairs, yet she knew he was alone up there. She found him with the telephone in his hand, gabbing away. It was Mike on the other end. He’d called to discuss a story, but was happy to talk to my boy instead. He was laughing when I took possession of the phone. Well, why not? It was surely more fun than listening to me plant my flag on some needless adjective.

Decades of reading more than 10,000 short stories a year in search of the dozen or so that The Atlantic could actually publish that year infused Mike with a deep belief in the importance of fiction to culture, and a kind of impish wisdom about the writing life.

On handling disappointing news from editors: “Take your rejection slips and cover a wall with them. I did that when I was in college. I became fascinated by the different paper colors and typefaces and probably sent work to magazines I otherwise wouldn’t have, except that I wanted to get copies of their rejection slips.”

On what a short story can accomplish: “The value of short fiction lies, perhaps, in its capacity to ignite uncertainty and mindfulness into our lives, as well as to remind us of the perceptiveness and artfulness of the storytellers among us.”

Mike leaves behind six anthologies of short fiction, including Contemporary New England Stories (1992), Contemporary West Coast Stories (1993), God: Stories (1998), and Faith: Stories (2003); five Atlantic National Magazine Awards for fiction, along with many more finalist nominations; and the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, which awards $5,000 and publication to a debut book of short fiction by writers living in the South.

He is survived by his wife, the novelist and poet Betsy Cox; his brothers, Ben Curtis and Andrew Curtis; his son Hans Curtis; his daughter, Hilary Curtis Osmer; his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Morrow; his stepson, Michael Cox; and five grandchildren—D. J. Osmer, Jack Morrow, Nate Morrow, Caroline Cox, and Andrew Cox. His oldest son, Christopher Curtis, died in 2013. He is also survived by hundreds of writers whose careers he launched or nurtured; by the thousands more whose work he gave the respect of serious attention; and by a republic of letters enriched by his having contributed to it with such dedication for so long.

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As an American living in Britain for the past decade, I’ve had a front-row seat to two dysfunctional democracies hell-bent on embarrassing themselves. President Donald Trump warned that a hurricane was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” Prime Minister Liz Truss failed to outlast a lettuce at Downing Street. These years have not inspired confidence in democracy.

In Britain and the United States—and across most faltering Western democracies—this democratic dysfunction is routinely chalked up to a catchall culprit: polarization. The reason our democracies are decaying, we’re often told, is that we’re more divided than ever before. And that’s true: Polarization is worsening. Debates over Brexit and Trump tore citizenries—and families—apart.

But Britain’s and America’s democratic woes are not at all the same. The problems in American democracy are worse. That’s because a particularly insidious disease has infected the core of its political system, one that is not present to the same degree in other rich democracies: extreme conspiracism. Other countries, including the U.K., have polarization. America has irrational polarization, in which one political party has fallen under the spell of conspiratorial thinking. Polarization plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral. The battle for American democracy will be a battle over reality.

Within the modern GOP, conspiracy theories—about stolen elections, satanic cults, or “deep state” cover-ups—have replaced policy ideas as a rallying cry for Trump’s MAGA base. Trump’s disciples have developed an encyclopedic knowledge of a dizzying cast of characters, along with a series of code words for alleged cover-ups. They rattle off their accepted wisdom about conspiracies that most people have never heard of, such as “Italygate,” the absurd notion that the U.S. embassy in Rome, in conjunction with the Vatican, used satellites to rig the 2020 presidential election.

In Britain, far fewer people believe in conspiracy theories. According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent. Seventeen percent of Americans agree with the statement that “a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles has taken control of parts of the U.S. Government and mainstream U.S. media,” compared with 8 percent of Britons.

What’s really troubling about this political moment in America, though, is not merely the spread of conspiratorial thinking in the general population. It’s also that the delusions have infected the mainstream political leadership. The crackpots have come to Congress.

When Kevin McCarthy finally became speaker of the House this week, one of the first photos to circulate was a selfie taken with Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former QAnon believer who once blamed a wildfire on Jewish space lasers.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

Writing a similar sentence about modern British politics would be impossible. There’s just nothing like it. Instead, in Britain, conspiracy theorists are ostracized by the political establishment. Politicians may disagree about policy, but those who disagree about reality face real consequences.

Last week, for instance, Andrew Bridgen, a conservative member of the British Parliament, tweeted a graph from a conspiracy-theory website, spreading false information about the risks of COVID vaccines. The vaccination program, Bridgen wrote, was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.” The response was swift. Bridgen was condemned across the political spectrum. His own party expelled him. The Tories, Britain’s ruling conservative political party, didn’t want to be associated with a conspiracy theorist.

Meanwhile, America’s political right is the leading global source of COVID conspiracy theories. The more outlandish, the better. Two years ago, in Ohio, in an almost exact parallel to Bridgen’s remarks, Republican State Representative Jennifer Gross compared mandatory vaccination to the Holocaust. Then Gross went much further. She effusively praised the testimony of a quack expert who claimed that vaccines magnetize people, such that spoons will stick to your forehead following a shot. “What an honor to have you here,” Gross fawned, after the alleged expert testified that vaccines can “interface” with 5G cell towers. Gross faced no primary challenger and was recently reelected, with 64 percent of the vote.

Rather than getting expelled from the Republican Party or becoming pariahs on the right, conspiracy theorists have become GOP stars. Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and a former top intelligence official, has falsely suggested that COVID-19 was created by George Soros, Bill Gates, and the World Health Organization to steal the 2020 election. In a separate statement, he argued that Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the best-selling book Sapiens, was part of a plot to alter human DNA and turn us into cyborgs.

Flynn should be an irrelevant laughingstock. Instead, he’s headlining right-wing conferences and commanding huge audiences. Flynn recently shared a stage at the deranged ReAwaken America event with Eric Trump—during which one speaker alleged that “demonic satellites” control voting in America. Donald Trump, America’s conspiracist in chief, spoke to the conference by phone.

Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the links between evolution and human storytelling, has come up with a simple, compelling explanation for why people are innately drawn to conspiracy theories. We are, in his words, a storytelling animal. Our minds have evolved to latch on to stories to make sense of a maddeningly complex world.  

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are some of the best stories out there. They’re thrillers. Many would make great blockbuster films. And to debunk a conspiracy theory is to tell someone that there is no story. It’s trying to convince a person who has made sense of patterns—by squinting at them through the fun-house mirror of conspiratorial thinking—that those patterns are meaningless. That’s not a message the storytelling animal wants to hear.

[Tim Harford: What conspiracy theorists don’t believe]

All humans of all political persuasions are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Millions of Americans, on the political left and the political right, believe in them. But conspiratorial thinking is thriving especially on the right because it’s sanctioned, and endorsed, from above.

This asymmetrical conspiracism has been going on for a while now. The historian Richard Hofstadter noted how “the paranoid style” took root on the right in the mid-20th century, starting with McCarthyism and continuing  through Barry Goldwater’s rise in 1964, shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature. This is partly because of Trump himself, who peddled countless debunked conspiracy theories, including that climate change is a hoax invented by China, and the lie that Ted Cruz’s father had links to the JFK assassination. As Trump took over the party, his conspiratorial lies became Republican orthodoxy. And that opened the door to conspiratorial influencers, who started inventing new lies.

Deranged grifters profit from what the writer Kurt Andersen has called the “fantasy-industrial complex,” in which media provocateurs, including Infowars and Fox News, have cashed in on political messaging defined by a conspiratorial mindset.

They prey on susceptible individuals, particularly those who are lonely and bored, browsing alone, and finding online communities to replace real-world ones. People with paranoid personalities are particularly vulnerable, as are those with a Manichaean worldview—a perception that the entire world is a battle between good and evil. At the ReAwaken America event, one speaker advanced the outlandish claim that the election was stolen by demons.

Alone, polarization is damaging but manageable. When polarization merges with deranged conspiracy theories, then democratic breakdown becomes far more likely. One purpose of democratic government is to allow citizens to solve problems through compromise without resorting to violence. Modern Republican conspiracist politics undermines those aspects—solving problems, compromising, and avoiding violence.

To solve a problem, you first must agree it exists. Democracy therefore requires a shared sense of reality. Instead, America has splintered into a choose-your-own-reality society, in which citizens self-select into whatever version of the world they want to inhabit, reflected back at them by media outlets that earn most when they challenge worldviews least. Conversely, in Britain, the BBC continues to dominate broadcast-media market share, and outlets that push conspiracy theories have tiny audiences. Moreover, left-wing and right-wing politicians both watch and agree to be interviewed by the BBC, whereas in the U.S., politicians gravitate toward friendly partisan media outlets.

Even if politicians can agree a problem exists, the Manichaean nature of conspiracy theories—and the extreme claims embedded in conspiratorial cults such as QAnon—makes compromise unlikely. Trying to find shared ground with a fellow American who disagrees with you on health care or taxes is one thing, but if you believe that Democrats are harvesting children to suck their blood, then working together on, say, democratic reform becomes much harder. Granted, elected Republicans on the whole don’t truly believe those more outlandish claims, but some of their core voters do, and that puts pressure on them to treat Democrats like evil enemies rather than legitimate political opponents.

On January 6, 2021, thousands of deluded insurrectionists attacked the Capitol because of lies spread by Trump and his acolytes. But the bigger problem was inside the ranks of Congress itself, as most House Republicans voted not to certify the election based on those debunked theories. These were the conspiratorial insurrectionists in suits—and they’re now in charge of the House of Representatives. What will they do now that they’re in power? Launch countless investigations into COVID vaccines, deep-state cover-ups, and the elections that they wrongly claim were stolen. Governing will be put on hold for two years.

Until modern Republican politics stops systematically empowering crackpots, America’s democratic dysfunction cannot be considered equivalent to the mere polarization that exists in peer countries such as Britain. In Britain, the political system is broken in ways that are more easily fixed. When reality shifts, people change their minds—and someone as incompetent as Liz Truss gets booted from office in just 42 days.

Unfortunately, loosening the grip of conspiratorial thinking in politics is extremely difficult; it means trying to make the storytelling animal give up on one hell of a story. But here is one nugget of wisdom for how to start, drawn from H. L. Mencken: “The way to deal with superstition,” he wrote, “is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.”

QAnon is crazy. The notion that vaccines cause spoons to stick to you is moronic. Anyone who tells you that a best-selling historian is part of a secret plot to turn you into a cyborg is, with insincere apologies to Mike Flynn, a complete idiot. In the battle for reality, ridicule is a powerful weapon.

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