The University and College Union says staff will walk out "alongside fellow trade unions".

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.

Since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, he has apparently spent a considerable amount of time “looking into” the personal complaints of individual users who suspect that they are not as visible on the platform as they should be.

Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the fearmongering account Libs of TikTok, pointed out that she is on a “trends blacklist” and asked, “When will this be fixed @elonmusk?” A popular MAGA shitposter who goes by Catturd ™ wrote that he was “Shadowbanned, ghostbanned, searchbanned.” The far-right personality Jack Posobiec said that “a lot of people” had told him that they couldn’t see his tweets for some reason. And Musk replied to each one and offered all of them the same assurance: He would get to the bottom of it.

“Shadowbanning,” in its current usage, refers to a content-moderation tactic that reduces the visibility of a piece of borderline content rather than removing it entirely. It originally referred to something much more dramatic: quieting annoying personalities on message boards by making their posts totally invisible to everyone else. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have denied doing anything that extreme, but they do limit content’s reach in various ways—it’s frequently unclear how or why, which makes people suspicious. Shadowbanning can mean that posts aren’t promoted to a wide audience, or it can mean something more severe, such as hiding accounts from search results (platforms tend to blame this on bugs).

In general, the practices that slow a post’s spread or limit an account’s reach are intended to be consolations or compromises—they allow for more nuanced moderation than a system in which something is only either left up or taken down, and a person is either not banned or banned. Regardless, shadowbanning has been a pet peeve of Republicans since 2018, when Donald Trump called it “discriminatory and illegal.” Controversy was renewed in December with the temporary uproar over “the Twitter Files,” a batch of pre-acquisition documents and internal communications about content moderation (including some practices that could be called shadowbanning) that Musk gave to hand-selected reporters.

Although Musk wants to be the hero who ends shadowbanning forever, he’s unlikely to fully assuage paranoia about it. After more than a decade of widespread social-media use, many people have deeply held pet theories about how algorithms work, and about how they affect them personally. So far, the Musk era of Twitter has been a shadowban Rorschach test, with different users seeing a different reality based on the stories they’re already telling themselves about their experiences on the platform. “Thank you @ElonMusk for lifting the #shadowban on controversial views,” an #exvegan who advocates for all-meat diets posted earlier this month. Meanwhile, Catturd ™ tweeted on Friday that he believes “all conservatives accounts are being throttled and hidden again just like before @elonmusk took over ownership.” Other users have also complained that they’re still being persecuted:

“It’s so dull & frustrating STILL being under a shadowban” “@Twitter busily shadowbanning folks again, including me” “Hi @elonmusk, can you stop hiding my cleavage from the world?”

Musk recently added “View” counts to the bottom of tweets, presumably with the intention of equipping users with data and giving them greater insight into whether others actually are seeing their tweets and just not liking them. This effort appeared to mostly anger people: The numbers were smaller than expected, which served as more evidence of shadowbanning.

[Read: The Elon Musk placebo effect]

Effective or not, Musk’s efforts indicate that moderation policy on major social-media platforms is moving into an anti-shadowban era. Users have been loudly agitated by shadowbanning for so long that platforms are finally acquiescing. Instagram introduced an “Account Status” tool in October 2021, which gives creators and business owners limited but meaningful insight into whether a professional account’s content has been marked as ineligible for recommendation (meaning that it won’t be promoted in the app’s Explore section or in other users’ feeds). In December, Musk announced, “Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal.” This update has yet to materialize (Musk says it’s coming “no later than next month”), but it’s sure to be popular when it does.

“Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned,” Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, wrote in The Atlantic last year. In a survey he helped run, 9.2 percent of social-media users said they believed they’d been shadowbanned at some point in the past year.

But of course, these people had no firm proof. Those who believe themselves to be shadowbanned can only swap stories, share data they’ve collected, make arguments, and suggest conspiracies. This is the subject of recent work by Laura Savolainen, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Helsinki. For a paper published last year, she used a tool called 4CAT to collect thousands of comments about shadowbanning posted in popular Reddit forums about Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Sorting through the comments, she saw social-media users sharing bits of what she calls “algorithmic folklore.” They would describe a fluctuation in the engagement on their accounts and then tell a story about what they imagined was causing it. Or they would listen to someone else describe their suspicions and help build on them.

These people evoke data and cite analytic tools that monitor account performance, demonstrating their “heightened awareness” of “ubiquitous numbers,” according to Savolainen. But the way in which many of them use these numbers is arbitrary. They fill in the gaps with speculation and personal grievance.

“Algorithms are very conducive to folklore because the systems are so opaque,” Savolainen told me. “These wider technological networks connect us to people on the other side of the world, and we don’t know who they are or why they made this decision or that decision.” Obviously, we’re going to have fraught relationships with something that undergirds our social lives and, for many, our financial stability. (In the survey that Nicholas ran, 20 percent of respondents who believed they’d been shadowbanned said it “affected their ability to make a living.”)

Here is where the shadowbanning debate becomes sort of a tragic misunderstanding. People who use social platforms think of themselves, naturally, as people. And they think of the algorithm as one all-powerful thing assessing them and passing judgment. In reality, the people who use these platforms are collections of data. Savolainen explains in her paper that the algorithms behind something like TikTok or Instagram regard their users as “composites of individual features—clusters continuously formed and reformed as the data traces users emit are processed and correlated.”

In the Reddit comments Savolainen cataloged, there were many people who took their shadowbanning “very, very personally.” They felt persecuted by the algorithm; sometimes, they felt self-doubt. “Am I shadowbanned, or is it just not good-quality content? Maybe I’m shadowbanned, or maybe I’m not that good of a singer after all. I’m not sure which would actually have been worse for people,” she told me.

[Read: ]To be honest with you, no influencer has been treated more unfairly than Donald Trump Jr.

To her mind, platforms owe us transparency not because it’s fair and because we are all entitled to a certain amount of visibility, but because they have created a fake emotional and mental conundrum for us, and they should resolve it. “Everything that goes on on a platform is already always artificial,” she said. There’s no control against which to compare any post’s performance, because post performance isn’t a concept that exists without social media. The distinction between “now the algorithm is working normally” and “now the algorithm is shadowbanning me” is all in the brain of the beholder. It makes no sense. It’s not reality. (It’s hurting my head.)

The people in charge of most of these platforms would argue that they can offer answers only within limits. If they start revealing every single consideration that goes into every single recommendation decision, people will begin to game the system in ways that nobody will like. Or, if they start providing a ton of context to users about the way their accounts are being treated by various algorithms, there’s no telling what people would actually make of the information. Some may only be further confused by it.

And what’s worse? You may find that you’re not shadowbanned. You may find that ignorance was bliss.

After University of Alabama basketball player Darius Miles was charged with murder in the death of a 23-year-old mother and removed from the team, the victim's loved ones say she was shot and killed when she declined a man trying to flirt with her.

CNN's Isabel Rosales discusses the latest updates of the single-vehicle car crash that killed University of Georgia offensive lineman Devin Willock and staff member Chandler LeCroy early Sunday, just hours after the team celebrated its national championship victory.