Radio Free Mike

Thad Ziolkowski is a poet, novelist, and memoirist who has written a fascinating book about surfing and addiction called The Drop . He’s no stranger to difficult themes, and I have a feature in the current issue of The Surfers Journal (issue 34.2) that explores not just trauma and surfing, not just Somalia and my father’s suicide, but also the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation, a fabulous group in...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Meghan Daum is a an essayist and author who lives in L.A. but lost her home in the Eaton Fire in January. She also has a new book out called THE CATASTROPHE HOUR. She insists the title is a coincidence, because she named the book before the fires started. We talk about the fires, being “problematized,” and...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Mark Sundeen is an accomplished novelist and essayist, author of The Man Who Quit Money , a bestselling biography of Daniel Suelo, who sold all his things to live in a Utah cave. Now Mark has published a collection of similar nonfiction portraits of people who inhabit the American West, the drifters and dr...

Antoine Wilson is the author of three fine novels, including The Interloper and Panorama City , and his latest book, Mouth to Mouth , is about a man who rescuscitates a stranger on the beach in Santa Monica, but afterwards can’t resist intruding on the saved man’s life. We talk about the unreliable nature of narrative, but for the first ten minutes we also discuss the L.A. wildfires and surfing, s...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Jeanne Carstensen was in Greece as a reporter for The World when an overfilled boat chugging across a narrow part of the Aegean foundered and sank. The disaster brought the island of Lesbos together, in part because its residents remembered even older surges of migration, including the one caused by the Gr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Peter Theroux has started to publish a two-volume memoir about his career in US intelligence. He’s an excellent writer, from a family of them — his brothers are Paul and Alexander — and In Obscura describes his government work in the Middle East and suburban Washington with a sharp sense of detail and a li...

Soraya Simi was hand-picked by Angela Madsen to direct a film about her last major ocean-rowing voyage, a solo attempt to row from L.A. to Honolulu in 2020. Angela was a professional ocean rower and paraplegic, an Olympic gold medalist, a Guinness world-record holder in several categories, and a former U.S. Marine. Soraya’s new film about the ill-fated voyage is named after Angela’s fiberglass boa...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com American journalist Jacob Kushner is the author of a fine new(ish) book about a series of crimes by a neo-Nazi gang in Germany called LOOK AWAY: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants . I was still at Spiegel Online when the cops closed in on the “National...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com In 2022 the Sundance Film Festival accepted, but then cancelled, Meg Smaker’s documentary about Guantánamo inmates and other accused terrorists living in a rehabilitation center in Saudi Arabia. Meg swears JIHAD REHAB will come out, under a new title, in 2025. We talk about that and a bunch of other things...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Jason and his wife Yegi were both foreign correspondents in Tehran when members of the Revolutionary Guard knocked on their door in 2014. The Guards hauled them to jail, and Jason, who holds two passports, was accused of spying for the United States. The Iranian government held a sham trial and kept him in...

David Rohde, National Security editor for NBC News, author of Where Tyranny Begins , talks about Donald Trump and his war against the Justice Department and the FBI. His meticulously reported book argues that Trump trashed a number of Watergate-era norms in Washington, which allowed him to organize something far worse than Watergate on January 6, 2021. David also talks about being held hostage by...

Announcing a new podcast called Radio Free Mike. Episodes will be audio-only, available on your favorite podcast platforms or through a link to Substack, which we’ll send out every two weeks or so. Full episodes are for paid subscribers, but free previews are for everyone. Join us if you can, and Happy New Year.. Full website: http://radiofreemike.net/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to di...