Radio Free Mike

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Diane Foley is the mother of Jim Foley, the American journalist who was kidnapped in 2012 by members of ISIS in Syria, and beheaded on camera in 2014. Diane has written a memoir called American Mother, with the help of Irish novelist Colum McCann, about the hostage ordeal and its long echo. The book descri...

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actor and writer who was diagnosed in 2020 with Stage 4 lung cancer. The diagnosis came as a complete surprise, and her new book about the shock and its aftermath is called The End of My Life is Killing Me . It’s a collection of personal essays dealing with the clichés of cancer patient-hood, with juicing machines that did not help, Greek myths that did, and with her short...

Meg Smaker is a filmmaker and journalist, director of Jihad Rehab (or The UnRedacted ), which was the subject of an earlier Radio Free Mike episode . In 2003, Meg was held hostage with two other Americans in Colombia by an anti-FARC militia for about ten days. We talk about what it means to be held hostage; in fact this interview starts with Meg interviewing me. A little context: Jihad Rehab deals...

Ed Park is a novelist and journalist and the author, most recently, of An Oral History of Atlantis , a collection of stories full of wit and humor and strange invention. We talk about our shared enthusiasm for REM — which shouldn’t take any of my listeners by surprise — and by the end of the show we talk about his two upcoming books in a surprising amount of detail. So if you’re interested in that...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Today we’re talking to not one, but two guests — a journalist, Daniela Gerson (right), and her wife Talia Inlender, who’s an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles. Daniela’s the author of THE WANDERERS, a new book about their Jewish grandparents, who all escaped the Holocaust from eastern Poland by heading eas...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Elizabeth Crane just published two collections of stories on the same day, a new one, called THAT MIGHT NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK, and her first book, from 2003, WHEN THE MESSENGER IS HOT, in a reprint from Triquarterly Books. I’m a fan of her memoir about a broken marriage called THIS STORY WILL CHANGE, and...

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and author of three books, including One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps , which follows the modern development of irregular prisons beginning in the 1890s, when the Spanish Empire first tried to corral Cuban revolutionaries using new technology that included factory-produced barbed wire. We talk about Hitler, as well as Stalin, and I ask her to gr...

Thomas Blubacher is a Swiss theater director and author on theatrical subjects who’s published a new book about European emigrés in Los Angeles called Weimar Under the Palms . Many of the artists who fled Hitler in the ’30s and ’40s — including Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann, Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht — came to the West Coast for the studio paychecks and the sunshine. They contributed in...

Tom Jennings, an award-winning filmmaker for PBS Frontline , has a new documentary on the The New Yorker site called Rovina’s Choice , about a South Sudanese woman whose children lived in a refugee camp in Kenya, malnourished but surviving, until food aid had to be cut last year. The film shows the human effects of Trump’s sudden, wholesale destruction of USAID. The foreign-aid organization had se...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Adam Skolnick is a journalist and author who’s written his first novel, American Tiger , about a large cat on the loose in the hills around Simi Valley, California. It’s loosely based on a real event Adam covered for the LA Weekly , once upon a time, but it also centers on a smart and over-imaginative girl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Deborah Kapchan is an American folklorist and ethnographer who’s written a new memoir, Taking Leave , about her complicated relationship with three different major religions: Judaism and Christianity, which formed her as a kid in New York, as well as Sufi Islam, which intrigued her during a phase of her li...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Kenneth R. Rosen has spent a great deal of time above the Arctic Circle, and his new book POLAR WAR covers the great-game politics of territory that may not be covered in floating ice or permafrost in the foreseeable future. We talk about the reasons Trump wants Greenland; the moment in 2007 when Russia cl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Mo Ogronik is a documentary and feature filmmaker who teaches at NYU, and her first novel GULF is a stark and laconically written story of five women whose lives intertwine in the Middle East, from as far away as the Philippines but centered near the Arabian Gulf. We talk about class differences in the tha...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Jonathan Lethem is the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn , which became a film with Ed Norton, and Fortress of Solitude , which got turned into an off-Broadway musical. He’s just published a career collection of short stories from the early nineties to the present, titled A Different Kind of Tens...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Ben Weissenbach is a young writer from California who recently spent a lot of time adventuring through cold and isolated parts of Alaska. His book North to the Future takes a look at migrating forests, melting glaciers, and thawing permafrost to examine the effects of climate change in a place where the cl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Francisco Cantú wrote THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER about working for the Border Patrol — and quitting — between 2008 and 2012. He grew up in Arizona, so the border’s been on his mind for most of his life, but his complicated relationship wtih government work, and the agency itself, gives him a strong perspecti...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Brian Klaas is an American political scientist who works at University College London and writes essays for The Atlantic . His most recent book is Fluke , a study of chaos and random chance, but we’ll concentrate on a title of Brian’s from 2022 called Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us , whi...

Tom Zoellner won a National Book Critics’ Circle award for ISLAND ON FIRE, about the uprising in Jamaica that led to the end of slavery within the British Empire. His new book, THE ROAD WAS FULL OF THORNS, argues that an improvised legal theory during the American Civil War — about slaves as “contraband” — led straight to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. President Lincoln at first just wante...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Sonia Kennebeck is the director of a 2023 documentary called REALITY WINNER, about the whistleblower who released evidence of a Russian hacking attempt during the 2016 US presidential election. Reality was arrested by the FBI during Trump’s first term for leaking a classified document to The Intercept , a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Roger Carstens’ first job at the State Department covered Austin Tice’s strange disappearance in Syria. Austin, a former Marine, had been kidnapped in 2012 as a journalist covering the Syrian civil war. When Damascus fell on December 8, 2024, the prisons began to empty, and there was some hope that Austin...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Saumya Roy started writing about the waste-pickers of Mumbai after a major fire started on its largest “garbage mountain” in 2016. By then she had already met a number of waste-pickers and -traders through a micro-loan NGO she ran with her father. Her book Castaway Mountain is a fascinating portrait of the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com Mark Sarvas is the author of three novels and the founding editor of a well-known literary blog called The Elegant Variation . His new novel, @UGMan , is a short and slightly strange book about an asocial, divorced, but extremely online character who hates almost everything except The Beatles. The characte...

Laurence Norman has covered Iran’s nuclear program for the Wall Street Journal for over a decade, and for almost as long I’ve admired his pieces. He’s a Berlin-based journalist, measured and smart, not easy to fool, and (crucially) he knows what he doesn’t know — which is almost our entire topic of conversation in Episode 14. What did the US and Israel destroy in June? And what, if anything, did t...

Khuê Phạm’s first novel Brothers and Ghosts deals with a Vietnamese family scattered across three continents, from Saigon to Germany to Southern California. It was translated last year from German into English, and it’s met with a great deal of critical praise, including from Ocean Vuong, who called it “a groundbreaking work in German literature.” On the podcast we talk about the Vietnamese diaspo...

Jessa Crispin’s new book, What Is Wrong With Men , studies American masculinity through a close reading of Michael Douglas’ movie roles from the mid-’80s through the late ’90s. The son of Kirk Douglas, who played Spartacus and Ulysses in the mid-20th century, Michael Douglas arguably dramatized the crisis of American men after the Sixties, because his characters are so startled by what they find s...