Radio Free Mike

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Charles Hawley is a journalist, editor, and former colleague of mine at Spiegel Online in Berlin. He was born in Seattle, but in the meantime he’s run into trouble bringing his family back to the States. His teenage daughter is trans, she has two passports, and — well, I’ll let him explain the legal problem under President Trump. We also talk about the …

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Taran Khan is an Indian writer who lives in London. She’s the author of Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, an appreciation of Kabul drawn from her years there from 2006 to 2013. The book peels back layers of Afghanistan’s history, from the Mughal empire, the British colonial period, the two phases of Taliban rule, and U.S. and NATO occupation after 9/11. We talk about Kabul’s fragile public library as well as the “Bush Bazaar,” and an American spy blimp that hung in the sky over the city for years.

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Resources:

Shadow City, by Taran Khan

Taran’s Instagram page

“The Dam,” an essay by Taran at Granta

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Vanessa Fabiano is a writer and businesswoman who spent time in China, off and on, over nine years from 1994. Her debut collection of stories, Chinese on the Beach, is a remarkably vivid series of portraits of Chinese as well as expatriate life in Shanghai and Beijing during the boom decade of the ’90s, when the government loosened its economic controls and set a huge number of cultural changes in motion — toward high fashion, international glamor, and beach life in a coastal town.

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Resources:

Chinese on the Beach, by Vanessa Fabiano

Vanessa’s website on Substack

Other featured books on Radio Free Mike

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Isaac Fitzgerald follows the path of Johnny Appleseed, or actually John Chapman, the real nineteenth-century pioneer from Massachusetts who traced Indian footpaths and planted apple trees as far west as Illinois. As we discuss in this episode, I have my own reasons for being fascinated by Johnny Appleseed, but from AMERICAN RAMBLER you’ll learn a lot about the man, as opposed to the myth, and a lot about the myth, and a lot about Midwestern history, and a lot about Fitzgerald’s own family and past.

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Resources:

American Rambler, by Isaac Fitzgerald

Dirtbag, a memoir by Isaac Fitzgerald

How to Be a Pirate, a children’s book by Isaac Fitzgerald

Isaac’s website

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Saumya Roy is a journalist and author of Castaway Mountain, about a garbage mountain in Mumbai and the people who earn their livelihoods from it. For a new anthology of essays she has a piece about the state of homelessness in San Francisco. The anthology is called How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, and I encourage you to pick up a copy, because it features twelve international writers responding to massive changes in America.

Saumya once ran a micro-loan NGO in Mumbai to help homeless people (and others) — and she’s been on our podcast before.

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Resources:

How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, from editors of The Dial

Castaway Mountain, by Saumya Roy

The UK edition is called Mountain Tales

Episode 015 of Radio Free Mike with Saumya Roy

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Scott Hulet is the longtime, formative editor of The Surfer’s Journal, a magazine focused on the art and adventure of surfing rather than its klieg-lit industry. Flow Violento is a collection of his pieces from around Latin America, and the title derives from a phrase in Cuban slang that translates, roughly, to “amazing style.”

We talk about surfing Ecuador, about “Shipwrecks” in northern Baja, about a remote island off the coast of Nayarit which has both surf and fish, and about the romance of Mexico in the mid-20th century, when The Night of the Iguana was written and filmed in Puerto Vallarta.

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Resources:

Flow Violento, by Scott Hulet

Sweetness and Blood, Mike’s folk history of surfing

“Flow Violento,” a rap song by Arcángel

Other books featured on Radio Free Mike

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 describes her meeting with one of Jim’s captors, Alexanda Kotey, after Kotey pled guilty to charges regarding Jim and several other western hostages. He’s serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison.

Diane now runs the Foley Foundation in Washington, DC, which speaks up for hostages, and Colum is a co-founder of Narrative 4, a global storytelling nonprofit.

This podcast comes in advance of a long-read essay about the trial in my own hostage case. We had some audio interference, so if we talk over each other it’s because we couldn’t hear each other as well during the live interview as you’ll be able to hear us now.

Resources:

American Mother, by Diane Foley and Colum McCann

Foley Foundation website

Colum McCann’s website

Narrative 4, Colum’s nonprofit

Twist, by Colum McCann, his latest novel

Apeirogon, by Colum McCann, a novel about a friendship between an Israeli and a Palestinian

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, a National Book Award-winning novel about the Twin Towers

The new Radio Free Mike virtual bookshop features almost every book mentioned on the podcast, and I earn a small commission if you order from it.

ALSO:

If you’re in Southern California, please come out to “Pub Fiction” this Sunday, July 12, at Knoll’s in Aliso Viejo. I’ll read from a work-in-progress. No reservations necessary.

7pm, 29971 Alicia Pkwy, Laguna Niguel, CA 92677

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 career as a merch girl for a touring heavy-metal band.

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Resources:

The End of My Life is Killing Me, by Annabelle Gurwitch

Annabelle’s website

An extract from the book in the New York Times

Featured books on Radio Free Mike (I earn a small commission!)

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

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 with former inmates of the American prison at Guantánamo who were sitting in a re-integration center in Yemen. Meg exlpains how her short kidnapping in Colombia led her, eventually, to the topic of her controversial film.

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Resources:

Meg Smaker filmography on IMDB

Website for the film now called “Unredacted”

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

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, stick around.Ed has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his two upcoming books include a memoir “of sorts,” called Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties (in August) and a long story called The Repairer of Reputations (in September). Ed tells me the long story is not unrelated to the stories we discuss on this episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Next week on June 10 I’ll be in conversation with Jeanne Carstensen — also a Radio Free Mike guest! — at Village Well Books in Culver City. Her book A Greek Tragedy tells one of the horrific stories from the migration push across the Mediterranean. It was a finalist this year for the PEN/Galbraith Award.

Tickets available here, and the price can include a copy of the book. And I’m happy to sign copies of The Desert and the Sea at the store.

Podcast Resources:

An Oral History of Atlantis, by Ed Park

Ed’s website

Three Tenses preview

Repairer of Reputations preview

The new Radio Free Mike virtual bookshop features almost every book mentioned on the podcast, and I earn a small commission if you order from this page.

radio free mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe