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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 that part of the world, human trafficking, some differences between writing and filmmaking, and a great deal about craft in fiction, especially the difficulties of plotting a multi-voiced novel.

Resources:

Gulf, by Mo Ogrodnik

Mo’s bio at NYU’s Tisch School

“The Ghost of Reem Island,” an essay by Mo at The Paris Review, on the story that gave rise to the novel

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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 Tension, after a Buzzcocks song. We talk about the tension in his work between the real and the surreal, about talking animals — including a show-biz crab in one good story — and, well, a lot about Franz Kafka.

Resources:

A Different Kind of Tension, by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem’s website

“The Beggar King,” a short story narrated by a cat, by Michael Scott Moore

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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 climate has changed the most — in Alaska the average temperature has risen more than twice as fast as the global average since about 1970.

It’s also about a “digital native” of the twenty-first century learning how to look at the real world — a sort of analog coming-of-age — and it just won a National Outdoor Book Award.

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Resources:

North to the Future, by Ben Weissenbach

Coming into the Country, by John McPhee

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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 perspective for a memoir. We talk about his career, about mission creep for migration enforcement under Trump, and about changes in cross-border traffic since about 2006.

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Resources:

The Line Becomes a River (2018), by Francisco Cantú

Francisco’s website

Mike’s recent border coverage

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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, which deals with the wide variety of corruptions in a modern politics, the conditions that allow them to thrive, and how they might be starved of both water and light.

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Resources:

Corruptible, by Brian Klaas

Fluke, by Brian Klaas

“The Other Side of Deportation,” an essay by Mike about the border, Trump, and Third World–style corruption

A podcast by Brian, featuring Mike and several other guests on kidnappings and ransom

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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 wanted to keep the Union together; the South wanted to preserve the “peculiar institution”; but a single incident at Fort Monroe in northern Virginia would change Lincoln’s mind, as well as American history.

Tom Zoellner is a journalist, essayist, and historian who also teaches at Chapman College in California, and edits at the Los Angeles Review of Books. This episode is free for all subscribers.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, etc.

Resources:

The Road Was Full of Thorns, by Tom Zoellner

Island on Fire, by Tom Zoellner

A Safeway in Arizona, by Tom Zoellner — about political violence in America

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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 news site, and the Department of Justice came down on her using the Espionage Act. The case is interesting again because of a tendency to whitewash the interference story since Trump got re-elected.

Sonia is also the director of NATIONAL BIRD, a 2016 documentary about U.S. Air Force drones, as well as a short New York Times Op-Doc about my own case in Somalia.

Resources:

Reality Winner website

National Bird, Sonia’s film about the drone war

From Journalist to Hostage, Sonia’s short film about Mike

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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 might be found. Roger talks about the search for him in late December; about the evidence of Austin’s escape attempt in 2012 or ’13, and what the chances are now of finding him alive.

Roger served as SPEHA under two presidents — a Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs — so we talk about his role at the State Department for the first few minutes of the show. He was re-hired by President Biden after his appointment by President Trump, and he’s been a fine example of consistent, nonpartisan hostage policy under the newish framework designed by President Obama.

Resources:

The family of Austin Tice, their official website

The Unforgotten, Mike’s essay about Austin for New Lines, republished on Radio Free Mike

Part 3 of a very good Economist podcast about Austin’s case

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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 economy of garbage, as well as the slum established on the edge of Mumbai’s notorious Deonar landfill — on purpose — as a feckless answer to homelessness, especially after the city grew into an international business hub in the 1970s.

Saumya has written for Forbes India, Mint, Outlook, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and Bloomberg News, among other publications. She co-founded and ran the Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai’s poorest micro entrepreneurs by giving small, low-interest loans.

Resources: Castaway Mountain, by Saumya Roy

The UK edition is called Mountain Tales

NPR “Books We Love,” 2021: Castaway Mountain

A picture from space of the 2016 fire:

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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 character’s Twitter handle is a direct reference to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, and he shares some modern paranoia with his 19th-century forebear.

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Resources:

@UGMan, by Mark Sarvas

Memento Park, by Mark Sarvas

Harry, Revised, by Mark Sarvas

The Elegant Variation, a literary blog

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