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 we talk about the similarities between that book and her new short fiction, but also the horrors of dating apps, and what to call her slightly frantic first-person stories.

Upgrade to a paid subscription to Radio Free Mike

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

That May Not Mean What You Think, by Elizabeth Crane

When the Messenger is Hot, by Elizabeth Crane

This Story Will Change, a memoir by Elizabeth Crane

Elizabeth’s website

“Breakdown” by Tom Petty

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

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 grade the United States’ new plan for warehouse-style “detention camps” on a historical curve.

Her assessment isn’t good.

Upgrade to a paid subscription to Radio Free Mike

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

One Long Night, by Andrea Pitzer

Andrea’s website

Sweetness and Blood, by Michael Scott Moore — nominally about surfing, but it has a section on Indonesia’s detention camps and an interview with the novelist Pramodya Ananta Toer

“Somali pirates gave me toothpast and soap,” the viral tweet

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

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 sometimes invisible ways to the culture of California, but found something besides pure political freedom.

There should be more from me on this topic in the near future. But this is a name-dropping episode, so you’ll find an index of names at the bottom of this email.

MEANWHILE don’t forget about our beach-noir reading this Thursday, March 26, 2026, at the Hermosa Beach Museum. A new Kelp Books anthology called The Savage Waves of Spring will be launched into the stratosphere, and Mike will read from a story.

It’s free, but reserve a seat. Space is limited, and these evenings are popular. If you’re in California, consider a trip to the watery fringe of L.A., and if not, order the anthology at your favorite bookstore, online or otherwise. Or straight from Kelp.

Upgrade to a paid subscription to Radio Free Mike

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

Weimar Under the Palms, by Thomas Blubacher

Thomas’ biography in English

A link to his new novel, Aufgelöst, in German

Sweetness and Blood, by Michael Scott Moore, for more on surfing in Bali in the 1930s

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

An index of names in Episode 30:Friedrich W. Murnau, director

Walter Spies, painter and musician

Berthold Viertel, director

Salka Viertel, screenwriter and actress

Emil Jannings

Ernst Lubitsch, director

Charlie Chaplin

Vicki Baum, author and screenwriter

Lion Feuchtwanger, author

Marta Feuchtwanger, author

Bertolt Brecht, playwright

Helene Weigel, actress and cabaret singer

Thomas Mann, author

Greta Garbo, actress

Christopher Isherwood, author

Aldous Huxley, author

Fritz Lang, director

Arnold Schönberg, composer

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

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 sent poverty and disaster relief all over the world for over sixty years — including to East Africa, a place I know something about.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

Rovina’s Choice, directed by Tom Jennings

Direct link to the film on YouTube

Tom’s bio on Frontline

The Desert and the Sea, by Michael Scott Moore

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

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 who wants the tiger to survive. We talk about wri…

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 life in Morocco. I was interested in this book in part because Somalia is also a Sufi nation, at least on the surface, and like my book Taking Leave ends in a rejection of tribalism.

Resources:

Taking Leave, by Deborah Kapchan

Deborah’s website

Gnawa music, as recorded by Paul Bowles

The Desert and the Sea, by Michael Scott Moore

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

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 claimed the watery North Pole by planting an unusual flag; and the ways in which China may or may not be a “near-Arctic state.”

Get in touch if you need help with Substack’s billing platform — a few subscribers were bucked off unexpectedly at the end of the year — and in the meantime please support Radio Free Mike by upgrading to a paid subscription. Holiday rates are available!

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

Polar War, by Kenneth R. Rosen

Ken’s other books, including Bulletproof Vest, about the Iraq War

Some Thoughts on the Purchase of Greenland, an essay by Mike from last February, somehow still relevant

North to the Future, a Radio Free Mike interview on the Alaskan Arctic with Ben Weissenbach

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

North to the Future, by Ben Weissenbach

Coming into the Country, by John McPhee

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