Radio Free Mike

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.

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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.

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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 east — though not together, and the coincidence they discovered about their family histories will be worth the price of admission. We talk about World War II history, fleeing the Third Reich, and about how the past is not really past.

This episode has a mild echo on Talia’s feed, which vanishes after a while. We’re on a budget around here. For that reason, please upgrade to a paid subscription to Radio Free Mike!

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Resources:

The Wanderers, by Daniela Gerson

A review at the Wall Street Journal

Daniela’s website

Talia’s bio

The new Radio Free Mike virtual bookshop, featuring almost every book mentioned on the podcast. (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 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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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 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

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…

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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.