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Episode 5 with Soraya Simi

Soraya Simi was hand-picked by Angela Madsen to direct a film about her last major ocean-rowing voyage, a solo attempt to row from L.A. to Honolulu in 2020. Angela was a professional ocean rower and paraplegic, an Olympic gold medalist, a Guinness world-record holder in several categories, and a former U.S. Marine. Soraya’s new film about the ill-fated voyage is named after Angela’s fiberglass boat, THE ROW OF LIFE, and the story behind the film is almost as tense and tough as its subject. On Episode 5 of Radio Free Mike.

Episode 4 with Jacob Kushner

On Episode 004 of Radio Free Mike, Nazis On Bikes, I talk to Jacob Kushner about his book LOOK AWAY, which deals with a German far-right gang and how the police finally (didn’t) end its reign of terror. We also discuss the German elections coming up this weekend, and, yes, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute.

Episode 3 with Meg Smaker

I had a terrific time talking with Meg Smaker, director of JIHAD REHAB, on Episode 003 of Radio Free Mike. (Her Sundance-cancelled film will come out this year, even if she has to do something drastic.) We also talked about Somalia, chewing khat, and the California wildfires.

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan, and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, as well as a Silver Nautilus Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting; and Yaddo, MacDowell, and DeWitt Wallace–Reader’s Digest fellowships for his fiction.

He’s been a visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and UC Riverside. He worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. Michael was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, became an international bestseller.

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Hellfire from Paradise Ranch

My review of a book about the drone war, Hellfire from Paradise Ranch, is up at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Planet Waves

While I was in Somalia a man called Geoff Carter wrote about a picture of Indian men surfing on stand-up boards around 1800 off Chennai, which altered the known history of surfing a bit, even though the picture was hiding in plain sight at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

The Language of Torture

My review of Ingrid Betancourt's first novel, The Blue Line, is up at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

26 Hostages Freed

The men from the Naham 3 are all friends of mine — a crew of 26 sailors from southeast Asia who worked on a tuna long-liner flagged in Oman but owned by a company in Taiwan, which abandoned them after Somali pirates hijacked the ship in 2012.

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Episode 5 with Soraya Simi

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