pirates

The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

Adventure journalism in Southern California. An essay for The Paris Review.

Pirates on the Migrant Trail

Inside the East African migrant corridor, where Somalis (and others) escape to Europe, former pirate financiers are also busy. Reported from Sicily and a German warship, the Frankfurt am Main.

Somalis and Tolerance

Human beings like to think they have nothing to do with certain other human beings. That’s a scurrilous lie.

Sending in the Marines

NATO, officially, is pleased to have pirates to fight. A mission against sea bandits in the Indian Ocean is not mission creep for the trans-Atlantic alliance, if you talk to its leaders

Battleships Off Somalia

Navies are expensive, and sending warships to Somalia is a hugely inefficient way to fight pirates, considering that the number of successful attacks off the Somali coast this year

How Do You Prosecute a Pirate?

The most eyebrow-raising aspect of Western counter-piracy missions off Somalia is how rarely they arrest a pirate.

Precedent, or a Farce? The Hamburg Pirate Trial


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; MacDowell and Wallace Foundation 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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