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Journalism
Rafts of the Medusa
Why every day on the Mediterranean is a new scandal for Europe. For both Foreign Policy and Die Zeit.
California’s Attempt at Land Reparations
How land seized from a Black family 100 years ago may be returned. The Bruce’s Beach story from a hometown angle, for The New Yorker
Day of the Oprichnik, 16 Years Later
The novelist Sorokin, the president Putin, his man Dugin, and the war in Ukraine. For n + 1.
The Rushdie Narrative
On Knife and the crumbling ground beneath the feet of free speech
There Must Be Some Way Out of Here
An essay on Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower,” and Somali pirate captivity.
My Century, by Günter Grass
A pastiche-novel in 100 chapters, rooted in the political surges of Germany’s horrid and fascinating 20th century.
Cambodian Seafarers Talk About Pirates
Mike visits Cambodia for The New Yorker to talk about a harrowing shared experience in Somalia
The Muslim Burial
Cambodian hostages remember digging a grave for one of their own. A sequel chapter to The Desert and the Sea
The Real Pirates of the Caribbean
Adventure journalism in Southern California. A travel essay for The Paris Review.
Antifa Dust
An essay on anti-fascism in Europe and the U.S., for the Los Angeles Review of Books
Was Hitler a Man of the Left?
A book that helped Republicans in America lose their damn minds.
Ghosts of Dresden
The Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945 destroyed the baroque center of what Pfc. Kurt Vonnegut called, in a letter home from Germany, “possibly the world’s most beautiful city.”
George Freeth, Biographed
The first academic treatment of America’s surf pioneer. Also, was Freeth gay?
It’s Called Soccer
Americans live on what amounts to an enormous island, defended on two shores by the sea, and we’ve evolved a few marsupial traditions that nobody else understands.
Tilting at Turbines (in the Severn River)
The morning was clear and cold, with frost on the church steeple and the cemetery grass. I had a quick English breakfast at a white-cloth table, in my wetsuit, and drove to Newnham, a village on the Severn River in Gloucestershire, parking near the White Hart Inn.
The Curse of El Rojo
I’d packed the car lightly — a bag of clothes, a bag of cassette tapes, a backpack of books, a few essential tools.
