politics

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.

Noah and the Dinosaurs

Mike finds a leader of the Intelligent Design movement in a compromising position (with Creation Scientists). An exclusive for Spiegel Online.

“Our People”

The Somali refugees living in a small meatpacking town in southwestern Kansas loved America. So did the three men who wanted to kill them. A story about a bomb plot in the Heartland.

Talking to Jihadis

As people shopped for groceries at an open-air market on New Year’s Eve in the Indonesian coastal town of Palu, a homemade bomb loaded with nails killed at least eight people and ripped apart a kiosk selling pork.

By George!

Behind the frosted-glass office doors of an old building on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco you can find a barber shop, a bartending school, and a number of lawyers

In Another Country

A Mosque in East Berlin

Bethlehem’s Unofficial ‘Banksy Tour’


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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