Politics & Prose
Havana, Cuba, 2009
THE MENU ON THE LEFT is an archive of Mike’s reporting and criticism. Mike was a 2006-2007 Fulbright fellow in Berlin, where he edits and writes for Spiegel Online. He’s at work on two further novels and a documentary film about honor killings; he also just published a travel book about the spread of surfing to odd corners of the world for Rodale in the US. He originated the European Dispatch column for Miller-McCune magazine and he’s written about politics and travel for The Atlantic Monthly, The Financial Times, Slate, Salon, and the Los Angeles Times.
Mike also belongs to a small group of web editors devoted to preserving the shamefully unknown essays of Richard Mitchell, who for fifteen years published a brilliant and cranky pamphlet called The Underground Grammarian. Professor Mitchell thought of himself as a pamphleteer, but his self-published broadsides also make him a grandfather of the blog. A special feature Radio Free Mike — a Richard Mitchell archive — can be found over here.
An early piece of Mike’s travel writing includes a description of Mitchell. A feature on Denis Johnson involves a rare interview with the novelist. A piece on Munich surfers in The Atlantic prefigures Mike’s surf book, and a column about Nazi revisionism in America sprays Raid on a rampant idea.
