The Myth and the Mud: Writing the American West

This Coin Bought Someone’s Bread: The Rhodian Drachm and the World It Came From — T.O.P. Podcast with Michael DiMatteo

A Rhodian silver drachm, 4th-2nd century BC, bearing the face of Helios and the rose of Rhodes — this is the coin Michael DiMatteo wears every day, a gift from mentor and fellow history teacher Ron Hurst. In this episode of the T.O.P. Podcast, DiMatteo traces the coin from the mint of ancient Rhodes through the hands that may have held it: sailors, merchants, market women, the enslaved. He explores what Rhodes was at its zenith — the dominant maritime power of the Aegean, creator of the first international maritime law, builder of the Colossus, protector of the freedom of the seas. Drawing on historical methodology and informed inference, this episode asks what objects carry across time and what it means to wear a primary source. Ancient history, Greek civilization, numismatics, and the legacy of a gifted teacher come together in one of the most personal episodes of the T.O.P. Podcast.

Too Much and Not Enough: Bukowski, Hitchens, and the Art of Being Too Much

Charles Bukowski and Christopher Hitchens — two of the most controversial, brilliant, and unapologetic writers of the 20th century. In Season 2, Episode 20 of The T.O.P. Podcast with Michael DiMatteo, we go deep into the lives and work of the poet of the American gutter and the intellectual who picked public fights with God, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — and won most of them. From Bukowski’s Ham on Rye and his poem Roll the Dice to Hitchens’s Letters to a Young Contrarian and his final book Mortality, written while dying of esophageal cancer, this episode asks the same question about both men: what do you do with a writer who refuses to be anything other than exactly what they are? Controversy first. Brilliance second. Literary history and biography for readers who want the unfiltered version.

Writing With Intent: When Words Were Weapons | The T.O.P. Podcast Ep. 19

Cicero, Jonathan Swift, Frederick Douglass, George Orwell, and Émile Zola — five writers who used the page as a weapon. In Season 2, Episode 19 of The T.O.P. Podcast with Michael DiMatteo, we trace 2,000 years of purposeful writing: from Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations in 63 BC, which brought down a conspiracy against the Roman Republic, to Zola’s J’Accuse in 1898, which cracked open one of history’s most infamous miscarriages of justice. Along the way: Swift’s savage satire of colonial indifference in A Modest Proposal, Douglass’s searing Fourth of July address, and Orwell’s Animal Farm alongside his essay “Why I Write” — in which he laid bare his mission to make political writing into an art. Literary history, rhetoric, and the writers who refused to look away.

Bread: The Staff of Life, the Currency of Power, and the Mirror of Civilization.

Bread built civilization. Egypt paid pyramid workers in loaves. Rome bought loyalty with grain. And someone had to control the story. SEE MORE Bread is not food. It's history, power, and the oldest mirror civilization has ever held up to itself. In this episode of The T.O.P. Podcast, host Michael DiMatteo traces bread from the Epic of Gilgamesh — where eating bread makes a wild man human — through the industrial bakeries that fed the Egyptian pyramid workers, the Roman grain dole that propped up emperors, the Maya creation text that says humanity itself is made of corn, and the Revolutionary propaganda machine that weaponized a queen's imagined contempt for the starving. Along the way: the independent invention of flatbread across Persia, India, and Central Asia; the theological weight of the Lord's Prayer and the Eucharist; Pablo Neruda's democratic ode to the loaf; and John Steinbeck on what happens when men lose their connection to the bread they eat. Literary sources confirmed and cited. Apocryphal attributions called out. Historical propaganda examined as propaganda. The T.O.P. Podcast sits at the intersection of world history, literature, and the human condition — hosted by a published author, retired educator, and Hall of Fame coach who brings serious research and a storyteller's instinct to subjects that span time, culture, and borders. Season 2 · Episode 18

The Cost of the Page: Writers Who Published Against the World

Gustave Flaubert, Zora Neale Hurston, and D.H. Lawrence — three writers who published work their societies called dangerous, obscene, or simply wrong. This is Episode 17 of The TOP Podcast with Michael DiMatteo. Flaubert stood trial in a Paris courtroom in 1857, charged with offenses against public morality for refusing to condemn the inner life of a woman his society had decided was expendable. Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was attacked not by the government but by her own literary peers — condemned in the pages of The New Masses for writing in the wrong language and telling the wrong kind of story. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley's Lover privately in Florence in 1928, knowing it would be banned — and it was, in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, until a landmark obscenity trial in 1960 finally set it free. He had died thirty years earlier. Episode 17 traces what each of these writers risked, what it cost them, and why the thing that made their books dangerous is the same thing that made them last. Primary source quotes throughout. Literary history for general listeners.