The Tripe of Black Friday
Every year, Pavlina and I take a break the day after Thanksgiving and drive away to a secluded mountain retreat. The first year we did…
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From Podcast to Print – The Long Road to the First Bulgarian Empire
Much like with the Bulgarian History Podcast itself, I began working on my first book because I felt it should exist. My career goal was…
It’s Monday – Dedember 15th
A weekly digest – part serious, part not – in partnership with The Sofia Globe The beauty of living in Plovdiv versus Sweden is the…
From the Moon to Mars
This is speculative fiction. The Lunix Station doesn’t exist—yet. But the physics of photosynthetic memory, coherent systems folding cause into effect, and consciousness as thermodynamic…
The Grand Illusion: How Brussels Became a Museum and Why Bulgaria Might Be the Future
The Greeks had a word for it: hubris – the belief that mortals could achieve what only gods should attempt. In Brussels, where the towers…
Between Google, Bulgaria, Frustrations, and Love
Between Google, Bulgaria, Frustrations, and Love (A Historically Accurate Account of My Descent Into Digital Madness) Historians, centuries from now, will study the early 21st…
The tree in wind
Watch a tree in windstorm. Really watch. The wind comes hard—the kind that snaps rigid things, that topples what won’t bend. But the tree doesn’t…
THE WAY OF THE RATCHÉ SEAGAL
There are certain things the universe does not intend you to take seriously, and one of them is a rat in a tiny black headband…
Beyond Certainty: Democracy as Ongoing Conversation
Politics, at its core, is not meant to be a theater of dominance but a discipline rooted in humility. Real leadership begins not with the…
As an actor, I was born in Bulgaria
It began with an advert in an English-language newspaper, The Sofia Echo. A foreign production was seeking English-speakers for small parts in a feature film…
From Podcast to Print: The Journey of Writing The First Bulgarian Empire
In part 1, I talked about its origins in the Ottoman and early post-Ottoman period. By the early 20th century, this had evolved in a…
The twenty-eight Year test: How Bulgaria became Europe’s most prepared nation
February 1997. A young Bulgarian university graduate woke up to discover his monthly salary—earned, deposited, saved—was now worthless. Overnight, literally overnight, the hyperinflation had accelerated…