What happened to the ideal Modernist city on the edge of Bucharest, written with Vlad Odobescu and published in The Black Sea and DoR With the air rank with dust, thick with exhaust and deafened by the burr of drills and car-horns, Bucharest’s western district of Drumul Taberei is a typical zone of the Romanian […]
Category Archives: Comment
Opinion pieces with a satirical edge from 2012 onward
How the planning of Communist blocks in Bucharest changed from a western vision of functional housing to a sabotage of the city – a micro-history of a megalopolis: published in The Black Sea, co-written with Vlad Odobescu To an outsider, Bucharest is a sea of uniform blocks that hustle and crush a pre-World War […]
We wanted to expose how Romanians are the main nationality of male prostitutes in Rome… and we did not do it An article co-authored with Vlad Odobescu and published in The Black Sea A taxi driver told us where to find boys. His name was Mario. He wasn’t an average taxi […]
Today a cool March light is giving way to a humid afternoon, and I have just left the Anthony Frost English Bookshop in Bucharest, which has closed its doors. The reaction from the city’s passionate reading community has been shock and grief, as though a well-loved relative not seen for years has suddenly announced […]
A piece of invective published last year in the second issue of Jug magazine On the face of a ten-story 1980s block inspired by the architecture of Pyongyang, abseilers risk their lives to raise a giant poster of Marilyn Monroe sipping the metal lip of a Coke bottle, or Alicia Keys perfecting her skin with […]
A comment piece published in Scena9 During the negotiation process for Romania’s accession to the European Union in the early 2000s the question echoing through European capitals was: is Romania ready to join the EU? It was this word, repeated, again and again: ready. This was a subjective and emotive issue – there […]
A comment piece in Romanian on Contributors.ro A petty argument in the British conservative party between supporters and enemies of the European Union has forced the UK into a disaster. If the country leaves the 28-member bloc, financial ruin will spread across the continent, far right groups will seize control and the peacetime success of 70 […]
