My Pulitzer Prize

I published an article on Huffington Post on January 1st 2014 called Thank You Romania and it went viral. Over 11,000 people liked it on Facebook and everyone I met in Romania seemed to have seen it. Apparently it was just what was needed in Romania – a positive article to balance all the scaremongering by the British tabloids about the „Romanian immigrant invasion’. By now, almost two months later, everyone knows that story is a joke but for Romanians a bitter taste remains; it’s hard for them to accept that they’re disliked – even hated – in the UK.

When Formula AS, a leading Romanian weekly newspaper, asked me to do an interview based on my brief analysis of the British tabloids in my Thank You Romania, I jumped at the chance. (more…)

How to Not Get Robbed

Being robbed is a shocking and humiliating experience which raises immediate questions: how did it happen? why did it happen to me? How could I be so stupid? (more…)

Watching TV

I’m sitting in front of 4 flat screen TVs, only one of which has the sound on – KISS TV – filling the canteen with the sound of rap and soft porn images. Next to KISS is Realitatea, a Romanian news channel, where sound isn’t needed: so far I have learned there is a big meeting going on in Brussels about “the pact that stabilised Europe” (I’ll believe that one when I see it). They have several crawler texts on the screen one of which contains financial information and share listings, another one with “urgent” news updates. (more…)

3 Romanian Film Directors

trei-directori This video was found in our archives, translated into Romanian and published in Jurnal National (click here).

If you want to see the video without reading all this text, go to the end of this article (scroll down).

The Story Behind the Video:

The ending of the year (2011) seems to be a month of nostalgia, particularly in Romania where the media are wallowing in a sea of memories based on unanswered questions about the 1989 revolution. Searching for answers gives editors pages of material (the biblical phrase “old wine in new bottles” springs to mind) and characters like Petre Roman, Romania’s first post revolutionary PM, get wheeled onto TV chat shows to discuss their memories of Communism. (more…)

Swedes Sue Romanians Over the Name Ice Hotel

Getting to Romania’s Ice Hotel involves a hair-raising ride in a cable car to a frozen lake two thousand metres above sea level. Every December the family who run it cut blocks of ice from the frozen lake, bind them together with a mortar made of snow and water and build a small hotel that lasts until May. They also construct an ice chapel complete with a kitsch sculpture of the last supper and a frozen Jesus on the cross. (more…)

Ordo Quod Chaos

casa-poporului-crw_11298bw This article was also published in Romanian, on the Dilema Veche website.

My view of Romania over the last 10 years is that it has been developing in a steady, predictable and incremental manner. The key policies of capitalism which were put into place almost immediately after the 1989 revolution – free elections/press/travel, rule of law, property rights – have been steadily strengthened. Every few years there were rumours in the media that Iliescu, Nastase or Basescu are about to become dictators, but each of these has proven to be a chimera; each one of these leaders has done a bit to consolidate this stability. (more…)

What’s Wrong with Romania?

This article was first published in the Hotnews Blog “Contributors”.

Someone recently asked me what’s the main factor that prevents Romania from realising its economic potential and I said, without hesitation, “the inability to delegate”. Delegation is one of keys to running a successful organisation (or countries for that matter) but in Romania the principle of delegation – making people responsible for their work – does not seem to be understood and this is one of the reasons why the public sector is so dysfunctional. (more…)

Why Romania?

Shop front in Brasov

This article was translated by Iulia Marusca and published in the Hotnews blog “Contributors”.

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I’m reading a book that has helped me crack a mystery that has troubled me for 20 years: why do I live and work in Romania? People have been asking me this question since 1990 and my answers – “the people…the warmth…the challenges…” – always sound a bit unconvincing. I am strangely unable to explain what it is that keeps me here.

Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential, which is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, gave me the answer even though he doesn’t mention Romania once in the book. He describes the madness of investing in the restaurant business in New York City: (more…)

An update about the France-Roma-Romania argument

Nicolae Gheorghe

This article was first published on the Economist’s website Eastern Approaches. It is worth looking at the Economist’s version of the article as it has been quite well edited, tightened up and de-personalised and made suitable for the Economist’s more anonymous style. I intend to print out both versions and compare them as this will enable me to better understand the kind of article the Economist required (this was how I learned journalism 20 years ago: I would analyse articles I really admired and try and work out the style of the publication I was targeting. Easy. Many years passed before I found out that you could actually study journalism. Back then I don’t think I ever met anyone who had. (more…)

East Europe’s Toxic Timebomb

www.guardian.co.uk

An edited version of this article was published by Time (see their version here).

On Sunday October 4, 2010, the small Hungarian village of Kolontar was evacuated. Local officials had been warned that the dam at the nearby Ajkai alumina plant was about to be breached. The following day over 700,000 cubic metres of caustic red mud burst out of the storage reservoir and a two metre toxic wave devastated Kolontar and two other villages, killed 8 people, hospitalized 150, contaminated over 1,000 hectares of farmland and polluted 3 river systems. An intense political drama about responsibility for the spill is being played out in Hungary, with furious statements by the Prime Minister (“This should have been detected”), the nationalization of the operating company (MAL) until compensation is paid and the temporary arrest of its CEO, Zoltan Bakonyi, a controversial figure whose father ran the Environmental Department at the Ministry of Industry around the time when the alumina plant was privatised. (more…)

Tag: romania