Writing
Books, languages, travel, and now and then something I cannot keep quiet about. [to be continued]
34 pieces
- Литературен вестник22 May 2024
The villain is not so bad, nor the good ones so good
The humour comes mostly through the bandit's lines — he turns out to be naive, and a little dim.
- books
- language
- Списание VIP26 Jul 2022
The strange art and discourse of Maurizio Cattelan
Three collectors paid a hundred and twenty thousand euros for a banana taped to a wall. None of them received the original banana — each was handed a different one, which rotted and was thrown out, possibly the most accurate statement anyone has made about the art market.
- culture
- Литературен вестник9 Jul 2025
The home of the short story
A whole world can fit into a few pages — dense with feeling, images and ideas.
- books
- culture
- Списание VIP24 Aug 2022
The highest wave ever surfed
Nazaré was a fishing village with a dangerous sea until Garrett McNamara rode seventy-eight feet of it in 2011. Records are now settled with 3D models and geometric correction of photographs, because the eye is no longer enough.
- nature
- travel
- Литературен вестник4 Jun 2025
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Music as an anchor is a motif that unfolds across the whole book — but music is also, in itself, a code.
- books
- culture
- Списание VIP17 Aug 2022
The books nobody will read until 2113
Every year one writer hands over a manuscript that nobody alive today will read. In 2114 they will fell the spruces in a Norwegian forest, and a hundred stories will be published all at once.
- books
- culture
- nature
- 10te.bg25 Aug 2024
The 10 most remarkable sports grounds in the world
Horses have raced on the ice of Lake St Moritz since 1907, and Federer and Agassi played tennis two hundred and ten metres up. Ten grounds chosen for where they are rather than for their prestige.
- culture
- travel
- 10te.bg20 Sept 2025
The 10 most fairy-tale places in the world
Glowing caves in New Zealand, a castle in Bavaria, a lake with an island in Slovenia. Ten places that sound like a fairy tale and have the inconvenient habit of existing.
- travel
- 10te.bg30 Jun 2026
The 10 most beautiful, most deadly plants
Looks deceive: lily of the valley acts on the heart the way digoxin does, and every part of an oleander is poisonous, down to the last leaf. Ten gorgeous plants that learned to defend themselves.
- nature
- 10te.bg22 Jul 2024
The 10 greatest mysteries in the world
An underwater monument off Yonaguni, a manuscript from the 1420s nobody has yet deciphered, and red rain over Kerala in 2001. Ten things whose explanation keeps running late.
- culture
- science
- 10te.bg19 Jul 2026
The 10 best diving spots in Europe
Silfra in Iceland lets you swim between two tectonic plates, Portofino keeps its Mediterranean wrecks, and Lofoten offers Arctic cold. Ten places in Europe, not one of which requires a flight to the tropics.
- travel
- nature
- Списание VIP30 Aug 2022
Surfing and climate change
In December 2021 a super typhoon erased Cloud-9 in Siargao, the wave people fly half the world for. By 2100 half the planet's sandy beaches may be gone, and surfing is still deciding whether to pay more for cleaner boards.
- nature
- society
- Списание VIP8 Jul 2022
Summer cinema, smiles and civic responsibility
Free open-air cinema in Geo Milev park: seven films in one evening. One of them, Wind2Win, follows a three-hundred-kilometre windsurf along the coast, done for the sake of the plastic in the water.
- culture
- society
- Списание VIP2 Jul 2022
Seven reasons we lose motivation, and how to get it back
We forget the reward, set ourselves impossible goals, then give up and call it a lack of willpower. Seven reasons we lose motivation — and not one of them is laziness.
- society
- Списание VIP18 Jul 2022
San Marino and the half-forgotten art of statues
San Marino has a Statue of Liberty of its own, a gift from a Berlin countess in 1876. Among its monuments there is also one for Beslan — a great deal of remembering for a country the size of a large neighbourhood.
- culture
- travel
- Списание VIP9 Aug 2022
Little-known Oaxaca and its beautiful turtles
Thirty years ago the sand at Mazunte was stained with blood and the water ran red. Today that same beach is one of the five largest turtle nesting sites on earth — and that did not happen by itself.
- nature
- travel
- Литературен вестник30 Apr 2025
Labatut's metaphysical delirium among the terrifying colours
Labatut does not want fame chasing him, and I will respect that — so I will speak only of his words. Of Prussian blue, of the poisoned wells in North Africa, and of the terrifying greenery that will one day smother us all.
- books
- culture
- science
- Списание VIP7 Jul 2022
ISIC adventures
There is a card that gets students into museums in more than a hundred and twenty-five countries, and into fifteen hundred places in Bulgaria alone. I found out about it after Athens — precisely the moment at which it stops helping.
- travel
- Списание VIP29 Jul 2022
How Yes Theory changes the way we think about fear
Four strangers met in Montreal in 2015 and set themselves thirty challenges in thirty days. Their channel now has 7.63 million subscribers, and the idea behind it is simple: discomfort is the price of anything worth having.
- culture
- society
- Списание VIP12 Aug 2022
Facts about the annual Perseid meteor shower
The nucleus of comet Swift-Tuttle is about twenty-six kilometres across, roughly the size of the one that finished the dinosaurs. Every August we pass through its dust at sixty kilometres a second and call it beautiful.
- science
- nature
- Списание VIP6 Sept 2022
Dialects in adapted cinema
Dialect is the first thing lost in translation, and the first thing lost in editing. I followed its trail through Ferrante and through Ruskov’s “Elevation” — and in both cases the film swallowed it.
- language
- books
- culture
- Литературен вестник5 Mar 2025
Between dream and reality: the literary cosmos of Vladimir Poleganov
The stories feel like pieces of a larger mosaic the reader has to assemble alone — and soon senses they never will.
- books
- culture
- Литературен вестник29 Oct 2025
Attempts at river-forming
The lives of these characters are marked by limits, by a routine cruelty the Argentine setting makes unavoidable.
- books
- culture
- Списание VIP13 Jul 2022
Art & the City in Rimini
Should graffiti be measured against modern art? In Borgo San Giuliano, beside the bridge of Tiberius, the whole quarter is painted with scenes out of Fellini — and the question rather answers itself.
- culture
- travel
- Списание VIP6 Aug 2022
A small free Hogwarts library
Charissa Bates from Minnesota built a free little library shaped like Hogwarts in the year she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. This year she marks three years clear, and her father-in-law is already measuring the spot for Hagrid's hut.
- books
- culture
- 10te.bg18 Apr 2026
10 stories about Antarctica
The sun rises on 21 September and sets on 22 March — one year, one day. A blood-red waterfall runs out of the Taylor Glacier, and meteorites keep better there than anywhere else on earth.
- travel
- nature
- science
- 10te.bg26 Jul 2026
10 reasons to walk the Camino de Santiago
Seven routes, twenty to thirty thousand steps a day, and another two or three days if you carry on to Finisterre. People set out for religious reasons, for athletic ones, or for none they can explain — which is probably the best part.
- travel
- 10te.bg19 Aug 2026
10 reasons to visit Italy
Rome carries two thousand eight hundred years of history, Cinque Terre is five villages tied together by footpaths and a train, and Sicily fits Greek temples, Norman churches and Etna onto a single island. Ten reasons, if you need reasons at all.
- travel
- culture
- 10te.bg25 Jul 2026
10 places to go if you are in Seville
Seville casts something over its visitors that does not leave easily afterwards. Plaza de España, Santa Cruz, the Golden Tower — ten places that bring you back.
- travel
- 10te.bg21 Feb 2024
10 of the greatest natural disasters in history
The Bhola cyclone took around five hundred thousand lives in 1970. For the Chinese floods of 1931 the estimates run from a hundred and fifty thousand to two million — a gap that says something on its own.
- nature
- science
- 10te.bg27 May 2026
10 obstacles we meet when we start something new
The monotony of the early stage, the doubt when results are late, and the money every beginning asks for. Ten obstacles — listed so they can be recognised, not so they can frighten.
- society
- 10te.bg21 Oct 2024
10 interesting facts about Latin America
Mexico City sinks twenty-five centimetres a year, and in Paraguay duelling is legal so long as both of you are registered blood donors. Ten things I did not know and can no longer forget.
- travel
- culture
- language
- 10te.bg29 Feb 2024
10 extinct and critically endangered animals
Steller's sea cow was discovered in 1741 and gone by 1768 — twenty-seven years from the first meeting to the last. The Caspian tiger was seen for the last time in 1970 and only declared extinct in 2003.
- nature
- 10te.bg15 Jun 2026
10 animals with “supernatural powers”
The Turritopsis jellyfish presses restart and reverts to an earlier stage of its own life. The mimic octopus impersonates other creatures even when nothing is hunting it — ten entirely real superpowers.
- nature
- science