Elizabeth Kostova is a well-known name in literary circles in the United States. Her first novel, The Historian (2005), quickly became a national and then an international bestseller, and it was subsequently translated into many languages.
In the summer of 2017, after years of debates, projects and protests, Sofia looked as though it would finally part with one of the most controversial monuments of the period referred to as Mature Socialism (roughly, the 1970s and 1980s in Communist Bulgaria). Everyone knows the monument in question: it is the 35-metre-high angular construction of granite plates and metal, crowned with ghostly statues and disintegrated slogans, in front of the NDK in central Sofia.
Ironically, the name of the monument slated for demolition is 1,300 Years of Bulgaria.
This would have been the perfect story for Andy Borowitz. A group of people identifying themselves as intellectuals start a war of words (involving so far just one non-verbal Molotov cocktail) over another group of people whom the intellectuals dub uncouth simpletons with fascist or Taliban tendencies over a monument no one has ever liked and everyone, including the engineers, agrees is actually dangerous not only to your sight and mind but also to your head in case you happen to be walking too close by.
Bulgaria's potential in high technologies transcends the outsourcing software services it is popular for now. Rüger Consulting has been a successful example for exploring new fields. It is a regular feature in the top 3 list of the most prosperous IT consultancy companies by the Computer World Bulgaria weekly. It is small, but it's clients' portfolio includes major international names, like UniCredit Germany and the largest financial group in Northern Europe – Nordea. The company implemented and refined many terabyte scale enterprise data warehouses and big data applications.
According to their testimony, the three co-defendants had met while flipping ollies in the drained swimming pools of suburban southern California and a decade later had gone on to serve as graphic designers and principal investors in Abacus 5, their own product line of extreme sports clothing. Without seeking prior permission from myself or my former employer, Black Star Photo Agency, Abacus 5 had printed a series of T-shirts that used elements of eight photographs spanning several phases of my career, albeit significantly altered from their original form.