These past  days Romania’s little corner of the Internet has been all astir : lines have been drawn in the sand and crossed, war drums  beaten and in a very uncharacteristic move, Romanians have  once more taken to the streets. The reason? A controversial gold mining project has recently been approved […]

 “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever, is either a madman or an economist.” (Kenneth Bouldin, economist) At university, the first graph we were shown in the economics class was plotting GDP growth in time, throughout the history of humanity. It turns out growth is actually a relatively […]

Can anything shake Europe’s vacation-emptied, heat-stupefied capital on a hot July day? Perhaps a sandwich protest can! Unpaid and low-paid interns and trainees working in Brussels this year decided to stage an unusual protest against unfair internship conditions, long hours and no pay, and the questionable educational value of their […]

Although primarily an economic union forged with the aim of bringing long-lasting peace to a continent devastated by bloody wars, the European Union soon became an identity-centered construct. European citizenship brought about fundamental individual freedoms and there has been hope that decades of integration would successfully shape a single identity, […]

There’s an old Communist-era joke that neatly sums up the way most Romanians think about the relationship between the state and the individual. It hinges on a play on words so is not so easy to translate into English: “Știi bancul cu Statuia? Statu’ ia tot.” (Do you know the […]