Some books are read; others are entered, and stay. Psychology of Leadership: Cognitive Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence closed a long academic road in December 2025, tracing leadership to the mind's deep structure, beneath the manner. It reads the leader as a fox reads the ground — the trap known by the snare-setter, the game and the board seen before the move: poker for the odds, chess for the geometry, the dice for what no cunning governs, and beneath them the mathematics of decision. History gives the same craft — the Great Game of Britain and Russia, the language-thread from India to Persia, an empire moving on a borrowed word. Beneath it lie two degrees taken with distinction — an MBA, a Master's in Criminology and Psychopathology — and fifteen years inside eight hundred London houses that framed its question: success watched at close range, unguarded. Behind it stands Why Bulgaria Didn't Become Venice — Roads, Trade and Dervishes, four years of archive and field with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences: a history of the corridor from the Bosphorus through the Black Sea and Crimea into the Balkans, which carried the wealth of three continents for twenty-five centuries, then handed most of it to Venice, Genoa, and Amsterdam. It follows that road through every empire that taxed it — Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Soviet — and reads the machinery beneath: the credit, the endowments that held capital, the guilds that ruled who could trade, and why the one instrument that made others rich — the joint-stock company, built to outlive its founders — never took root here. Work of that weight is usually examined and rewarded with a title. Here it was simply done, and given away. From the same clinical training came The Comic Guide to Hypnotherapy, 2026 — a modern teaching guide that practises what it teaches, carrying the reader into visualisation by visualisation itself, the lesson drawn on the page because the unconscious learns in images before it learns in argument. The first step came earlier — If You Meet Buddha, Kill Him! — A Pilgrimage to Freedom, 2021 — its title the injunction to refuse the teacher and every comfortable account of value: critical thinking made a practice, each certainty made to earn its keep. Two years on, The Devil! I Know Him pursued the same question by metaphor, Faust behind it — the free individual and the open market set against the machinery of the total state, the growth of one person the only way a society is ever changed. It reckons with what the last century did to such people — the camps, the famines, the confiscations, where anyone distinct, or who owned what he made, was taken first. Nulla dies sine linea.
On Christmas morning of 2021 a novel was given to the country, free, by an afternoon's arrangement with a broadcaster. A nation woke to a book it had not bought. The book had earned well in Britain and beyond, and what it earned there it could afford to give here, at Christmas, to the people it had come from. The comparison was not offered. It was simply available. Writing is not a business. Writing is what a person does with the freedom that business bought, and no ledger has ever held it. In 1864, in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky's man refused the single thing the calculators demanded of him: that his responses be tabulated. He would act against his own advantage, he said, and go on acting against it, to prove himself a man and neither a piano key nor a stop in an organ. That is what a person does when nobody is paying him to do it. Dare to know, and then dare to be corrected: the second daring is the harder one, and it is where excellence turns pedantic on purpose. His books are art made of words. That same craft, turned upon an institution rather than a life, is journalism — the attention brought to what would rather not be looked at. Nothing is repaired before it is named. Made systematic, the attention becomes research: a society read as a self is read, for the pressures it will not admit to, the story it tells about itself, and the place where its account stops making sense. He examines the one as he was trained to examine the other. Of the three, a household is the smallest, and the nearest.
The market will offer you a standard: a managed household, a programme of wellbeing, an assistant trained to a specification. Whatever can be specified will be done by a machine soon enough, and without complaint. You have never once bought a standard. A match is watched for the player who does what no training produced; a song is kept for the voice, since melodies can now be fabricated by the thousand. The Angel Social Group was assembled for the remainder. Literature creates movements, and not merely readers. Publishing brought the Group figures whose endorsement costs corporations millions — influencers, pop icons, footballers and managers, musicians, an Olympic champions, an actor, the fathers of Bulgarian rock — and not one of them through payment. This constellation formed around a book, and formed itself. Art gathers people who owe one another nothing. What holds them is distinction, and contribution, and the plain joy of standing among people who have made something that did not exist before. Norbert Wiener, who gave the world cybernetics, wrote in 1950 that the future would be no comfortable hammock in which to lie down and be waited upon by machines. Anything that can be repeated will be repeated, and better. What survives is the particular: an eye, a judgement, a thing made once by somebody who was nobody's copy. Every one of them came of that. So is every person who will ever answer the door of the Angel Social Group.
The National Union of Journalists. The European Federation of Journalists. Podkrepa. Membership is bought; office is conferred. In Pazardzhik the district's writers elected their chairman for the years 2022 to 2024, and handed him two years of their disputes, their dismissals, and their fear of losing the work. It was carried, and returned. Behind the office sits the training that gives it reach: history, law, criminology, and psychology, four disciplines fused into the faculty analysts call strategic reading — a situation taken past its surface to the structure under it, the actors behind it, and the turn it will make before it makes one. In a chancellery it names the crisis early; in a house it is the person who has already seen what the night will ask. That instrument has been spent on the hardest ground the century offers: Eastern Europe and Eurasia read to their undercurrents, South-East Asia followed the same way; the dynamics of Africa and of the Middle East; energy, resources, and the security wars they breed; the fifth wave of radicalisation; the money and fear that move beneath a border. Across all of it, one question — how a private grievance becomes a public force, and who is drawing the picture that lets it. Walter Lippmann opened Public Opinion in 1922 with Plato's cave — prisoners chained before a wall, taking the shadows for the world. We act not upon the world but upon the pictures of it we carry, and whoever draws the pictures governs the acting, and is rarely required to say so. A picture may be drawn to free a person or to hold one; the discipline is identical, and only the consent differs, and the profit. For years this ran through The Angel Today, the review Kuzmanov built and edited, and through his by-line across the Bulgarian press; it runs now through GeoPsychology, the academic journal he owns, where geopolitics is read through the psychology that drives it. Investigations appeared that nobody had commissioned, into arrangements nobody had disclosed. Silence, in certain quarters, had been profitable for a long time. But an article that names a wrong and stops has done half the work, and the undone half is the half that changes anything. Whoever stands in your rooms is drawing on your walls. The question is only whether the picture is yours.
In 2024 the Executive Agency for Bulgarians Abroad, under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gave its documentary award to Pilgrim in Thailand — produced and written by Iliyan Kuzmanov, judged by a jury that reached from Bulgarian cinema to the president of the Chinese Academy of Cinema and Television. Its subject is sustainable travel, and the journey taken one soul at a time — meaning gathered by encounter, where the organised tour carries thousands to the same shrine, the same route, the same photograph, four hundred times over. That same philosophy runs through how he keeps a house and orders a life: the single guest served in particular, the hour arranged for one person and no other. It sits at the centre of his craft. That craft was earned on the road. Three continents have been lived on and worked across, and Asia was walked slowly — a road, a bowl, an hour inside a monastery where explanation stayed at the door. The going began in scholarship, with Central Asian studies in Montreal, and it carries the languages a guest is answered in: French from a lycée, Serbian from the Balkan research, Russian from the source, Latin from the law. Beside the road runs a lifelong training in the arts of presence, taken up by choice year after year — Stanislavski for the reason beneath a spoken line, Meisner for the truth of a reaction, Lecoq for what the body says before a word. It is the study of why a person says the thing they say, and of the objective that stays unspoken beneath it. The best direction is the kind no one sees. It is the difference between a house that is catered for and a life that is understood.
In 2024 the Executive Agency for Bulgarians Abroad, under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gave its documentary award to Pilgrim in Thailand — produced and written by Iliyan Kuzmanov, judged by a jury that reached from Bulgarian cinema to the president of the Chinese Academy of Cinema and Television. Its subject is sustainable travel, and the journey taken one soul at a time — meaning gathered by encounter, where the organised tour carries thousands to the same shrine, the same route, the same photograph, four hundred times over. That same philosophy runs through how he keeps a house and orders a life: the single guest served in particular, the hour arranged for one person and no other. It sits at the centre of his craft. That craft was earned on the road. Three continents have been lived on and worked across, and Asia was walked slowly — a road, a bowl, an hour inside a monastery where explanation stayed at the door. The going began in scholarship, with Central Asian studies in Montreal, and it carries the languages a guest is answered in: French from a lycée, Serbian from the Balkan research, Russian from the source, Latin from the law. Beside the road runs a lifelong training in the arts of presence, taken up by choice year after year — Stanislavski for the reason beneath a spoken line, Meisner for the truth of a reaction, Lecoq for what the body says before a word. It is the study of why a person says the thing they say, and of the objective that stays unspoken beneath it. The best direction is the kind no one sees. It is the difference between a house that is catered for and a life that is understood.
