Welcome to Ukraine@War, where I will be writing about ultra-competitive Ukraine-style politics for the duration of my COVID-19 isolation and Russia’s further invasion(s).
I’m an Irish journalist from New York City interested in shenanigans and Ukrainian macroeconomics.
I was born in the United States into an Irish family and traveled around the former Soviet Union with my father, who was a U.S. diplomat. I worked at USM-5 in West Berlin at the end of the Cold War (81-85), before Detachment A was disbanded, and the State Department. Later directed Merck & Co.’s Scientific Network in Russia and Central Asia and OSI/BSF in Minsk. Since 1999, I’ve been running long distances in Kyiv and working as a journalist.
I speak English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German, Latin and sign language. I also do magic tricks.
I support the principles of Open Society and think a lot about the interplay between the tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation), subscribing to Karl Popper’s view that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about free energy minimization versus entropy and why that might explain why some people are goofy.