On the next day, I set out to find a cross. I was a kid but I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that accosting adults and asking to be provided with a cross was a dangerous thing to do. So I saved my lunch money for weeks and approached the gypsies who always hung out next to my school selling outlandish things like bright red lipstick and chewing gum. I had always heard they had things nobody else did, so it made sense to ask them. I was terrified of the gypsies because they used very bad words but they were my only option.

The gypsies were perplexed to see an 8-year-old clutching a handful of coins and asking for a cross. They told me to come back the next day, and when I got there, they had a cross for me. I couldn’t wear it around my neck because if anybody saw it, my parents would be in a sea of trouble. So I put it in the pocket of my school uniform, right on my chest.

Prayer was harder. How do you find out how to pray? I wracked my brain but came up with nothing. Then my father took me to Moscow to visit a friend who was a dissident. While my father and his friend were chatting in the kitchen, I browsed through a voluminous book collection in the bedroom. Hidden behind a row of books and wrapped in a newspaper, I found a copy of the Bible.

“Hah!” I thought. “There’s got to be instructions in here on how to pray.”

It so happened that when I opened the Bible, it opened directly on the text of the Lord’s prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” It was clearly meant to be that I’d find it.

I knew I had struck the motherload. I copied the prayer on a sheet of paper, memorized it, and destroyed the paper. Since then, I prayed every single day of my life.

Years later, my father revealed to me that he was always secretly Christian and also prayed every day. We prayed in secret from each other to protect each other. That’s what the USSR was.

I don’t tell this story often because it’s a very strange story but it happened to me and it changed the entire course of my life. I don’t know why or how but this is a huge part of my journey.

Some of you already read the story of my mystical experience but I’m happy to repeat it because it’s such a great and a very strange story.

I was a very typical Soviet child in what concerns religion. All I knew about it was that religion is stupid, and the only people who had any use for it were illiterate old babushkas deep in the countryside. Like everybody else at school, I really enjoyed all of the stories we were assigned about the smart little grandkids who found the grandma’s icon of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and chopped it up into little pieces. That was hilarious! We all rooted for the grandkids who were saving the babushka from the darkness of ignorance.

But then I had a mystical experience during which Virgin Mary came to me. I won’t give all the details of what was said because it’s not the Virgin of Fatima situation with a message that’s relevant to all of humanity. This was a message relevant only to me. I didn’t understand much of it but later in life when things started coming true, it was quite an experience.

When 20 years later I read St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross, I finally had a name for what had happened to me in second grade because it was so similar. This is why I hate it when people sexualize St Teresa’s writings. Stupid limited creatures who want to reduce everything to the genital area. I was eight! I wasn’t having any sexual experience. Eeww, freaks.

The Virgin said that I had to find a cross and wear it. I also had to pray daily. I had to remain faithful, and everything would be right in my life because God was watching out for me.

“God is with you always,” she said.

I felt an incredible sense of peace in that dream. I felt that everything was right and exactly the way it needed to be. I felt this luminous presence, it was incredible, people.

In the next post, I will share how I proceeded to find a cross and learn to pray, which in the USSR was not an easy endeavor, to put it mildly.

My brain is as pure as driven snow on this one, my friend. I read nothing, know nothing, have not the slightest inkling of anything.

My faith is probably the only thing in my life that I haven’t intellectualized. I had a mystical experience as a child, and that decided things for me. I accepted that I don’t need to understand. That it’s fine sometimes to bow your head and accept what is.

So I’m useless on this subject but, readers who are less intellectually barren on this subject, please share your sources of reading and inspiration.

I was certain that the video of Trump on a stopped UN escalator was AI. It was impossible to believe that the fat, confused men around the president were Secret Service. They just stood there, looking lost and befuddled. I thought the video had been manufactured as a gag.

It’s impossible to understand how this degree of incompetence is possible. Did anybody even check in advance if the escalator was functional? Was a Secret Service agent stationed next to whoever operated it?

Wealthy leftists have so successfully erased the issue of class from every corner of their consciousness that they sincerely don’t understand that a neighborhood filled with immigrant professors and dentists is different from the kind of immigrant neighborhood that less wealthy Americans get.

I also want to note that “immigrants commit far fewer crimes” is a talking point that does not correspond with reality. These numbers do not exist because nobody was ever allowed to count. There’s literally no way to calculate it in any meaningful manner. For example, I was naturalized in 2016. If I commit a crime, will it count as immigrant crime? Obviously not. Am I still an immigrant? Just as obviously yes.

These are empty, meaningless talking points by people whose understanding of reality is constrained by ideological blinkers. “I don’t know any drug addicts in my very privileged life, so drug addiction must be a myth” would be an equivalent of the quoted take. “I’ve never been to Australia, so it must be invented.”

🚨🇺🇸 | INSÓLITO: El colectivo de mujeres embarazadas de izquierda en EEUU comenzó a grabarse tomando grandes cantidades de Paracetamol en protesta contra Trump, luego de que revelara que aumenta radicalmente el riesgo de autismo en niños. pic.twitter.com/PlOPO8UJ9M

— La Derecha Diario (@laderechadiario) September 24, 2025

Trump’s their daddy. Not of the babies but the women themselves. This is how a 14-year-old girl with an absentee dad tries to attract his attention. No adult woman would ingest a substance to spite a politician who doesn’t know she exists.

Parents, please be more present with your children because look at the results of not doing so.

I was introduced to a very young guy who wants to be a writer. I checked out his stuff, and it was a strange experience. He writes like a Boomer. The turns of phrase, the ideas, the emotions are all identical to what I hear from very liberal 70-year-old friends. Who are very nice people. Everybody in this story is a nice person.

What I’m saying is that the horizon of possibility is closed and screwed shut on the Left. There’s a limited range of words and expressions that are allowed. You can’t step even a millimeter beyond the line. Nothing I read or hear from the Left makes me go, “Hah. Never thought of it this way.” It was the call-out culture, then it was the cancel culture, and the result is that there is no culture. You are supposed to be reciting a limited range of precisely worded statements. No departure is possible.

Nazism, fascism, hatred, something-phobia, no human is illegal, trans women are women, gun culture, mental illness, climate change, non-traditional good, traditional bad, we just want you to have healthcare.

And then all over again, on a loop. Nazism, fascism, hatred, something-phobia. Even the young people aren’t finding a tiny crevice to escape from this mechanical recitation. The drumbeat of identical slogans drowns out any original thought.

I have no idea why people are suddenly going nuts on social media over the suggestion that they shouldn’t take Tylenol during pregnancy. Isn’t it widely known that medications should be avoided during pregnancy unless specifically indicated by the OB-GYN? What’s the big shocking thing here? There are many things we avoid during pregnancy. Smoking, alcohol, raw fish. Everything that is not spinach if you are severely gestationally diabetic.

Of all of the discomforts of pregnancy, truly avoiding Tylenol should be the least noticeable. As long as you get your baby in the end, who cares? Why are people fixating on something so unimportant?

I’ve tried being Managing Editor, and realized that this role is not for me. I can only be Editor-in-chief. On the issue where I was ME, I can’t even say that things were moving at a glacial pace. They weren’t moving at all. One person lost her password to the system and couldn’t gain access for months. Another simply stopped responding to emails. Nobody knew who was responsible for the final decision on each submission.

At the point when our issue of the journal celebrated its one-year anniversary of being delayed for publication, I staged a coup, muscled the non-existent leadership out, appointed myself Editor-in-chief, and started making decisions. As a result, today the journal is ready to go into pre-publication. I had to issue multiple groveling apologies to authors who have seen their publication delayed for no reason apparent to them. But it’s moving ahead. I hate it when things are stuck because people can’t get their shit together. They are letting down colleagues who need the publication for tenure or promotion. How can one be such a crap colleague? There’s no excuse. No personal hardship justifies this. I’ve had hardship galore but what really helped me get through it is the knowledge that I’m not letting anybody down and not spoiling anybody’s existence with my drama.

In any case, I realized that I can only either be in charge at this stage of my life or work under the leadership of somebody who is like me. Organized, aggressive, decisive, and energetic. When people start proposing that we hold meeting number 17 to decide who has the authority to do the tiny bit of work needed before we can proceed to the next stage where we’ll hold meeting number 18, and so on, I wilt.

Next Fall I’m on sabbatical, and I’ll step down from all my roles as a condition of the sabbatical. Then, I’ll start looking for new roles.

Any fans of JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series on here? I was waiting eagerly for the new installment in the series but it’s been out for a week, and I have to make myself slog through it. Is it me? Is everybody else enjoying it?

I loved the series until now. Listened to each 1,000-page book three times. Why am I not enjoying this installment?

Tomorrow, a new Inspector Lynley drops. If that fails to do it for me, I’ll consider seeking medical help.

My very last hope is the autobiography of Andrés Trapiello that will be released the day after tomorrow. If that one is a dud, not even medical intervention will help me.