That I’m diabetic doesn’t mean I want everybody to develop Type 2 diabetes. To the contrary, I want fewer people to develop diabetes.

Similarly, that I’m an immigrant doesn’t mean I want more people to become immigrants. I wouldn’t want my child ever to be an immigrant.

Why is this so hard to understand?

This post is inspired by a conversation with a non-immigrant colleague earlier today who doesn’t understand how I can be opposed to mass migration if I’m an immigrant myself.

I don’t need to see myself reflected in other people to feel comforted. Even I’m not that neoliberal.

I’m not giving any updates on the situation with my department because it’s so cooky I don’t think anybody will believe me. I don’t know how to narrate the story while not sounding completely barmy.

Here’s a very small part of it so that you understand what we are talking about. At the end of June, Department Chairs were saying goodbye to those who were stepping down from the position.

“What about you?” people asked. “Are you going to continue as Chair? What is going on with your department?”

“I have no idea,” I said honestly.

After July 1, I had to go into the payroll system to find out if I’m still getting paid as department Chair. Because – get this – no human appears to know. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Every two weeks, I access the payroll system to find my status from there. No human being communicates with me about it. We no longer have any idea who makes the decisions or if anybody does.

See? I told you it was nuts.

The plot based on an encounter of an innocent child with the hypocritical world of adults has been done to death. To revive this exhausted topic, Gary Shteyngart sets his novel Vera, or Faith in a near future where Eastern Europe has formed a Coalition of Illiberal States, Ohio constantly tests women to see if they have had an abortion, AI and self-driving cars are everywhere, and Russia is colluding to make the votes of immigrants in the US count for less than people whose ancestors have been here since the revolutionary war.

None of this, however, is what makes the novel fail. You can be an ideologue but still be great at your craft. Shteyngart’s main failure in Vera is that of a writer whose plotting is too lazy and character development is careless. He’s not a talentless author but he wants to write political manifestos more than novels. And this destroys the literary quality of the book.

One great problem is that Shteyngart writes the little 10-year-old heroine, Vera, like she’s a boy. He hasn’t made the slightest effort to understand the experience of a girl growing up, although there’s a trillion coming of age novels about little girls. Suffice it to say that the brilliant, well-read Vera with a mega progressive mother never heard of menstruation. That the daughter of left-wing parents doesn’t carry around “a menstruation kit” since at least age 7 defies belief.

This is only one thing out of many that makes it clear that Shteyngart doesn’t care much about the characters he creates. The plot is equally carelessly constructed, accelerating at the point where the author gets bored with his own story and is eager to get to the end as fast as possible. When a character becomes inconvenient, Shteyngart writes him out of the novel in a sloppy way.

Shteyngart is not devoid of talent. I did finish the novel, which means there’s enough in it to hold my interest. But he’s lazy. Yes, his gift is on the modest side but that’s precisely why he needs to grind more than authors with greater natural gifts. I won’t be reading anything else by this author because, at the age he is, I don’t believe he’ll rethink his entire life strategy and start to work to defeat his sloppiness and laziness.

Words fail to describe how terrible these people are:

For students in Illinois, mental health screenings will soon be required alongside annual vision and hearing exams.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill into law Thursday that will require public school students in grades 3 through 12 in the state to undergo a mental health screening each year.

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Wellness/illinois-1st-state-require-student-mental-health-screenings/story?id=124275407

This alone is reason enough for people who can’t afford private schools or homeschooling to move out of Illinois.

Even the USSR with its famous punitive psychiatry didn’t go this far.

To the person who sent in an anonymous message with an apology:

I’m so assimilated that I find the crowds of immigrant parents who crammed their elementary-school children into the ultra-expensive “STEM Kids Camp” on campus to be like aliens from another planet.

I mean, why move to America if you won’t let your kid have an American childhood? It’s the kind of childhood that creates the America you so wanted to join.

Economic anxieties should be resolved by adults and not farmed out tio children. The same goes for people who are very eager for their children to learn languages or to master musical instrument. Recognize that it’s your own desire and go for it. Leave the kid alone.

I’m reading a novel titled Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart. I knew he was Soviet the moment I saw the book cover. Vera, or Faith is a play on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. Vera was Nabokov’s wife’s name. And the word vera means faith in Russian.

I decided to read the book because I’m curious about Soviet immigrants in America. Shteyngart is older than me, he was born in 1972 but he was brought to the US as a little boy. This means that his parents must have gone through hell to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

What I find shocking is that Shteyngart is very woke. Like Commie-pinko-prays-at-the- handmade-altar-of-Ilhan-Omar woke. Really out there. And he’s a Soviet Jew. Soviet Jews are all right-wingers. They were so beaten down in the USSR that they all have conniption fits at a whiff of wokedom. That’s the main difference between an American Jew and a Soviet Jew. The latter one is mega-MAGA while the former one is oy-vey-let’s-BLM-today.

Again, though, Soviet Jews are high-IQ. Maybe Shteyngart figured out that, what with being a white dude with a non-PC identity, he ran a snowflake’s chance in a real workplace to get published, so he faked himself up some lefty beliefs.

It’s also possible that the American education system managed to brainwash the dude so thoroughly.

Once again, I’m reading a book where the parent flies in Business class while his small child spends the 14-hour flight in Economy. This happens in reality. I know of people who do that. These are people I will never comprehend.

What’s wrong with everybody? Weird, weird people. I wouldn’t enjoy Business if I knew that my 10-year-old (the age of the character in the book) was cramped somewhere with strangers.

Then rich people wonder why their kids are such neurotics.

I’m really entertained by how easily our day-long meeting on Thursday avoided any left-wing topic. In the past, 80% of all time during such meetings was dedicated to aggressive left-wing propaganda, equity trainings, racial insults, mockery of men, etc.

And now it’s like people’s brains were wiped and a new program was installed. It’s extraordinary how easy it turned out to achieve this.

All the race-baiting, BLMing, #MeTooting – for most people it was simply opportunism and faddishness. All the damage that they caused was because they picked up a stupid fad they don’t even care about.

Lawler: No one is demanding that Russia provide the same level of aid to the Ukrainians. . Why is it that Israel is being subjected to a totally different standard? pic.twitter.com/yNEKXnZlae

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 1, 2025

Because Ukraine is a sovereign nation, you stupid bastard. And Israel’s whole position is that Palestine is not a separate country. You claim that Palestine is part of your own country. Your relationship with parts of your own country is, by definition, different than a relationship between two separate warring nations. If Palestine is, indeed, a separate country, then recognize it already and leave us all be.