A Year in Reading: Il’ja Rakos

These things come in threes and today they came nearly all at once. The first, when the President of Ukraine–famous for his chocolate–announced that he was putting the half of the country that borders Russia under martial law. The second with the two emails from the U.S. Embassy: the first advising me to be aware of “heightened police presence” and the second which informed me that my sons, 3 and 5, had been issued American passports. And finally there came Michael Cohen and the glimmer of hope that we might not be hearing the phrase “constitutional crisis” every damn evening on the news much longer.

I don’t know and am loath to predict how these events fit together–the war, the passports, the Cohen revelation–I just know they do. You can laugh, but that’s the way things work here: in threes. You greet an honored guest with three kisses. You receive a long