Putting wrapfigure right next to the following paragraph

I have grown increasingly fond of replacing wrapfig with paracol. It is far more robust, but it does require manually breaking paragraphs (nopar and noindent).

documentclass{article}
usepackage{graphicx}
usepackage{paracol}

newcommand{nopar}{{parfillskip=0ptparskip=0ptpar}}

begin{document}

section*{Clarence Merriweather}

setcolumnwidth{dimexpr 0.7textwidth-columnsep}% right column is 0.3textwidth
begin{paracol}{2}
begin{itemize}
item Occupation: Professor
item Drive: Scholarship
item Pillars of Sanity:
        begin{itemize}
    item Positivism: the world can be understood via science
    item Enlightenment will prevail over primitive barbarism
    item The world changes, but I'll always have the family house in Abingdon
        end{itemize}
end{itemize}

After seeing Europe sink into the death cult that was the Great War,
Prof. Merriweather, himself spared of experiencing combat first-hand
by his academicnopar
switchcolumn
includegraphics[height=2.5in, % in real document remove this option
                 width=linewidth]{example-image}%{portrait.jpg}
end{paracol}
noindent standing and his asthma, decided to leave his faculty
position in Oxford to pursue a new career in NYU

His interest in primitive cultures and the occult is purely
academical. He is happy to lend his expertise to the FBI to help with
cases involving ''crazies who imitate the primitive savages''.
end{document}

I'm not familiar with pandoc, but in LaTeX code (resulted from pandoc) code should be something like this:

documentclass{article}      
usepackage{graphicx,wrapfig}

begin{document}

section*{Clarence Merriweather} % this is LaTeX emulation of pandoc
    begin{itemize}
item Occupation: Professor
item Drive: Scholarship
item Pillars of Sanity:
    begin{itemize}
  item Positivism: the world can be understood via science
  item Enlightenment will prevail over primitive barbarism
  item The world changes, but I'll always have the family house in Abingdon
    end{itemize}
    end{itemize}
    
begin{wrapfigure}{r}{0.3textwidth} % <--- had to be inserted here
vspace{-baselineskip}
includegraphics[height=linewidth, % in real document remove this option
                 width=linewidth]{example-image-duck}%{portrait.jpg}
end{wrapfigure}
After seeing Europe sink into the death cult that was the Great War,
Prof. Merriweather, himself spared of experiencing combat first-hand
by his academic standing and his asthma, decided to leave his faculty
position in Oxford to pursue a new career in NYU.

His interest in primitive cultures and the occult is purely
academical. He is happy to lend his expertise to the FBI to help with
cases involving ''crazies who imitate the primitive savages''.
end{document}

which produce

As you can observe, wrapfigure had to be at begin of paragraph, where is desired that image be inserted.

Addendum:

Unfortunately wrapfig doesn't work with itemize. A possible solution is incapsulate lists in minipage and instead of wrapfigure use InsertBoxR defined in plain TeX macro package insbox

documentclass{article}
usepackage{graphicx}
usepackage{enumitem}
input{insbox}%%%%%%%%%%%%%% TeX macro, very useful


begin{document}

section*{Clarence Merriweather}

   InsertBoxR{0}{%
    includegraphics[height=0.4linewidth, % in real document remove this option
                     width =0.3linewidth]{example-image-duck}%{portrait.jpg}
                  }   
noindentbegin{minipage}[t]{0.65linewidth}
setlist[itemize]{topsep=0pt, itemsep=0.2ex, leftmargin=*}
    begin{itemize}
item Occupation: Professor
item Drive: Scholarship
item Pillars of Sanity:
        begin{itemize}
    item Positivism: the world can be understood via science
    item Enlightenment will prevail over primitive barbarism
    item The world changes, but I'll always have the family house in Abingdon
        end{itemize}
    end{itemize}
    end{minipage}
    
After seeing Europe sink into the death cult that was the Great War,
Prof. Merriweather, himself spared of experiencing combat first-hand
by his academic standing and his asthma, decided to leave his faculty
position in Oxford to pursue a new career in NYU.

His interest in primitive cultures and the occult is purely
academical. He is happy to lend his expertise to the FBI to help with
cases involving ''crazies who imitate the primitive savages''.
end{document}

(red lines indicate text border)