Good morning, it’s Friday.
I recently moderated a panel about the use of tech in K-2 classrooms. Five (I think it was) experts – both medical professionals and educators – debated the impact of relying increasingly on screens to educate young people and the negative impacts of too much screen time on developing minds.
It was an insightful and also terrifying experience. I learned a lot, but one of the things that I found most profound was the revelation that teachers and special ed experts are seeing an alarming loss of fine motor skills in young people who spend a lot of time swiping and very little time actually writing.
This was eye-opening for me, since I don’t have young kids. (My step-kid is in college, and the dogs don’t have opposable thumbs). One could make an argument that in the digital everything age – you don’t even need to physically sign your name anymore at the register – there’s less of a need for handwriting skills.
Apparently, though, handwriting is making a comeback. More than half of U.S. states now require – or at the very least strongly encourage – schools to teach students how to read and write in cursive. For the record, New York is not one of them.
Looking back to the days when I was learning how to write, being able to use fancy pens encouraged me to practice – especially my cursive. It is unusually satisfying, I have found, to sign one’s name with a high-quality fountain pen. It’s a throwback to a different age, to be sure, but also the hallmark of luxury and refinement.
I mean, truly, who carries their own monogrammed pen anymore? I think I got a fancy pen-and-pencil set for my Bat Mitzvah, but have zero recollection of what might have happened to it.
According to the interwebs, fountain pens – both vintage and modern-day versions – are having a comeback, and apparently purists feel some kind of way about the cheap models produced overseas that are flooding the market. Fountain pens are reportedly popular with Gen Zers who are longing for a return to a simpler, more analog time.
But they’re probably not the consumers who are purchasing multimillion dollar, jewel-encrpens. And yes, they do exist.
Today is National Fountain Pen Day, which is celebrated annually on the first Friday in October and is a time, according to what I think is the day’s official website, to “embrace, promote and share the use of fountain pens.”
Fountain pens have been around, in some form or function, since ancient times. If you want to go very deep on the fountain pen origin story, click here.
I used to have a Waterman, which is probably one of the best known fountain pen makers, and really enjoyed using it – especially when I lived in France. (In case you don’t know, Waterman was actually founded in New York City, but it was the company’s French subsidiary that kept it alive after the U.S. branch shuttered in 1954). Today, all Waterman pens are manufactured and assembled by hand in France.
Today, Waterman makes a budget option – the Allure – which will run you about $31. I’m thinking of getting back into the groove and this seems as good a place as any to start. I’ll report back.
Compared to the amazing weather we’ve been enjoying of late, this weekend is looking kind of on the meh side. Today will actually be the best of the lost, with clouds in the morning giving way to sunshine in the afternoon. Temperatures will top out in the mid-to-high 60s.
The mercury will drop over the weekend, with highs only in the mid-50s both days. Saturday will bring clouds in the morning and rain showers in the afternoon. Sunday will be dry and mostly cloudy, though the sun might make more of an appearance as the day progresses.
In the headlines…
President Donald Trump blamed the Democrats’ blue wave election wins for Thursday’s unprecedented stock market sell-off that saw firms lose trillions of dollars in value in a single day.
Stocks plummeted on Thursday, erasing the sharp gains from the rally seen in the wake of the U.S. midterm elections, as investors accelerated their move away from technology stocks on fears of a data-center buildout slowdown.
The S&P 500 slumped to its worst daily decline since April 2025 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq entered correction territory, as investors fretted about the durability of the A.I. build-out.
In a series of social media posts, Trump sought to deflect blame from his role in the sweep of GOP defeats across the country, where his party faced challenging races because of his unpopularity, his handling of the economy and his decision to start a war in Iran.
A federal judge on Thursday night promptly blocked construction of President Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch near the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery after a Trump-friendly panel approved it.
The ruling temporarily stalled progress on one of the president’s favorite projects, which Democrats have threatened to kill when they take control of Congress in January.
Trump on Thursday signed a proclamation that seeks to designate as national monuments the Oval Office and the adjacent Cabinet Room, remaining focused on his renovation projects while his party reels from a rebuke in the midterm elections.
The Democratic House majority surged past 250 seats on Thursday as the party seized its biggest majority in nearly two decades by flipping more seats, including in Montana, where a former smoke jumper disrupted decades of Republican dominance.
Incoming presumptive House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is planning a legislative blitz against President Trump during the first 100 hours of Democrats’ time back in power.
Democrats’ midterm victories may raise the chances that enough states sign onto a mechanism that, in theory, could elect the next president effectively by popular vote instead of through the typical rules of the Electoral College.
At least seven incoming Democratic freshmen have publicly suggested – or said outright – they will not commit to supporting Sen. Chuck Schumer in next month’s leadership vote.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday dismissed reports that he was planning to leave the Trump administration and declined to answer questions about his political future.
Washington State voters allowed a tax on millionaires to stand, rejecting a ballot initiative that would have repealed a 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million, though a lawsuit is pending that seeks to block the tax before it takes effect in 2028.
Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman (D) has defeated embattled mayor Karen Bass, joining the growing ranks of democratic socialists leading major American cities, according to the Associated Press.
Once she takes office, the mayors in the two most-populous American cities and the nation’s capital will be members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a political group of dues-paying members organized around a broad policy platform.
The election showed Democrats can take sharply different approaches to the party’s resurgent left and still prevail. The harder question is what those relationships demand now that the campaign is over — and the first real test will be in Albany.
Long Island’s Republican stronghold Hempstead shockingly flipped blue under the weight of the Democratic blue wave in Tuesday’s midterms — as the northern suburbs of Westchester and Rockland counties appeared to be headed the same way.
Pessimists have been worried that after the election, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a larger-than-ever contingent of socialists would drag Gov. Kathy Hochul to the left on measures like statewide rent stabilization. But the pessimists are wrong.
Hochul signed an executive order extending the statewide measles disaster emergency declaration through December 4.
Hochul largely swept in NYC on Tuesday, but did lose ground in a handful of neighborhoods, however — nearly all of them in Manhattan, in areas among the most exposed to the new pied-a-terre tax.
A federal judge has denied a request from 15 New York county sheriffs to temporarily block enforcement of Hochul’s Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, which restricts cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities.
New York Republicans are demanding a reckoning in their own party after a blue wave swept away many of their candidates Tuesday.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republicans’ unsuccessful candidate for governor, on Thursday criticized U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik — his one-time rival for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.
“Elise Stefanik is a selfish, do nothing politician that didn’t lift a finger to help Republican candidates in New York this year,” Blakeman wrote on X. “She had one moment of glory in what was otherwise an unremarkable career.”
An eye-watering $308 million was pumped into New York State congressional races during the 2026 midterm campaign – including some $64 million spent in the Empire State’s most closely watched battleground.
Since Carl Heastie became Assembly speaker in 2015, a campaign committee he helps lead has spent over $1 million on sporting events, including luxury suites and meet-and-greets with retired Yankees stars.
Heastie and his staffers were treated to thousands of dollars in luxury Boston Celtics tickets by a gambling company, Delaware North, which later scored a projected $18 million in state tax breaks, an investigation reveals.
Mayor Mamdani has pledged to support street vendors, but under his administration tickets for people illegally hawking trinkets and merch have reached new highs, data shows.
Dozens of businesses were hit with more than 130 violations for selling illegal e-bikes and scooters in a two-month enforcement blitz to protect consumers against fire-prone and overpowered micromobility devices.
City officials and advocates are outraged that the tech giants behind the exploitive delivery gig economy have yet again sued to block a city law that protects delivery workers from random deactivations — a key workplace improvement that also keeps streets safer.
MTA Chair Janno Lieber said Thursday that he’s optimistic the end of the “anti-city” movement has arrived and that more federal funding for public transportation projects is on the horizon after Democrats won control of Congress in the midterm election.
New York City Comptroller Mark Levine’s office said they’ve been working overtime to process early childhood education contracts after critical payment delays to providers before the start of this school year.
The FDNY boss offered “fire safety” advice from the annual Somos political conference in Puerto Rico Thursday — just hours after a fire killed six people in Brooklyn.
A ransomware attack Wednesday on the Queens Public Library resulted in a system-side network outage that continued into Thursday and could take some time to be fixed, library officials said.
The century-old Strand Bookstore has agreed to pay the federal government nearly $1.5 million to resolve a claim that it was not eligible for a pandemic-relief loan it obtained because the store’s owner is married to a member of Congress.
The Archdiocese of New York and lawyers representing the 1,300 people who said they were sexually abused by its clergy and lay leaders formally agreed to an $800 million settlement on Thursday, bringing years of litigation to a close.
This year’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was cut down on Thursday and will be trucked to New York City to usher in the holiday season.
A State Police sergeant from Orange County was arrested Thursday on charges of sexual exploitation of children and possession of child sexual abuse material.
Proctors Collaborative announced on Thursday that their CEO Philip Morris will be retiring from his role in the spring. He will be passing the torch to Jean Leonard, who has been with the organization for 15 years.
Proctors is marking its 100th anniversary with $1 movie screenings and a holiday food drive to support the Sycamore Collaborative.
The tight contest between Republican state Sen. Jake Ashby and Democrat Devin R. Lander won’t be decided until next week at the earliest.
Mayor Carmella Mantello is seeking to increase the money Troy receives each year through its sales tax agreement with Rensselaer County.
Mayor Dorcey Applyrs and other Albany officials are at the Somos conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, this week, where networking and policy discussions will unfold against the backdrop of the city’s increasingly difficult budget negotiations.
Salon, the left-leaning news and opinion website that was early to online publishing, said on Thursday that it would shut down after more than 30 years.
In an unsigned announcement posted on its website, Salon said that the “business realities of independent digital journalism” had changed profoundly and that “our publishing model is no longer sustainable.”
Russell Brand, a YouTuber who first found fame as a comedy and acting star, was found guilty in London of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was found not guilty of two other counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
