Atlas Stationers

Elaine and I made a post-Thanksgiving stop at Atlas Stationers in Chicago. It’s pen and paper bliss: several counters devoted to pens, one aisle (both sides) devoted to notebooks, another aisle’s worth of shelves devoted to inks, other aisles devoted to dip pens, pencils, greeting cards, stationery, stamps and ink pads, blotters, pen rolls, and other supplies. At the center of things, a master calligrapher doing his thing and talking to customers.

Friendly people were everywhere: I spoke at some length with Therese, Mrs. Atlas, about all sorts of things, including the Leuchtturm A4+ Daily Planner, a behemoth I’d never seen before. Mrs. Atlas explained that it caught on during the pandemic, when students taking online courses began buying it for note-taking. I asked if someone from the Hulu series The Bear, filmed (mostly) in Chicago, had come in to buy notebooks — everyone in that series seems to use a notebook. (No.)

At a pen counter, I asked Sean about the store’s tournament of pens — brackets on a whiteboard, with customers having voted for the Pilot 823 over the Kaweco Sport in the final matchup. Would I like to try the Pilot? Sure. When I learned that Sean likes old Parkers — Duofolds, Vacumatics, and 51s, I mentioned the great scene in the movie Double Indemnity in which Walter Neff’s Duofold is the pen that Mr. Dietrichson uses to sign the accident policy that seals his doom. And then we got talking about the Criterion Channel.

Such a great store, and buzzing with people on a Black Friday. Analog lives!

[And, yes, of course, we spent some serious money: ink, notebooks, pencils, stationery.]

Sources of truth

Robert Reich offers sources where one might find some truth. I’ve added italics here and there:

The Guardian, Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, The Economic Policy Institute, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.

You’ll notice that some prominent purveyors of news are absent. “This Substack,” Reich’s Substack, is available here.

Two items I’d call attention to from these sources:

The November 30 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American offers a useful history of the idea of liberal democracy. An excerpt:

When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals — which was quite deliberate — they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.

And in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer recounts “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History” — and what a history. An excerpt:

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

It’s no time for internal exile.

George’s Diner

[72 Third Avenue, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like seeing a diner wherever there’s space for one. Nature abhors a vacuum. See also the Loring Grill, the Tiny Diner, the Unique Diner, and Jack’s Diner, which is right down the avenue from George’s.

The church to the right still stands, now as the Temple of Restoration. (You can see the words Church Office on that door.) The space once occupied by the diner is now a church parking lot.

Thanks, Brian, for pointing me to this diner.

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]