Dear Commons Community,

Today’s issue of Science has an article alerting readers that the public needs to be prepared for side effects from the coronavirus vaccine.  Essentially the article warns that a subset of people taking the vaccine may face intense, most likely temporary, side effects which are termed “reactogenicity.”  The article cautions these side effects may include swelling of joints, fever, cold and hot rushes.  The article also advises that these transient reactions should not dissuade people from getting vaccinated.  The full article is below.

As I have said a number of times on this blog – I will take the vaccine (side effects and all) only if Dr. Anthony Faucie says it is okay.

Tony

Trump Loses it at Thanksgiving Day Press Conference

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump held a news conference last night at about 6:00 pm during which he answered questions from reporters and only Fox News aired it.  CNN, MSNBC and the major networks did not carry  it.  And it is good that they didn’t as his comments were nothing but the same bunch of election fraud lies that he has been telling for the past three weeks.

Trump completely flipped out when asked a follow-up question by Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason who asked him if he will concede when the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. 

“Well if they do, they made a mistake, because this election was a fraud,” Trump replied, before launching into a tirade about the number of votes Biden got compared to former President Barack Obama.

When Mason interrupted this lengthy digression, Trump snapped, “Don’t talk to me that way.”

″You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way,” he added.

This tone typified much of the press conference, in which the president evaded questions about whether he will attend Biden’s inauguration, persistently alleged widespread voter fraud, attacked election officials, and complained that his successor shouldn’t be allowed to take credit for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Following the Mason exchange, Trump said: “It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede, because we know there was massive fraud…This was a massive fraud, this should never take place in this country. We’re like a third-world country.”

The president said he wouldn’t comment on his attendance at any inauguration event on Jan. 20, adding: “I know the answer to that, but I don’t want to say it yet.” When pressed by other reporters, Trump said that he would leave the White House in January.

“Certainly I will. … Certainly I will, and you know that,” Trump said before adding, “There will be a lot of things happening between now and January 20th, a lot of things.”

Trump and his attorneys have lost virtually all of their court challenges to the results of the presidential election in the key battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Biden won more than 80 million votes in the election, a historic number, and currently leads the president by more than 6 million votes.

“I know one thing, Joe Biden did not get 80 million votes,” Trump said without evidence. “This race is far from over.”

Electors will meet on Dec. 14 to cast their votes in their respective states, a move that constitutionally determines the next president.

Biden holds 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Congress counts and certifies the results on Jan. 6. Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Trump even demeaned Republican election officials in Georgia and said he “didn’t lose” in the state despite a hand recount that confirmed Biden led in the state by just over 12,000 votes. That recount, Trump said, was “meaningless.” (It is not.) He said his loss in the Electoral College would be “fraud,” a statement not supported by any evidence.

“If they do, they’ve made a mistake,” the president said, referring to the Electoral College certifying Biden as the winner next month.

I think it was a smart move on the part of the news media not to air this press conference.  Trump should be happy too because it showed viewers that losing the presidential election is eating away at his sanity!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday President-Elect gave greetings (see video above) on the eve of Thanksgiving.  His basic message was one of unity and a call for our country “to be made whole again!”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tony

David Dinkins with his wife Joyce, who predeceased him last month

Dear Commons Community,

David N. Dinkins, the 106^th mayor of New York City from  1990 to 1993 died on Monday at the age of 93.  He served a single four-year term as the City’s first and only Black mayor. His tenure has been judged harshly at times, but it was also filled with accomplishments.

Mr. Dinkins had a significant influence on the city, shaping its physical infrastructure and beginning criminal justice initiatives that started to reduce crime.

He was remembered as a gentleman who led the city during a difficult period of fiscal crisis and racial tension — themes that the city and the nation are currently grappling with once again.

“David Dinkins simply set this city on a better path,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said yesterday.

The New York Times has an article this morning listing five of his contributions. Here is a look:  

A mentor who inspired others to run for office

Mr. Dinkins helped inspire a generation of Black leaders to run for office, including Laurie Cumbo, the majority leader of the New York City Council.

“His campaign inspired and ushered in the new wave of Black elected leaders, which then opened up opportunities for all people to know that they can also lead,” she said.

Carl Heastie, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, said Mr. Dinkins “was an example that although you may be the first, you must push open the doors for those who will come after you.”

Mr. Dinkins was a mentor to Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term who said Mr. Dinkins deserved credit for his marriage. He met his wife, Chirlane McCray, while both were serving in the Dinkins administration.

“He was my mentor, he was my friend, and his steadfast commitment to fight for that ‘gorgeous mosaic’ inspires me every single day,” the mayor said, referring to Mr. Dinkins’s motto — and the name of his biography — that symbolized the city’s mix of people of different races, faiths and sexual orientations.

Mr. Dinkins also had the most diverse administration up to that point. Two women became deputy mayors, and he appointed the city’s first Puerto Rican fire commissioner. For police commissioner, he chose Lee P. Brown, a Black veteran of the Atlanta and Houston forces.

He was a racial reconciliator

Mr. Dinkins was elected not long after Yusef Hawkins, a Black teenager, was chased and murdered by a white mob in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, and a white jogger was beaten and raped in Central Park, leading to the conviction of five Black and Latino teenagers who were later exonerated.

It was a time of great racial strife in New York City and Mr. Dinkins issued a call for unity.

Stacy Lynch, the daughter of Mr. Dinkins’s chief political strategist, Bill Lynch, said her father often talked about how difficult it was to lead with that message of reconciliation.

“You had entire neighborhoods in the city that didn’t believe in his gorgeous mosaic,” said Ms. Lynch, now an aide to Mr. de Blasio. “The expectation that one person could resolve all of that was unrealistic. What he tried to do was create a space where people could work it out.”

But he also struggled to respond to racial violence in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, after a car in a rabbi’s motorcade killed a Black boy — an episode that came to define his mayoralty.

Patrick Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations, who served as a senior aide to Mr. Dinkins, recalled being a young man who was constantly enraged at the racial injustice that he encountered. But Mr. Dinkins, who was also outraged by racial injustice, had a different approach.

Mr. Gaspard, who referred to Mr. Dinkins as a “political Jackie Robinson,” recalled one St. Patrick’s Day parade where the crowd hurled beer cans at the mayor along with racial epithets. As he was rushed to his car, a beer can almost struck Mr. Dinkins. Mr. Gaspard saw a flash of anger on Mr. Dinkins’s face.

“I saw him breathe deeply, compose himself and wave to the crowd,” Mr. Gaspard said. “I know what he wanted to say and the response he wanted to give back but he was not going to debase himself or the office.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton said that he had urged Mr. Dinkins to be more strident and confrontational on issues of race, but was rebuffed.

“He was a racial reconciler without giving up what he believed,” Mr. Sharpton said. “He never stopped being a warrior, he just fought in ways that sometimes those who agreed with him didn’t understand.”

He laid the groundwork for a record drop in crime

Mr. Dinkins added police officers to combat the city’s troubling murder rate and raised taxes to make it happen.

His “Safe Streets, Safe City” plan increased the size of the police force to roughly 38,000 officers. Homicides hit an all-time high on his watch — there were 2,245 murders in 1990, including the subway killing of a tourist from Utah named Brian Watkins. They fell by 13 percent during his tenure to 1,946 in his last year in office and declined much more under Rudolph W. Giuliani, who succeeded him.

Michael R. Bloomberg, who served as mayor after him, said on Tuesday that he often reminded people that Mr. Dinkins’s successors “stood on his shoulders and built on his legacy.”

“He entered City Hall at a difficult time in New York’s history, and he helped set the city on a course for success — and a reduction in crime — that no one at the time imagined possible,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

He improved the National Tennis Center and Times Square

Mr. Dinkins, an avid tennis player, expanded the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Mr. Bloomberg later called it “the only good athletic sports stadium deal, not just in New York but in the country.”

Mr. Dinkins made other impressions on the city’s physical infrastructure.

He began the remarkable transformation of Times Square, even though Mr. Giuliani is often given credit. A key deal with the Walt Disney Company to rebuild the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street was agreed upon on the last day of the Dinkins administration in December 1993.

Mr. Dinkins fought for years to pull together the parties that would spark the revitalization of the area because he knew what it would signal, Mr. Gaspard said.

“He knew that it would become a beacon that demonstrated to the world that New York City was open for business,” he said.

He championed policies that helped poor New Yorkers

Mr. Dinkins was known for programs that helped the city’s poorest residents, including the after-school program known as Beacon centers, and putting health care clinics in medically underserved neighborhoods.

Beacon centers, which were created in 1991 as part of “Safe City, Safe Streets,” offer sports, tutoring and crafts in an effort to keep children out of trouble. The city now has 91 centers.

Mr. Dinkins also started an innovative plan to add health clinics in struggling neighborhoods to give poor children another option instead of expensive emergency room visits.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and one of several candidates hoping to be the city’s second Black mayor, said Mr. Dinkins’s successes were not merely symbolic.

“Through his actions on behalf of lower-income people, he was both our effective advocate and confirmation of a long-held hope that our lives mattered to our government,” he said.

In sum, New York is a better place because of him.

May he and his wife rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Deep in the Mars-like landscape of Utah’s red-rock desert, a gleaming metal monolith (see video above) was found last week in one of the most remote parts of the state.

The smooth, tall structure was found during a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, officials said Monday.

A crew from the Utah Department of Public Safety and Division of Wildlife Resources spotted the gleaming object from the air Nov. 18 and landed to check it out during a break from their work.

They found the three-sided stainless-steel object is about as tall as two men put together. But they discovered no clues about who might have driven it into the ground among the undulating red rocks or why.

“This thing is not from another world,” said Lt. Nick Street of the Utah Highway Patrol, part of the Department of Public Safety.

Still, it’s clear that it took some planning and work to construct the 10- to 12-foot (3- to 4-meter) monolith and embed it in the rock.

The exact location is so remote that officials are not revealing it publicly, worried that people might get lost or stranded trying to find it and need to be rescued.

The monolith evokes the one that appears in the Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Because it’s on federal public land, it’s illegal to place art objects without authorization.

Bureau of Land Management officials are investigating how long it’s been there, who might have created it and whether to remove it.

Somebody is having some fun!

Tony

 Dear Commons Community, 

Business leaders are celebrating yesterday’s performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaking the 30,000 point mark for the first time in its history.  Analysts were crediting news about the latest progress in developing coronavirus vaccines,  the transition of power in the United States to President-elect Joe Biden, and the appointment of Janet Yellin as Biden’s Treasury Secretary. These probably all contributed, but there were also longer term business developments that have helped the Dow reach this milestone.  The Associated Press has an article (see below) this morning analyzing the rise in the Dow for those of us who do not follow it closely.  

Tony

——————————————————————————————–

The Associated Press

EXPLAINER: Why the Dow topped 30,000 for the first time

By STAN CHOE

November 25, 2020

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street busted through its latest milestone Tuesday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 30,000 for the first time.

The Dow rose 454.97 points, or 1.5%, to close at 30,046.24. Investors were encouraged by progress in the development of coronavirus vaccines and news that the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden is finally beginning. Traders also welcomed word that Biden has selected Janet Yellen, a widely respected former Federal Reserve chair, as treasury secretary.

The milestone is an attention-grabbing psychological threshold, and it’s an encouraging signal that the market’s rally is broadening beyond the handful of stocks that carried Wall Street through the pandemic. But the Dow at 30,000 means less to most investors’ 401(k) accounts than the fact that broader market indexes are also at record highs.

Here’s a look at how the Dow has rallied to its latest multiple of 10,000, the first time that’s happened since January 2017, and what it means for investors.

WHAT IS THE DOW, EXACTLY?

It’s a measure of 30 companies, mostly blue-chip stocks spread across a range of industries. They include tech stars like Apple and Microsoft, as well as more traditional industrial companies like Boeing and Caterpillar. Other behemoths in the Dow include Nike and The Walt Disney Co.

Unlike many other measures of the market, the most important thing for the Dow is how big a stock’s price is, not how much a company is worth in total. That means a 1% move for UnitedHealth Group has a bigger effect on the Dow than the same movement for Apple, even though Apple is worth more than six times the insurer. That’s because UnitedHealth Group’s stock price is $336.01 versus $115.17 for Apple, due to having a smaller number of total shares.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS DOW 30,000?

It’s just an arbitrary number, and it doesn’t mean things are much better than when the Dow was at 29,999. What’s more impactful is that the Dow has finally clawed back all its losses from the pandemic and is once again reaching new heights. It is up 61.5% since dropping below 18,600 on March 23.

It took just over nine months for the Dow to surpass the record it had set in February, before panic about the coronavirus triggered the market’s breathtaking sell-off.

WHAT GOT THE DOW THIS HIGH?

The Dow’s rocket ride to 30,000 got big boosts from the Federal Reserve, which slashed short-term interest rates back to roughly zero and took other measures to stabilize financial markets, and Congress, which came through with trillions of dollars of financial aid for the economy.

The economy has improved since the pandemic’s initial shock. For instance, claims for unemployment benefits dropped from 6.9 million in March to 742,000 last week. Company profits didn’t tank as much as initially feared. And the possibility that a COVID vaccine could begin distribution by the end of the year has recently given the market more reason to be optimistic.

Among individual companies, Apple did much of the heavy lifting early in the Dow’s recovery after its price soared nearly $275 to above $500 by late August. A four-for-one stock split on Aug. 28 cut Apple’s stock price below $130, diminishing its impact on the Dow, even though its total market value continued to rise.

Since then, Honeywell and Caterpillar have provided the biggest boosts to the Dow as expectations have built for a recovering economy.

Looking over the longer term, profits strengthened sharply for most Dow companies since it first rose above the 20,000 threshold at the start of 2017. At American Express, for example, analysts expect earnings per share to bounce back from the pandemic and tally $6.69 next year, versus $6.07 in recurring earnings in 2016.

At the same time, investors today are more willing to pay higher prices for each $1 of earnings because alternatives are less attractive. The yield on the 10-year Treasury Tuesday was 0.88% compared with 2.5% in January 2017.

SO THIS MEANS MY 401K IS DOING BETTER?

Probably, but not because the Dow is at 30,000. For most 401(k) accounts, what matters much more is how the S&P 500 is performing. That’s because many, many more stock funds either directly mimic the S&P 500 or benchmark themselves against that index than the Dow.

Nearly $4.6 trillion in investments directly track the S&P 500, while another $6.65 trillion measure themselves against the index’s performance. That total of $11.24 trillion is roughly 360 times the $31.5 billion in investments that track or benchmark their performance against the Dow.

Tuesday’s rally also pushed the S&P 500 above its record high set on Nov. 16.

WHY PAY ANY ATTENTION TO THE DOW, THEN?

One thing the Dow’s final leap to 30,000 indicates is that it’s no longer just tech stocks driving the market.

Five Big Tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google’s parent company — alone account for nearly 22% of the S&P 500 by market value. That gives their movements incredible sway over the S&P 500. The Dow doesn’t even include Amazon, Facebook or Google’s parent company.

The dominance of Big Tech early in the market’s recovery is a big reason the S&P 500 returned to its pre-pandemic record in August compared to November for the Dow. More recently, with hopes rising that a vaccine or two may be arriving soon, the stock market’s gains have begun to broaden out.

The Dow is more heavily weighted toward stocks in the financial and industrial industries, which have done better than tech recently after earlier getting walloped by the pandemic.

NEXT STOP IS DOW 40,000, RIGHT?

Many strategists along Wall Street are optimistic that stocks can keep climbing in 2021, mainly because of the prospects for a vaccine. But the market is facing plenty of threats in the near term. Chief among them is the worsening pandemic, which is pushing governments around the world to bring back varying degrees of restrictions on businesses.

Bitter partisanship also means Congress is making little to no progress on delivering more financial support for the economy in the meantime. That sets the stage for a potentially bleak winter for both health and the economy.

So don’t be surprised if the Dow crosses back and forth over the 30,000 threshold a few more times.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning asking the question: Will Covid-19 Revive Faculty Power?   While the pandemic has spurred professors across the country to organize, the concern is that they may be too late!  Here is an excerpt from the The Chronicle piece.

“The pandemic, with the financial pummeling that accompanies it, is a mighty force, perhaps impossible to combat. By the beginning of July, more than 51,000 higher-education employees had already been furloughed, laid off, or had their contracts not renewed, according to Chronicle reporting. Some boards and presidents have acted unilaterally, with little incentive not to. Decades of adjunctification have already thinned the ranks of full-time college instructors and weakened the collective power of the teaching staff — perhaps past a point of no return.

However, across the country, faculty members are campaigning to be meaningfully heard by the powers that be at their institutions — big and small, elite and open access. They’re laying the bricks of new structures of faculty and staff governance after decades of erosion. In some ways, the pandemic has become this “great leveler,” says Jennifer Fredette, an associate professor of political science at Ohio University. Tenured professors are feeling the insecurity that contingent faculty members have long experienced. A raw deal has reached their doorstep, she says, and they’re now saying, “Nobody deserves this.” Still, Fredette says  this movement is bigger than one institution. It feels impossible to go backward. “I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle.”

After a panicky spring came a summer of fear, anger, and growing resentment. Nationwide, instructors have been denouncing myriad decisions that they say weren’t constructed with shared-governance principles in mind. In some cases, concerns about their own health are going unheeded, they say, as college leaders make tuition-paying students a priority over employee safety.

Faculty groups have criticized austerity measures for affecting the lowest-paid workers first, rather than cutting from the top. The City University of New York’s faculty and staff union is suing the university for not reappointing around 2,800 employees, seeking to rehire those people and award back pay and benefits. Grass-roots protests have cropped at Canisius College, in Buffalo, and Carthage College, in Wisconsin.

Some college boards rubber-stamped the decisions of their leaders. Trustees at Radford University, in Virginia, passed a resolution that gave the university’s president budget-cutting powers to meet “challenges associated with the Covid-19 global health pandemic,” Nonprofit Quarterly reported. Trustees at Ohio University did something similar, ratifying “all staffing, operational, and financial decisions” related to Covid-19 made by the president, The Chronicle previously reported. Faculty in the University of Wisconsin system have cried foul about a financial plan they say is a power grab, the Wisconsin Examiner reported.

At Pennsylvania State University and Purdue University, professors chastised their leadership for largely skirting the professoriate while making plans for the fall semester, including decisions about instruction. Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, insisted on national television that Purdue must give it “the old college try” and reopen. Its chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a press release that leaders had brought “not one single piece of legislation regarding changes to instruction due to Covid-19 to the University Senate, the faculty representative body at Purdue, let alone reopening plans.”

And control over what happens in one’s own classroom seems to vary drastically from campus to campus. Contingent faculty, especially, have far less power to assert their will if they want to work remotely. Protesters staged “die-ins” at Penn State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a car caravan at Boston University. At least two faculty groups — one at UNC and another at Appalachian State University — were so alarmed with their institutions’ fall plans that they pleaded publicly with their students not to return to campus. A group of faculty and staff members in the UNC system sued in an attempt to delay the reopening. (After 135 students and staff tested positive for Covid-19 during the first week of classes, UNC-Chapel Hill pivoted to remote instruction.)

In late June, the AAUP warned that the pandemic “must not become the occasion” to “jettison normative principles of academic governance.”

I gave a talk last week at the Online Learning Consortium’s ACCELERATE conference basically making the case that the pandemic has eviscerated faculty governance at most college campuses.  Traditional governing procedures related to collective bargaining, class size, faculty and staff dismissals have been bypassed to meet the dire fiscal situation that colleges are facing.  It was my conclusion that without a substantial federal stimulus package, higher education’s fiscal situation is not going to change soon and if it doesn’t, faculty governance will be in jeopardy

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Veteran Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein has publicly named 21 Republican senators he says have “repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for [Donald] Trump and his fitness” for office.

As Trump continued to try to subvert the results of a presidential election he clearly lost to Joe Biden, Bernstein said on Twitter (see post above) he was “not violating any pledge of journalistic confidentially [sic]”.

His information, he said, came from “colleagues, staff members, lobbyists [and] White House aides”.

Then he named names.

They were: Rob Portman (Ohio), Lamar Alexander (Tennessee), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Roy Blunt (Missouri), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), John Cornyn (Texas), John Thune (South Dakota), Mitt Romney (Utah), Mike Braun and Todd Young (Indiana), Tim Scott (South Carolina), Rick Scott and Marco Rubio (Florida), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Martha McSally (Arizona), Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts (Kansas) and Richard Shelby (Alabama).

The list contained senior Republican figures such as Thune, the majority whip; Rubio, acting chair of the intelligence committee; and Grassley, a former judiciary committee chair.

Some on Bernstein’s list, Sasse, Cornyn, Collins and Murkowski among them, have criticized Trump publicly. Romney, Rubio, Murkowski, Toomey and Collins have recognized Biden as president-elect.

Bernstein, 76, worked with Bob Woodward on the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

Woodward’s coverage of Trump has produced two bestselling books, Fear and Rage, which have relied on unnamed sources highly critical of Trump – and, in the latter case, the president’s own on-record and highly damaging thoughts.

Speaking to CNN on Friday, Bernstein said: “Many, if not most, of these individuals, from what I have been told, were happy to see Donald Trump defeated in this election as long as the Senate could be controlled by the Republicans.”

He went on to say that with few exceptions, their craven public silence has helped enable Trump’s most grievous conduct—including undermining and discrediting the US the electoral system.

Tony

GSA Administrator Emily Murphy

Dear Commons Community,

With the backing of President Donald Trump, the head of the General Services Administration informed President-elect Joe Biden yesterday  that the official governmental transition process has been approved.

GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, after weeks of delay, said in a letter to Biden that he is now able to access millions of dollars in federal funds and other resources to begin his transition to power. Trump in a pair of tweets vowed to continue his legal fight but said, “I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”

Biden’s transition had been stalled by the GSA as Trump waged a spurious legal battle across the country to contest the results. Michigan certified its results yesterday and Pennsylvania plans to do so shortly.

It is also expected today that Biden will officially announce a number of cabinet-level appointments.

The presidential election is over!

Tony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7sH_RC5inI

Dear Commons Community,

BBC/PBS NOVA recently aired two documentaries (see above trailer)  highlighting written communication as one of the greatest inventions in human history.  The first documentary examines the development of the alphabet.  It is an incredible presentation of how the letters of the alphabet evolved from the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, China and the Sinai Peninsula to Phoenicia, Greece and Rome.  For example, it shows how the letter “A” started as a hieroglyph symbol for a bull.  It takes the viewer to the ruins of Serabit El-Khadim on the Sinai Penisula where one of the first alphabets was  depicted on its walls somewhere between 1850 BC and 1550 BC.

The second documentary examines the development of writing implements such as pens and paper to the invention of movable type and the printing press.  It shows how papyrus, parchment and paper were actually made. There is also interesting commentary on the importance of Johannes Gutenberg’s decision to print the Bible as his first commercial book. Prior to the printing press an illuminated book might cost as much as the price of a house.  The vast majority of people at the time, if they could read, could never afford to buy a book so providing something  as popular as the Bible might excite them enough to buy it at a reasonable cost.

In sum, I found both documentaries an education.

They are available for free viewing at the NOVA website:

Alphabet A to Z:  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/

How Writing Changed the World: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-how-writing-changed-the-world/

Below is a review that appeared in last week’s Science.

Great stuff!

Tony