Thank you to the classmates who are out and about and letting us know of their activities. Keep it coming, please.
Alan Flaherty is the devoting a lot of his time volunteering with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), a 1500-member program at the University of Cincinnati devoted to providing information and entertainment to anyone over 50. Alan, who lives in Cincinnati, has moderated about 10 classes and 60 sessions since he started with OLLI in 2013. He’s generally focused on technology and related social issues, such as sustainability and electric/autonomous vehicles, but this spring he presented eight sessions on the US Constitution. During the last couple of years he’s also become part of the OLLI leadership, which is wrestling with the issues associated with drawing new and younger members into a program in which the current average age is 73. For anyone interested, here’s a link to the Cincinnati OLLI website: https://ccps.uc.edu/academics/olli/about.html
Fire in a Wire: Electricity Empowers Human Evolution Beyond Homo Sapiens (Massaemett Media, 2025) by Steven Reed Nelson (Northampton, Ma) was published in August. According to Steven, “The biggest-selling nonfiction book of the 21st century is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Written for a general reader and extensively illustrated, Fire in a Wire tells the story that Sapiens missed, about the most important development in recent human history: using electricity and its myriad applications. Just as fire was pivotal in the evolution of archaic humans, so too is electricity pivotal in the ongoing evolution of modern humans. Electricity is the new fire. Fire in a wire.
“The book begins when, as a Cornell undergraduate, I was awarded a grant to spend a summer in the Andes doing anthropological field work as part of the landmark Cornell-Peru Project, living without electricity among descendants of the Incas in the remote community of Vicos at 10,000 feet. But it was not until many years later that I fully grasped the significance of that experience, after a career as an entrepreneur of cutting-edge applications of electricity like broadband internet, solar energy, computer software, rock concert production and video/TV. In a flash of insight I realized the connection between electricity and human evolution, which led to my writing this book after a Google search found nothing about the subject.
“Many species of early humans arose and eventually went extinct, like the Neanderthals. Conventional thinking says that Homo sapiens is the sole surviving species of human. I disagree. A new human species is emerging, not in some imagined future but living among us today: Homo electric. The electrified world is our natural habitat. We use electricity for everything from providing food to medical care to artificial intelligence to sex. We cannot survive without it. It is changing how we live and who we are becoming as human beings in the Electric Age.
“For millions of years we were only able to interact in real time face-to-face, but electricity enables us to communicate remotely, one-to-one or to millions. We are the first species with extended intelligence: the ability to store, access and process information outside our brains. As I wrote in The New York Times (September 12, 2025), “Smartphones, computers and the internet are central tools in the evolving culture of humans in today’s electrified world.”
“We no longer live in a Darwinian state of nature ruled by the “survival of the fittest.” Human actions can override natural selection. Our genes alone do not determine our destiny. We are taking control of our own evolution. We can, and we must, if we are to survive.”
Robert H. Lieberman of Ithaca, NY is an award-winning novelist, film director, and a long-time member of the physics faculty at Cornell. (www.roberthlieberman.com). He proudly reports that his granddaughter is in her second year at the Cornell vet school and his grandson transferred from Fordham and is now a sophomore at Cornell!!! “We are Cornellians to the 9th power!”