Essays by Larry Barnett
A Californian for nearly 50 years I’ve infrequently traveled by train but I grew up in the suburbs of New York and took the train to Manhattan from time-to-time. My earliest memory of a long train trip was when I was eight years old and my family took an overnight train to Florida.
Trains really did… Read the rest
It would be nice, I suppose, to believe that everything is just fine: the motivations of people are well-intended, science and technology always solve every problem, freedom and democracy are humanity’s natural state, the world can accommodate an unlimited number of people, and infectious… Read the rest
Setting aside the purely commercial aspects of harvest decorations and TV commercials featuring cute turkeys and cartoon characters in Puritan outfits, Thanksgiving’s acknowledgment of earth’s bounty and the value of kindness towards others is a welcome departure from our customary… Read the rest
In the world’s economy there are only three types of money, fast, slow and no.
Fast money is just that, credit which moves so quickly it requires the use of automated computer algorithms. At its extreme, fast money is circulating the globe, staying in sync with the international dateline, executing… Read the rest
Try as we may to be blasé – making it the subject of horror movies, detective dramas, novels and so forth – the mystery of death remains humanity’s primary conscious and unconscious preoccupation. The heart of philosophy and religion, not to mention Hollywood, “the great… Read the rest
Every new artifact of human culture generates a set of effects. The most predictable of these relate directly to the operation or impact of the artifact; for example, the invention of the automobile made the horse and buggy obsolete. Less obvious… Read the rest
Countries have used a variety of excuses to go to war. Some cite the need for protection of people who speak their language, like Vladimir Putin is doing in the Ukraine or Adolph Hitler did before annexing the “Low Countries” adjacent to Germany in the 1930’s. Others, like the United… Read the rest
It’s interesting how medical terminology has been applied to the digital realm; after all, computers are just machines, right? Machines don’t get sick and that’s what we’ve always loved about them and why they’ve effectively replaced human beings as a labor force.… Read the rest
Back in the hippie-dippy days of the 20th century two things were a Big Deal: Hair and Astrology. Long-haired men faded as an issue when pattern baldness and changing fashion inevitably reduced their impact to statistically ordinary, and astrology – replaced by ecology – quietly slid… Read the rest
It was recently reported that the world’s oceans now contain three times as much methyl mercury as they did before the industrial revolution. Oceanic mercury becomes highly toxic methyl mercury due to the chemical action of sea water, and methyl mercury causes cognitive impairment, sometimes… Read the rest
Our society is so permeated by commerce that business metaphors are regularly applied to non-business situations. Thus we “profit by experience,” “calculate our losses,” and “take stock in the situation.” Another common phrase concerns “the business… Read the rest
Being a grandfather provides the opportunity to experience contemporary fairy-tale movies, and suffice to say, the stories have changed.
The German fairy tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm were indeed quite grim; Sleeping Beauty, for example, included episodes of potential infanticide and … Read the rest
All language is metaphor, and for that matter, so is every word in every language. We humans are metaphor-makers, and making metaphor means making meaning.
Words create a nominal, or language-based reality which generates internal image-ideas. Through a process of fine-grained description we … Read the rest
America is exceptional in many ways, not all of them so good. One way which falls into this “not so good” category is an inordinate pride in speaking and teaching one language only, namely English. Pride is often a good indicator of self-righteousness in individuals, and so it is culturally… Read the rest
The internet of things had not arrived when NYU professor Neil Postman wrote his 1985 critique of television and its effects on society. I suspect the concerns and predictions he made in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” would have not differed greatly had he seen what… Read the rest
Beginning with painting on rocks and writing code for binary computers, the records of what we know have variously been kept. Between these two extremes are found language, hieroglyphics, cuneiform markings in clay, pictograms, alphabets, printing… Read the rest
Why does poverty exist in the wealthiest countries in the world? This question has vexed economists for several hundred years, and the answer remains elusive.
In tribal societies, now increasingly rare, economy is intrinsic to cultural habits and social relationships; reciprocity, sharing and… Read the rest
An unoccupied mind is a dangerous thing. Organic brain’s powerful processing capacity combined with limitless symbolic creativity of mind gives rise to the need for pursuing purpose and meaning. Lacking these, people veer into forms of madness; hyperactive states of violence against others, self-injury,… Read the rest
The idea of labor as a commodity, the creation of a class of people subject to competitive rates who can be bought and sold on the open market is inherently dehumanizing, but we live in a capitalist world addicted to consumption, increased productivity and shareholder profit.
Accordingly, though relegated… Read the rest
Human sensibilities are in part a matter of scale, which is to say that as we interact with the world we move from the particular to the general and vice versa, oscillating between conceptions of reality in order to find our comfortable place among events.
Though we like to imagine we and the universe move… Read the rest