Essays by Larry Barnett
One of the strangest experiences while flying across the continental U.S. happens above Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas; soaring six miles above, one looks down upon networks of old missile silos.
The networks stretch for many miles; narrow… Read the rest
From time to time I get a hand-written note or letter from older women about a column I’ve written. Rarely are such letter writers critical, and I enjoy knowing that my writing is appreciated. What’s always of interest to me, though, is the lovely and refined penmanship these notes so often display.
In… Read the rest
Since I launched my Kibble for People idea last year in this paper things have really moved along.
In case you missed that column, Kibble for People is my latest billion-dollar idea. Pibble, as it will now be called, is the fully-nutritional, out-of-the-bag, one-flavor-only food that replaces everything… Read the rest
In the Middle East, authoritarian leaders in power for many decades are being challenged by the young and disenfranchised. During their rule, these leaders enriched themselves, their families and their friends while exercising police-state control over ordinary citizens. This accumulation … Read the rest
In the movie Minority Report, while the hero (played by Tom Cruise) walks through a subway corridor his iris’ are scanned and advertising specifically geared to his interests appears on video billboards visible only to him. While this seems mildly futuristic, I want to emphasize the word “mildly” … Read the rest
As a bull facing certain death stubbornly raises its head one last time, kicks up dust and charges the Matador, so my Brooklyn-born father faced his own end; ninety-one years old, and he truly thought he’d never die. “Why is this happening to me?” he asked me while hospitalized,… Read the rest
“You are a very strange man.” My wife Norma is smiling at me and gently shaking her head. Her comment follows my latest effort at romance. “Inherent non-locality means that when we kiss the entire universe is involved,” is what I said. Admittedly, this does not have the poetic charm of Shakespeare’s sonnets.… Read the rest
Our granddaughter Isabelle loves to paint. She’ll be three years old in late February, and seems to have gravitated to making art. Unconstrained by matters of self-criticism, perfectionism, or rules of any kind, her work is completely expressive, uninhibited and spontaneous. Watching her playfulness… Read the rest
I managed to catch a nasty chest cold circulating around town, found myself low on energy and sitting around for most of a week in no mood to work or even read, so I browsed Netflix and nostalgically began watching the first season of the Paladin saga, Have Gun – Will Travel.… Read the rest
Our modern lives are very speedy, filled with constant activity and continuous stimulation – deadlines, commitments, obligations, forms of entertainment, trips to the store, picking up the kids from school, getting to and from work, doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, running errands… Read the rest
I don’t watch too many television shows, but I’m hooked on Mad Men. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, where my businessman father lived the Mad Men life alongside the other post war executives.
A episode this season featured scenes in a restaurant called The Forum of … Read the rest
A few months ago Wikileaks released hundreds of thousands of government documents about the Iraq war, some of which reveal that not only did the U.S. military look the other way as Iraqis tortured and murdered Iraqis, but actually turned Iraqis over to the Iraqi torture squads. The other revelations… Read the rest
Many of the most moving moments during the last weeks of my father’s life were experiences of hospice. In this age of modern medicine where every effort is used to successfully prolong life, hospice instead focuses patient comfort and dignity.
Prolonging life, even when it comes at the high cost of family… Read the rest
We study, analyze, organize, strategize, plan, anticipate, and calculate probabilities, but life constantly upends us. We enlist computers, algorithms, software programs, collected metrics, trend-spotting, forecast modeling and plain old intuition, yet fail to accurately predict much more… Read the rest
The human condition requires eventually losing everything, even our body; we don’t get to take it with us when we die anymore than we get to take our favorite sweater. Birth, aging, sickness and death comprise the totality of our physical experience – we all know this – but we still suffer… Read the rest
Considering the immeasurable diversity of forms of life in this world – tube worms breathing methane at the mouth of 800 degree volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean, lichens digesting the minerals in rocks for survival, worms living inside glaciers, bacteria that grow “legs” to move across… Read the rest
Cause and effect are so all-pervasive and unobstructed, most of the time we don’t notice it in operation. The world we enjoy (or not, as the case may be) reflects the continuity of cause and effect at work on everything, even hamburgers and ketchup.
In their classic act, Bud Abbott… Read the rest
Thousands of years ago the idea of atoms was proposed. Ancient Hindus and then Buddhists wrote and taught about atoms, as did the Greeks. Reduced to smaller and smaller particles, physical material eventually became too small to be seen physically, so the existence of atoms was inferred.
Not verified… Read the rest
Having never been to Las Vegas my wife and I planned a visit to celebrate my birthday. We felt excitement mixed with horror; and every friend we told about our plan reacted with: “You’re kidding!” But kidding we were not. Like Ishmael… Read the rest
I’ve just completed James Lovelock’s recent book, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”. Lovelock, now 90, is the scientist-inventor who popularized the term “Gaia” in the 1970’s to define the earth as a single living organism – dynamic, self-regulating, and responsive to global and cosmic forces. Gaia Theory,… Read the rest