Essays by Larry Barnett
A recent article in the New York Times Magazine highlights the work of two social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who have concluded that happiness is contagious. Unhappiness is contagious too, but 2% less contagious, it turns out.
The research used data from the historic multi-year… Read the rest
I’ve been spending time lately watching live and recorded transmissions from the International Space Station. Unlike the videos and transmissions of the past with poor image fidelity and sound, the quality of the current transmissions is fantastic. The color is great, the image clarity and focus… Read the rest
People think in words, but the world is not words. Language is an expedient method to describe reality using words in an attempt to communicate what we or others actually experience, but it never quite suffices. Life has an ineffable quality that’s hard to pin down. Try describing the color blue.
When… Read the rest
Profiling has been a hot topic lately, and the arrest of Harvard Professor Gates certainly stimulated a fresh round of examination of the topic. The issue is not whether or not people quickly form opinions of others; it is abundantly clear… Read the rest
Nobody can argue this economic recession has not been painful; jobs have been lost, homes foreclosed, pensions and retirements diminished or eliminated. People are suffering and this despite the fact that most have worked hard and lived honest, decent lives.… Read the rest
Perhaps it really is true everything we need to know we learned by first grade. The songs we sang as children, “Row Your Boat” for example, actually contained surprising wisdom. It’s a rather simple four-line song, easily dismissed:
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily,… Read the rest
During a recent trip to visit our granddaughter I needed to buy a swim suit so we could go for a dip in the pool at our motel. I was stunned to discover my swim suit cost me only $5.98 at K-Mart.
I’ve never shopped at K-Mart before; call me naïve or perhaps just loyal. I buy my clothes right here in town and figure… Read the rest
Each year terribly well-educated and insightful people make predictions about the future. In some cases they are right but mostly they are wrong. Rarely, however, do we go back in time to review just how accurate our prognosticators have been. We are so caught up in “worrying about… Read the rest
The immensity of the universe is inconceivable. No matter how far we look, there is still more beyond. No matter what we see, there is far greater yet unseen. No matter how much we come to understand, there is ever more about which we no nothing.
The Mahayana Buddhist Flower Ornament, Avatamsaka Sutra… Read the rest
Last year it was the Autonomous Region of Tibet; this year it is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. China, it seems, is undergoing another round of its periodic socio-political upheavals.
Chinese history is not customarily taught… Read the rest
The typical view of the body is it is a thing apart, something we “have” but not what we “are.” According to this view, when illness occurs “it” needs to be fixed, much as we fix a broken muffler or lawnmower. This common narrative reinforces a mind/body split, objectifying our body.
An alternative view… Read the rest
My mother is a superb cook, an absolute natural in the kitchen with a talent for turning whatever is available into an elegant repast. She once visited me while I was young and penniless…all we had in the refrigerator were lemons, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t whip up the finest… Read the rest
The newly born infant enters the human realm pure of heart and mind. In the beginning all is one: no form, no feeling, no perception, no memory, no consciousness. Despite the varied manifestations and appearances of the world, for infants all sight, sound and feeling are the expression of one unconfined… Read the rest
We live in a time of specialization. Higher education for example, has primarily become a workplace on-ramp preparing top students to enter professional careers in which to specialize and make lots of money. Scholarship and acquiring knowledge for its own value has… Read the rest
Slowly but surely the “torture” debate inches closer to full disclosure and accountability. In what is most assuredly one of the darkest chapters in modern American history, our immoral use of torture to wrest “confessions and information” from “enemy combatants” and other suspects held in Guantanamo… Read the rest
Entropy is the process of the orderly becoming less orderly, like water in a bowl slowly evaporates into vapor. The second law of thermodynamics posits entropy with determining the ultimate state of matter in the universe. As energy dissipates, the very structure of matter transforms through an entropic… Read the rest
As nuclear weapons technology has proliferated in non-western countries, Europe and the United States fulminate against authoritarian regimes viewed as a threat to peace and security. In some cases, like Pakistan, which is responsible for the spread of nuclear technology to the likes of North Korea,… Read the rest
According to Jigme Thinley, Prime Minister of Bhutan as quoted in the The New York Times, the cause of today’s economic crisis is “Greed, insatiable human greed.” I can’t think of a shorter and more concise analysis of our current condition that says it better.
The Times article is about Bhutan’s efforts… Read the rest
The media’s attention has recently turned to pirates, those who steal from others and betray the customary conventions of territory and ownership. Populated with iconic Hollywood images of burly men with eye patches and peg legs, romantic characters and cruel villains like Blackbeard, the true … Read the rest
My father recently turned ninety. He’s had a rough couple of years, progressively losing much of his hearing and his eyesight. Neither entirely deaf nor blind, his deficiencies are nonetheless significant enough that he can no longer read and must wear hearing aids in both ears. His gait has slowed … Read the rest