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Foggy Notions: Memorandum of a Man-in-the-Making

An estimated 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression in some form or another; that's roughly 5% of the global population. Ten years ago this malady became the inspiration for the author to begin scribbling down his own personal experiences and observations, documenting the overwhelming battle for his mind, if only to simply deal with the mounting frustrations, struggles, angst, and confusion. These recorded thoughts began to add up and collect moss of reflection, introspection, and retrospection, eventually evolving into sixteen separate yet intertwining chapters, from the warm, flexible facts of his beginnings to the resilient joys of finding so many opportunities in the plentiful mistakes of his ongoing journey. Mistakes such as being one of the first students in his grade accepted to college yet failing to show up for high school graduation, then boldly entering into a major of psychology nearly twenty years later in a perfectly ripe season. Foggy Notions: Memorandum of a Man-in-the-Making engages some of those wondrous questions that we all attempt to juggle on a daily basis. Herein lies the informal record of someone who was color blind at birth, taxpayer at fourteen, high school dropout at eighteen, married at twenty, divorced at twenty-three, and insatiable student of life from then on. It is the noteworthy account of someone who has lived within, around, under the weight of, and symbiotically detached from depression for nearly a quarter of a century. It is part memoir, part exterior help, part interior guidance, part something unspoken. Waiting patiently within the pages are a little bit of logic and a whole lot of lessons learned. After spending most of his life chasing and wasting time, somehow he always seems to have an ample amount left over at exactly the right instant to do what he needs to in the perfect span of ticks and tocks.

Rational Fog

A thought-provoking examination of the intersections of knowledge and violence, and the quandaries and costs of modern, technoscientific warfare. Science and violence converge in modern warfare. While the finest minds of the twentieth century have improved human life, they have also produced human injury. They engineered radar, developed electronic computers, and helped mass produce penicillin all in the context of military mobilization. Scientists also developed chemical weapons, atomic bombs, and psychological warfare strategies. Rational Fog explores the quandary of scientific and technological productivity in an era of perpetual war. Science is, at its foundation, an international endeavor oriented toward advancing human welfare. At the same time, it has been nationalistic and militaristic in times of crisis and conflict. As our weapons have become more powerful, scientists have struggled to reconcile these tensions, engaging in heated debates over the problems inherent in exploiting science for military purposes. M. Susan Lindee examines this interplay between science and state violence and takes stock of researchers’ efforts to respond. Many scientists who wanted to distance their work from killing have found it difficult and have succumbed to the exigencies of war. Indeed, Lindee notes that scientists who otherwise oppose violence have sometimes been swept up in the spirit of militarism when war breaks out. From the first uses of the gun to the mass production of DDT and the twenty-first-century battlefield of the mind, the science of war has achieved remarkable things at great human cost. Rational Fog reminds us that, for scientists and for us all, moral costs sometimes mount alongside technological and scientific advances.

The Sugar Cane