Cold World

To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of depressive black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of militant dysphoria via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction's activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the cold world of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.

An amateur female sheriff tries to fill her late father's boots and be the sheriff her small Washington State mountain town needs as a deadly snow storm engulfs the town, in this dark, twisty mystery. The world felt pure. Nature made the location pristine again, hiding the scene from prying eyes. As if no one had died there at all. In the months since Bet Rivers solved her first murder investigation and secured the sheriff's seat in Collier, she's remained determined to keep her town safe. With a massive snowstorm looming, it's more important than ever that she stays vigilant. When Bet gets a call that a family of tourists has stumbled across a teen injured in a snowmobile accident on a mountain ridge, she braves the storm to investigate. However, once she arrives at the scene of the accident it's clear to Bet that the teen is not injured; he's dead. And has been for some time . . . Investigating a possible homicide is hard enough, but with the worst snowstorm the valley has seen in years threatening the safety of her town, not to mention the integrity of her crime scenes - as they seem to be mounting up as well - Bet has to move fast to uncover the complicated truth and prove that she's worthy of keeping her father's badge.

USA Today Bestseller! One of Amazon's Best Romances of August! She has a to-do list a mile long and falling for her coworker isn't on it—yet somehow he’s become her top priority in this romantic comedy from the national bestselling author of Love in the Time of Serial Killers. Lauren Fox is the bookkeeper for Cold World, a tourist destination that's always a winter wonderland despite being located in humid Orlando, Florida. Sure, it’s ranked way below any of the trademarked amusement parks and maybe foot traffic could be better. But it’s a fun place to work, even if “fun” isn’t exactly Lauren’s middle name. Her coworker Asa Williamson, on the other hand, is all about finding ways to enliven his days at Cold World—whether that means organizing the Secret Santa or teasing Lauren. When the owner asks Lauren and Asa to propose something (anything, really) to raise more revenue, their rivalry heats up as they compete to come up with the best idea. But the situation is more dire than they thought, and it might take these polar opposites working together to save the day. If Asa thought Lauren didn't know how to enjoy herself, he's surprised by how much he enjoys spending time together. And if Lauren thought Asa wasn't serious about anything, she's surprised by how seriously he seems to take her. As Lauren and Asa work to save their beloved wintery spot, they realize the real attraction might be the heat generating between them.

Ron Robin looks at the original power couple of strategic studies who, during the most dangerous military standoff in history, gained access to the deepest corridors of power. The Wohlstetters’ legacy was kept alive by disciples in George W. Bush’s administration, and their signature brilliance and hubris continue to shape U.S. policy today.

A multidisciplinary collection of essays reflecting on Cold War cultural tropes in film, fiction, and contemporary art, and the models of knowledge that they imply. If the term “Cold World” describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors of Cold World globalization, where our collective consciousness is overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incomputability of this alien yet constructed world. But what is the crime scene of the Cold World? How is it to be decrypted? Where are its discontinuities, what is the nature of its violence? This is to say, what is our place in this alien world and how do we even compute the “we” that we describe ourselves to be? Given the existential uncertainty unleashed for those who lived through the Cold War, but whose repercussions are in many ways amplified, relayed, and replayed in a new form for those who must now survive what has been called the “Cold World”—that of technological subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and ecological crisis—this terrain comprises an experiential and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage in myriad forms, a fundamental question: “What will we of make of ourselves?” Cold War/Cold World documents a research project in progress that attempts to evaluate and respond to this fundamental shock to the system, examining attempts to render knowable, representable, or figurable the looming threats of both Cold War and Cold World—the common denominator being a distressed attempt to inquire into the dynamics of a real that seems in excess over understanding and the means of politics traditionally conceived; and a concomitant temptation to abandon any intelligent collective engagement in favour of a pragmatics that limits itself to wrestling with local contingencies, or an aesthetics mesmerised by a global sublime.

The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series

The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.

Examines every aspect and phase of aid under appropriate headings. Includes an extensive bibliography subdivided into regional and subject areas and a dateline covering principal events in the development of aid strategies.