The Grey Zone

"From renowned neuroscientist Adrian Owen comes a thrilling, heartbreaking tale of discovery in one of the least-understood scientific frontiers: the twilight region between full consciousness and brain death. People who inhabit this middle region called the 'gray zone' have sustained traumatic brain injuries or are the victims of stroke or degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Many are oblivious to the outside world, and their doctors and families often believe they're incapable of thought. But a sizable number of patients--as many as twenty percent--are experiencing something different: intact minds adrift within damaged brains and bodies. In 2006, Adrian Owen led a team that discovered this lost population and made medical history, provoking an ongoing debate among scientists, physicians, and philosophers about the meaning, value, and purpose of life. In Into the Gray Zone, we follow Owen as he pushes forward the boundaries of science, using a variety of sophisticated brain scans, auditory prompts, and even Alfred Hitchcock film clips to not only 'find' patients who are trapped inside their heads but to actually communicate with them and elicit answers to moving questions, such as 'Are you in pain?' and 'Do you want to go on living?' and 'Are you happy?' (Many gray zone patients do, in fact, claim to be satisfied with their quality of life.) Into the Gray Zone shines a fascinating light on how we think, remember, and pay attention. And it shows us how the field of brain-computer interfaces is about to explode, radically changing prognoses for people with impaired brain function and creating, for all of us, the tantalizing possibility of telepathy and augmented intelligence. Ultimately; this is not just a spellbinding story of scientific discovery but a deeply human, affirming book that causes us to wonder anew at the indomitable bonds of love."--Jacket.

The future is grey.For most of the world life had improved after the implementation of the Basic Human Standard and the formation of The Global Federation of Nations. However, after fifteen years, there are some who still fight against the principles of the organization. Natalie Kelley is a journalist for the Chicago Tribune whose reporting focuses on American terrorist groups in opposition to the GFN. When an Oklahoma City restaurant is attacked, Natalie travels to investigate the incident, but soon begins to question whether the assault was an amateur action or part of a larger conspiracy. The Grey Zone follows Natalie and a cast of characters from both sides of the battle and explores the ramifications of an exceedingly globalized planet as conflicting ideologies clash across the United States.

THE STORY: Recruited by the Nazis, a group of Hungarian Jews are promised they will live longer if they assist in the extermination of other Jewish prisoners. As if their lives in the concentration camp weren't already a living hell, these men find that a

Based on rare, in-depth fieldwork among an undercover police investigative team working in a southern EU maritime state, Gregory Feldman examines how "taking action" against human smuggling rings requires the team to enter the "gray zone", a space where legal and policy prescriptions do not hold. Feldman asks how this seven-member team makes ethical judgments when they secretly investigate smugglers, traffickers, migrants, lawyers, shopkeepers, and many others. He asks readers to consider that gray zones create opportunities both to degrade subjects of investigations and to take unnecessary risks for them. Moving in either direction largely depends upon bureaucratic conditions and team members' willingness to see situations from a variety of perspectives. Feldman explores their personal experiences and daily work in order to crack open wider issues about sovereignty, action, ethics, and, ultimately, being human. Situated at the intersection of the EU migration apparatus and the global, clandestine networks it identifies as security threats, this book allows Feldman to outline an ethnographically-based theory of sovereign action.

We are in a world facing numerous systems transitions. From hierarchies to networks and sociocracies. From office-based to a global and mobile workforce. From a human resource era to a co-dependent AI/VR/robotics era. From patriarchy to equity-based systems. We are in the midst of major shifts and transitions as we live through the global COVID-19 pandemic and the anti-racism movements sweeping the globe. So, what is the grey zone of change? I define the grey zone of change as the space in-between systems - between the from and to of transformational change- that is undefined and unknowable. Systems may be worldviews, philosophies, organization transformations, methodologies or social systems. This guidebook is about living, leading and facilitating transformations in this context.

Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.

How can works of the imagination help us to understand good and evil in the modern world? In this new collection of essays, Alex Danchev treats the artist as a crucial moral witness of our troubled times, and puts art to work in the service of political and ethical inquiry. He takes inspiration from Seamus Heaney's dictum: 'the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it'. This is a book of blasphemers, world menders, troublemakers, torturers and turbulent priests of every persuasion.

The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called “privileged” positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi’s concept of the “grey zone,” this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on “privileged” Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of “representing the unrepresentable,” this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.