Personal Note: Surprise! The Memory Cache is Returning!

Hello again, dear readers,

 

In February, I made a decision to step away from this blog (at the time, I assumed permanently), based on what I perceived of as my own self-inflicted pressure to produce regular and frequent posts. I wanted more leisure and lack of obligation to the blog to enjoy time spent with family and friends, to work more on my music, song-writing and recording, and to be able to enjoy the books I read and shows I watch for the sheer pleasure of it, rather than as fodder for commentary and analysis.

 

These were good and important insights about myself, and the process and demands of the kind of writing I’d done for the blog over the course of a year. And as hoped, I have definitely enjoyed the time away from it since February, and have made good use of the time. 

 

On that note, there’s so much news to share!  For one thing, I just went online with my music website – I've put a link to it on the Favorite Links list. There you can find information about my music and music videos, and a little about me and the musical side of my artistic and creative life.  It’s also a hub for linking to my artist profiles on music streaming sites, my social media accounts, my YouTube channel and the like.  I’ll also have a blog there, about what I’m doing with my music, and other specifically music-related topics of interest.  

 

Most importantly, check out the site's Contact page – from there, you can join my email list, and if you like, send me a short message. I’ll use this email list to send out occasional news about my music, and also my future writing projects.  I promise the emails won’t be a burden – I’ll only use it occasionally, and every email will have an “Unsubscribe” link so you can quit whenever you want if you’re tired of it.

 

But wait, there’s more! After releasing seven singles to digital streaming in 2021 and 2022, with videos, I’ve been working hard all this year writing and recording five new songs to combine with the others on my first album, Strangers. The album will be released on Friday, September 29th, and will be available on all music streaming services, plus in a limited run CD release.

 

Despite all this other music-related activity and focus this year, though, it occurred to me recently that perhaps it might be possible (and rewarding) to resume The Memory Cache blog, but on different terms (for myself, as well as the readers). 

 

It’s unfortunate that the nature of the attention economy and its imperatives make anyone with a web site assume that they have to produce constantly, or their site will “go stale”, and no one will bother to look at it anymore. That was certainly a major factor for me in deciding to give it up in February – it just felt like way too much pressure to produce, to keep people interested and checking the site for frequent new posts.

 

But with time to reflect, I’ve realized how unnecessary that approach is. The remedy, I realized, is simple – I just need to approach this blog as a place to continue posting and sharing whatever information and musings I think are useful, fun or particularly significant to other people too, but only when the mood strikes me. In other words, the blog site and my writing for it could be much more about quality than quantity, passion than productivity. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition.    

 

With that in mind, I’m happy to announce I have decided to begin posting new entries here again starting in the fall of 2023. However, this time, I will only post when I think there’s something especially important or exceptional about the content or issues I’m covering. That means I may only write an article every month or tw0 – I’ll see as I go along how often I’m inspired. But when I am, you’ll be able to read it here on the site again.

 

Of course, I understand that it’s hard to follow a blog that only changes infrequently, but that’s probably okay. You’ll only need to check it occasionally to see what’s new, especially since (like a monthly magazine) I’m not trying to provide up-to-the-minute news flashes, but rather less time-sensitive interpretation and opinion. 

 

And with my emailing list up and running (don’t forget to sign up on my new web site on the Contact page), I can and will send a bulletin out whenever there’s a new post, so you won’t have to check the site at all in between posts if you're on the email list. You’ll know when there’s something new.

 

Looking forward to writing to you (and for you) again soon.

Book Review: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (2022). Richard V Reeves.

I recently read this truly excellent book by Richard Reeves, on a topic which the author mentions he was discouraged from writing about by several friends and professional colleagues, due to its extremely controversial nature.  

 

He wrote it anyway, and I'm very glad he did.  It's all about why and how men and boys, and a wide range of their contemporary problems and needs, require our attention and resources, and why neither the Left nor the Right are getting it right with respect to the difficulties faced by men in our society today.

Reeves anticipates the predictable feminist-oriented reaction against this position, and the assumption that he and his arguments are misanthropic and anti-women in nature, which they are not. At the outset, he states a number of important caveats about what he's not arguing for, principally the expectation that he hopes to preference the needs of men over women, and then moves on through chapter after chapter, exploring many ideas and the scientific research in support of the notion that we need to pay more attention to the plight of men and boys.

 

This is a book that needs to be read in its entirety, and the various pieces of the puzzle which he explores need to be seen together as a whole to be fully understood.  But here are just a few of the important points he considers.    
 

Boys and men have fallen behind in school and academics.  Women at this point, as a result of Title IX and 50 years of widespread governmental and institutional support, now succeed at a far higher percentage of the population in acquiring education in most subject areas than do men.  Why is this?  
 

Boys and men are also struggling in employment – despite the "glass ceiling" for women, and the predominance of men at the top of the corporate elite.  In fact, a significant number of young, able-bodied working age men have dropped out of the work world entirely, and are no longer in the labor pool, which has created major negative impacts in other areas of social life, such as family stability and lower availability of suitable or desirable mates for many women.  
 

Black boys and men, as distinct from males who are white or even in other ethnic groups, have a specially compounded set of problems caused by the legacy of slavery, systematic demonization of black men as a result of systemic racism, and widespread lack of functional fathers and male role models in many black families due to widespread imprisonment, welfare laws and other structural impediments put in place over many generations, which need particular focused attention and help.
 

Reeves then makes a strong case for something that on some levels, most of us accept, which is that human boys and men do have biologically-based differences from girls and women. This idea, seemingly so obvious, has actually been highly contested in some circles for the past 50 or more years, in service of the need and desire to remove sex-linked characteristics as the basis for discrimination against women.  

 

Reeves' analysis on this central topic is refreshing and insightful. Many of the differences between men and women that have been universally recognized and accepted over eons have actually been verified in much social research recently. As he points out, the stereotypical male tendencies and behaviors that are different from those of women are not "bugs" of masculinity.  They’re features, resulting from evolution, which in the past rewarded men for focusing on aspects of the needs of their families and communities which were different from those of women, due primarily to the men's lack of ability to bear children.

 

Reeves mentions common beliefs about the differences in men and women, such as that men are more interested in things, while women are more interested in people, or that because men have more testosterone, that leads men to greater aggression, risk-taking, and more competitiveness, all features which play out over time as the evolutionary tools by which men struggle to be able to reproduce their genes, by gaining access to women's attentions and their bodies. 

But these differences aren’t (or shouldn't be) grounds for discrimination (as they have been in the past) – they’re simply tendencies that overlap between men and women, and appear in different proportions in each individual. This means that in a perfect world, for example, we still wouldn’t expect to see a perfect balance in the number of men and women in all employment fields or areas of interest.  

 

This point was a revelation to me -- that we shouldn't always strive or expect to see complete parity for example in male/female distributions within any particular profession, even if everyone has equal access to them. The distribution instead should mirror the averages of how interested each sex (as a group) is in that profession.

 

The point, as Reeves says, is to make it possible for all people to realize their best interests and capabilities.  Our lives and opportunities are not and should not be controlled by just our sex at birth, and the attributes that come with it. They are controlled instead by three different factors:  nature (what we're each born with), nurture (the training and support we receive), and our personal action and choices. 

 

We can encourage women in STEM, but that doesn't mean that 50% of the profession will ever be women -- as a part of the population, they probably are just not quite as interested in those fields as men.  But it might be 41%, and if so, they should have the opportunity to succeed, just as much as the men should. 
 

One important point that derives from all this in Reeves' view is that treating traditionally male characteristics as a “toxic” pathology is damaging to men, and it's wrong. Masculinity is only toxic when it doesn’t serve the greater good of the species, or isn’t under mature adult control.  No one ever says anything about “toxic femininity”. When harnessed correctly, masculinity is natural, a result of evolution, and of benefit to society.  One example of this would be the greater propensity of men to take personal risks in defense of others.  

 

In Reeves' view, the #METOO movement's use of the term "toxic masculinity" as a routine pejorative for men and the way they behave is demoralizing, too broad-brush, and doesn't take into account the negative psychological effect it has on the morale and self-image of many boys and men, especially young ones trying to understand how they are supposed to behave in the world, and what their self-worth is.
 

The author then points out the opposite side of recognizing the positive and natural value of masculinity, which is that men also have “female” characteristics in varying proportions, while many women also have varying proportions of "male" characteristics. Care-taking and nurturing tendencies, and greater social interest and engagement, exist in men too – just to a somewhat lesser degree on average.  Women similarly have aggressive, competitive and less social tendencies too, just to a somewhat lesser degree on average than the men.
 

The chapter on the politics of all this is particularly thoughtful and convincing.  Reeves asserts that the political left and the progressive/feminist ideologues need to recognize and accept that there are truly biological differences between men and women, and that admitting that is not a basis for justifying individual and systemic discrimination against women. Conversely, the political right, which has been capitalizing in recent years on reactionary anti-feminist feelings among many men, needs to realize that there’s no reclaiming the oppressive, hierarchical masculinity of yesteryear.  

 

The central challenge for all of us is to realize that it’s necessary to have both men and women adapt to the new reality of a society based on equality between men and women. It’s not a zero-sum game: we can support women and their rights, but also support the men too. But if the left (progressives) won’t deal with the very real problems and difficulties boys and men are currently facing in our society, then the opportunists and bad actors, recognizing the grievances and sense of loss that many men feel as their traditional roles have disappeared, will surely come up with their own bad solutions.  The rise of Donald Trump and the misogynistic alt-right demonstrate this risk all too clearly. 
 

In the last part of the book, Reeves begins to try to pull together recommendations for what should be done to help boys and men succeed. He starts with the equitable and obvious claim that for the past 50 years in the United States, a great deal has been done to advance women’s health, rights and status in society, and that's good.  But nothing of the sort is being done for men, and it should be.
 

He suggests that we need to promote more men in the HEAL professions (health, education, and other social service fields),  just as women in STEM has been pushed.  We should get rid of the stigma of “women’s professions”, and open up more employment and career opportunities for men in these types of work, where they are needed and could have good careers. This might also improve pay scales for women in those professions.
 

One of his other innovative ideas for improving boys' outcomes in education and later life, which has drawn a lot of both positive comment and criticism, is what he calls "Redshirting" the boys – holding boys back a year (after the girls) in starting school.  He argues this would provide a significant positive effect on giving boys better results, because in general their intellectual development is delayed compared to girls (another biological difference between the sexes which recently has been well-established through research). 

 

Parents could still have the choice to opt out of a general system change like this, based on the needs of their particular children. And Reeves expresses willingness to hear other proposals to help with the uneven rate of brain development between boys and girls, relative to education.  But he's trying to start a discussion of how to help boys do better in an educational process which is currently stacked against them, compared to the girls -- a worthwhile and timely objective.

 

This book is a fascinating exploration of the situation of modern boys and men in America, and what they need to be successful and productive humans in a world shared more fairly with girls and women. It's full of important and genuinely humane proposals and insights to make things better for all of us, as we try to create a society where everyone can have a better chance to realize their own hopes and dreams, whether male or female. 

 

The book (and this review) may well be controversial, and challenge many peoples' thoughts and feelings about the relationship between the sexes, and their respective roles, but it is well worth taking the time to read it, and think more deeply about these issues in the light of contemporary science and social science research. Very highly recommended.

Movie Review: Good Night, Oppy (2022). Amazon Prime.

This enchanting documentary of space exploration in our own era tells an uplifting story of our intelligent machines, and the fascinating emotional relationships we humans can develop with them. It seems perfect for the current moment, with our rising excitement but also fears about A.I. and robotics, and how the development of these technologies may affect us.

Two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity (or "Oppy", as it became known), were launched in 2003, and arrived six weeks apart on the surface of Mars in early 2004. Each was expected to last only a few months, but both ended up continuing to operate, and send back astonishing pictures, videos and data about Mars, for many years instead.  Spirit lasted for more than six years, until 2010; Opportunity lasted an astonishing 14 years before its final signal in 2018, surviving and continuing to explore and broadcast despite mechanical failures, unexpected harsh surface conditions and technical mishaps. 

This film is the delightful tale of these two extraordinary Mars rovers, and the marvelous discoveries they made and shared with humanity. But it is also a very human story of the individuals and teams at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who invented the rovers, designed, assembled and tested them, successfully sent them to Mars, and then controlled and monitored their explorations from Earth.   

We meet some of the dedicated space scientists at JPL, and get to share their experiences working on the project, their growing amazement and wonder at the longevity of their far-away mechanical team members on the Martian surface, and the affection and feelings they develop with the passing years for these intrepid machines, as they work together to overcome problems so the rovers can continue to send data and photos back to them.   

Using archival footage and recent interviews, the movie shows team members at various stages of their careers and the rover project, and how they increasingly anthropomorphized the remote robots, cheered them on, and coped with their ultimate demise and their grief about it, after nearly a human generation's worth of the rovers' service and communications from Mars.

This is an inspiring and hopeful story of humans, robots and true-life adventures in space, with amazing samples of the huge volume of photos and videos of Mars taken by the rovers, and an excellent Hollywood-quality sound track. Recommended.

Book Review: Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity and Democracy (2023). Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.

This brand new non-fiction book combines the true story of a recent masterpiece of complex investigative journalism with revelations that are disturbing and important for all who value privacy, individual rights and democratic norms.

The authors are two noted French journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.  They are both leaders in a French non-profit journalism organization called Forbidden Stories, which seeks to continue the investigative work of assassinated reporters from many dangerous authoritarian countries around the world. To accomplish this mission, they make use of the skills of a team of their own organization's staff, who work in collaboration with top reporters and technical experts from major news media companies and human rights groups from many nations.

The target of the special investigation described in this book was an Israeli company called NSO. NSO was a high-tech security company that developed and sold surveillance tools to governments. Among their most valuable tools was a secret product known as Pegasus, a combination of spy software and hosted I.T. services which allowed their customers to hack into smartphones, and to use the compromised phones and their data in a variety of nefarious ways.

Pegasus enabled not only access to all the existing content (email, text, video, audio) on any  phone it compromised, but also the ability to plant data on it (such as child porn, or other fake evidence used to besmirch the phone owner’s reputation, and justify arrest and prosecution). It also allowed the cracker to activate the microphone and cameras on the phone remotely, to serve as an unintended bugging device against the phone's owner, as well as being able to use the phone's GPS information to track the phone's owner's location. And it enabled the cracker to interact with the phone in other ways too, to control it, and download a vast array of personal private information from it on demand.

The product was quietly sold to select governmental agencies in allied countries with the permission of the Israeli government. In the beginning, it was marketed and defended by NSO as a tool for democratic governments, primarily in the west, to defend themselves and their populations from terrorists and criminals, in response to the many new apps and tools for data encryption on Apple and Android phones. The ability to hack into suspects' phones appealed to worried law enforcement agencies and officials in many countries, who feared that new phone encryption apps would prevent them from being able to monitor and investigate lawbreakers effectively.

However, this positive spin on the purpose and uses of NSO's tools took a dark turn when Forbidden Stories obtained a list of over 10,000 phone numbers from a secret source (probably within the NSO company), from nations around the world, which had been hacked using Pegasus. 

It quickly became obvious from the journalists' initial review of the phone numbers on the list that NSO must also be selling the product to repressive regimes and unsavory leaders in many places, to allow those dangerous customers to surveil, monitor and track individuals who were considered a threat to them or to their regime(s).  Pegasus suddenly looked to be a terrifyingly powerful new weapon for authoritarian dictatorships hunting dissidents, and seeking to silence or punish political opponents and inquisitive reporters.

Once Forbidden Stories realized the threat posed by the existence and sale of this tool, to them as journalists as well as to anyone who might fear the sort of all-knowing governmental surveillance and targeting made possible by Pegasus, they set to work on trying to find out more about it. To do that, they had to slowly and carefully build a wide network of respected journalists and media outlets in many countries, who would contribute to a large group investigative journalism project, but under very strict security restrictions.

One of the greatest risks to the project, and to the journalists working on it, was that each of their own smartphones might become a potential source of leaks that could blow the story wide open, before they were able to complete the deep and wide research needed to document it. Indeed, just by tracing the owners of many of the phone numbers on the list, the journalists working on the project quickly discovered that some of their own phones had already been hacked by Pegasus customers from repressive regimes.  

The reporters, computer experts and Forbidden Stories project organizers thus had to find ways to do their work, coordinate all their efforts and handle communications among participants on different continents, over a period of many months, without relying on the most common tools of their trade, the ones we all take for granted now – their phones and the internet.  This made their achievements all the more difficult, and their success that much more astonishing.

This is a truly disturbing, but impressive and thoroughly researched story on how a voluntary network of idealistic journalists around the globe pieced together the truth about a set of repressive surveillance tools, aimed directly at our smartphones, that could destroy the ability of anyone to trust in their own personal safety or security from malevolent governments and criminals anywhere in the world.  Having managed to uncover and document the story in astonishing detail, they then made it public, with a highly synchronized barrage of stories from many reporters in different places, with each report addressing the local instances and effects of the Pegasus spyware and operations in their many respective countries.  

The fact that Forbidden Stories' investigation, and its revelations, ultimately drove NSO out of its very lucrative phone spyware business is encouraging, but only somewhat. Unfortunately, as the authors point out, we still have to recognize how relatively easy it is to create spyware systems like Pegasus, tools that can use all the wonderful technological capabilities of our smartphones against us. The authors suggest we need to try to prepare for the next time in advance, by passing laws to try to limit or prevent development of these kinds of Orwellian surveillance technologies in the future.

This is an exciting real-world thriller of investigative journalism, combined with a vital cautionary tale about the threats to freedom and privacy posed by our ubiquitous smartphone technology. It includes a powerful and enlightening introduction by Rachel Maddow. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat (2021). On Netflix.

This interesting recent movie on Netflix is a good docudrama about one of the more audacious Allied intelligence operations and victories of World War II.  It's about Operation Mincemeat, a real plan created by the British Naval Intelligence Division (NID), to confuse the Nazis with false information about the location of the planned 1943 Allied invasion of southern Europe (which ultimately was launched against Sicily).

The story begins with the development of proposals for the British military on how to create confusion and doubt among the German military authorities about the impending invasion. Ewen Montagu (played well by Colin Firth), a commanding officer within the NID, and his team members, are considering different ways they might feed credible-sounding fake intelligence to the Germans. They ultimately make the controversial decision to try to float a dead body ashore off the coast of Spain, disguised as a British military courier, with false plans for the invasion.

The group realizes they needed to create a completely fictional backstory for the body. But first, they need to find a fresh dead man’s body of the right age, sufficiently anonymous that it can be “repurposed” with a different identity, and well preserved enough to appear to have died recently. Once they overcome that challenge, they have to create a convincing history for this person who didn’t really exist, by forging public documentation and a discoverable history, and also figuring out how to put convincing corroborating evidence on the body itself.

Finally, they need to find a way to deliver the body, in the guise of a courier who apparently had been shot down over the ocean, so that it would float ashore and be found and accepted as real by the Spanish authorities, then passed along to a German agent, who they hope will send the information on to the always suspicious and sophisticated German intelligence apparatus, and ultimately to Hitler himself.

It's a far-fetched but well-crafted cinematic tale of this unlikely plan that not only happened, but even more amazingly appears to have succeeded in fooling the Germans about the location of the invasion. It also nicely depicts the lives and interactions of the team of seemingly ordinary men and women in an obscure London NID office, who worked together to assemble all the elements of this elaborate deception scheme, and see the whole fraud through to the end.

One of the movie’s noteworthy characters is Lt. Commander Ian Fleming (played by Johnny Flynn), Montagu’s personal assistant, who later became famous (in real life) as the creator and writer of the original James Bond spy novels. Fleming is believed to have played an important role in this secret operation.

It’s worth noting that this story has been told several times before in books and films, including in the book The Man Who Never Was (1953) by Ewen Montagu himself (which I remember reading and enjoying long ago); a popular movie of the same name, based on Montagu's book, from 1956; and the more recent book Operation Mincemeat (2010) by Ben McIntyre, which was the basis for this recent film.

However factually accurate and complete it may or may not be, it’s an enjoyable and dramatic portrayal of one of the high points of British spying and information warfare against the Germans in World War II. Recommended.

Personal Note: Phasing Out Rock and Roll Friday

From early on here at The Memory Cache, I’ve used the fourth Friday of each month as my day for posting reviews and writing about pop music, musicians, music films, music books and even a music podcast. I called this regular feature "Rock and Roll Friday". 

However, as part of the ongoing evolution of the blog, I’ve decided to discontinue this tradition effective today, and simply move to writing about music whenever something good turns up, as I do with all other topics covered here.

I currently have U2’s lead singer Bono’s recent autobiography Surrender high on my reading list for the near future, so no worries – there will be more music-related posts to come, whenever I discover anything of the kind that I really enjoy and find noteworthy. It just won’t necessarily show up in the blog on any particular day of the month.

In the meantime, happy fourth Friday!

Movie Review: She Said (2022). In Theaters and on Peacock.

Last year I wrote a review of Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow’s excellent non-fiction autobiographical thriller about his attempts to research and expose the stories of institutionalized sexual abuse by powerful men in major corporations, centered on NBC’s host Matt Lauer and the Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein. It’s a remarkable story, and an inspiring addition to the history of investigative journalism as an essential and difficult tool in the struggle for democracy and against abuses of power.

Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor were the two New York Times reporters also working the story of Harvey Weinstein, and his serial abuse of women employees and young actresses throughout his career as one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, at the same time Farrow was trying to uncover the story for The New Yorker. 

After their sensational revelations in the pages of the New York Times, which ultimately led to Weinstein’s disgrace, his departure from Miramax and successful criminal prosecutions for rape, Twohey and Kantor also wrote a bestselling account of their work on the Weinstein story, She Said, which I haven’t read yet (but will).

In the meantime, though, I have seen the dramatic movie made from their book, which is an outstanding creative work in its own right, and a worthy entry on anyone’s “best investigative reporting stories” list of great films. 

As the story begins, we see how Weinstein first appeared on Kantor's radar, as a possible illustrative case of sexism in the workplace for an article she was researching on that topic. As she begins to follow leads, she hears harrowing accounts from several of Weinstein’s victims, but also runs into barriers, including the fact that most of the victims had received settlements, and had signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), which barred them from disclosing what had happened or talking to the media about their experiences.

We then see how Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) recruits Twohey (Carey Mulligan) to work with her on the story, and how the two – with the careful and tough oversight of their editors and executives, and the everyday love and support of their husbands and young children, despite long hours at work and midnight phone calls – compile an exhaustive body of notes, anecdotes, sources, witnesses and documents, in order to write the story.

Much of the drama builds from watching the two of them arranging for and then conducting interviews with scared, reluctant sources in a variety of settings, as they try to understand the magnitude of Weinstein’s crimes, and the nature of the cover-up operations by the Miramax board of directors and Weinstein’s lawyers. It's also obvious that the fact that they are both career women and mothers of young daughters adds to the empathy and bond they are able to establish with many of the victims, as they try to gain their trust, learn their stories, and then ultimately try to get one or more of them to go on the record.

One of the most impressive features of the story (as in most investigative journalism tales) is the team’s high standards for the types of evidence they need in order to publish their findings. After all the recent years of constant attacks on the press for “fake news”, it is a revelation to watch what it takes to be able to publish a credible investigative report in the mainstream news media.

In the movie, it’s clear that the editors and writers automatically agree on the need for a high level of verifiability, because that’s their understanding of their jobs and the nature of their profession. There’s a reason that the New York Times is considered one of the most authoritative news sources in the world. But it’s also made clear that a story of this sort – about the crimes and misbehavior of a famous and powerful man – must be unimpeachable to withstand the sorts of attacks an influential man like Weinstein, and a wealthy company like Miramax, can unleash to protect themselves.

With all the social tumult of the last decade, it’s easy to see certain currents like the #METOO movement, which has had such an important role in uncovering institutionalized sexism and abuse in the workplace – as having arisen spontaneously. But it didn’t. The #METOO movement exploded as a direct result of the truths told by these few talented and dedicated writers and their editors, who were determined to get to the bottom of this ugly story, in order to shed light on institutional abuses of power, and by the brave women, some of them famous, who were ultimately convinced to make their own pain and victimization public in the hope of improving the lives of other women.

She Said is a gripping and intensely moving drama of two women investigative journalists working together on one of the most notorious and difficult real-life news stories of recent times. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth (2019). Gordon L. Dillow.

I stumbled on this intriguing book over the holidays, in a pile of remaindered science books in one of our local bookstores. It turned out to be one of the better impulse book buys I’ve made lately.

The title itself is suggestive of the contents, but doesn’t nearly capture the richness of the author's presentation. The general topic is asteroids colliding with earth, and the threat they pose to life on earth and modern civilization, but Dillow approaches the subject with a measure of humor, a longtime journalist’s talent for research and storytelling, and a truly cosmic problem to consider.

The book begins with the author describing a large meteorite exploding in the atmosphere over his home in Arizona a few years ago, a spectacular natural event which he and many others witnessed, and which started him down the road toward writing this book.

From that beginning, he moves to the story of the 50,000-year-old meteorite crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, which is a now a local tourist site. He explains how it was created, how it was “discovered” by white settlers in the nineteenth century, and how (as with other meteorite crash sites around the world) it was initially believed to be the residue of some sort of volcanic event. He then recounts the history of the clear-sighted individuals who eventually realized what it was, but then had to convince a skeptical worldwide scientific community over many decades that it really was the result of a massive meteorite impact.

Dillow then continues to weave together other aspects of the related scientific discoveries and events which inform our current understanding of the asteroid and comet threats to our planet. He explains how science had long had a consensus view that natural processes in the earth sciences were controlled by the uniformitarian doctrine, the idea that all changes were gradual, and caused by the same processes we now know about, a concept that was recently disrupted by the rise of the catastrophism doctrine. 

Catastrophism is the contrary view (to uniformitarianism) that contends that some major changes in earth’s history were the result of cataclysmic but rare events, such as asteroid strikes. Inevitably, this leads the author to a discussion of the changing scientific beliefs about what caused the end of the dinosaur era, a debate which has played out over the past half century or so in popular culture as well as the scientific community.

Some of the most fascinating parts of the book detail several major asteroid strikes in historical memory, and how scientists came to understand and prove what they really were, in contrast to earlier religious and pseudo-scientific explanations (spoiler alert: they weren't caused by UFOs). 

The 1908 Tunguska explosion in Russia, which I can recall was still considered a scientific mystery when I was young, is one of the best examples, as well as the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid event (also coincidentally in Russia). Dillow includes fascinating descriptions of both, and the means by which scientists eventually were able to confirm and explain what happened, including being able to calculate the approximate size and speed of the asteroids, and explaining why they created the particular explosive effects they did.

From there, the story moves on to the networks of governmental organizations and resourceful amateur citizen astronomers who have gradually built a database of Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and have begun to plan for the planetary defense. Needless to say, there are some wonderfully interesting and eccentric personalities involved. Dillow also looks at the growing public recognition and acceptance of the risks posed by asteroid strikes, the strategies proposed for defending against asteroids on a collision course with our planet, the politics of it all, and also includes evaluations of the Hollywood science fiction movies that have been made about it.

This book was written just a little too early to include a discussion of Don’t Look Up, the satirical 2021 disaster film about an impending asteroid strike starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence (previously reviewed here). It’s too bad, because at the time, most people (including me) thought the movie was really not about an asteroid strike, but about climate change, and our collective failure to do anything effective to stop it from destroying our planet and civilization. It was very much in keeping with a long history of popular culture and science belittling and laughing about the idea of giant asteroids striking earth, whether in the ancient past or in the future.

But in retrospect, Dillow’s presentation makes it clear that while a catastrophic asteroid strike may be a far less likely event in any of our lifetimes, it is one that is no less potentially devastating to us, our global human society and life on earth than the climate crisis. For that reason, he suggests, we should take it seriously too, and keep working on ways to try to protect our world from this low probability but very high-impact threat.

Fire in the Sky is an excellent piece of science reporting. It includes an enjoyable and educational mix of human stories of individual dedication and collective folly, along with plenty of science history. It also provides clear explanations of what we currently know and believe about asteroids, comets, and their frequent collisions with other celestial bodies, especially Earth and the moon. Highly recommended.