Any aviation fan knows that the SR-71 Blackbird is the ultimate plane: The fastest (2,242.48 miles per hour), highest (85,069 feet), most incredible aircraft every built. Designed by the genius Kelly Johnson at Lockheed's Skunkworks, the SR-71 flew from 1966 to 1990, providing rapid reconnaissance to American presidents on locations around the globe. The Untouchables is a celebration of the SR-71 by pilot Brian "Speed Check" Shul, a gorgeous coffee table book full of photos and stories about the plane, co-authored with his backseater Colonel Walt Watson.

The core of this book is three days over Libya in support of Operation Eldorado Canyon, providing intelligence and bomb damage assessments of the F-111 strike. Shul describes the difficulties of mid-air refueling at higher than normal altitudes to avoid civilian traffic over the Mediterranean, the joy of coaxing absolute performance from a plane that seemed like a living thing, and the fear and exhilaration of outrunning missiles fired by the Libyans below. Watson's perspective is equally valuable. While pilots get all the glory, flying wouldn't matter without the mission, and Watson had a complicated job managing the navigation, camera, and electronic warfare systems. In a rare moment of visible impact for the crew, they watched a news interview with Qaddafi where the dictator flinched as sonic booms from their plane reached the ground.

But the SR-71 was more than a plane, it was a program, and Shul interviews many of the civilian technical experts who kept the Blackbird flying. The absolute love of the aircraft and professionalism of the whole team shines again and again. For an aircraft designed with slide rules and analog electronics which pushed the limits of possibility, it was a surprisingly tough machine that could give you as much speed as you needed, limited only by skin heating. The Air Force shut down the program as part of the Cold War peace dividend, distributing the planes to museums across the US, where they are glorious and tragic relics.

I did not know this, but we owe many of the iconic images of the Blackbird and its crew to Shul. He was an amateur photographer (now a professional wildlife photographer with a gallery in the Bay Area), and was bold and persuasive enough to take photos of the super secret program. Aviation history would be much poorer without him.

The only knock against this book is that it costs an arm and a leg and a kidney, but it is truly gorgeous and fascinating.

I really enjoyed Suvorov's The Aquarium, about his career and defection as a GRU officer, but Spetsnaz is simply not as compelling.

Suvorov provides an overview of the doctrine and training of Soviet special forces, the Spetsnaz. The overall objective of the Spetsnaz is strategic reconnaissance and chaos. Some categories of objectives are clearly military, to locate and destroy NATO nuclear weapons, aircraft, radar, and other key facilities on the eve of a general attack to clear the way for the Red Army. But Spetsnaz also has objectives of political terror and sabotage, using the weeks leading up to war to dislocate NATO infrastructure and political systems.

Spetsnaz training is self-consciously extreme, combining snake-eating machismo with the omerta of Russian prison gangs. Spetsnaz soldiers are desensitized to violence, hardship, and danger, and trained to use deception and torture to achieve their ends. Training includes frequent beatings, harsh survival exercises against the Siberian wilderness and Soviet internal security, and obstacle courses that include a literal maze of blood.

Suvorov reveals several secrets. The Soviet athletic complex is intimately bound up with Spetsnaz, with the top ranks of the organization consisting of Olympic quality athletes, especially those focusing on militarily useful sports like parachuting, scuba diving, and mountaineering. Western Europe is also riddle with Spetsnaz agents and safehouses, locations operated by non-political local pensioners stocked with supplies and vehicles. In the event of war, Spetsnaz soldiers will infiltrate to these prepared safehouses, stock up, kill their owners to ensure silence, and then carry out their attacks.

It's all very thrilling, very hardcore, but also somewhat abstract and graceless, especially compared to the sharp specificity of The Aquarium

Mapping the Great Game is a somewhat scattered but still fascinating account of geography and spycraft in 19th century Asia. India was the crown gem in the British Empire, but its frontiers were poorly understood and even less well defined, and it took a dedicated effort to map them. The consistent fear was one of Russian attack from the north, a rivalry that prefigured the Cold War, and was in many was a mirrored provocation by the imperial powers at the expense of the locals.

The story is bookended by military history, the First Anglo-Afghan War and the 1904 British Expedition to Tibet, two of the more pointless and brutal imperial exercises of the period. The heart of the book is an account of the Pundit expeditions. While Europeans were conspicuous and vulnerable beyond the frontier, Indian natives could pass as traders and pilgrims, and specially trained locals, most notably Nain Singh, carried out long distance route surveys to fix the location of ancient Silk Road oasis cities and the courses of mighty rivers. Their methods were crude: trained paces, latitude observations with sextants and altitude observations with boiling thermometers, and they always operated under risk of exposure and execution as spies, but they were surprisingly accurate in their measurements and gained significant accolades.

A second theme is the Grand Trigonometric Survey. As people who have read James Scott or Foucault know, accurate maps and census are a key part of governmentality, and the British Empire launched an ambitious plan to map India using the most modern trigonometric methods, starting with a painstakingly measured baseline and then extrapolated by large triangles, until every key point was fixed. This was a physical and mathematical odyssey, requiring precise measurements with heavy instruments in the worst of conditions, and then painstaking calculations to compensate for everything from atmospheric refraction to gravitational anomalies pulling plumb bobs out of true. It took hundreds of men decades to complete, and broke new ground in precisely measuring the Earth.

The thing about the Israel-Palestine debate in contemporary American Judaism is that there is no such thing. The matter is settled. American Jews are supposed to shut up, get in line, and support Israel no matter what. And despite large divergences in culture and politics, aside from some quiet grumbling, that's how it's worked. And if anything, American Jews are actually less supportive of Israel than the average American, and certainly less supportive than the average politician or media figure, who'd rather slit their own throat than cross the Israel lobby. In We Are Not One, Alterman masterfully traces the origins and consequences of this unswerving support.

The book opens with a 2019 quote from then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, "If the capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that'll remain is our commitment to Israel", a statement less metaphorical after Trump's January 6th coup attempt. Republicans are even more ardently pro-Israel than Democrats in a rare bipartisan consensus.

At Israel's founding, American support for the new state was far from given. While FDR was cosmopolitan and had many Jewish friends and staffers, Harry Truman had the typical provincial antisemitism of the time, yet came around as a strong supporter. The Jewish community was internally divided on the Zionist question, with the leading American Jewish Committee unable to reach a position and various rabbis dueling for priority. The romance of the Israeli War of Independence, and a cannily organized PR campaign around the novel and movie Exodus by Leon Uris helped link American sentiments to Israel.

While the sentimental attachment to Israel was amplified by victories in the Six Day War, and disaster into victory of the Yom Kippur War, American Jewish support for Israel was financial and political, but rarely personal. The number of American Jews who made aliyah was always vanishingly small. Israel was an idea, a Zionist imaginary of "next year in Jerusalem", rather than an actual move to Tel Aviv.

But the action practice of Zionism, an ethnic nationalist movement which requires perforce the salami-slicing occupation of land inhabited by Palestinians, was anathema to mainstream American Jewish liberal sensibilities. For much of the 20th century, this cognitive dissonance was carefully managed. Jewish liberalism ended at Israeli borders. Three interlocking political factors ensured this cognitive dissonance didn't boil over.

The first was a minority neoconservative movement, a hard anti-communist rejection of both traditional American conservative isolationism and Nixon's détente. In this new political movement, with many ideological Jewish Americans, Israel was a bastion of American values against the Soviet-backed Arab states, against the conventional wisdom that oil and population meant the United States should buddy up to Arabs who could support American economic interests. The second was the rise of political Evangelical Christianity. The return of Jews to the Holy Land is a key part of Evangelical eschatology, a necessary prelude before Revelations. And third was the capture of American institutional Judaism by billionaire donors with hard Zionist views, primarily the late Sheldon Adelson (and may his memory be a bight). AIPAC became not merely a Jewish or even pro-Israel lobbying group, but specifically a pro-Likud organization with the barest pretense of larger Jewish values, much more comfortable with billionaires and evangelicals than actual Jews.

This state of affairs has had several effects, both in America and Israel. The first is the enervated state of contemporary Reform Judaism. Pragmatically, culturally there's not much to distinguish Reform Judaism from a mainstream Protestant denomination, when Judaism has often been defined by deliberate difference from surrounding gentiles, and mainstream Protestantism has had a rough 20th century as well. But as Jewish leaders urgently see younger Jews (myself included) drifting away from the faith and marrying outside the religion, which is reasonably caused by the fact that aside from Zionism and Holocaust remembrance, there's barely any there there in Reform Judaism, their reaction has been to triple down on the Zionist card.

The second is the AIPAC noise machine, which is centered on AIPAC but supported by a wide range of longstanding Jewish organizations and hastily spun-off PR fronts. Jews certainly don't control the media, or the banks, or government, but crossing AIPAC is a bad idea. If you're a politician, you'll be primaried with your opponent raking in hefty support. If you're a professor, a journalist, or other public intellectual, even the mildest criticism of Israeli policies, such as referring to the state of affairs as an occupation, apartheid, saying "Palestinian homeland", or remarking that maybe Israel should consider American wishes given the hundreds of billions of dollars of aid they have received, will invite a swarm of criticism from ardent Zionist culture warriors. And third, while at the same time arguing that accusations of "dual-loyalty" are an anti-Semitic attack, AIPAC will label any Jew who speaks against them as self-hating, and demand an unflinching primary loyalty to Israel.

The last consequence is an active disdain for American Jews on the part of the Israelis, and for American political priorities. Israelis don't much like American Jews. They don't regard Reform Judaism as a valid religion. And while they'll happily agree to anything at various peace conferences, not a single Israeli prime minister has ever done more than briefly halted settlements in the occupied territories or given the most perfunctory rebuke to extrajudicial Israeli security service actions. The Israeli future has no peace plan, simply a large question mark and then "and no more Arabs", and we should be honest about that.

Alterman's book is comprehensive, deeply sourced, and utterly damning in its conclusions. It's provoked a serious rethinking of my own relationship to institutional Judaism. Something is going to break, but I can't yet tell you what it is.

Friedman is one of OGs of divorce mediation, having co-founded The Center for Understanding in Conflict back in 1981. Both the Center and Friedman himself have numerous training courses and books available, many of them likely more updated and better organized then this book, which is 30 years old as I write this review.

The undeniable advantage of this book is that is centered around a dozen case studies of "actual" mediations (quotes because I'm not sure how much is verbatim and how much is reconstructed and how much has been altered to protect privacy), which provide an immediate grasp of how underlying issues that lead to divorce can be expressed in difficult circumstances, and the delicate edge a mediator must walk to ensure neutrality while also protecting a party in the marriage who has mostly not spoken up.

The case studies center on the more challenging examples. Mediation failed in the case of a physically violent abuser, in one of the most dramatic examples. But there are more mundane issues about who gets to live in the house and how much support will be paid, which are resolved to various degrees of satisfaction. Two things that comes through are managing pride and uncertainty. There are multiple instances of "I won't pay a dime in spousal support, but I will pay [x] as long as it's not called spousal support". And of course discussions about the home and children are especially difficult if one parent is re-entering the job market.

I'm sure the practice of mediation is more sophisticated now, but this is a fast and readable overview that provides mediators with touchstones for hard cases, and people going through the process with ideas about how to unstick it.

Sakai was one of the Imperial Japanese Navy's top aces, with over 60 confirmed kills in air to air combat. He also had a charmed life which somehow saw him through the war despite the tremendous losses the IJN took. This memoir focuses mostly on the dogfights, with just enough life on the ground to provide context.

Sakai was born in an impoverished family of samurai origin, and wound up in the IJN in the 30s. He was one of 75 enlisted men selected for flight training, and one of 25 in that class to actually graduate, making him a true elite in the air. Superior individual training and superior aircraft let Sakai rack up the scores in fighting over China, and then in five glorious months posted to Lae dueling P-39s and P-40s over New Guinea. But while this was still the period of Japan's easy victories, there were cracks. The B-17 was a true flying fortress, fast and difficult to shoot down. And no matter how many planes Sakai and his squadron shot down, the Americans and Australians were always back up in the air the next day, bombing Lae and opening new bases.

Sakai avoided an assignment to the doomed Midway fleet, and was transferred to Rabaul for the Battle of Guadalcanal. His first encounter with American Navy pilots in F4F Wildcats was of a different order, and Sakai's Zero was shot full of holes, and he was heavily wounded. Somehow, he nursed his crippled plane back to Rabaul, and was sent home to Japan for surgery. He lost sight in one eye, a major disadvantage for a fighter pilot, and as the war turned against the Japanese, he returned to combat. He was posted to Iwo Jima months before the invasion, where his squadron of 80 Zeroes was decimated by the superior F6F Hellcat. He was ordered on a kamikaze mission, but failed to find the American fleet. Somewhat shockingly, Iwo Jima was barely defended at this point. If the Americans had invaded in May 1944 instead of fulfilling McArthur's promise to return the Philippines, they could have taken the island with minimal resistance.

He and the remaining Japanese aces were withdrawn to form interception squadrons, piloting Raiden and Shinden fighters against B-29 raids. These last-generation planes were heavily armed bomber destroyers, but they were vulnerable to escorting P-51s. And ultimately, sheer numbers and a switch to night bombing rendered Sakai and his comrades impotent.

Samurai! puts a human voice to an enemy that was dehumanized during the war, and the doomed heroism of Japan's defenders at the end of the war.

I am very mixed on this book. On the plus side, Heller writes in a breezy, understandable style with plenty of anecdotes based on his interview. He strongly advocates looking out for the best interests of the children first, and that fighting over incidentals is harmful and counter-productive. Taking the high road, being generous with your ex, even when it's against your desires, is the right thing to do.

But that's a really hard attitude to take when that *insert appropriate expletive* here is making unreasonable decisions with serious long-term consequences and winning a game of legal chicken by taking advantage of the fact that you're the reasonable person in the room. And I personally don't even have that bad of issues with my process! It is just difficult to always be the bigger person in the room.

Compared to the other books I've read, Heller is writing from the perspective of an amateur, a divorcee with kids rather than a lawyer or mediator, which is helpful because he's coming from the same place you are. His specific advice for a comprehensive marriage separation agreement covering all contingencies, especially move aways, and with recourse to a special master rather than a trial process for resolving disputes, is very useful, and I think comes from a long-term matter of having to live with the divorce rather than guide people through it.

While the high road sounds great, as the poet said, sometimes you have to dig through the ditches and burn through the witches.

Absolute Zero is a fascinating popular history of research into cold, from Francis Bacon through the present day, with a climax around the liquification of helium by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. Popular in the sense that Shachtman avoids equations and a historical perspective, this book is comprehensive and enjoyable.

As Shachtman notes, cold presents an unusual negation of phenomenon for early physicists. Unlike light, sound, motion, or heat, cold is an absence. Francis Bacon, the proto-experimentalist, died of pneumonia after an impromptu test to see if snow could preserve chicken (yes), and after that the study of cold languished for centuries, a mere adjunct to the more important measurement of temperature.

The dominant caloric theory of the 18th century was intuitively satisfying, but its invocation of a ineffable and non-existent heat bearing fluid model the emerging technology of steam engines, or the mechanical production of cold by gas expansion. As physicists experimented with cold, they proved that gases could transform to new phases of matter at low temperatures and above atmospheric pressure. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and finally helium were all liquified.

Onnes was the first to liquify helium, and the first to note the astonish property of low temperature superconductivity in mercury and a host of other substances, as well as the superfluid behavior of liquid helium. Low temperatures proved an experimental bridge between classical physics and the new quantum physics, where at low temperatures macro-scale objects that could be manipulated in the lab exhibited properties only explainable by quantum effects.

Today, commercial refrigeration and air conditioning are so commonplace as to be entirely unremarkable, but cold was once cutting edge, and this book captures the romance of the quest for absolute zero.

David Lynch's Dune opens with one of the greatest scenes ever in sci-fi, with the Emperor of the Galaxy clearing his court to receive a Guild Navigator. The Navigator arrives in an immense black casket, which slides open to reveal an aquarium of orange gas, out of which swims a horrific vagina-faced man-fish who speaks in a harsh buzz that is translated by a nearby gimp in a latex raincoat. It is harsh, and stunning and like nothing else put to film. And the rest of the movie kind of limps downwards, until at some point you realize that this is awful, and it's never going to get better. Hopefully you have consumed a lot of "Spice Essence" yourself.


Lynch's Guild Navigator is the high point of the movie, which unfortunately occurs right at the start.

So it's not a good film. It might be a great one, but it's not a good one. Defeat is an orphan, and there's been a lot of finger pointing over the years. The producers, Dino and Rafaella de Laurentiis, murdered the movie in the edit, David Lynch wasn't the right director, the story made no sense, the effects were laughable, and so on.

Objectively, Dune is a tricky book to adapt to a movie. There have been a lot more failed versions than successes. Of the existing versions, both the recent Villeneuve Dune and the early 2000s SyFy miniseries cheat by spreading the story over more hours of film than Lynch was allowed. Ridley Scott abandoned the project before Lynch, and Jodorowsky's Dune inspired a documentary movie, but would have been an insane version with almost nothing in common with the book.

A Masterpiece in Disarray is a 500 page oral history of pre-production, filming, the release, and legacy, which interviews pretty much the entire living cast and major crew, as well as a variety of fans. The basic thesis is that David Lynch is a visionary who got many things right, and who's style of filmmaking taps directly into the collective subconscious. Evry even managed an interview with David Lynch himself, since David does not like to talk about a movie he regards as a traumatic experience. Somewhat surprisingly, the de Laurentiises come off better than I expected. While Dino was a charming old pirate, he and Rafaella apparently genuinely cared for the story. Dune was the favorite book of Dino's dead son Federico, and the film is dedicated to his memory. Universal studios expected something fun and toyetic, a new Star Wars, and they definitely failed to market the movie that they got. Lynch was the only person who had an actively bad time on the movie, and unlike a lot of directors he kept his pain private. Everybody is still friends.

The flipside is that the production was genuinely a fiasco. Preproduction dragged out forever and somehow ended without a filmable script. Filming in Mexico presented major challenges, including customs barriers, unreliable electricity, and food poisoning that afflicted cast and crew. A lot of people were drunk much of the time. Filming proceeded without call sheets, with every day an improvisation. Lynch responded to calls for discipline from Los Angeles by inventing new scenes to film. Ultimately, when filming was done, there was no budget left for effects, and the original effects house, John Dykstra's Apogee (Dyskstra basically invented modern special effects working on Star Wars) demanded a lot of money from empty pockets. The second choice studio did their best, but didn't have the chops, leaving a film with some amazing shots, like the combined miniatures and live action shot of the Arrakis landing field, and a lot of stuff that simply didn't work.

When Dune hews close of Lynch's passions of biological monstrosity and industrial decay, it works very well. But the political intrigue is pro-forma, and so far none of the adaptations have managed to capture Paul-the-prophet.

Evry's book is probably the first and last word on Lynch's Dune. It's not for everyone, but the obsessive Dune fan, Lynch fan, or cvlt fan will absolutely love it.

Thinking in systems is a fascinating, if somewhat dated book. Meadows was a pioneering contributor to systems thinking, a member of the Limits to Growth membership, who's life and career was cut tragically short by cerebral meningitis. Thinking in Systems is assembled from notes and lecturers, and represents a consistent whole anchored by the material in the essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Systems are modelled by stocks, flows, and sinks. Stocks are quantities that we care about, hopefully measurable, often not. Flows increase or decrease stocks, and can be fixed or vary based on natural, human, controlled, or uncontrolled processes. Sinks are much like stocks, but are assumed to be set to an infinity, an approximation that makes calculation easier. The basic dynamics of systems are feedback loops, delays, and oscillations. Negative feedback loops make the level of a stock trend towards a finite value. Positive feedback does the opposite, increasing the amount of a stock higher and higher until some countervailing feedback loop appears. And finally, due to innate delays, systems tend to oscillate rather than settling at a single configuration.

Where this gets tricky is first in mathematical modelling, because assigning limits to systems and making sure that the models match the real world is more of an art than a science ("All models are wrong, but some are useful" --George Box). And second, in convincing others of the somewhat counter-intuitive results of systems thinking. The one that jumped out to me was a simple inventory management model which entered into wildly uncontrolled oscillations as the decision to re-order became more responsive to inventory levels. Desired behave was achieved by basing re-order decisions on bi-weekly moving averages.

Meadows usefully provides the math at the end of the book. I feel like a contemporary update would include computer resources for experimentation and examples updated from the immediate post-Cold War where this book was written, but this is a useful book.