A Meteor in the Russian Sky Caught on Car Cams: The New Yorker At around 9:20 local time on Friday morning, a brilliant fireball, believed to be a meteor, appeared in the sky above the Russian Urals and shot across the horizon, leaving a trail of billowing smoke. A deafening boom shattered windows and television screens throughout the city of Chelyabinsk. Serious damage was reported at a zinc factory and an ice rink. Flying glass caused over five hundred injuries, some requiring hospitalization. The Russian Academy of Sciences announced that the fireball had been a meteor, that it had weighed ten tons and entered the earth's atmosphere at some thirty-three thousand miles per hour. It shattered over the Chelyabinsk region, where the Russian Army has reported finding meteorite fragments and a twenty-foot crater. Such events don't happen every day, but they aren't totally unheard of. In 1908, the so-called Tunguska Impact levelled eight hundred and thirty square miles of Siberian forestland. The truly new thing about Friday's meteoric event was, rather, how we got to watch it: from inside people's cars. The dashboard-camera videos of the meteor, which proliferated on the Internet all Friday morning, represent an intersection of astronomical forces with the technological and sociohistorical conditions of Russian life. Dash cams, as reported in Animal, have become ubiquitous in today's Russia, where road hazards range from "insane gridlock" to "large, lawless areas" habited by "police with a penchant for extortion and deeply frustrated drivers who want to smash your face," and where courts rarely award damages without video evidence. A large percentage of Russian car crashes are thus captured on video and aggregated on a devoted LiveJournal page that gets more than four million views per month. The car-crash video corpus is a gold mine of piquant Russian slang, from the derogatory potsient - a hybrid of "[hospital] patient" and "putz," used to denote crash victims - to the honorific zhelezobetonnoe ochkko - anus of concrete - for drivers who navigate deadly situations without losing their cool. Russian dash-cam videos have been around, in other words, but they were a niche taste. The meteor brought them into the mainstream, and shifted the focus: now the collision isn't between two cars, but between the earth and a celestial rock. The dash-cam videos, capturing the very first glimmer of the unawaited fireball, have a certain dramatic irony: we notice the meteor before the driver does. I found them mesmerizing. I watched them all morning. In one video, the car comes to a stop at a red light. The turn signal starts its distinctive clacking. The oncoming cars still have their headlights on, and tram lines crisscross the darkened sky. A white, blazing fireball shimmers in the sky, glowing like a Disney shooting star - like something that would precede the materialization of a fairy godmother. As it races toward the horizon, the driver launches into an unhurried stream of Russian profanity, starting with "What the fuck is that?" and getting gradually more colorful. The light changes and, with a few parting profanities, he turns right. The whole scene takes forty-nine seconds. It's like reading a poem. In another video, imprinted with the wrong date and time, a man drives down a country road, listening to dance music, systematically passing one car after another. The fairy godmother comes to visit him, too, but he just keeps driving. Another driver, heading along a rural highway, listens in phlegmatic silence to an entire pizza commercial as the glowing trail shoots across the sky. He utters only a laconic, anus-of-concrete comment: "What the fuck." With their juxtaposition of the cosmic and the mundane, the Russian meteor videos reminded me of Tolstoy's description, in "War and Peace," of the comet of 1812: Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.... Above the Prechistenka Boulevard, surrounded ... on all sides by stars but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812 - the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly - like an arrow piercing the earth - to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life. In "War and Peace" the comet stands for one of the novel's central themes: the way world-historical forces interact with individual destinies. The ancient, cosmic power of the epic exercises its gravitational pull on the prose of the world. Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't turn off. We're also thinking about pizza, or passing a slow tractor, or making a turn, and for a magical instant our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars.