LIVE from the NYPL: Nathaniel Rich & Elizabeth Kolbert

Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinctions when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, we are the asteroid.

Elizabeth Kolbert offers a startling look at the mass extinction currently unfolding before our eyes in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and in conversation with Nathaniel Rich, whose novel Odds Against Tomorrow is a philosophically searching inquiry into our greatest fears about the future.