Director emerita Lorraine Daston joins Thomas Jones on The LRB Podcast to discuss Kaboom!, an essay she contributed to the current issue of the London Review of Books. In her review of Sadiah Qureshi's Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, she examines how people throughout history tried to make sense of natural disaster and extinction.

"Extinction is a protracted, uneven process, and hard to square with our mental picture of abrupt catastrophe."