What We Are Reading: ‘The Sixth Extinction’ by Elizabeth Kolbert

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Updated 19 October 2024
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What We Are Reading: ‘The Sixth Extinction’ by Elizabeth Kolbert

In “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. 

Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

Updated 11 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

“Novel Relations” engages 20th-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.

Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read.

These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too.