Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now,

and in the third episode I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky. You can find a link in

the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and this week I'm talking with Lorraine Daston,

Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She's written on

the history of probability, wonders and scientific objectivity, and her next book will be a history

of thinking about natural disasters. She has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on the history of thinking

about extinction of species but also of cultures and peoples. It's a review of vanished and

unnatural history of extinction by Sadiya Qureshi. Hello Lorraine and thank you so much for

joining me today. Hi, very nice to be with you.

So as you say in your piece, when we, well, not you, but people like me, think about large-scale catastrophes or extinction events, such as the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula

around 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, as it said. We think of those

sudden events. The impact was sudden, but the extinction event itself wasn't, was it? It wasn't

that 75% of life on earth was annihilated in an instant. No, I think our imaginary is very much

formed both by the very human disaster of nuclear weapons,

which is the analogy used indeed by the scientists who first interpreted that last most recent extension by the Yucatan asteroid, and also, of course, by cinematic

depictions, which of necessity, given the art form, collapse beginning, middle, and end into one

...