Events & Calendars "Point/Counterpoint: Progressing Our Way to Mass Extinction?"

Each event in the Point/Counterpoint conversation series features an Amherst College professor and guests engaging in thoughtful discussion and attempting to bridge the growing ideological divide in our nation. Series information is available on the Amherst College website.

Join Professor Lawrence Douglas and environmentalist author Elizabeth Kolbert for a discussion on "Progressing Our Way to Mass Extinction?" Q&A will follow, and books will be available for purchase through Amherst Books.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the 2019 recipient of the Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square. Her most recent book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, on mass extinctions past and present, began as an article for The New Yorker, was one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2014, and won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2015.

Lawrence Douglas is a professor in the Amherst College Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought. He is the author of six books, including The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial and the upcoming Will He Go?, a discussion of the potential legal implications of a refusal by President Trump to acknowledge electoral defeat in 2020.

This series is based on a course of the same name. The course and associated event series received special funding through a generous gift from 36 members of the 50th Reunion Class of 1970.