Chris Natrop

“Midnight Traveler” tells the harrowing story of Afghani director Hassan Fazili and his family’s displacement as filmed on their cell phones.

66 million years ago, an asteroid caused Earth’s Fifth Extinction, destroying the dinosaurs and most other life forms. Now Earth is facing another extinction, as fish, plants and animals vanish forever. But this time, it’s not the asteroid, it’s us. This week, hundreds of people, both young and old, took to the streets in cities all over the world to begin weeks of protest called the Extinction Rebellion. In the natural course of evolution, the decline and disappearance of a life form takes thousands of years. In the course of a human lifetime, not even one species might disappear. But now, some 28,000 species are vanishing all of a sudden. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker magazine has written a book called “The Sixth Extinction.” She says, “Extinction rates are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times higher than what is known as the background extinction rate that has pertained over most of geological history.” In her words, “You should not be able to see all sorts of mammals -- to name just one group -- either going extinct or on the verge of extinction. And that is a tipoff that something very, very unusual, and I would add, very dangerous, is going on.” “We’re running geological history backwards. Fossil fuels that were created over the course of hundreds of millions of years buried a lot of carbon underground. We’re now combusting it, putting that carbon back into the atmosphere over a matter of centuries. So we’re taking a process that hundreds of millions of years to run in one direction and then, in a matter of centuries, running it in another direction.” We’ll hear what that means now and for the future of life as we know it.

This weekend, the 48th annual Santa Barbara Old-Time Fiddlers’ Festival features performances, jam sessions, workshops, and competitions at the Stow House in Goleta.

This week: engage in clean talk about dirty air; party like it's 1990 at CAAM's "Cross Colours" opening night; sip in the essence of old Hollywood; contemplate the complexity (and…

Getting into character and scaring people silly is one of Campbell Harmon's favorite things in life.

Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman climbs a tree, stops believing in God.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I am called courageous for doing something I had no choice but to do, and for doing something else I had no idea was risky in any way, so…

What’s the difference between a dramatic story and a play? That’s the question that nervously filled my mind with the first words of “How the light gets in” at Boston Court.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, “Talking to Strangers,” is out, while he’s hosting the podcast, “Revisionist History.”