• Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, is being sued by two Papua, New Guinea, men who claim the award-winning science writer lied about their lives to prove that tribal culture is violent.
• Diamond used the men’s story to illustrate a story from his own life, about how his father-in-law had the opportunity to kill the man responsible for murdering his family in a Polish prison camp during World War II. Instead of killing the man, Diamond’s father-in-law turned him into police, who released him a year later. Apparently Diamond’s father-in-law regretted for the rest of his life that he did not take violent revenge, and it weighed on his conscience.
• But the New Guineans, Diamond claims, have no such neuroses because unlike civilized European guys they exact violent revenge on each other all the time.

Definitely a big tarnish on Diamond’s work.