Jared Diamond doesn't use a computer. He relies “completely” on his secretary and on his wife for “anything” requiring one, as he puts it. Diamond also confesses that he lacks the ability to turn on his “home television set” and can “do only the simplest things” with his newly acquired iPhone. “Whenever friends have shown me how to use a computer, they turn it on and something goes wrong,” Diamond once explained to an aghast reporter. “I just get frustrated.”
Such incapacities haven't held Diamond back. Just the opposite. He has spent much of his career explaining and championing the “modern ‘Stone Age' peoples,” as he calls them—cultures reliant on tools and practices dating back thousands of years. The most “vivid part of my life,” Diamond has written, was spent in “technologically primitive human societies,” especially the “intact” societies of New Guinea, where Diamond worked for decades studying birds. It was on one such ornithological trip in the 1970s that Diamond encountered a “remarkable” Papua New Guinean named Yali. Diamond met him by chance on a beach, the two walked together for an hour, and Yali—with a “penetrating glance of his flashing eyes”—asked a big question: Why did whites have so much and New Guineans so little?
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