The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.
by Jared Diamond
How the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism.
by Jared Diamond
Some written languages are a precise reflection of speech, while others, like english, are a complete mess. Is this alphabetical evolution? Or the unequal application of logic to literacy?
by Jared Diamond
Race based body chemistry makes no more sense than race based on looks, but you do get to move the membership around.
by Jared Diamond
When Columbus and his successors invaded the Americas, the most potent weapons they carried were germs. But why didn’t deadly disease flow the other way, from the New World to the Old?
by Jared Diamond
Once upon a time, all the fruits, nuts, and berries our gathering ancestors ate were wild. Someone, at some time, had to come up with the bright idea of crops.
by Jared Diamond
Why was it Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or the Middle East?
by Jared Diamond
Among world powers today, the Japanese are the most distinctive in their culture and environment. Japan’s rising dominance and touchy relations with its neighbors make it more important than ever to strip away myths and unearth the origins of the Japanese.
by Jared Diamond
Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.
