Some materials of note....

It has been a while since I have posted anything to the MIG blog so I thought with the summer coming I would try to more regularly post items of interest to members. While the following items have been circulating on the web, I thought I would link some of them together here:

• Jared Diamond's piece 'Vengeance is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?' in the 21 April 2008 issue of New Yorker has generated some interesting buzz about Papua New Guinea. Alex Golub has usefully commented on the piece in Savage Minds.

• Interesting video from CBS 60 Minutes, regrettably called "Garden of Eden," of an area in the Foja Mountains of Indonesian Papua which Bruce Beehler (ornithologist, tropical VP of Melanesia Center for Biodiversity Conservation, Conservation International) is working to study and save from human encroachment. The film shows some remarkable images of birds of paradise, and bower birds. An article by Beehler 'The Fojha Mountains of Indonesia: Exploring the Lost World' gives some of the context of the trip and research.
  

• In the March 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine David Mason has a new short story entitled 'The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace', which imagines Wallace's specimen collecting and musings after sending his essay 'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type' to Darwin.