The New Yorker and Diamond Respond
So the battle is joined:
“The complaint has no merit at all,” Jared Diamond tells Science magazine in an exclusive interview published today, referring to the $10 million lawsuit filed against him and The New Yorker, for his April 2008 piece on a blood feud in Papua New Guinea.
The Science story is only available to subscribers, or those with online access, but the author, Michael Balter, has excerpts on his blog, including this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick:
It appears that The New Yorker and Jared Diamond are the subject of an unfair and, frankly, mystifying barrage of accusations.
He’s talking to you, Rhonda Shearer, and to a lesser extent, you guys over at Savage Minds. Time to double-down?
It seems the gamblers here are Diamond and the New Yorker- the house, in this case ‘the facts’, are stacked against them. Many individuals are disappointed by the performance of Diamond and the New Yorker. The ‘mystifying’ aspect of their gamble here is the risk they took by forgoing careful and appropriate fact checking.