Gaze at dreamy Jared and ponder evolutionary anthropology

LOCATION: GW Lisner Auditorium, 730 21st St TIME: Tomorrow (Thursday) , 6:30PM EQUIPMENT: Yourself, $15, PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED, copy of his most recent book "Collapse" for this academic sex-god to sign OPTIONAL: Lacy panties to throw on stage

I first discovered Jared Diamond my sophomore year in college; "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was fascinating, but my respect for the man's intellect deepened into a big ole crush, thanks to the jacket photograph on the back of "Why Sex is Fun"*, in which the fresh-faced Jared sported lovely cheekbones and an exuberant Jew-fro that scraped the borders of the photo's composition. Oh, he is beautiful, possessing of an ambitious and original intellect, enough of a bad-ass to hang out with obscure cannibal tribes in Papua New Guinea for 17 years (and get away with that hair-style), environmentally conscious, and mature enough to write about sex without being either prurient or musty...How can you not just, like, swoooon?

He's a marvellously lucid writer with a great touch for big ideas ("I've set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years"), and although the picture from a more recent biography suggests that the years have taken their toll on my icon, I'm standing by my favorite sexy anthropologist.

Click here for the link to the Lisner Auditorium event (with the phone # to call and register).

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*A book about the evolutionary anthropology of sex, which is probably the best cocktail-party conversation fodder I've ever encountered. Fun fact: Proclivity towards monogamy and proportionate testicle size in all primates are inversely correlated. So, for example, free-lovin' bonobos have gigantic testicles in comparison to their body weight, while harem-holdin' gorillas might have bulky brawn, but their balls are wee. This relationship makes perfect sense: if a female of the species is likely to have active sperm from a few different males inside her at once, it's in your interest to pump out lots so that your boys have a numerical advantage. But if you've got tight control over your harem, why bother wasting metabolical resources on maintaining a disproportionately large body organ? The primate homo sapiens sapiens, you'll be interested to hear, fits directly into the middle of this continuum, ni fish nor fowl: stymieing both Victorians and hipsters who like to rant about how monogamy is just not natural for our species.