2 New Yorker articles +

[fiefoe]

"The Height Gap" / Burkhard Bilger (2004-04-05)

• A survey of some six thousand adolescents in the 1960s showed that the tallest boys were the first to get dates. The only ones more successful were those who got to choose their own clothes.
• In Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds.
• The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years.
  

"Getting There" / Nick Paumgarten (2006-04-24)

• He tended to speak in the formal, euphemistic manner of a police officer testifying in court.
• geographic analysts, whose job is to go onto the roads to make sure everything that it says about those roads is true—to check the old routes and record the new ones. The practice is called ground-truthing.
• Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile,
• For the past twenty-five years, scholarly discussion of cartography has been dominated by “critical geography,” what you might call a post-structuralist approach to map reading.
• "These are the maps we know. You see not just the single route but the layout of all the routes within the area, with some differentiation in quality. And it is up to the traveller to make choices about which route to take. This kind of map comes into common use in the eighteenth century. It’s broadly associated with greater freedom of movement."
  

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Apparently "Love and Other Near-Death Experiences" is Mil Millington's third novel, but that third-time charm skipped out of town this time. Or maybe I just miss his erstwhile justly famous exuberantly confrontational verbiage.
__ Body language is full of irregular verbs.
__ "I'd prefer to be known as 'rich'."
__ massive elegance

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