We only talk about short stature in a positive light once every four years, when Simone Biles dazzles us in a leotard. That has left the many advantages enjoyed by short people underappreciated. On average, short people live longer and have fewer incidences of cancer. One theory suggests this is the case because with fewer cells there is less likelihood that one goes wrong. I’d take that over dunking a basketball any day.
The short are also inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of eight billion. Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash).
Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, oceans from pole to pole were covered with a blanket of ice a kilometer or so thick. Scientists call this “snowball Earth.”
Some early animals managed to endure this frigid era from roughly 720 million to 580 million years ago, but they had their work cut out for them. Despite their valiant successes, the repeated expansion and contraction of giant ice sheets pulverized the hardy extremophiles’ remains, leaving almost no trace of them in the fossil record and scientists with little to no idea of how they managed to survive.
Human civilization had a good understanding of how sex and reproduction worked long before the microscope was invented. But it wasn't until the 17th century that anyone knew what sperm actually were, or were aware of their strange appearance. And when sperm finally were formally discovered, by Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, he was so uncomfortable he wished he could unsee what he'd just observed.
This past spring, the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein taught his final two classes at the New School for Social Research, in New York, where he had been a professor since 1989. One was a course on American pragmatism, the tradition to which his own work belongs. The other was a seminar on Hannah Arendt, who, late in her life, was Bernstein’s friend.
Years ago, when I got my Ph.D., I was Bernstein’s student. I still am, in a way. And so I asked him if I could audit the class on Arendt and write about it. He said that he didn’t like passive auditors—I would have to participate fully. That requirement struck me as a good description of what Bernstein had done all his life.
This is one reason why I recently became interested in learning how to cry on command. The ability to produce tears on demand is a critical part of the professional actor’s playbook. When the script calls for crying, you need to be able to do it, even if you might not feel particularly sad at that moment. I aspired to this level of control over my own mind and body. I wanted to see my tears as a choice, rather than just an involuntary emotional reaction—and I wondered whether, by gaining mastery over my tear ducts, I might also learn how to shut them off at will.
The anonymous setting of Mohsin Hamid’s 2022 novel The Last White Man brings with it a certain comfort. The British Pakistani author’s lack of specificity is purposeful: dropped into a nameless town in an unknown country, the reader has no cultural touchstones to grab onto, no societal baggage to carry. The blank slate leaves just one aspect to focus on, which Hamid homes in on with his first line: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” This succinct statement of fact — a rarity in the novel — establishes the binary law of the land: you’re either white or dark, no in-between.
Spotswood allows his heroines to shine. Lillian, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, is shown in moments of strength and weakness. Will, her “leg-woman” and “occasional browbeater,” proves a force to be reckoned with. The dialogue crackles, the mysteries intrigue and there is an abundance of wit and grit. This is a rollicking ride with a class double-act.
“Love and Rockets” is about many things, but taken altogether, it’s about time — about its passage and the ways it whittles us into who we are in the present. The brothers’ singular achievement is that four decades out, their narratives continue to beguile. The comics may retain echoes of the past, but their stories — full of yearning and ache — remain utterly, absorbingly timeless.