Last week Pete Hegseth dressed down America’s generals and admirals saying their weight and height will now be measured twice a year: “Today, at my direction, every member of the joint force, at every rank, is required … [to] meet height and weight requirements twice a year every year.”
The weight part I get: obesity in the military is a big recruiting problem which makes it a national security issue.
But the height part is odd because…you can’t really do much about how tall you are. True, you can have your legs stretched surgically, at great pain and cost. And while carrying too many pounds is a bad look, is carrying too many inches the same? Or does carrying too few inches make you unacceptable? The jury’s still out on whether more weight is bad and more height is good.
Traditionally, of course, we looked up to tall men and they got all the breaks: more power, better jobs, more attractive partners, more confidence, longer lives. But that’s changing.
Back in 1960, you had to be 5’8” in order to even try to be a Toronto firefighter. Now, there are no height requirements at all. In the early 1970s, Toronto police had to be at least 5’10”. That fell to 5’8” for men today and 5’4” for women.
For decades, the U.S. Army insisted male recruits be at least 5’ and females 4’10”. But this year, while the basic minimum for men remains at 5’, women can be 4’8” and officers, 4’10”. In other words, U.S. military leaders can make up for their lack of height in other ways, like more brains.
This lowering (or is it raising?) of height standards might be because there are now firewomen as well as firemen and fisherwomen as well as fishermen – and women are generally 5 inches shorter than men.
So I’m not sure what 5-star General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will do when he goes in for his height-weight test in March and is told that he’s now 5’11” when for decades he was one inch taller.
I’ve got to believe the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a pretty competitive place and you wouldn’t want your colleagues to know you failed your height test lest they turn into rivals.
General Caine, who is 57 and nicknamed “Raisin”, may react the way Jean and I did this summer when we went in for our bone density tests. Old people get their bones tested for how hard and durable they are because they can snap like matchsticks when you age, and especially when you fall.
Jean, who is 83, and I, who am 76, had been happily 5’3” since we met 35 years ago. But we were shocked when the technician measured our heights and said we were each 5’2”. We had both shrunk by an inch, and as Jean the physician noted, for sure it was all above the waist because that’s how people shrink into little bent old people when they grow very old. The good news was, we don’t have osteoporosis.
But General Caine can feel good about himself too. Lots of military and political leaders,good and evil, have been small, from Napoleon and Churchill, who were 5’6”, to Lenin who was 5’5”, Putin, 5’7”, and Stalin, 5’5”.
Meanwhile…
1. Contrarians awake! The world is not what we think: For one, great hype isn’t good medicine. Next, nice guys do (kind of) finish last. Next, some great psychological truths (listening to Mozart makes you smarter; thinking about money makes you more selfish, etc.) are false. Next, around the world 20% of adults are ‘switching religions’. Not dropping out of religion, but changing their faith. Finally, Shackleton’s expedition was doomed from the start, and Shackleton knew it.
2. More on AI tips. Instagram is awash with how to write AI prompts to cut your work gargantuanly and boost your income/power/happiness by intergalactic quantums. But amidst the swill are prompts you can actually benefit from, like making air travel faster and cheaper, to determining if a picture or video is a deepfake and so much more, including accessing any article behind a paywall.
If you don’t use AI yet, this is an easy place to start. Just sign on for Chat GPT or Perplexity, and start doing prompts, i.e. asking questions.
3. How tech makes having an affair tricky. As with all things tech, what’s good for most of us is terrible for some of us. It wasn’t technology that made the Coldplay Cammake us cringe. But with infidelity on the rise, new technologies make it easier to hide, likeDailyNewsTalk, which looks like a news site, but is actually a “vault” app. As The Times of London notes: “It displays real news articles from legitimate sources and notifies you of breaking news. But hidden behind the innocent exterior lies a comprehensive cheating platform.” Then there’s Calculator Pro+, and CoverMe.
But there are also apps that expose cheating: like Cheaterbuster, Catch Your Partner Cheating, and Cheater Search.
Then again, you can always lead a virtuous life. Or write a book about it.
4. People without precedent. 9,497 of the 9,500 prior generations of humans have never experienced Earth as a Pale Blue Dot. This essay, sourced by our friends at The Browser, unpacks just how different we are from every other generation in the past.
And speaking of differences, Dambisa Moyo asks: How much financial speculation can thereal economy stand?
5. Life in the air. First, what countries have the most airports? Next, you don’t ever want a ‘travel day’ like James Ehnes’. Plus, the birds that fly into hurricanes. Plus, the loudest sound the earth has ever made…and hey, even I can do this.
6. How to talk to terrorists. This should be a life skill, taught not only in diplomatic academies, but universities. This Guardian piece, published in 2014, doesn’t feel dated because it deals with a universal subject. It doesn’t deal with Hamas and their predations, but with the most successful terrorists of all time: the IRA in Ireland.
7. How to keep your sense of wonder. It, too, is definitely a life skill, but we lose it when we leave childhood. Here’s how to get it back. Vital to re-learn as life gets less wonderful as time clicks by.
8. What’s in the water in Newfoundland… that it breeds such marvelous storytellers? Like the legendary printmaker David Blackwood (“Ink as dark as the deep”)whose big retrospective show opens next week at the Art Gallery of Ontario…and the legendary innkeeper, Zita Cobb, who figured out that Fogo Island’s greatest asset is itsstorytellers.
9. Quick, name your favourite Irish-Syrian novelist. This is why we go to festivals, not just to see our favourite stars, but to discover new ones we’ve never heard of. The 5th edition of the Kardamyli Festival took place last week in Greece and not only were our fave writers like Rory Stewart and Michela Wrong there. But so was Ferdia Lennon, the Irish-Syrian writer whose contemporary novel set in 415 BCE about the war between Athens and Sparta, is a tragedy drenched in comedy. He reads from Glorious Exploits here.
10. Katherine Rundell is the new J.K. Rowling. Indeed, her franchise of Young Adult fantasy novels, led by Impossible Creatures, could grow bigger than Rowling’s, which is the best-selling book series in history. How so? Walt Disney has just bought the movie rights to her first two novel