IN THE MAIL: Short: Walking Tall When You’re Not Tall At All by John Schwartz.  Speaking as a borderline short person (I’ve been called dapper, which is code for short-and-wears-a-suit), I thought this book was charming, but what’s best is how it subtly undercuts the entire grievance industry.  If even the height-and-income studies have been hyped, imagine the data distortion underway in more politicized fields.  Says Schwartz in an interview:

I didn’t find any studies that really supported the idea that being short was a disadvantage—even those much-publicized studies that seem to say small people earn less than taller folks. Beyond that, I knew that science can be manipulated and misused, but even I was surprised to see how far people stretched it. I spoke with David Sandberg, a researcher whose groundbreaking work showed that the overwhelming majority of short kids actually cope pretty well with being small. His studies showed that their height doesn’t cause them deep psychological stress, and in fact he found that other kids did not see them in a demeaning way. … Sandberg was startled to find that his work was being cited to the FDA to support the notion that small kids do have big problems!