Thirteen-year old girls storming the Bastille.

I wanted this blog to function as a place I could put links to items I barely had time to mention in lecture. Here is a great example, a fascinating article from the New Yorker on changes in human height, subtitled 'Why Europeans are getting taller and taller—and Americans aren’t.' There is some great writing here and some wonderful images:

"Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. “They didn’t look like Errol Flynn and Alan Hale,” the economist Robert Fogel told me. “They looked like thirteen-year-old girls.”