Why Europeans are getting taller —and Americans aren’t.

New Yorker -   The first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, was a giant for his time, towering well over six feet when he was anointed on Christmas Day, in the year 800. The moment marked a high point, at least in terms of height. For centuries afterward, Europeans got shorter and shorter, defying the common perception that humans have been on a steady ascent since antiquity. A thousand years or so after Charlemagne’s death, Europeans were getting taller again, but they were still three inches shorter than their white counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic—and even shorter than the men of the northern Cheyenne.

The New Yorker’s Burkhard Bilger examined the history of height in the spring of 2004, by which time the Dutch, formerly the shortest residents of Europe, had surpassed Americans to become the tallest people in the world. (Dutchmen averaged six feet one, while their female compatriots measured five feet eight.) With height comes great advantages: higher salaries, more romantic opportunities, and, if you’re in the U.S., better odds of reaching the White House, where occupants have overwhelmingly stood above average size. These days, Brady Brickner-Wood reported last week, height anxiety causes countless men to lie about their stature on dating apps, and has led to an N.B.A. crackdown on similar behavior by recruits.

The highs and lows of human height are influenced by obvious factors—diet, for starters—but also by more surprising variables, including weather and even a country’s political system. Still, our species’s upward mobility is ultimately limited, no matter how much we optimize. “We will not go through the ceiling,” a pediatrician tells Bilger about the Dutch. “But it is possible that we will grow another ten centimetres.”