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From the New York Times :

ELMIRA, N.Y.—This small city in the state's Southern Tier was not the setting for fence painting or frog-jumping contests, and its river could never compare with the Mississippi. But that mattered none to Mark Twain, who spent many summers and wrote some of his most famous works here. … While so-called Twainiacs usually know of Elmira's influence, casual readers often associate the writer more with his childhood antics in Hannibal, Mo., or his permanent home in Hartford. But in the last few years, Elmira officials have begun considering how to attract thousands more tourists interested in Twain without disrupting the scholars of his work who already come here for the same thing he did, a quiet place to study and write. "There are all kinds of ideas now in the works," said Gretchen E. Sharlow, interim director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.

• "The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants," says the New Yorker in a piece on the history of height. And quickly: in less than two centuries, the average male has grown seven inches. Other European and Asian populations have grown at least a half-inch per decade in the last half-century, but, strangely, the United States hasn't budged. The importance of height in the study of sociology has, shall we say, grown in stature only recently, the New Yorker says. Now researchers are puzzling over a pituitary riddle: How can the United States be one of the wealthiest nations ever and yet fail, for fifty years now, to grow? The New Yorker article gets muddled at the end, taking a stab at blaming income inequality and fast food (and, odder yet, trying to tie them together). Until then, it makes you wonder why we grow. Full story
• So preschoolers are now using antidepressants, we learn from the Christian Science Monitor. It may be the ultimate validation of a pharmacological culture.
  Western society's overly medical approach to mental illness has relieved much previously unexplained suffering, but it has not made us "lastingly happier," said psychologist Martin Seligman in a recent interview with Edge.org. "We didn't develop interventions to make people happier; we developed interventions to make people less miserable," he said. Seligman is interested in the recovery or discovery of "eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness … the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation." After this promising setup, Seligman lapses into New Age blather, concluding, "The more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life." Interview

Related:
Pleasure discrepancies in southern and northern Europeans, from the New Statesman
Temptation in America, from the Los Angeles Times
Earlier:
Our inability to predict causes of happiness (third item)
Take Back Your Time Day

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