In "Tall Tales: New Approaches to the Standard of Living" (May 1999), the idea that standard of living can be measured by height seems a little far-fetched. While no one would doubt that height in slave children was indeed correlated to their lack of well being, how can this theory explain the height of Africans today? Peoples such as the Masai in Kenya and the Senegalese are exceptionally tall, though impoverished. And the Japanese, the shortest of any industrial people, were already among the longest-living group before they gained an average of 8 centimeters.

I am especially saddened to learn of Professor Andrew Bongiorno's death because, of all the fine teachers I had at Oberlin, he was my favorite. During my senior year I was fortunate enough to take two of his courses, the first in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the second in creative writing. He taught them as seminars in a room high up in Peters Hall. Using Dorothy Sayer's translation of La Divina Comedia and drawing upon his remarkable scholarship, Professor Bongiorno brought Dante and his vision of the world to life. He even looked like Dante. In the second course, he gave us weekly writing assignments, one in particular in which he sketched out a simple plot for a short story, and we students had to create characters and context for the plot.