Today’s Big Story

Coming Up Short

As online dating adopts height filters, what are short kings supposed to do?

Memes are rarely ever wrong. And that “Looking for a guy in finance, six-five, blue eyes …” might’ve just been predicting where online dating was headed. Because suddenly, sussing out a romantic partner’s actual height has become a dating app obsession.

And that obsession is often fueled by a collective desire, often among heterosexual women, to find a partner who’s over six feet tall. Seeing a “height requirement” on daters’ online profiles is now par for the course; a former product manager for Bumble told The Wall Street Journal, that most women on the platform set a baseline height of six feet for prospective male partners.

Earlier this summer, Tinder started testing a new feature that allows people who pay for the app to filter potential matches based on height—a move that's sparked discussion online about dating discrimination. And understandably, short kings everywhere are up in arms. The feature might be new for Tinder, but it’s already part of other dating apps, like Hinge and Bumble, which have long offered height filters for paying users.

“The way that I see six feet is that it's one of these status markers,” says Lana Li, who writes about the data of dating. She told GQ so much of dating is tied to ego. “So we really treat the dating process, unfortunately, often as a way to try to calibrate: ‘Where do I fall?’ You try to figure out how ‘valuable’ you are by how high of a status of a mate that you can attract.”

While anyone below six feet may be excluded from the feeds of otherwise compatible matches, this new sorting system feels most arbitrary to those who are five-eleven. On a Reddit subthread entitled “sigh…being 5’11” is brutal in this dating economy,” one user shared, in their experience, how much being six feet appears to matter on the apps: “I'm just over 6’ and I used to put 5’13” in my bio like 2 years ago. I noticed a significant increase in matches when I changed to just 6’ 🙃.”

These filters are just one unfortunate aspect of an already fraught online dating scene. There’s certainly widespread suspicion that people are fudging details on the apps to stand out within the algorithm. And if it’s taken for granted that everyone is stretching the truth, prospective daters must adjust their expectations accordingly. Therefore, guys who say that they’re five-eleven are often assumed to be fibbing. It’s a vicious cycle.

White House Fires CDC Director

Susan Monarez was said to have refused to adopt RFK Jr.’s stance on vaccination policy

The White House on Wednesday fired Susan Monarez as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a tense confrontation in which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to remove her from her position and she refused to resign. Dr. Monarez, an infectious disease researcher, was sworn in just a month ago by Kennedy, but had clashed with the secretary over vaccine policy. Her lawyers accused RFK Jr. of “weaponizing public health for political gain” and “putting millions of American lives at risk” by purging health officials from government.

Four other high-profile CDC officials quit en masse, apparently in frustration over vaccine policy and Kennedy’s leadership. Demetre Daskalakis, who was director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on X that recent policy changes threatened lives and there had been an “intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines.” Earlier on Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved new COVID vaccines while limiting who could receive them. The vaccines will be available for all seniors, but younger adults and children without underlying health conditions will be excluded.

Top health experts described the loss of senior staffers as “reckless,” a “disaster,” and ruinous to evidence-based public health policy—leaving the country more vulnerable. CNN reports that the latest drama at the CDC follows an attack by a gunman on the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, which killed a police officer. The horror further fractured morale at an agency reeling from mass layoffs by RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.

J.Crew’s AI Fiasco

What the brand’s ad controversy reveals about brand authenticity and transparency

Will AI slop become the new Photoshop fail? It seems the AI model that shimmied her way into the pages of Vogue last month has referred her friends from the Uncanny Valley to J.Crew. Earlier this week, popular style Substack Blackbird Spyplane published an investigation into a series of nostalgic images recently posted to J.Crew’s Instagram page. Promoting a collaboration with Vans, the images appear normal, referencing the throwback imagery memorialized on well-known accounts like lostjcrew. But upon further inspection, the folks over at Blackbird identified several quirks that suggest the campaign photos are actually AI-generated.

The Blackbird crew pointed out strange details such as the model’s “right foot appears to be bending backward underneath him at a 90-degree angle. Like, somehow we’re looking at the heel of the shoe? Either that or the shoe has morphed into a laceless slip-on.” Commenters noticed, too. One wrote, “I don’t know what’s worse—that you used AI to regurge your own aesthetic in the first place, or that once you did, you couldn’t even be bothered to pay a retoucher to fix the glitches.”

The news ricocheted around the style world and J.Crew updated the Instagram posts to include the credit “Digital art by: @samfinn.studio.” While AI is increasingly pervasive in advertising—more and more brands are deploying the tool at some stage of the creative process—Ad Age reports that public reception remains frosty. Of course, the feelings are influenced by the product category, some experts said. It can be an issue “particularly in fashion or beauty where authenticity, product fidelity and the model itself come under much higher scrutiny in terms of ‘Is that a real person showing that product?’ and ‘Is that really the product?” he said, adding that such categories have “higher standards and thresholds for the consumer to feel safe and good about the brands’ expression.”

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