It’s Zach Kanin week here at mental_floss, and I’m so excited about it, I’m going to lock the Caps and type that all over again: IT’S ZACH KANIN WEEK HERE AT MENTAL_FLOSS!

Zach’s responsible for many of the hilarious cartoons over at The New Yorker and has a funtabulous new book out called The Short Book: Tall Stories, Freakish Facts, & the Long & Short of Being Small in a Great Big World.

If you’re short, if you’re friends with someone short, married to someone short, in love with someone short, envious of someone short, sympathetic to someone short, or just plain short on time, you really want to pick up a copy of this little gem, right over here. Tomorrow, Zach will be sending us our own cartoon for the caption contest, which he’ll personally judge. And then Thursday, well, you don’t even wanna know what’s coming Thursday…

Look, I’m so excited about it, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, a little background on the little man: in addition to working for The New Yorker, at 5’ 3”, Zach was the shortest president ever of The Harvard Lampoon.

And now, the interview! Click on through to find out how Zach came up with the idea for his book and other fun things like why Romans used to starve children and constrict their growth. And for more great Kanin cartoons, check out this page at the Cartoon Bank.

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It’s a new year, so I thought I’d start by introducing a new feature I’m calling Creatively Speaking, in which I interview all sorts of artists for a first-hand look at how they go about creating their work.

Let’s kick it off here with Isobella Jade, who is getting national attention these days as the model who wrote a memoir without the use of computer. (Let me clarify: without the use of her own computer.) Her new book, Almost 5’4”, which chronicles her experiences as a short woman trying to break into the modeling business, was written almost entirely in an Apple store in—where else?—the Big Apple.

It may very well be the start of a new breed: books written in public spaces on public computers. Follow the jump for my exclusive interview with Jade and find out exactly how she did it. And watch for the next installment of Creatively Speaking coming real soon.

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