I HAVE NOW BEEN MEASURING CELEBRITIES ON THE STEPS OF THE MET GALA, using the same forensic image analysis techniques as intelligence agencies, for two weeks.
(You can read about why I'm doing it here, about the specifics of the technique here, and the first part of the Met Gala analysis here.)
I went into it thinking it would be a simple examination of the celebrity industrial complex, and its tendency to exaggerate everything. Which is why I focused on men, who seemed more likely to lie. Instead I learned many things about life, about myself, and about the nature of human dishonesty.
This time I thought I'd try to guess, from looking at images, how tall someone was before checking using the techniques outlined here. It's impossible. I can tell nothing. Body shape makes tiny people look tall, and tall people look tiny. Having said that, I did develop a system based on my measurements, a rule of thumb for estimating actual celebrity heights from their internet-listed height.
If it says someone is 5-foot-4, they are 5-foot or under.
If it says someone is 5-foot-7, they are 5-foot-4.
If it says someone is 5-foot-10, they are 5-foot-7.
If it says someone is 6-foot or 6-foot-1, they are 5-foot-11. (Nobody can resist that rounding up.)
Here, anyway, is how all that applies to Rami Malek, Bradley Cooper, Brooklyn Beckham, Justin Bieber, George Clooney and Sean Combs. I also did Kim Kardashian, just because she was once described to me as unbelievably tiny, and there was a good image from which to measure her.
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First, a reminder that this is not science. Second, I think I got pretty good at these measurements. But I also never want to measure anything ever again. Let's do it in listed-height order.
Kim Kardashian is listed at 5-foot-2. She is, in fact, 4-foot-11 in heels, so probably 4-foot-9 without them. This makes her the smallest celebrity we have measured.
Rami Malek, whom I measured just because he stood in a perfect position and why not, is listed at 5-foot-7. He is, in fact, 5-foot-4.
Justin Bieber is listed at 5-foot-9. But he's also 5-foot-4. (I checked this one many times.)
Brooklyn Beckham is listed at 5-foot-10. And he is, in fact, 5-foot-10. If anything, slightly taller. That felt oddly poignant.
Sean Combs, who is listed at 5-foot-10, is actually 5-foot-7.
George Clooney, who is reputed to be 5-foot-11, is also 5-foot-7.
And finally, Bradley Cooper, who is listed at 6-foot-1, is 5-foot-11.
By the end, I felt like those referees who stand oddly alert in some little room fervently applying video assistant referee, or VAR, lines to World Cup matches. They haven't made the game better or fairer. They've just made a new and different genre of mistakes.
When treasure hunters seek shipwrecks, they look for straight lines, because nature never makes them, only human beings. So next week, for the final part of this series on measuring idiotic things, I'll be applying new tools to a very new kind of challenge.
RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.