The papers blog is updated, only 32 hours or so late.

Allan Hazlett has allegedly created a map of the Midwest, though I don’t think it’s definitive. The odd thing about ‘Midwest’ is that everyone thinks it is closer to them than people from far away do. Us New Englanders think the Midwest starts around that part of 10th Avenue that Port Authority buses pull out onto. (I guess that’s a mild exaggeration, but you get the idea.) People from the north (like Allan, who’s from Michigan) think that the Midwest is centred around Chicago. People from further south may think that Oklahoma and Nebraska are part of the Midwest, though Allan clearly does not. I don’t know if this feature extends westward. Do Washingtonians think the Midwest extends as far as Montana?

We went through this before several times – see here and here and here, or, if you’d prefer the old blog with its comments, here, here and here.