Archive

The appeal of New Jersey is that is has “the excitement and voltage of New York with some of the Zeitgeist of Mayberry” — in other words, New Jersey is worldly “like its much bigger neighbor, but with more regular guys, less elegance” and therefore more appealing.

The state of Arizona resisted adopting Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday years after most other states embraced it. The sheriff in its largest county forces inmates to wear pink underwear, apparently to assault their masculinity. Residents may take guns almost anywhere, but they may not cut down a cactus. The rest of the nation may scoff or grumble, but Arizona, one of the last truly independent Western outposts, carries on. Now, after passing the nation’s toughest immigration law, one that gives the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being here illegally, the state finds itself in perhaps the harshest spotlight in a decade.