{"id":833,"date":"2009-08-08T16:21:12","date_gmt":"2009-08-08T20:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=833"},"modified":"2009-08-08T16:24:06","modified_gmt":"2009-08-08T20:24:06","slug":"the-biggest-american-place-youve-never-been","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=833","title":{"rendered":"The Biggest American Place You&#8217;ve Never Been"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m still too groggy to tackle anything cerebral in this space (and it&#8217;s uncouth to let your nose drip down into your expensive buckling-spring keyboard) but this self-directed question came up while I was pondering the life I had documented versus the life I remembered: <em>What was the largest American city I had never set foot in?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>My guess going in was Minneapolis\/St. Paul, but I was wrong, and wrong by a <em>lot<\/em>. Working from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population\">this list of the largest American cities by population<\/a>, I discovered that the most populous American city I had never visited was&#8230;Jacksonville, Florida.<\/p>\n<p>WTF?<\/p>\n<p>Jacksonville is not only larger than either Minneapolis or St. Paul, it&#8217;s larger than both of them put together, by almost 150,000 people. I didn&#8217;t know that. Nor did I think that Indianapolis was as big as it is (800,000) nor Pittsburgh as small (310,000).<\/p>\n<p>My top three were Jacksonville, Memphis, and El Paso, assuming you don&#8217;t treat Minneapolis and St. Paul as a unit. (In practical terms, most people do.) If you do consider them as a unit, the Twin Cities come in third, narrowly ahead of El Paso. Of the top 100 cities listed, I had visited 66. I guess I&#8217;m not as much of a hermit as I thought I was, though I&#8217;ll admit it took me 57 years to get there.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an interesting exercise, and if any of you are inclined to do the test yourself, I&#8217;d be interested in seeing your results in the comments. Now I need to pop another decongestant and lie down again, so that I can get back to real work (of which there is much) tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m still too groggy to tackle anything cerebral in this space (and it&#8217;s uncouth to let your nose drip down into your expensive buckling-spring keyboard) but this self-directed question came up while I was pondering the life I had documented versus the life I remembered: What was the largest American city I had never set [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[78],"class_list":["post-833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideasandanalysis","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=833"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":836,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions\/836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}