“America Is the Philadelphia of the World”

That’s what this guy tweeted last week. More broadly, it reflects an apparently rampant, and usually non-sensical cultural habit: amusing ourselves with the geographical formula “X is the Y of Z.” As in, “Russia is the Florida of Europe” and “Scranton is the El Dorado of Middle Class America.” For your viewing pleasure, a computer programmer has created a global map documenting every single such simile he could get his hands on. [Atlantic Cities]