A new hire mentions she grew up outside St. Louis. Before anyone learns her last name, someone asks where she went to high school. She laughs like she’s answered it a hundred times. That’s because she has. These are the habits that mark someone as a Missouri kid, whether they notice them or not. 1….
Anders Hardware in Northport is run by the fifth generation of the same family, 117 years after it opened as a mercantile store in 1909. Big chains don’t get five generations out of one storefront. Alabama’s independent hardware stores kept doing the small, fiddly jobs long after Lowe’s and Home Depot decided those jobs weren’t…
Winning the Pennsylvania Lottery takes one lucky ticket. Collecting the money takes a lot more. These are the gut-wrenching lottery rules in Pennsylvania that winners find out about after they claim. Note: This is general information, not legal, financial, or tax advice. Lottery claim rules, withholding rates, and debt-intercept requirements are subject to change, so…
Think South Carolina and Georgia settled their shared border a century ago? The Supreme Court has had to step in more than once, over the exact same stretch of river. These are the arguments South Carolina and Georgia still haven’t let go of. 1. Who Grows the Most Peaches Georgia has marketed itself as the…
Think Floridians have made their peace with AI by now? The state’s top prosecutor hasn’t. Florida became the first state in the country to sue an AI giant outright, and it didn’t send a warning letter first. These are the signs Florida’s fear of AI is outrunning the technology. Note: This is general information, not…
More than 40,000 people flooded into Milan, Indiana, on a March night in 1954. At the time, the town’s population was about 1,150. The crowds came because the local high school team had just won the state title. Out-of-staters can’t quite understand why an entire state grinds to a stop for two teams almost nobody…
A phone’s turn-by-turn directions read Sepulveda Boulevard out loud in a flat robot voice. But it doesn’t land the way Los Angeles says it. Neither does the app’s version of half the state’s other Spanish-rooted street names. These are the California street names locals don’t say the correct way, let alone tourists. 1. Los Feliz…
Ask a Mississippian about their home state, and there’s a good chance they’ll have to correct at least one assumption. No, Mississippi isn’t landlocked. No, Elvis wasn’t born in Memphis. And no, the Mississippi River didn’t get its name from the state. Some things just shouldn’t have to be explained this many times. 1. Mississippi’s…
Forty-two percent of the parishes in Ohio’s Cleveland Catholic Diocese were already running a deficit before a single closure went on paper. That was true back in 2009, years before many Ohioans noticed the pews were emptier. Several other Ohio traditions faded the same way. These are the Ohio traditions that have all but disappeared…
Think a Friday night in small-town Texas means a couple hundred folding chairs and a scoreboard nobody quite trusts? Tell that to Aledo, where a stadium built to hold 9,155 people fills up many weeks in a town of about 7,100. That’s not the exception. These are the Friday night traditions Texas towns take far…
