I don't hold any particular brief for Chicago. My denomination has its headquarters, main 4-year college, and seminary there (North Park), so I have lots of friends who are attached to the place. I've been there, in-and-out.
It was "Laconia" that caught my eye when I clicked through the Maggie's link. Not many famous people from NH Lakes Region, though a lot spend their summers there.
The article about how "elite" various cities are is interesting.
The only time I lived in Chicago, instead of a suburb, I stayed in a neighborhood that was a little island between the Latin Kings and the Latin Disciples. The block's addict would steal from garages and sell the contents door to door. I bought a hood lock--just in time, because the next day somebody tried to steal the battery.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's just me, but I never got attached to the city.
Chicago, and Illinois, seem to be high on the "corruption" list.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the Laconia that Aaron Renn refers to is NOT in New Hampshire, but in Indiana. Consider Manhattan Institute information on Aaron Renn:
ReplyDeleteAaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. His perspectives on urban issues are regularly cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, The Economist, Daily Telegraph, and other international media.
Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991. He has created several widely used open-source software packages, including the only program for recovering data from corrupted gzip backups. In 1998, Renn launched one of the nation’s first blogs, the Weekly Breakdown, to cover the Chicago Transit Authority.
Given his Midwest, Indiana University background, I suspect that Aaron Renn is from Laconia, Indiana, a town which makes the New Hampshire Laconia positively big city by comparison.