A colleague recently tipped me to a Bloomberg Media article about radical cartography, focusing on an interview with Bill Rankin. Before I moved to Michigan from Tennessee, I would never have considered that some people and agencies would consider the latter to be a part of the Midwest. According to Rankin’s aggregate map (below), the region stretches from Ohio to the Rockies, though I don’t know if people who live in the Plains region universally consider their states as “Midwestern.”

In my mind’s eye, I consider Pittsburgh to be the Eastern gate into the Midwest region from Appalachia, which separates the East and Mid-Atlantic from the Midwest and South. Of course, having lived in Syracuse for several years, I consider Western New York to be part of the Midwest, too, and it barely even registers on Rankin’s rendering.

Huh.