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I thought a lot about those words as I wondered, for weeks, what made the guy so popular in the state of my birth. The "reputation" to which Shorty was alluding—the cast of an MTV reality series, the political corruption steeped in public officials' personal dilemmas, the toll booths and smokestacks and highways in the opening credits of The Sopranos—has seeped so much into the country's consciousness that New Jersey subsists, beyond its borders, as nothing more than a caricature built of its worst attributes. The nation lauds Springsteen and tolerates the movie Garden State, and that's about it.But for those born and bred here, this land also breeds a particular nostalgia. While it's a place that many natives try to flee, it's also one that anticipates their return, always with the absence of judgment or ridicule: Being in New Jersey is the only spot one can talk about New Jersey without the constant obligation to defend it. I went to college in Boston, and in the four years I spent in the city, I recognized one identifiable difference between Massachusetts and where I grew up: People from Massachusetts share the belief, unprompted, that where they live is indisputably the best; people from New Jersey, in contrast, are forced into that same philosophy from a responsive camaraderie, a universal attitude that values the eccentricities the outsiders ridicule. The effect of the feeling is easy to summarize: It produces one big fucking party.Related: Motherboard wonders why we aren't spending more money on exoskeleton technology.
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