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3 weird facts for your Christmas dinner conversations

Thomas Brown
2 min readDec 23, 2018

The USA is a big and weird place. There’s a lot to know. There’s a lot of strange and counter-intuitive facts about America most of the world doesn’t understand.

I’d wager most Americans don’t quite know these either. Here’s some unusual and true stuff to talk about at the Christmas dinner table.

Image courtesy of Milo Simmons.

The United States (well, North America) is not parallel to Europe. For some reason, people think that it’s a straight line from London to New York but the US is actually located farther south on the globe than Europe. It usually blows people’s mind to learn that New York City is technically farther south than Rome. The southern-most European capital (Valetta, Malta) doesn’t even reach as far south as the Texas/Oklahoma border, leaving another 800 miles (1280 km) to the southern tip of the US/Mexico border. So when Americans talk about how hot it gets in the American South, remember that Miami is about the same latitude as Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

America was designed to be combative. From top to bottom, our political system is designed to work against…

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