This 12 months, Madison (and the remainder of Dane County) earns the No. 1 place among the 300 greatest U.S. metropolitan areas in our 1996 Best Places to Live in America rating. It snagged the highest spot as a result of apparently somebody forgot to tell the oldsters in Madison that life is supposed to be stuffed with commerce-offs. The 390,300 residents of Dane County, eighty miles west of Milwaukee in south-central Wisconsin, have a vibrant economy with plentiful jobs, very good well being care and a variety of cultural activities normally associated with cities twice as big.
More than 90{c2a201166b47cab960dfed11c94bea9dd7ab5be12aca7e2c8909c74f39e3f8a1} of Madisonians rated their quality of life good or excellent in a recent survey. Since the cosmopolitan Madison space — the city accounts for about half the county’s inhabitants — is surrounded by Wisconsin’s everpresent dairy farms, it seems only proper to toast 1996’s No. 1 big cheese with a wedge of aged Wisconsin cheddar. Second, given the nichification of everything, whether by subject matter or sensibility, I am not surprised that the New York Times is finding it tough to sustain an opinion part purporting to represent all sides of a problem. This isn’t the pre-Internet period, when …