Tina Brown's Daily Beast is always embarking on strange, sensationalistic "studies" that pronounce Emerson dangerous, or BC delicious. We often question their results, but this time around they might have gotten one thing right: Providence is pretty crazy.
The Beast recently ranked America's "craziest" cities, using not Girls Gone Wild per capita but psychiatrists per capita, stress levels, eccentricity, and drinking levels. Boston's sobriety may have killed us; we ended up a relatively tame #31 on the list, our ranking boosted in part by the book made of human skin that lives at the Athenaeum (for serious).
But Little Rhodie rose near the top, with Providence's number of shrinks per head (teehee) and massive amounts of drinking pulling the tiny town ahead of Las Vegas, New Orleans, Austin, and other purportedly odd cities to win the bronze medal of weirditude. Achievements like beadmaking and lighting water on fire may have helped as well.
We buy Providence at #3, and San Francisco at #2, but we're not so sure the craziest city in the country is... uh... Cincinnati? Hmm. [Daily Beast]
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