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Lee Siegel, a visiting professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, penned a January 24 article in the Wall Street Journal saluting the beauty, diversity, and artistic abundance of--yes--New Jersey.

In "The Hidden State of Culture," Siegel calls New Jersey's stark contrasts and diversity "the source of Jersey's remarkable harvest of talent." Siegel peers beyond common notions of the state as littered with industry, gangsters, and suburban sprawl and celebrates Jersey's "fractured personality" along with the numerous artistic talents who call the Garden State home.

As of January 26, the article was the fifth-most emailed on the Wall Street Journal's website.

"No place has New Jersey's tightly packed diversity, its quick changes from urban to country, from mountains to coast, from gritty to gorgeous," Siegel writes. "New Jersey's small size has a lot to do with both its much-inflated deficiencies and its virtues. A lot is packed into limited territory. Urban squalor is squeezed up against dairy farms; picturesque villages right out of a New England landscape are a sneeze away from sulfurous factories and malodorous highways. For a lot of people, caricature of the state's deficiencies is an efficient way to reduce its multifaceted nature to a clear meaning."

Siegel has been the book critic for the Nation, art critic for Slate, and television critic for the New Republic. He has written for Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, New York, the New York Observer, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is author of three books, most recently Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (Spiegel and Grau, 2008).

Siegel received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism in 2002. He is a visiting professor at Rutgers for 2008-09 to the departments of journalism and media studies, English, and American studies. This semester, he is teaching a class on Screen Culture.