It’s no secret that there’s little consistency between a state’s size and its resident population. Alaska is so large and sparsely populated that it’s home to just 1.3 people per square mile. Every square mile of New Jersey, on the other hand, is home to 1,205.3 people on average.
So what would the U.S. map look like if state borders were redrawn not by the arbitrary history of the nation but by the size of the residential population? The folks at MyLife, a service that connects social media accounts, wondered the same thing and produced the map below in answer. Alaska suddenly seems more manageable.