It’s the Economy: Money Changes Everything

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Depending on when you're reading this column, economists have a pretty good guess as to what kind of mood you're in. If it's Sunday, you're almost certainly happier than if you're catching it on a Monday. Either way, there's a good chance you're in a lousy mood if it's 7 a.m. (Sorry!) You'll be happier around lunchtime, sadder at 2 p.m. but should perk up by 8 in the evening.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Happiness quantification is growing rapidly.

2. The question is: How do we use this information?

3. And can it actually make us happier?

It's the Economy

Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.

And economists will definitely have a theory about your happiness based on where you live. In collaboration with psychologists, a number of respected economists have spent much of the past decade or so mapping our levels of happiness across borders and daytime hours. Angus Deaton, an economist at Princeton University, is helping shape the movement to incorporate subjective measures of emotions into serious economic analysis. The goal is to use this new data to inform more traditional measures, like G.D.P. or the unemployment rate, and to influence government policy. Or at least that's the idea.

Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness. Still, some of the data make lots of anecdotal sense. Given that Nevada was ground zero for the housing bust, it's not surprising that its citizens are less happy than Coloradans. Other findings, though, are more opaque. Why does western Long Island score several points higher on the happiness scale than most of Brooklyn? (Does being richer make you feel better than being cooler?) Why do Filipinos, who live in a relatively poor country, report such positive emotions?

Though still unrefined, happiness quantification has come quite a long way since 1974, when a University of Southern California economist named Richard Easterlin published an important paper that put the field on the map. His conclusion, known as the Easterlin paradox, stated that people do not become happier as they get richer. Around the same time, the Kingdom of Bhutan (population 738,000; average income, around $5,800) also began plans to measure what it called gross national happiness. These ideas might have had an impact, but nobody paid attention. "The general reaction of economists," Easterlin told me, "was: 'This is just subjective testimony that nobody puts any credit in.' "

Happiness studies became a hot discipline in the early 2000s, and France, Britain and other governments now conduct surveys of their own national levels of emotional well-being. It can be fairly instructive. Deaton, who advised the French government on its report, said, "The French are pretty miserable." The United Kingdom's Office of National Statistics reports only a slight happiness dip despite a deep recession. On the other hand, Bhutan's happiness survey is so complex that I have no idea what the Bhutanese are feeling. Nonetheless, a United Nations committee has called upon the world's governments to adopt happiness measures. A United States government panel is exploring the issue here.

As more data come in, however, many economists are becoming convinced of one significant change: the original Easterlin paradox doesn't quite hold up. Broadly speaking, the data now indicate that as people get richer, they report getting happier too. Though it's not quite that simple. Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan who helps advise the U.S. government on happiness statistics, told me that poor people in poor countries are not unhappy simply because they don't have wads of cash. They are more likely to have fewer choices, more children who die in childbirth and other grave problems. And while wealthier nations are generally happier, there is no evidence, Wolfers says, that an artist would be happier if she became a hedge-fund trader.

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Exit Light, Enter Night

Last Wednesday the French government decreed that as of July, all shops and offices in France must shut off their lights at night. The action is intended to "reduce the print of artificial lighting on the nocturnal environment." Thierry Cohen's portfolio "Starry, Starry, Starry Night," which appeared in this past weekend's magazine, shows us what major cities might look like if there were no light pollution.

When I was talking about these pictures last week with Jeff Roth, who is an archivist in the picture library at The Times, he told me about a night he spent under the stars in Times Square during the blackout of Aug. 14, 2003. Roth and Tony Cenicola, a staff photographer, along with many other Times employees, couldn't get home that night because of the problems with mass transit. It was a hot evening, so they decided to sleep under the stars on a terrace on the ninth floor of the former Times building. (They eventually gave up and went inside because a nearby generator was so loud they couldn't sleep.)

The image above is one that Cenicola shot that night, looking north from 43rd Street. It never became quite dark enough to see a lot of stars, because some of the buildings with generators stayed lighted. But if you look really hard, you can see a couple stars, a rare sight in Times Square.

Cenicola also shared with me two images he made after Hurricane Sandy. He took the pictures around 2 a.m. on Green Island, in Tom's River, N.J. He was struck by the sight of all these stars that are usually not visible, obscured by the lights of the city.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Alec Soth Hits the Road

When it came time to assign a photographer to this past weekend's cover story about the oil boom in North Dakota, Alec Soth was the obvious choice. He not only lives in the neighboring state of Minnesota, where he was born and raised, but he also has delivered strong covers for us in the past. He also is the type of photographer who loves wandering around with an open-ended assignment, capturing people in ordinary settings.

Soth's first cover story appeared in 2004 (above left), the same year he published his first book, "Sleeping by the Mississippi," a series of color portraits and landscapes taken during road trips along the river. Back then he traveled mostly alone and made pictures using an 8-by-10 camera. In 2006, he put out "Niagara," about the famous honeymoon destination, and in 2010 "Broken Manual," about men living off the grid. Here's a selection of pictures from all three books:

By 2006, Soth was also experimenting photographically, shooting digitally and making short films, including some for The Times's Opinion pages. More recently, he has been printing The LBM Dispatches, which he has described as "an irregularly published newspaper of the North American ramblings of photographer Alec Soth and writer Brad Zeller." So far, Soth and Zeller have issued dispatches from Ohio, New York and Michigan. Siri Engberg, the curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which in 2010 organized the first major survey in the U.S. of Soth's pictures, says Soth is working like a "small-town reporter . . . with a camera ready to capture the ordinary things" and following in the road-tripping footsteps of Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld and William Eggleston.

"From Here to There: Alec Soth's America," is currently on view at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Chip Brown on Witnessing North Dakota's Oil Boom

Chip Brown, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week's cover article about life in and around the Williston Basin in North Dakota, which is experiencing its biggest oil boom. He last wrote for the magazine about the filmmaker Whit Stillman.

What was your biggest surprise when you arrived in North Dakota?

What surprised me the most was my own ignorance of the history of the land, and the role of the Missouri River, which is really the great river of North America, not the Mississippi. For much of the east and west coasts, North Dakota is flyover territory, insignificant, easily ignored. But it was once the territory of some of the great indigenous nations in North America, the Sioux and other tribes. It is extremely beautiful, but its beauty is of a modest, unflamboyant kind that partly depends on forbidding temperatures and a subtle sort of scenic quality that doesn't draw hordes of people looking to build tourist motels and summer homes.

You write that objections to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as a way to get oil from shale are much milder in North Dakota than in parts of the northeast. Why is that?

I think there are fewer objections to hydraulic fracturing because it represents a set of opportunities in a land that has a long history of economic blight and distress. Plus North Dakota has had experience with oil development since oil was first discovered in the state in 1951. What's more, the situation in North Dakota is fundamentally different than it is in New York, where you have a watershed that is one of the greatest feats of far-sighted urban planning and civil engineering in the history of cities. Given that it provides superb drinking water for millions of people, the New York City watershed has to be considered a resource as valuable if not more so than the fossil fuel reserves beneath it. To paraphrase W.H. Auden, millions have lived without love (and oil); none without water.

I don't think holding libertarian or Republican views automatically means you are in favor of fracking or are by definition hostile to environmental issues. In my experience, people in North Dakota have political views but their political views don't prevent them for enjoying the company of someone who might have a different set of views. As is true of all places that have some aspect of the frontier about them, some quality of being "on the edge," it is easier to see people as individuals and maybe harder to lump them into dumb generalized categories like ''political party.'' It was a relief to visit a place where people look at the person before their party.

So people weren't talking to you, say, about how the boom might help achieve political goals like "energy independence"?

Unless they have a kid in the military, or they themselves were in the military and were posted to Iraq to guard oil wells, I think they see "energy independence" as a slightly more abstract virtue on the continuum of benefits that includes jobs and economic vitality.

One way boomtown North Dakota seem to resemble traditional frontiers is the scarcity of women. Was that immediately apparent?

The scarcity of women is very striking in Williston and Watford City, but probably not as striking as the profusion of women in New York City. More striking in small towns like Tioga and Crosby and Grassy Butte is the absence of people altogether, though that is changing. But the feeling of decay and decline in many small towns is still very powerful. I took a photograph of a church in a small town called Fortuna that will give you a feel for what I mean.

Were most of the people you met recent transplants?

It is getting harder to find a native North Dakotan in the hordes of newcomers, though most of the people I talked to had been living there all their lives or had been there for 30 or 40 years — long enough to remember the boom that busted in the 1980s. I wanted to talk more to people with a historical sense of what the boom means; I was less interested in the transient workers who are flocking to the state for jobs — whose stories were nicely captured in some of Alec Soth's photographs accompanying the story.

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The 6th Floor Blog: What I Learned From Reading Every Last Word of India Today

Tyler Cowen writes the One Sentence Book Review for The One Page Magazine, as well as a regular column for the Sunday business section.

The most striking feature of a late December issue of India Today is its aspirational tone and near-relentless gloss and promotional fervor. An article about the "Indians of Tomorrow" describes them as "Dreamers and Doers." The state of Madhya Pradesh describes itself as "On the Move" in an ad that accounts for the opening eight pages of the magazine. It seems the current government can do no wrong, but note the province has a per capita income of 38,669 rupees, which translates to $726.32 at the current exchange rate. More than 70 percent of the population of Madhya Pradesh lives in villages. The boosterism nonetheless is tinged with just enough of the erratic, just enough of the idiosyncratic and just enough of a glimpse into another India to make it interesting, at least for the reader who puts in the time.

Here are a few of the things I learned:

1. One writer of a letter to the editor suggests that viewing pornography is in fact an acceptable way for people to learn how to please their partners and that it should not be viewed as shameful.

2. The Hindi film actor Paresh Rawal offered the following capstone political advice, inscrutable to me even after rereading the entire article: "It is the cubs of a lioness who are fit to rule and not the kids of a goat. You know who the lion is. Vote for the lion and live your life with pride."

3. India was derecognized by the International Olympic Committee in December because its government has interfered regularly in the election processes of national sports bodies. This means India cannot compete in the Olympics, and there is no obvious solution immediately at hand.

4. The gap between the age of the average Indian and the age of the average Indian political leader is one of the largest in the world. No prime minister of the country has been born after 1947.

5. There is much more talk about the relations across the generations than you would find in a comparable Western magazine.

6. Published mortgage rates are running at around 10 percent.

7. The Good Shepherd Finishing School, in its ad, defines "Woman" as "A being far blessed than MAN and no less than GOD himself, owing to her significant and selfless contribution to the divine process of CREATION."

8. Bharath University, in its ad, brags of its 29-year legacy in India.

9. The All India Council for Technical Education has the following ambitions: "Entropy in the Universe should rise indicating that the well-being of the Universe is improving. If I can contribute to the well-being of our society and make an addition to the entropy, I am happy. On a different note, we have now developed the National Vocational Education qualification framework. . . ."

10. Lieut. Gen. JFR Jacob suggests that the Indian Army is still a World War II army, with no reorganization, little mobility and a defense-oriented outlook.

11. There are ads for Guatemalan coffee, and later, in a short feature, John McAfee is quoted praising the quality of coffee in Guatemalan prison.

12. Ashok Mitra opines that "The Left is the only hope for the country, the rest are all scum." This quote is pulled out for display, which struck me as odd for such a culturally conservative magazine.

13. Life has become tougher for Indian cricketers, as they formerly played 5 to 6 months a year and now play as many as 10 months a year.

14. In the middle of the periodical, there is a long feature article about Ravi Shankar (and his daughter Anoushka), as if he were still alive. Toward the back of the periodical, there is a long feature article about Ravi Shankar, honoring him upon his death. He is compared to Beethoven and Tansen, a 16th-century Mughal musician.

15. Nirvikalpa Natarajan, a 30-year-old female doctor, is a surgeon for diseases and deformities of the mouth, jaw and face. As an "Indian of Tomorrow," she is described as a member of Mensa since age 10 and as having a "Monalisa" smile.

16. Pandit Prasanna Gudi, a Bangalore musician, entered the Guinness Book of World Records by singing nonstop for 26 hours 12 minutes in 2009. He hopes to top this record by singing for 30 hours.

I fear that a more consistently mainstream editor eventually will make this periodical much less interesting, so in the meantime I am glad that the editor is the daughter of the owner. You can pick it up on domestic flights within India, and also at newsstands. India Today is published in English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam.

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It’s the Economy: Money Changes Everything

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Depending on when you're reading this column, economists have a pretty good guess as to what kind of mood you're in. If it's Sunday, you're almost certainly happier than if you're catching it on a Monday. Either way, there's a good chance you're in a lousy mood if it's 7 a.m. (Sorry!) You'll be happier around lunchtime, sadder at 2 p.m. but should perk up by 8 in the evening.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Happiness quantification is growing rapidly.

2. The question is: How do we use this information?

3. And can it actually make us happier?

It's the Economy

Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.

And economists will definitely have a theory about your happiness based on where you live. In collaboration with psychologists, a number of respected economists have spent much of the past decade or so mapping our levels of happiness across borders and daytime hours. Angus Deaton, an economist at Princeton University, is helping shape the movement to incorporate subjective measures of emotions into serious economic analysis. The goal is to use this new data to inform more traditional measures, like G.D.P. or the unemployment rate, and to influence government policy. Or at least that's the idea.

Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness. Still, some of the data make lots of anecdotal sense. Given that Nevada was ground zero for the housing bust, it's not surprising that its citizens are less happy than Coloradans. Other findings, though, are more opaque. Why does western Long Island score several points higher on the happiness scale than most of Brooklyn? (Does being richer make you feel better than being cooler?) Why do Filipinos, who live in a relatively poor country, report such positive emotions?

Though still unrefined, happiness quantification has come quite a long way since 1974, when a University of Southern California economist named Richard Easterlin published an important paper that put the field on the map. His conclusion, known as the Easterlin paradox, stated that people do not become happier as they get richer. Around the same time, the Kingdom of Bhutan (population 738,000; average income, around $5,800) also began plans to measure what it called gross national happiness. These ideas might have had an impact, but nobody paid attention. "The general reaction of economists," Easterlin told me, "was: 'This is just subjective testimony that nobody puts any credit in.' "

Happiness studies became a hot discipline in the early 2000s, and France, Britain and other governments now conduct surveys of their own national levels of emotional well-being. It can be fairly instructive. Deaton, who advised the French government on its report, said, "The French are pretty miserable." The United Kingdom's Office of National Statistics reports only a slight happiness dip despite a deep recession. On the other hand, Bhutan's happiness survey is so complex that I have no idea what the Bhutanese are feeling. Nonetheless, a United Nations committee has called upon the world's governments to adopt happiness measures. A United States government panel is exploring the issue here.

As more data come in, however, many economists are becoming convinced of one significant change: the original Easterlin paradox doesn't quite hold up. Broadly speaking, the data now indicate that as people get richer, they report getting happier too. Though it's not quite that simple. Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan who helps advise the U.S. government on happiness statistics, told me that poor people in poor countries are not unhappy simply because they don't have wads of cash. They are more likely to have fewer choices, more children who die in childbirth and other grave problems. And while wealthier nations are generally happier, there is no evidence, Wolfers says, that an artist would be happier if she became a hedge-fund trader.

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Alec Soth's Great Plains Dispatch

For this week's cover story about the oil boom in North Dakota, we asked Alec Soth, known for his photographic road trips, to drive from his home in Minnesota to northwestern North Dakota last fall and document life there. Recently he answered a few questions about the project via e-mail.

What most interested you about this assignment?

About a year ago I woke up to the fact that my photographic work had become a bit too self-indulgent. Fed up with my Twitter-ish navel-gazing, I started working on a series of small stories about Middle America. More often than not these stories were about the tenuous nature of community, particularly in a time of economic turmoil. Most of this turmoil has been recession-based. So when I was approached by the magazine about photographing this community turned upside down by an economic boom, I was thrilled to see what it looked like.

I know you like to drive to your locations. Why is that?

Driving is a way of getting my head in the game. There's something about spending a lot of time in the quiet container of the car with the landscape whizzing past that somehow prepares me for the kind of attention needed while photographing. When I fly to an assignment, I feel like my body is there but my brain lags behind.

How have your road trips evolved over the years?

I used to need solitude in the car. All of my early work was made while driving alone. When I worked with writers or assistants, I felt self-conscious. But over the years, a lot of that has dropped away. Lately I prefer having other people in the car with me. It helps dampen my solipsistic inclinations.

In your book "From Here to There," you compare yourself to Joel Sternfeld, calling him "more of a social documentarian," someone who "really is interested in the social issues of the day." Are you becoming a social documentarian now?

You are absolutely right. I've been really aware of this shift in my approach. Just a couple of weeks ago I tracked down an old copy of Life magazine with W. Eugene Smith's ''Country Doctor'' essay. While I've always admired his work, I never I thought I'd identify with it. More and more I seem to be working in that tradition. But I really haven't thought through all of the ramifications of this on my career. It just feels like the right work to be making at the moment. But who knows, in six months I could be back in my basement finger painting self-portraits.

Tell us about the cover photo.

The great thing about this particular assignment was that there weren't all of these specific expectations to fulfill. I was given extraordinary free range to photograph whatever I wanted. That said, there was this one lingering expectation to make a killer cover picture. This meant not only making a great vertical image, but also a picture that functions as a kind of shorthand for the story. This led to what I came to call the "There Will Be Blood" problem. Since this is a story about oil, everyone involved in the project, myself included, had a mental picture of men covered in oil. But when I asked a local, he chuckled and said that such scenes might have been common 80 years ago, but it wasn't like that anymore. (Afterward, my assistant and I joked about carrying around a bucket of oil to dump on men during our shoots.) So you can imagine my delight when I encountered Brian Coffey at one of the drilling rigs I visited. But here's the thing, it isn't oil – it's the slurry used in the drilling process. Nevertheless, it worked for the picture. But the magic is the contrast of this grime with the snow and fog. When I saw that, it actually surpassed the mental picture I'd been dragging around with me.

What were your impressions of this community that has been so tremendously affected by the boom?

What's happening in North Dakota is a perfect inversion of what's happening in the rest of the country. While most of America is still dealing with the collapse of the housing bubble, there's a housing boom in North Dakota. While many American citizens can't find jobs, North Dakota employers struggle to find workers. What was interesting, however, was that it still looked and felt like a community in crisis. The infrastructure simply can't handle what's happening. Everyone I talked to complained about the exorbitant rent, the crowded and understaffed Walmart, the bad roads and so on. The place didn't look or feel any happier than most of the recession-stung towns I've been visiting of late. If anything, it helped me appreciate the moderation inherent in the sluggish rebound of the economy at large.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Past Forward: When North Dakota Was 'The Country of Lonely Old Women'

The North Dakota in this Sunday's magazine is one marked by rapid transformation, a place where oil derricks are springing up everywhere, and as the author of the cover story, Chip Brown, puts it, you might find "single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field." Striking black-and-white photographs by Alec Soth, taken in the Williston Basin, in the northwest corner of the state, accompany the article.

Soth's images are reminiscent of those that accompanied an article published by the magazine in 1995. In  "The Reopening of the Frontier," by Jon Margolis, the photographer Charles Harbutt captured scenes in and around Carrington, in North Dakota's center. But if there's an affinity between the two sets of pictures — mostly on account of their black-and-white palettes — the feeling of the two moments couldn't be more different. Where Brown is witnessing boom times, Margolis was writing about life in an emptied-out state:

What remains of human settlement in the rural Great Plains is a Federal welfare project, sustained by Government farm programs and even more by Social Security and Medicare. This is the country of lonely old women, the widows who don't want to move South and whose children have gone elsewhere to find jobs. There are small towns in western Kansas, in the Dakotas and in the Oklahoma panhandle where nothing thrives except the drugstore and the clinic, if there is one. Or maybe an ''antiques'' shop where the merchandise is really the detritus of several attics, and the proprietors are an elderly couple who don't have anything better to do.

Harbutt's photographs that accompanied Margolis's article, along with additional pictures from that trip that he provided to us, appear in the slideshow above.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the location of the Williston Basin in North Dakota. It is in the northwest corner of the state, not the northeast.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Ed Koch's Unconventional Portrait

In the spring of 1989 the magazine assigned Gregory Heisler to photograph Mayor Ed Koch for an article by Sam Roberts that was published on June 11, 1989. Heisler followed the mayor around "fly on the wall"-style over the course of two days, during which time, he says, he got "a peek of what Koch was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras." According to Heisler, the moment Koch got out of the car or helicopter he had been traveling in, he would be totally on, in full "How'm I doing?" mode. Heisler does remember being surprised at one point, though, when the mayor got in a helicopter and promptly fell asleep, despite the vehicle's noise. "It was like a lullaby to him," Heisler says. Sometimes, when Koch was being driven around the city, "he would crash for a few blissful moments of sleep and recharge his batteries," Heisler says. "Two seconds later he'd be wide awake and on again." He was clearly a power napper.

After seeing this side of the mayor, Heisler decided he "wanted to to show New Yorkers that side of Koch that was very thoughtful and introspective." He wanted to show what he was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras. Making such a portrait, he knew, would require working in a way that would be conducive to introspection. He chose to use the large 8″ x 10″ view camera. Because that type of camera requires each sheet of film to be loaded individually, it slows things down. Subjects react to it differently than they might normal cameras. They respond to the extra effort that goes into working with that camera, and Koch was no exception.

After the resulting photograph was published in the magazine, Koch liked it so much that when his mayoral term ended he asked that a print of it be hung in City Hall in lieu of the traditional, commissioned oil painting. The large print that was made became the first official portrait of a New York City mayor that was not painted.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Alec Soth's Great Plains Dispatch

For this week's cover story about the oil boom in North Dakota, we asked Alec Soth, known for his photographic road trips, to drive from his home in Minnesota to northwestern North Dakota last fall and document life there. Recently he answered a few questions about the project via e-mail.

What most interested you about this assignment?

About a year ago I woke up to the fact that my photographic work had become a bit too self-indulgent. Fed up with my Twitter-ish navel-gazing, I started working on a series of small stories about Middle America. More often than not these stories were about the tenuous nature of community, particularly in a time of economic turmoil. Most of this turmoil has been recession-based. So when I was approached by the magazine about photographing this community turned upside down by an economic boom, I was thrilled to see what it looked like.

I know you like to drive to your locations. Why is that?

Driving is a way of getting my head in the game. There's something about spending a lot of time in the quiet container of the car with the landscape whizzing past that somehow prepares me for the kind of attention needed while photographing. When I fly to an assignment, I feel like my body is there but my brain lags behind.

How have your road trips evolved over the years?

I used to need solitude in the car. All of my early work was made while driving alone. When I worked with writers or assistants, I felt self-conscious. But over the years, a lot of that has dropped away. Lately I prefer having other people in the car with me. It helps dampen my solipsistic inclinations.

In your book "From Here to There," you compare yourself to Joel Sternfeld, calling him "more of a social documentarian," someone who "really is interested in the social issues of the day." Are you becoming a social documentarian now?

You are absolutely right. I've been really aware of this shift in my approach. Just a couple of weeks ago I tracked down an old copy of Life magazine with W. Eugene Smith's ''Country Doctor'' essay. While I've always admired his work, I never I thought I'd identify with it. More and more I seem to be working in that tradition. But I really haven't thought through all of the ramifications of this on my career. It just feels like the right work to be making at the moment. But who knows, in six months I could be back in my basement finger painting self-portraits.

Tell us about the cover photo.

The great thing about this particular assignment was that there weren't all of these specific expectations to fulfill. I was given extraordinary free range to photograph whatever I wanted. That said, there was this one lingering expectation to make a killer cover picture. This meant not only making a great vertical image, but also a picture that functions as a kind of shorthand for the story. This led to what I came to call the "There Will Be Blood" problem. Since this is a story about oil, everyone involved in the project, myself included, had a mental picture of men covered in oil. But when I asked a local, he chuckled and said that such scenes might have been common 80 years ago, but it wasn't like that anymore. (Afterward, my assistant and I joked about carrying around a bucket of oil to dump on men during our shoots.) So you can imagine my delight when I encountered Brian Coffey at one of the drilling rigs I visited. But here's the thing, it isn't oil – it's the slurry used in the drilling process. Nevertheless, it worked for the picture. But the magic is the contrast of this grime with the snow and fog. When I saw that, it actually surpassed the mental picture I'd been dragging around with me.

What were your impressions of this community that has been so tremendously affected by the boom?

What's happening in North Dakota is a perfect inversion of what's happening in the rest of the country. While most of America is still dealing with the collapse of the housing bubble, there's a housing boom in North Dakota. While many American citizens can't find jobs, North Dakota employers struggle to find workers. What was interesting, however, was that it still looked and felt like a community in crisis. The infrastructure simply can't handle what's happening. Everyone I talked to complained about the exorbitant rent, the crowded and understaffed Walmart, the bad roads and so on. The place didn't look or feel any happier than most of the recession-stung towns I've been visiting of late. If anything, it helped me appreciate the moderation inherent in the sluggish rebound of the economy at large.

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