Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • Drivers compete on a mud bog course with all-terrain vehicles.
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  • Drivers of four-wheeling, off-road vehicles compete while sliding through a slippery race course of muck at a weekend mud bogging contest on Prince of Wales Island. Competitors try to beat the clock as they drive through a water-logged muddy course.
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  • A man leads a baby camel through the chaos of four wheel drive vehicles.
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  • Pedestrians and vehicles on the way community to a gathering in Hanga Roa.
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  • Marriage is different in China, from mass weddings like this, to the “bare branches” phenomenon where there are not enough women for all the men to marry. Couples aspire to the ideal of the billboard above them—the one-child family. But will their son be able to find a girl? According to the 2010 census, there were 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls, which is 0.53 points lower than the ratio obtained from a population sample survey carried out in 2005. However, the gender ratio of 118.06 is still beyond the normal range of around 105 percent, and experts warn of increased social instability should this trend continue. For the population born between 1900 and 2000, it is estimated that there could be 35.59 million fewer females than males. So maybe everyone eventually has a car, but can every boy have a girl? It is important for China’s leaders to placate the Comfort Class. From issues of grave consequence to trivialities, the government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. In Beijing, for example, newly prosperous residents are snapping up automobiles at a rate of 1,000 a day. The number of vehicles on the capital’s sclerotic roads has doubled in the past five years, to 3 million, or about a million more vehicles than in all of New York City.
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  • Man on an off-road vehicle drives home after stones and debris turned the flooded road into rubble during a summer rain. Small streambeds are dumped with the excess rock and dirt that the length of the Ohio River is filled in. The result is a threat to clean water and the biodiversity of the ecosystem. Flash flooding occurs where it never has before.<br />
Like a cancerous mutation of strip mining, entire mountaintops are blasted away to obtain a small seam of coal. Unwanted rock is pushed into valleys and streams, destroying natural watersheds.
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  • Recreational vehicles line a mile-long section of undeveloped beach at Redwood National Park.
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  • Headlights and brake lights illuminate the darkened road at dusk as traffic moves both directions through customs at the Texas and Mexico border. Commercial trucks and private vehicles cross one of the four international bridges that connect Laredo and Nuevo Laredo over the Rio Grande River.
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  • A few cars make a traffic jam on a rainy afternoon at the main intersection in Coffman, Cove, Alaska, population 200.<br />
What began as a logging town on Prince of Wales Island is mostly made up of people who stayed on when the industry declined. Boats and off road vehicles are plentiful and a road connects the community to other parts of the island.
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  • A bride and groom drive away in a vehicle decorated with balloons.
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  • A four-wheel drive vehicle crossing a flooded road.
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  • Two men working to extricate their vehicle from deep mud.
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  • View through a cracked windshield of a man checking his vehicle.
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  • A bride hangs on for a four-wheel drive wild ride over boulders and rough slick rock trails near Moab, Utah. The Bureau of Land Managements designates specific trails for off-road vehicle riders like this who although dressed in traditional white, wants to be married in an untraditional way in the wilderness during a Jeep Safari.<br />
Most riders stick to BLM's loosely enforced straight-and-narrow rules are plentiful, but thousands more disregard the rules, answering the call of their combustion engines to chart new paths through roadless areas which had great ecological consequences.
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  • A bride  smooths our her long, white dress after a four-wheel drive wild ride over boulders and slick rock to reach a spot for the wedding near Moab, Utah. The Bureau of Land Managements designates specific trails for off-road vehicle riders in the wilderness during the annual Easter Weekend Jeep Safari.
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  • Bandit-style bandannas shield law abiders from dust on a well-worn trail in the Fisher Towers region of the Castle Valley near Moab, Utah. Off-road vehicle riders who stick to BLM's loosely enforced straight-and-narrow rules are plentiful, but thousands more disregard the rules, answering the call of their combustion engines to chart new paths through roadless areas. The degradation from rogue ATV riders has growing ecological consequences.
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  • Outmaneuvering rush hour gridlock, motorcycles rank as the vehicle of choice for many Santiago commuters. Dressed in a business suit and tie with a helmet, a Chilean businessman parks his motorcycle on a side street with lines of other bikes. Chile's bustling capital and largest city thrives on manufacturing, finance and trade.
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  • Some 40,000 train buffs a year pull out of Cumberland on a 16-mile scenic ride to Frostburg.
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  • A policeman locking a road gate during a heavy rain storm.
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  • A man transports a mattress on the Barcelona metro.
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  • Bird's-eye view of a vineyard and train tracks running through the bustling city of Balzano in the South Tyrol province of northern Italy. Set in a valley amid steep hills, it is a gateway to the Dolomites mountain range in the Italian Alps.
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  • A man boards an icy lift up to Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak in the Wetterstein Mountains. Three glaciers flank the mountain that is just over 9,700 feet high. The first ascent was in 1820, but today cable cars transport skiers and sightseers to the top for a view that is obstructed on snowy white-out on this day.
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  • A woman arranges items on a car to sell at a roadside flea market. West Virginians have always lived with the backdrop of the coal train passing by and money has gone out of town on that train—it is no coincidence that some of the poorest people in the US live in coal country. <br />
One of the main poverty issues of Appalachia stems from the fact that the employed population makes less money that others in the U.S. which was a trade off for other assets like a rich family life.
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  • A 1925 Model T drives down an old strip of National Road.
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  • Bygone atmosphere of aging alleys and jumbled rooflines characterizes Valparaiso's older neighborhoods. Victorian-era funicular railways run up and down the port city's notoriously steep hillsides behind a building where a man sits in a window.
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  • Fish inspectors take a break during their pursuit of salmon poachers.
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  • Riding subway line Number 1.
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  • Skiers dressed in fashionable clothing wait in a lift line in St. Moritz which has been referred to as "Europe's winter playground."
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  • Young commuters on the Barcelona metro.
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  • An accordion player in the Barcelona metro.
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  • Crowds at the Churchgate Railway Station in Mumbai flow between the trains. By 2030 it is estimated that 60% (4.9 billion) worldwide will live in cities.
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  • Coal trains move through a railyard on a foggy morning.
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  • Coal trains line up side by side move through a railyard on a foggy morning in Appalachia.
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  • Carolyn Rossi Copeland takes her twin daughters to her work in New York City fr om their home in Garrison, more than an hour's commute one way on the train. Th e route passes along the Hudson River.
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  • A photographer on assignment on a crowded train in Mumbai.
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  • Fish inspectors in surplus tanks pursue salmon poachers.
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  • Fish inspectors in surplus tanks pursue salmon poachers.
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  • Commuters in a subway car.
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  • Commuters in a crowded subway car.
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  • Commuters in a subway car.
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  • Children play with unexploded tank shells.
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  • Ferndale's Greek Investment Company, a cafe, exterior view.
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  • Camels converge on Abu Dhabi for an annual beauty contest.
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  • A single white car travels north on the Pan American Highway as it follows the oceans and coastline through desert sands along Peru's Pacific coast.
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  • Pedestrians walk down stairs to  a tunnel under the International Bridge Number one, the oldest existing link between Mexico's Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, Texas. Day and night more than four million people-commuters, shoppers and sightseers-walk across the bridge each year.
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  • Freewheeling four-wheelers trek across Coral Pink Sand Dunes of southwestern Utah. Part state park, part Bureau of Land Management wilderness quality land, the dunes are both playground and battleground. ATV riders fight for wide-open access: environmentalists for rare plant and animal species. <br />
The orange/pink color is from the Navajo sandstone layer formed 190 million years ago in the early Jurassic period. High winds pass through the region whipping sand into piles and water seeped down into the sand, carrying minerals with a mineral composition of iron, calcium carbonate, and manganese which gave the rock warm hues.
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  • Billboards advertising gold jewelry.
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  • The town of Portales, New Mexico with a community without well water.
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  • Infrastructure near the Mont Blanc Tunnel connects France and Italy passing 11.6 kilometers under the mountain.<br />
The tunnel connects France and Italy in the Alps and was first opened in 1965. A more than seven mile cut was made through Mont Blanc mountain linking Chamonix with Courmayeur.
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  • A father takes his son on his roll-aboard suitcase to the bus.
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  • Federal Immigration Service conducts a raid at a construction site.
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  • An Indian festival, Vaisakhi, in Barcelona's Rambla de Catalunya area.
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  • A vegetable garden in the Brush Park Historic District on a lot where a Victorian mansion once stood.
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  • Walking in Lummus Park along Ocean Drive in South Beach.
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  • A bachelorette party waits for taxis on busy Lincoln Road.
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  • A woman checks her cell phone on busy Lincoln Road.
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  • The Chicago river and buildings from the London Guarantee Building.
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  • A couple rides in a limousine to the airport to take a helicopter to the Mendenhall Glacier for their wedding.
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  • A cruise ship docks at Ketchikan's harbor bringing a city full of tourists for shopping and sightseeing. The once logging town is dependent on the growing tourism industry. Nearly a million cruise ship passengers visit Alaska, sometimes doubling a town’s population on a summer day. <br />
The ships travel the Inside Passage, a network of waterways between islands along the coast of Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state. <br />
Travelers can shop for native art and souvenirs or diamonds in one of many jewelry stores along what was a former red-light district during the Gold Rush. The Misty Fjords National Monument is one of the area’s major attractions.
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  • Dimly lit tunnels through the Alps allow traffic to avoid snow-covered passes.
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  • Schleichers ride in ornately decorated horse-drawn carriages in a parade that is part of a traditional celebration. Schleichers wear masks and elaborate hats that weigh 50 pounds - quite an ordeal to balance.  Hats are passed down generations and stored in museums.
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  • Lights blur as traffic in the Mont Blanc Tunnel connects France and Italy in the Alps. First opened in 1965, the more than seven mile cut through Mont Blanc mountain links Chamonix with Courmayeur.
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  • Border collies are trained to help manage sheep.
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  • Introduced Japanese kudzu vines overtake a car in a man's yard.
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  • Elevated view of a small mine operation finding coal after a larger company left. The owner of this operation stated that "One man's trash is another man's treasure." His equipment works on a mountain top coal mine.
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  • Families gather outside a small, white-painted church for a ramps dinner. Allium tricoccum, wild leek, wild onion, spring tonic, or most commonly, the ramp is a wild plant that grows in the mountains of Appalachia. It resembles a scallion and tastes like a cross between an onion and garlic and dinners are a long-standing community tradition.
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  • A man walks down the road in Tom Biggs Hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, while his great grandchildren play nearby.<br />
Lucious Thompson, who lives in nearby Tom Biggs Hollow, joined Kentuckians for the Commonwealth when he found his land disrupted from above. “There’s good mining and there’s bad mining,” Mr. Thompson said. “Mountaintop removal takes the coal quick, 24 hours every day, making my streams disappear, with the blasting knocking a person out of bed and the giant ‘dozers beep-beeping all night so you cannot sleep.”<br />
<br />
Mr. Thompson spoke with the authority of a retired underground miner. Underground miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh, deep workplaces that were far out of sight. Now, the hollow dwellers have become witnesses more than miners as a fast-moving, high-volume process uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills.<br />
<br />
“They make monster funnels of our villages,” said Carroll Smith, judge-executive, the top elected official, here in Letcher County, the location of some of the worst flooded hollows adjoining mountaintop removal sites. “They haven’t been a real good neighbor at all.”<br />
<br />
With underground mining, coal miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh workplaces deep in the ground and far out of sight. With mountaintop removal, a fast, high-volume process that uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills that help define the hollows, the residents have become witnesses more than miners.<br />
<br />
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/national/11MINE.html
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  • Bulldozers fill trucks with excess rock at a small mountaintop removal site in Man, West Virginia, where a small crew is mining coal in a site in Logan County that was left by a large coal company as rubble. Mine operator Gordon Justice said, "One man's trash is another man's treasure."<br />
<br />
Large mining operations are only visible from the air, although coal and debris are removed using enormous earth-moving machines known as draglines that stand 22 stories tall and can hold 24 compact cars in its bucket. The machines can cost up to $100 million, but are favored by coal companies because they can do the work of hundreds of employees. A small operation like this one can keep 17 employees working for five years and making good wages.
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  • Hundreds of cars line up to pay a toll on the New Jersey Turnpike.
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  • Teenagers in a limousine on their prom night head into New York City.
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  • Cars drive down a misty stretch of National Road in winter.
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  • People stop to watch the setting sun along Skyline Drive, a 105 mile drive along the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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  • Contractors and BLM horse specialists plan a wild horse roundup because of a lawsuit by The Rock Springs Grazing Association.
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  • A car rounds a curve along a scenic section of the Pan American highway north of Oaxaca in Mexico.<br />
The Pan-American Highway is a network of road that passes through the America's many diverse climates and ecological types – ranging from dense jungles to arid deserts.
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  • Pedestrians dash through and underground walkway that leads onto International Bridge Number one, the oldest existing link between Mexico's Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, Texas. Day and night more than four million people-commuters, shoppers and sightseers-walk across the bridge each year.
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  • A hat seller helps load a stack of straw hats onto a truck at a market that sells flowers for Day of the Dead fiesta.<br />
Heavily-loaded trucks carry red Terciopelo flowers to celebrate Mexico’s premier fiesta. Atlixco is the flower capital of Mexico exporting roses and gladiolas from the state of Puebla.
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  • Intersection of Number 1 Shimen Road and Middle Yanan Road.
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  • Scott Circle seen from a hotel window.
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  • A family parks an RV in the field during the harvest so they can escape the elements and the bugs while they eat.
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  • A Rapanui man with his girlfriend.
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  • A photographer takes images of an Indian festival, Vaisakhi, in Barcelona's Rambla de Catalunya area.
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  • Arriving for the camel contest in cars, trucks and by camel.
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  • Calves are used to lure camel mothers to the parade ground gate.
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  • A family parades their camels for all their neighbors to admire.
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  • Entrants arriving for the camel contest in cars and trucks.
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  • Construction of the Gilgel Gibe III Dam.
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  • Residents of a remote village ride a motorcycle.
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  • A dog relaxes in a motorcycle's sidecar.
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  • Koryaksky Volcano looms above Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
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  • Sections of a pipeline being stockpiled near Sobolevo.
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  • Residents of a remote village rush to meet the supply helicopter.
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  • A wedding photo on a bridge with the Pudong skyline in the background.
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  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park.
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  • A young woman shops at the Carrefours Department Store.
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  • A model at the 3rd China International Automobile Exhibition.
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  • Traffic sweeps past an American chain restaurant on East Nanjing Road.
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  • A bellhop at a boutique hotel.
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  • Workers preparing for a festival take a break.
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  • This easy migration of people from city to city is still hard for me to get used to. Seventeen years ago when I was traveling between Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, they all had a ring of policemen around them checking identity papers. I was in China trying to get through those rings of security during the Tiananmen Square uprising. I remember traveling with wire service photographers and driving through those checkpoints at 90 mph and seeing the policeman jump up and down on the dais—literally hopping mad—but there was nothing they could do because they did not have guns or radios. After being absent 17 years, I made (technically) five trips to China in about a one-year period. The growth is so fast paced I could feel the energy and the stress on the street. It makes you realize that our empire is over, but you can’t really understand that without being there. Even though the NYT has multiple stories, every day, on the growth and complexity of the Chinese economy, the average American has little idea what this means other than a fear that increased Chinese fuel consumption will somehow affect what they put in the tank of their SUV. Robert Frank photographed twentieth-century America, recording our coming of age—the baby boom, the start of television, car culture, modular housing, and relative wealth distributed throughout the middle class. His photographs are of progress, technology, plenty, but also the weary faces of waitresses and elevator operators who were desperately trying to join the economic party. Those 1950s faces remind me of a line in Leslie Chang’s story about modern China: “What looks like freedom just feels like pressure.”
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  • A teenage girl checks her cell phone commuting to school in a car.
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