Sublime

that to leave Finland or any other Nordic country behind and settle in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century was to experience an extraordinary—and extraordinarily harsh—form of travel backward in time.

I sat on my couch back in the United States and read about the advantages of Finland I’d chosen to forsake. While my fellow-American inhabitants and I were increasingly stressed out, overworked, unhealthy, underpaid, insecure, and uncertain whether our children’s lives would be any better, back home in Finland the middle-class friends I’d left behi

Newsweek had published the results of a survey it had conducted of nations around the globe. The magazine had set out to answer a question that, in its own words, was “at once simple and incredibly complex—if you were born today, which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly m