Condensation: Oil Boom

I had fun condensing that New Yorker story for you the other day, so I'm going to keep doing it from time to time. Maybe eventually I won't have to introduce what I'm doing. Let me know if this feature is irritating.

This is a three-sentence abridgment of "Boomtown Blues," a piece by Alexandra Fuller in the February 5 issue about the effect of an oil boom on a county in Wyoming:

But the truth is that if the graph showing the growth of ranching jobs in Sublette County during the past few years were your heart rate, you'd be dead.

"I didn't feel addicted; I just felt like I wanted some more meth."

A place in the throes of an energy boom isn't so different from a person in the throes of addiction: there's the denial that things are out of control; there's the sleeplessness and the moral carelessness, and the fact that you're doing something that you know isn't good for you but you just can't stop.