Sitting in a waiting room this week, I picked up the November 2017 issue of National Geographic and opened to the cover story about “happiness.” It was a good article, and I was reading and learning and taking it all in . . .

Until I came to this page with the world map of smiley faces purporting to show the places on this earth where people are happiest.

And suddenly, even though the underlying data set came from Gallup, I just couldn’t buy it. If Central America were really so much happier and healthier than the U.S., why would so many people from those countries keep risking their lives—and more significantly, their children’s lives—to cross the border into America? It just doesn’t make sense.

Maybe I was reading it wrong?

If you’re interested in seeing for yourself, the National Geographic article is here.

And I found the map posted not in the online version of the article itself but on a cartography buff’s blog, here. (I was able to link straight to the image of the map itself.)