How We Live
Intentional communities may offer solutions for loneliness and other problems of an atomized society.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is a professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of 12 books, including: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence

“'Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,' writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships.

"Ghodsee’s new book, 'Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life,' is an attempt to change that. The book is a tour of radical social experiments from communes and ecovillages to “platonic parenting” and intentional communities. But, on a deeper level, it’s a critique of the way existing structures of family and community life have left so many of us devoid of care and connection, and a vision of what it could mean to organize our lives differently." - Ezra Klein Producers

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The Ezra Klein Show: What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal