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What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal

What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal

FromThe Ezra Klein Show


What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal

FromThe Ezra Klein Show

ratings:
Length:
70 minutes
Released:
Jun 9, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

“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.Mentioned:“The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” by David BrooksSaving Time by Jenny OdellBook Recommendations:Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David GraeberThe Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuinGender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach ScottListen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioappThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld. The show’s production team is Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Kristina Samulewski.
Released:
Jun 9, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

*** Named a best podcast of 2021 by Time, Vulture, Esquire and The Atlantic. *** Each Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation on something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike?