Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,

with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.

We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.

So search for rapid response in your podcast player and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.

I'll see you on the other side.

Think of the 1840s, the Western frontier was sort of the Ohio River Valley.

In later stages of American utopianism, the northern west coast would become a place where a lot of these experiments were started

precisely because it was a highly unsettled area, land could be had cheaply.

There was a romantic idea of going into the wilderness

and building a new society from scratch.

That's Chris Jennings, the author of Paradise Now. He's an expert in utopianism. And back in

the mid-19th century, utopian communes were springing up across the country. These small

factions of idealists were setting themselves apart from mainstream society with the

aim of eventually bringing everyone along into a new utopian age.

One of these communities stood out in particular.

Brooke Farm was started by people that might be called urban intellectuals.

And they kind of had a pastoral vision of getting out of Boston

and going to a place where they could live in harmony with nature and

with one another.

The main idea was that they were all convinced that they could somehow, by building small-scale perfected societies, trigger the perfection of life on earth and usher in a sort of new and golden age.

They succeeded for quite a while at doing that.

The residents of Brooke Farm had had enough of urban living and set themselves apart from the rest of society. But these urban intellectuals soon began to realize that their faction was getting

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