Welcome to Kurt Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of

Current Affairs Magazine. I am delighted to be joined today by Kristen Godsey. She is

Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania,

author of books including why women have better sex under socialism and other arguments for economic independence,

and most recently the book Everyday Utopia, What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

Available from Simon and Schuster.

Professor Gonsi, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs today.

Thank you so much for the invitation.

So let's start with the word utopia.

Let's start with the concepts of utopia.

A lot of people are suspicious of utopias. A lot of people see even the word utopian as a pejorative

or a negative descriptor of any particular plan. You say in your book that there is a, quote,

persistent and profound suspicion of political imagination. So tell us first why utopian should not

be a bad word. Yeah, I think this is a really important question because in so many other aspects of our society,

we tend to laud those who think outside the box, those who engage in what is sometimes called

blue sky thinking, right? Sort of the old Apple computer ads in the 90s

think different, right? The people who imagine the world differently are the ones who are going to

change it. And in the boardroom and corporations and academia and science, we really celebrate

people who think different, who think outside the box, who think

with no bounds to their imagination. But the minute we try to apply that thinking to our personal

lives or to our social problems, then it's a terrible idea. It's scary. It's unrealistic. And I

think that that's a real problem, I think that the fact that we have

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