Sheet rock is easy. Utopianism is hard.

What makes this such an effective piece of writing is the author's ability to peel back the layers of a story far more nuanced than it appears at first glance.

They Built It. No One Came.

By Penelope Greenmay (New York Times)

... Their ideals were lofty but simple: They would live off the land, farming with Colonial-era tools, along with a band of like-minded men dressed in homespun robes wielding scythes and pickaxes. They would sleep in atmospheric log cabins and other 18th-century structures that they had rescued from the area and that they began to reconstruct, painstakingly, brick by crumbling brick and log by log.

But what if you built a commune, and no one came?

It turns out it’s not so easy to cook up a utopia from scratch.