*faircompanies

Why do people keep writing, singing, and building for audiences the market can’t see? The answer to this question is what makes some people irreplaceable.

I just overheard a conversation between two strangers that belongs to our cultural moment: they were two grown male teenagers, and one asked the other whether he had read a book I didn’t recognize.

A sp...

For the past 20 years, Josh and Chiara Morris have built a 360-acre homestead in the Missouri Ozarks that today provides their family with all its own food, water, shelter, and energy, and even its income. It’s a fully engineered system for self-reliance, first inspired by Josh’s years as an Army Ranger.

Deployed overseas, Josh saw firsthand what happens when ...

On an Ozark hillside and in the Maine woods, the quiet engineers of the postwar era are leaving, and handing off.

My father-in-law, now suffering from Alzheimer’s and unable to recognize us, grew up with a twin in the Bay Area. Those were times of free-range rearing, and the twins, growing up in the steep streets of Sausalito overlooking the bay and the City in fron...

For decades, Conway worked mostly alone, crafting a one-of-a-kind underground home into a Missouri mountainside — no permits, no architect, just him and his son growing up right alongside him, and an occasional friend.

Conway was an engineer who spent his career in the region’s lead mines and never lost his fascination with trains — and he put both to work her...

Rankings keep crowning the Danish capital. A few days there recently, sleeping among somebody else’s books, suggested the secret is less mysterious than it sounds.

The snowbird migration now runs in reverse when the Mediterranean gets too hot: a summer visit to Copenhagen. Just as Scandinavians chase the sun in winter, we flew north to cool down in mid-July, trading...