What If Your Neighbor Paints His House Purple?
A not-very-brownstone, explanation here.
My latest Atlantic column (link good for three days) looks at neighborhood paint wars: If people care about the looks of not just their own house but the neighborhood as a whole, what do you do about nonconformists?
It's a difficult question that I dealt with in more depth--though with less colorful examples--in chapter five of The Substance of Style, excerpted here by Reason.