“Isn’t every utopia someone else’s dystopia?” the essayist and poet Albert Mobilio wondered aloud, as he moderated a Friday afternoon panel on these unearthly antipodes in CUNY Graduate Center’s Elebash Auditorium. Although the language it’s couched in tends to have a little more of a jolt, that’s precisely the kind of question I hear posed every day on the L train, too. And so—in hope of getting some tips for those occasions when the expansively utopian spread of one passenger’s legs to take up two seats during rush hour proves to be a dystopia for me, schlepping home with aching feet under the burden of several bags of books and papers—I tried keenly to keep up with what the panelists had to say for...