Nice Try!

Sleep is at the core of our survival. So why aren’t we better at it? What happens when we don’t get enough? And what does our sleep say about us and our culture? On Are You Sleeping?, a new podcast from Mattress Firm and Vox Creative, we're pulling back the covers on all of it, with the help of some of the most fascinating sleepers and our own sleep experts. Listen and follow Are You Sleeping? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts: https://bit.ly/3FJrIdR Learn more...

On this season of Nice Try, we’ve asked why we bring certain goods into our homes. What kinds of utopia they promise, and what they deliver with the latest technology. But even the most faddish of gadgets might just improve a person's life, because we can fall in love with things. Join us for the last episode of Season Two: a love story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The bathroom is our most private room in our private homes, devoted to our most private business. And the American bathroom has long contained a stable trinity of fixtures: the toilet, bath, and sink. But is there room for another? This week, the riddle of the Western bathroom and our modern attitudes toward cleanliness—all wrapped up in the mystery of why Americans cannot seem to fully embrace the bidet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since industrialization, we have developed a convoluted set of cultural rules and etiquette around sleep—which often run counter to our actual, biological needs for sleep. Enter the mattress: a lightning rod for sleep performance, and a tool for modern self-improvement that's as mysterious and necessary as sleep itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fitness trends come and go. But the weight, about as low-tech and simple as it gets, is an anchor in the shifting tides of culture. As workout equipment has become canonized into the realm of home appliances, this heavy metal object aids in our dual—and sometimes conflicting—pursuit of athletics and aesthetics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Countertop kitchen appliances—cookers that range from slow to fast—promise healthier, easier, better ways to feed the body. These gadgets of convenience have raised the standards for how much variety and excitement one can reasonably expect from a meal. But what do we do with the time we've saved? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the most intimate, necessary, and perhaps loathed activities of the home is cleaning. Who does this work, and how good do we have to be at it? When is it okay to depend on some kind of help? A story of community, labor, and dirt—as told through the lens of the vacuum cleaner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The American dream of a suburban house with a white picket fence cordons off the home as a haven, separate from the outside world. This personal, private utopia becomes defined by who gets let in. And that is determined by a device that isn’t often thought of as technology. But it's the first thing that you touch when you enter someone else’s home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nice Try's second season, Interior, interrogates the lifestyle technologies and products that determine the ways we clean, cook, exercise, and sleep -- as we attempt to sail to the unreachable shore of a better life. Hosted by Avery Trufelman. From Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thursdays starting October 14th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Go For Broke is a new narrative series from Epic Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network exploring the 2000 dot-com bubble... and what happened when the bubble popped. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/31ovruD Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/34WWNZI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While you're waiting patiently for the next season of Nice Try!, we're sharing another podcast our host Avery Trufelman has been working on that we think you'll really like: the Cut from New York Magazine. In the Cut's first episode, Avery explores what the idea of optimism really means in our current moment. Subscribe to the Cut on Apple Podcasts: http://applepodcasts.com/thecut Subscribe to the Cut on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3csR8Ot Subscribe to the Cut on Stitcher:...

Before she began writing for the New York Times, or visiting glitter factories and the Royal Wedding, Caity Weaver grew up vacationing in utopia. Specifically: Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. During a recent live event at the 92Y in New York City, Avery asked Caity to bring us back to those vacations. As a reminder that discussion about utopias - and the failures and successes inherent in them - is an ongoing one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What have all of the utopias we've covered so far had in common? They were all largely driven by the will and power of a charismatic leader - usually a man, usually white. How do you build a utopia, then, for people in society who really need it? In our season finale, we visit worlds where there are no men. In fiction, and real life. Read more about all Utopian episodes - from Jamestown to Biosphere 2 - and the books that inspired us this season here: http://bit.ly/nice-try-utopia If you're in the New York City area, see Avery discuss utopias with a very special guest at the 92 Street Y on August 6th at 7:30pm. Get your tickets now: http://bit.ly/nicetrylive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 1991, eight people embarked on a two-year experiment to create a completely enclosed, self-sustaining ecosystem in a domed research facility in Arizona. Inside the dome, there was a man-made savannah. A rainforest. A farm. An ocean with tropical coral reef. And all of these habitats would be populated with life. Things did not go according to plan. But was it a failure? EDITOR'S NOTE: one instance of explicit language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 1938, Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer started redesigning Berlin for a New Order, elements of which exist today. The Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin features designs that specifically evoke the Third Reich. Following the end of World War II, the airport became a crucial access point for the US and British to bring food through the Berlin Blockade. It was closed in 2008, and then became a park, and emergency refugee housing. But the buildings remain. What do we do with the everyday reminders of a dark history? EDITOR'S NOTE: one instance of explicit language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Oneida Community was founded in upstate New York in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, a former theological student who believed that paradise could be found on Earth through nontraditional sexual and familial structures, including complex marriages and communal childraising. Hundreds of people followed him, and for many years their community succeeded. But the center could not hold, and the community pivoted — into a thriving business that became one of the world’s most prominent makers of flatware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Suburban developments built in the 1950s were idyllic communities and gave many people their first opportunity at home ownership, but typically excluded African Americans. While William Levitt used explicit racial covenants and other tactics to keep his famed Levittown developments white, one builder used racial quotas to create an integrated community — and succeeded, for a while. Can the suburbs be a utopia for all? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned famed architect Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh, to signal India’s rise on the world stage. But the city’s architecture and design has become known more for its Western modernist roots, and less as a symbol of Indian nationalism, and furniture that had been intended for the masses are now being auctioned off as high art pieces that wind up in Kourtney Kardashian’s dining room. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most people today know the story of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, from the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, and especially from the 1995 Disney animated film. A gripping recounting of the true story of how the settlement failed and recovered, and the toll it took on the English and Native Americans, shows how failure can be a transformative experience, and also how the stories we tell ourselves about the failures inform the way we live today. EDITOR'S NOTE -- one instance of explicit language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’re working hard to bring you the first episode of Nice Try next week - it drops May 30th! In the meantime, we wanted to tell you a little more about the themes underpinning this first season, Utopian.