Introducing: Utopian

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 gad...

2 Dec 202139min

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....

18 Nov 202135min

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 lightn...

11 Nov 202138min

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 app...

4 Nov 202145min

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 ...

28 Okt 202139min

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 ...

21 Okt 202130min

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...

14 Okt 202143min

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 o...

7 Okt 20212min