Nice Try!

By Curbed

Arts History Design

What's Nice Try! about?

Nice Try's second season, Interior, is all about the lifestyle products that have been sold to us over and over, and the promises of domestic self improvement they have made, kept and broken.

From Curbed, New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Nice Try! episodes:

05.31.2022
Are You Sleeping?
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...
12.02.2021
The Keeper
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...
11.18.2021
The Bidet
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?...
11.11.2021
The Mattress
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...
11.04.2021
The Weight
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...
10.28.2021
The Crock-Pot
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...
10.21.2021
The Vacuum
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?...
10.14.2021
The Doorbell
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...
10.07.2021
Season 2: Interior
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...
10.29.2020
Go For Broke: Inside the Dot-Com Bubble
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...
09.21.2020
Avery shares Optimism from the Cut
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,...
08.15.2019
Disney World: Celebrating Utopia
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...
07.18.2019
Herland: Reimagine Utopia
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,...
07.11.2019
Biosphere 2: The Theater of Utopia
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...
06.27.2019
Germania: Architecture in a Fascist Utopia
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,...
06.20.2019
Oneida: Utopia, LLC
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....
06.13.2019
Levittown/Concord Park: Utopia in Our Backyard
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...
06.06.2019
Chandigarh: The Modernist Utopia
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...
05.30.2019
Jamestown: Utopia for Whom
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...
05.23.2019
The themes behind Utopian
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.
05.04.2019
Introducing: Utopian
Explore the hidden stories behind how we design the world we live in, and what we can learn when those designs fail. Season one, Utopian, follows Avery Trufelman on her quest to understand the perpetual search for the perfect place,...