Nice Try!

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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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