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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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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