Nice Try!

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 …

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 …

Following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned famed architect Le Corbusier to design the …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Nice Try's second season, Interior, interrogates the lifestyle technologies and products that determine the ways we clean, cook, exercise, and sleep …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

Since industrialization, we have developed a convoluted set of cultural rules and etiquette around sleep—which often run counter to our actual, …

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 …

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 …

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 …