Podcasts and Questions

Please listen to this episode of the Nice Try! A podcast about the history of the Mattress.

Link: https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/nice-try-23485

After listening, please respond to the episode by reflecting on one or a combination of the following ideas: 

1. What is a connection you can make between what you learned about the doorbell, the vacuum, and the mattress? Consider the notion of privacy and its theme throughout all three of these technologies. How did the mattress go through a type of public to private change? 

2. The Mattress episode is a lot like The Stairs passage by Bill Bryson in that there isn’t a bonafide “history” of the technology because humans have more or less always been sleeping on SOMETHING. With that in mind, what approach does the Nice Try journalist take in thinking about and analyzing the mattress? Without a more traditional, chronological history of the mattress itself, what does she focus on about the mattress? 

3. Consider your own relationship to sleep. Have you ever gone through phases of trying new methods and technologies in order to improve your sleep? What has that been like?