What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

It's Rico Daley. I'm Adam Clark Estes and I don't know about you, but I am ready for Thanksgiving.

The stuffing, the gravy, the discussions about vaccine mandates with your extended family. There's a lot to look forward to.

But I'm willing to bet you never spent much time thinking about an essential piece of technology that most of us will be using as we travel to see loved ones for Thanksgiving.

The doorbell. It's the entry point into the American home and to a new season of Nice Try.

In its first season, Nice Try was all about utopias, but the new ones all about lifestyle products that have been sold to us over and over and the promises of domestic self improvement they've made.

The first episode is all about the doorbell. And since doorbells across the country, we'll be getting a lot of action in just a few days. We thought we'd share it with you.

Hello, Avery.

Hello. Just go to the door, go to the elevator and come up to the third floor. Thank you so much, Ruth.

From New York Magazine's Curved and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Nice Try. I'm Avery Chuffleman.

I want to start this with the act of entering someone else's home. An act that is at times mundane or exciting or transgressive, especially if one is barging in with a microphone.

You're already recording? I am. You know, it's like, I'll tell you why I usually don't like season one of Nice Try was about failed utopian experiments, about the yearning for more beautiful, more equitable, more pleasurable ways of living.

Across centuries and around the world. And even though so many of these utopian efforts fell apart, that hunger remains. This feeling that there has to be a way to a better, different lifestyle.

So this season is about where all those utopian yearnings got channeled, at least in the United States.

When I was a young adult, when I was your age, I knew a fair number of people who were living in commons, but they didn't survive.

They was communal living in Soviet Russia. It failed. They was communal living on the Kabutsim in Israel. It failed.

So I want to ask why, but can I first ask you to introduce yourself?

Professionally, as an author, I'm Ruth Schwartz-Kallen.

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