Rachel Z. Arndt

While not native to the Hamptons, they can certainly be found there—sunning themselves in the swimming pools of New York’s wealthiest denizens and posing for selfies with the rich and Instagram-famous. Flightless, featherless, and completely rideable, they may not be the spitting image of their real-world counterparts, but with increasing demand from retailers and sunbathers, inflatable swans are the summer’s hottest pool accessory.

Before women were all hunched over screens, applying filters and tapping out hashtags to food photos, we were hunched over sinks, sudsing dishes and keeping an eye on the stove. Today’s kitchens may have more machines, but they remain abuzz with structured and artificial femininity, from aprons to pink KitchenAids. Everything matches, even the woman, whose body the kitchen has been designed to fit—albeit inaccurately—since almost a century ago, when engineers measured thousands of women to try to make housework more comfortable.

In the future, we’ll outsource the burden of sleeping to our devices; we’ll lie on induction-charging mats for mere minutes and sit up, rejuvenated, perfectly calibrated to go out into the world and produce and consume. Until then, though, we’ll have to make do with letting those devices watch us sleep and then, when we wake, making sense of the measurements that’ll supposedly help us sleep better.