Playing With Fire Part 2: Does it Even Work?
Posted by Angela Owen | The Sleep Diva on 24th Sep 2026
When we left off, the Chicago Tribune’s 2012 “Playing with Fire” series had just exposed Citizens for Fire Safety — the industry group funded entirely by the three biggest flame retardant manufacturers — as a front group that used fabricated testimony to lobby state legislatures. Here’s what happened next: almost nothing changed, except the letterhead.
Within a
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Playing With Fire, Part 1: How We Ended Up With Chemicals in Our Beds
Posted by Angela Owen, Sleep Diva on 24th Aug 2026
I sold my first mattress in 2000, out of a little retail store in Boulder, Colorado called Boulder By Design. Back then, there was exactly one flammability hurdle a mattress had to clear: the cigarette test. Lab techs would set 18 lit cigarettes on a mattress surface — nine on the bare surface, nine tucked under two sheets — and if the char never spread more than two inches, it passed.
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Big Mattress Is Watching — The Consolidation of an Industry and What It Costs the Rest of Us
Posted by Angela Owen on 21st Jul 2026
It was 1989 and I was a young college student who had just landed an entry-level position in the marketing department at Wells Fargo Bank headquarters in San Francisco. The early years of massive mergers and acquisitions were just beginning for America’s largest banks. New waves of deregulation had opened the door to interstate banking, and our little marketing department was suddenly very b
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Water, Water, Everywhere and Never Enough
Posted by Angela Owen | Sleep Diva on 19th May 2026
I've spent this past week in the beautiful state of Montana and just visited Glacier National Park. Seeing the glaciers from the edge of Bowman Lake literally left me in total awe. The summer travel season had not yet started, so we had the park almost to ourselves. Standing there at the edge of the lake, the clear blue water, towering snowcapped mountains, reminded me how much water is on the pla
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