jbragland / Julianne Ragland

Huffduffing since April 24th, 2012

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Huffduffed (21)

  1. XX Factor: How the Sports Bra Changed History from Outside Podcast

    When it comes to important innovations in sports technology, few inventions can compete with the sports bra. In the 1970s, women’s interest in athletics was surging following the passage of Title IX. There was just one problem—actually, make that two problems: breasts. Boob bounce hurts, as women getting in on the jogging craze quickly found out. Then some friends in Vermont had an idea to stitch a couple jock straps together to build a contraption that would keep things in place. Their creation revolutionized women’s participation in sports and launched what’s become a multi-billion-dollar industry. Today, high-tech boob labs are helping designers make ever more effective—and stylish—iterations, even for athletes with DDD cups.

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    —Huffduffed by jbragland

  2. This Is Chance: Anchorwoman of the Great Alaska Earthquake - 99% Invisible

    It was the middle of the night on March 27, 1964. Earlier that evening, the second-biggest earthquake ever measured at the time had hit Anchorage, Alaska. 115 people died. Some houses had been turned completely upside down while others had skidded into the sea.

    There was no light or power in the city — and for a long time, virtually no communication with the outside world. But there was one signal making it out of the devastated area.

    Running on backup generators and a cracked transmitter, a radio station in Anchorage continued to broadcast. Then a station in Fairbanks picked up that signal and repeated it. A man in Juneau picked up that Fairbanks station, called a radio station in Seattle and let the broadcast play over his phone.

    The president of that Anchorage radio station happened to be on a goodwill tour of Japan. And when he turned on a radio in Tokyo, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing — it was the voice of his own “newsgirl” back home, a woman by the name of Genie Chance.

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    —Huffduffed by jbragland

  3. The Stethoscope - 99% Invisible

    Imagine for a moment the year 1800. A doctor is meeting with a patient – most likely in the patient’s home. The patient is complaining about shortness of breath. A cough, a fever. The doctor might check the patient’s pulse or feel their belly, but unlike today, what’s happening inside of the patient’s body is basically unknowable. There’s no MRI. No X-rays. The living body is like a black box that can’t be opened.

    The only way for a doctor to figure out what was wrong with a patient was to ask them, and as a result patients’ accounts of their symptoms were seen as diseases in themselves. While today a fever is seen as a symptom of some underlying disease like the flu, back then the fever was essentially regarded as the disease itself.

    But in the early 1800s, an invention came along that changed everything. Suddenly the doctor could clearly hear what was happening inside the body. The heart, the lungs, the breath. This revolutionary device was the stethoscope.

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    —Huffduffed by jbragland

  4. The Great Dismal Swamp - 99% Invisible

    Hundreds of years ago, before the Civil War, the dangers of the swamp and its seeming impenetrability actually attracted people to it. The land was so untamed that horses and boats couldn’t enter, and the colonists who were filing into the region detested it. William Byrd II, a Virginia planter, called it “a miserable morass where nothing can inhabit.” But people did inhabit the swamp, including thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans who escaped their captors and formed communities in the swamp. This “dismal” landscape was the site of one of the most remarkable and least told stories of resistance to slavery in American history.

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    —Huffduffed by jbragland

  5. La Sagrada Família - 99% Invisible

    There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. First, it doesn’t look like a Gothic church. It looks like it was built out of bones, or sand—it’s organic looking, somehow. But there’s another thing that sets it apart from your average old Gothic cathedral: it isn’t actually old.

    Gaudí wasn’t able to build very much of his famous church before he died in 1926. Most of it has been built in the last 40 years, and it still isn’t finished. Which means that architects have had to figure out, and still are figuring out, how Gaudí wanted the church to be built.

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    —Huffduffed by jbragland

  6. Hero Props: Graphic Design in Film & Television - 99% Invisible

    When a new movie comes out most of the plaudits go to the director, the producer and the lead actors, but there are so many other people involved in a film, and a lot of them are designers. There are costume designers and set designers, but also graphic designers working behind the screens on all of the designed objects that shape a film’s aesthetic and help tell its story.

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    —Huffduffed by jbragland

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