Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

speaker

1,089 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 3 Jun

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Planet Money · Strange threadfellows: How the U.S. military shaped what we all wear · 10 Dec 2025 podcast

You see, for the first century and a half of its history, the U.S.

military more or less took its sartorial cues from the militaries of Europe.

The Revolutionary Army basically took the design for the famous British redcoats and turned them blue, in part apparently because of how much indigo was produced on American plantations.

Later, our soldiers dressed like the French, and there was even a period when American officers wore pointy little helmets like the Prussian military.

But when World War II arrived, it presented a new kind of problem for the people in charge of outfitting U.S.

soldiers, one that called for a more technological approach.

This was a global conflict where millions of American soldiers would be potentially deployed to fight in all kinds of different climates and terrains, ranging from the balmy summers of the Pacific Rim to the frigid winters of Western Europe.

And one of the people tasked with solving this problem was a Harvard business professor by the name of George Dorio.

But for the purposes of our story, what's important is that George Dorio worked with a part of the military known as the United States Quartermaster Corps.

George Dorio took it upon himself to help organize a scientific effort within the Quartermaster Corps to solve this new gear problem the military was facing, employing many of the testing techniques that had emerged in places like the physiology department at Harvard.

At one point, the Quartermaster Corps designs a copper mannequin they can use to test out how cold or wet the soldiers might get when subjected to different kinds of conditions.

They named the mannequin Chauncey.

The model of the mannequin's name was Chauncey.

They had a team of Chaunceys, but they all had like copper skin that could tell how cold they were getting in different jackets.

After months of subjecting Chauncey and others to this terrifying testing regimen, the quartermaster engineers realize there may not actually be just one jacket to rule them all.

Now, people have obviously been layering in some form or another since the Paleolithic era.

When somebody threw a woolly mammoth poncho over their saber-toothed tiger skin.

But Avery says this is the first time layering for field performance was turned into a whole system.

A system built around a sort of simple olive green jacket.

But in 1943, this M43 jacket represented the cutting edge of clothing technology, a modular system that could be transformed to fit almost any environment.

Showing 981–1000 of 1,089 · page 50 of 55