Vox Borders Specials: Episode Guide & Ratings

Meet the people trying to make Japan great again. Like many nations, Japan is undergoing a surge in right-wing nationalism, the brand of nationalism that is skeptical of globalization and outsiders. But while Japan's nationalism looks similar to other right-wing movements in the West, when you look under the surface, you see a totally different story.

Why ocean ice matters. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Every year the ocean ice in the Arctic melts and refreezes again the winter. But recently the ice has been melting faster than ever. This means that the ice sheets are becoming thinner. This matters because ocean ice performs important regulatory functions for our planet.

The ritual of Japanese business cards. Ritual and ceremony are paramount in Japanese culture. Together, they dictate social interactions at both the macro and micro scales of society. Understanding and navigating these norms can be difficult, but sometimes the solution is waiting in Tokyo’s metro.

What vending machines can teach you about this country. While in Japan I noticed vending machines everywhere. Looking into it a little deeper a discovered that there's a very interesting answer to why Japan has so many vending machines. It's an economic story but it's also a story about how Japanese society values robotics and automation.

Oslo is the Tesla capital of the world. I spent a day in Oslo before traveling to Svalbard, and noticed that there were Teslas everywhere. Upon further investigation, I learned that the Norwegian government heavily incentivizes ownership of electric cars: Tesla doesn't pay a sales tax on the models it sells, electric car owners are exempt from automobile tolls, and they can charge their vehicles for free. The catch is that Norway funds these initiatives through its sovereign wealth fund, which is almost entirely comprised of profits from Norway's oil and fossil fuel exports.

What I learned when I trained sled dogs for a day. I spoke with my friend Sasha, who works in Barentsburg training Arctic sled dog teams. Dog breeds like the Husky or Samoyed were traditionally bred in Siberia, but in the 1920s when international dog standards were developing, the Soviet Union was closed to the world. Because of this, these traditionally Russian breeds fell under the administration of the Nordic Dog Union. Today, this has led to a schism about the identity and origins of these dogs.

I visited Svalbard's Global Seed Vault, built specifically for doomsday. In this video I visited Svalbard's Global Seed Vault, founded by the Crop Trust group in 2008. Over 135,000 genetic deposits have been stored since the vault's opening, to be used at a further date in case crop diversity is threatened due to changing global conditions. The seed vault had its first withdrawal, caused by the war in Syria in 2015, and had minor flooding in May 2017.

I spoke with a Haitian graffiti artist about the unintended consequences of longterm disaster relief funding. Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake in 2010. Seven years later, over 10,000 nonprofit organizations and $6 billion dollars of aid funding have been funneled into the country. Although there's still a desperate need for basic services such as food, healthcare, education, and shelter, questions have arisen about whether this continuous aid has become a crutch for the Haitian government. Similarly, Haitians themselves are awaking to the notion of self-determination in their country.

They taught me how to surf. The sport of surfing remains relatively unknown in Haiti. The organizers of Surf Haiti are trying to change that. They run a surf commune in the southern coast of Haiti at Jacmel. By raising domestic awareness of surfing through lessons and education, these surfers hope to build momentum for Haiti to submit a surfing bid to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, where surfing will debut as an Olympic event.

This sustainable initiative is helping to save Haiti's forests. Haiti has a significant deforestation problem, driven in part by the widespread usage of charcoal for cooking in Haitian households. This practice is doubly problematic as it also raises health concerns for Haitians who burn charcoal in their homes. One initiative, spearheaded by The Nature Conservancy, is tackling this problem through the introduction of solar ovens. These ovens cook food with reflected sunlight, reducing the burden of deforestation in a sustainable way.

There's more to the border than just a wall. This dispatch is from the Rio Grande River, on the Texas side of the U.S. border with Mexico. I embedded with border patrol, to learn about the technology, techniques, and challenges of monitoring a section of the border with over 300 miles of river.

Keeping time was challenging for ancient civilizations, so this one built a city to do it. This dispatch is from the ancient archaeological site at Teotihuacán, in Mexico. I walked around the ruins with a guide, and learned about how the people who built the site planned it in a way that helped them track time. Scholars theorize that the structures at Teotihuacán were built to align with the cosmos on certain days of the year, which let the people know when it was time to plant crops or conduct rituals.

I visited Gibraltar and hung out with monkeys. This dispatch is from Gibraltar, a British enclave on the southern coast of Spain. Gibraltar is home to Europe's only population of wild monkeys, the Barbary Macaques. They've lived on the island for hundreds of years, and have become part of its history, but nobody knows how they got there. Their origin is shrouded in legend.