As a consumer, steady prices and zero inflation seems like the ideal: You want your purchasing power to stay the same and for your dollar today to buy you exactly the same amount as your dollar tomorrow. But even in times of global economic health and stability, governments and their central banks actively avoid letting inflation get too low. That’s because 0 percent inflation might actually end up doing more harm than good.
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]]>In this video, we compare six of the ways Americans say they get money when they don’t have it: credit cards, bank loans, borrowing from a friend or family member, payday loans, selling something, and going into overdraft. How difficult is each one to access? How does paying off each kind of debt work? And how much does each one cost down the line?
None of these options are great for someone who can’t pay an emergency expense. But some of them are a lot worse than others.
This video is presented by DCU. DCU has no editorial influence on our videos, but their support makes videos like these possible.
]]>It’s true that many Americans lack basic financial knowledge, which is a contributing factor to the money challenges — high levels of debt, insufficient savings, poor investment decisions — that a lot of us face. But it’s not necessarily true that we never learned anything. Many of us sat through a few classes on money management. It just may not have been enough to stick.
In this video, we’ll take a brief look at the state of financial education in the US: past, present, and future
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This video is presented by Metro by T-Mobile. Metro has no editorial influence on our videos, but their support makes videos like these possible.
]]>From the very beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, identity has been at the center of Putin’s agenda. And as cultural sites all over the country sustain damage, it is becoming increasingly clear that erasing the cultural and historical markers of Ukraine is a key facet of Russia’s plan.
Ukraine is home to a vast array of visual and material culture — museums, monuments, archives, and architecture — all of which is at grave risk of destruction, both collateral and intentional.
We spoke with three experts actively working to safeguard Ukraine’s artistic treasures: Hayden Bassett, director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History’s Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab (CHML); Vasyl Mystko, director of communications for Lviv’s Gallery of Art, and Catarina Buchatskiy, co-founder of the Shadows Project.
If you’re interested in volunteering remotely, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is working to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions.
Or check out the Network of European Museum Organizations (NEMO). They’re collecting a list of some organizations in contact with Ukrainians on the ground.
This video is part of our broader reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
How Stalin starved Ukraine
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]]>It was designed nearly 100 years ago by an architect named Marcel Breuer, while he was a student at the Bauhaus, the famed German art school. This somewhat unassuming two-legged chair is the realization of a manifesto’s worth of utopian ideals about design and functionality. So maybe it’s no surprise it has somehow remained in fashion for decades: It’s a design icon. And just a really, really nice-looking chair.
This video is part of our By Design series, all about the intersection of design and technology. You can watch more of this series here.
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]]>But there is growing research that shows it might be the act of sledding itself that is the main driver of brain injury. With every run, athletes are exposed to immense force and vibration, causing micro-concussions that can add up to major damage. Those concussions are mild enough that they can go undiagnosed. But among sledding athletes, the symptoms that indicate a micro-concussion — headaches, dizziness, etc. — are so common they have a special nickname: “sled head.”
There’s a lot science still doesn’t know about sled head, and about the brain in general. But from what we can tell, it’s pretty clear that sliding sports put the brain health of their athletes at risk.
Further reading:
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]]>There are even different articles of clothing that correspond to different events and seasons of year. During times of penance, like Advent or Lent, the pope might wear a purple robe. For ordinary times, he might opt for green. And during major celebrations like Easter or Christmas, popes often wear white and gold to symbolize purity and joy.
Pope Francis has made waves within the Catholic church with his relatively modern and progressive takes on church doctrine and tradition, and his clothing choices can be read as a visual shorthand for those policies.
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]]>The thing is… it’s not actually Dutch. And it didn’t start with filmmakers. It was pioneered by German directors during World War I, when outside films were blocked from being shown in Germany. While Hollywood was serving up largely glamorous, rollicking films, the German film industry joined the expressionist movement in art and literature, which was focused on processing the chaos of world war. Its themes touched on betrayal, suicide, psychosis, and terror. And expressionist films conveyed that darkness not just through their plotlines, but through their set designs, costumes — and unusual camera shots.
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]]>With the help of some internet birders, we took a deep dive (pun intended) into the world of loons to explain how Hollywood misuses this bird call — and why the wail is so haunting in the first place.
To learn more about loons and what you can do to help protect them and their native habitats, check out the Loon Preservation Committee and the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation.
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]]>Ancient buildings and sculptures were actually really colorful. The Greeks and Romans painted their statues to resemble real bodies, and often gilded them so they shone like gods. So why is seemingly every museum on planet Earth full of white marble sculptures?
It’s partly an honest mistake. After the fall of Rome, ancient sculptures were buried or left in the open air for hundreds of years. By the time the Renaissance began in the 1300s, their paint had faded away. As a result, the artists unearthing, studying, and copying ancient art didn’t realize how colorful it was supposed to be.
But white marble couldn’t have become the norm without some willful ignorance. Even though there was a bunch of evidence that ancient sculpture was painted, artists, art historians, and the general public chose to disregard it. Western culture seemed to collectively accept that white marble was simply prettier.
Today, art history is more concerned with accuracy than it is with what might look better, so teams of researchers use a combination of art and science to painstakingly create reconstructions of ancient statues, showing us the true colors of classical antiquity.
Watch the video above to learn more. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.
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