Each one of these Palestinian prisoners has been processed by Israel’s military court system, which exists completely separate from the civilian court system that Jewish Israelis interact with. This system and the military orders that govern it have their origins in the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967.
In this video, two experts explain Israel’s military court system, why it’s been a focus of outcry from human rights organizations, and why hostage negotiations have historically involved the exchange of Palestinian prisoners.
You can find the video above and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
]]>At the time, the federal government was encouraging the idea of new cities. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development opened up a process to finance new towns built by private developers. McKissick took the opportunity to pitch his idea and hoped to secure federal funding to finally make his dream a reality. But to do it, he also made an unlikely ally: Republican President Richard Nixon. By 1972, Soul City was approved for funding, and McKissick broke ground on hundreds of acres of former tobacco plantation land in Warren County, North Carolina.
Designs were drafted. Land was cleared. An electrical grid and water system were constructed. Infrastructure was built, like roads, a public pool, a health clinic, and a massive industrial building called “Soul Tech One,” meant to be a manufacturing hub. But within just seven years of breaking ground, McKissick’s dream of Soul City was cut short. In the piece above, we explore what happened to this experimental town. With the help of McKissick’s son, former Sen. Floyd B. McKissick Jr., and one of Soul City’s first residents, Jane Ball-Groom, we look at what got built, what remains today, and the forces that came together to cause its end.
You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
]]>The easiest and cheapest places to install solar panels are often large, undeveloped plots of land. It’s why, in many places across the country, we’ve seen rural areas — including fragile desert ecosystems and valuable farmland — turned into solar farms. Many local residents and conservationists have protested these rural solar projects for a variety of reasons: Some want to keep natural views; others want to retain space for agriculture or aim to preserve biodiversity. Solar will likely play an important role in the country’s move away from fossil fuels, but is there a smarter way to do it that doesn’t require taking up so much rural land?
In the video above, we explore one option that could help: parking lots. Solar photovoltaics researcher and professor Joshua Pearce goes into the data on how placing solar canopies over parking lots could be a worthwhile investment for many cities. And as more countries, like France, are moving toward retrofitting parking spaces with solar, we look at what it could mean in the US.
This episode is presented by Delta. Delta doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this possible. For more information, visit www.delta.com/sustainability.
You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
]]>Prior to the Nakba, Palestine had a thriving population — largely made up of Arabs — who had lived and worked the land for centuries. But with the founding of Zionism, years of British meddling, and a British pledge to help create a Jewish state in Palestine, things began to change drastically. By 1947, with increasing tensions between Jewish settlers and Palestinian Arabs, the British left Palestine, and the UN stepped in with a plan to partition the land into two states. What followed was known as Plan Dalet: operations by Israeli paramilitary groups that violently uprooted Palestinians. An estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, more than 500 villages were decimated, and roughly 750,000 Palestinians displaced.
Most who were expelled from their homes couldn’t return to historic Palestine. And today, millions of their descendants live in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, and surrounding countries. The history of the Nakba has been deliberately concealed and often ignored in Western narratives around the creation of Israel. In this episode of Missing Chapter, we break down how the Nakba happened — and how it defined the future of Palestine.
You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
]]>For decades, the research was largely focused on how this different brain organization often resulted in delays and difficulty in areas like reading, spelling, and grammar. And today, there continues to be stigma and misconceptions around a dyslexia diagnosis.
But the challenges of dyslexia often overshadow another part of the picture. Research has repeatedly shown dyslexia is also associated with specific cognitive strengths. These include visual-spatial processing, narrative memory, problem-solving, and reasoning. While there is still a lot to learn about these advantages and how they work, in this video we unpack what we know about dyslexia, and what many studies have concluded about these strengths.
This perspective could be critical — not just for the roughly 20 percent of people who have dyslexia — but for the colleagues, peers, and educators who can better empower dyslexic thinking and better understand neurodiversity.
You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
]]>On the flip side, Pakistan is among the most water-scarce countries in the world — expected to reach absolute water scarcity by 2025 if nothing changes. You can’t remove climate change from this equation, but an overlooked factor is the role that British engineering played in building water infrastructure along the Indus River and its tributaries, Pakistan’s sole source of surface water.
A series of perennial canals, dam-like structures called barrages, and embankments were built to extract as much water from the Indus as possible and convert much of Pakistan’s arid landscape into farmland. But this water infrastructure exacerbates the destruction of flooding events and creates a hierarchical system along the canals in terms of water access.
In our video, we explain the design of this water infrastructure and how Pakistan’s colonial past has made the country’s relationship with water even more precarious.
You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
]]>Many around the world started calling the plant “poinsettia” to celebrate Poinsett’s legacy. But that legacy is a troubling one. Poinsett was an enslaver and a firm believer in American expansion, and during his tenure as secretary of war he oversaw the displacement of thousands of Native Americans. In his role as minister to Mexico, he meddled so much in local politics that he was asked to leave the country.
Because of that history — and the fact that the US still corners the lucrative poinsettia market while restricting their imports from Mexico — many people today reject the name poinsettia in favor of the plant’s Native name, cuetlaxochitl. Check out the video above for more on how the US got the poinsettia.
This video is part of Missing Chapter, our series on hidden histories, now on its third season.
]]>In this video, we look at Texas, where years of mass shootings in the US have been met with laws that expand gun access. We spoke with Flo Rice, a survivor of the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting, where a gunman killed 10 people. Flo was shot six times. She and her husband, Scot, became advocates for gun safety, and tried to get tighter gun laws passed in Texas. Watch the piece above to see what happened, and what their story reveals about who has power when it comes to gun policy in the US.
You can find the entire library of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.
]]>In the words of King Molasses, drag is full of “that swag you get in the shower that nobody sees.” Drag king performances are all about playing with masculine identities: politicizing them, satirizing them, and having fun with them. And performers like these have been around for centuries.
In China, documentation of “male impersonators” dates back to the Tang Dynasty, from 618 to 907 AD. In the mid-to-late 1800s, drag king pioneers like Annie Hindle, Vesta Tilley, and Ella Wesner began performing. And in the early 1900s, Go-won-go Mohawk was likely the first Indigenous male impersonator.
By the early 1900s, black performers like Gladys Bentley and Stormé DeLarverie were becoming drag pioneers. And by the 1990s, there was a thriving drag king scene in cities like New York City, San Francisco, and London.
Today, drag kings are pushing for space in a cis male-dominated field. And it’s working.
Check out the kings we interviewed by following them on Instagram!
You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.
]]>One of these Hand Talk variations, Plains Indian Sign Language, was used so widely across the Great Plains that it became a lingua franca — a universal language used by both d/Deaf and hearing people to communicate among tribes that didn’t share a common spoken language. At one point, tens of thousands of Indigenous people used Plains Indian Sign Language, or PISL, for everything from trade to hunting, conflict, storytelling, and rituals.
But by the late 1800s, the federal government began to implement a policy that would change the course of Indigenous history forever: a boarding school program designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into white American culture — a dark history that we’re still learning more about to this day.
Because of a forced “English-only” policy, the boarding school era is one of the main reasons the country lost so many Native signers — along with the eventual dominance of ASL in schools for the d/Deaf.
Today, there are just a handful of fluent PISL signers left in the US. In the piece above, we hear from two of these signers, Melanie McKay-Cody and Lanny Real Bird, who have dedicated their lives to studying and revitalizing the language. They show us PISL in action and help us explore how this ancient language holds centuries of Indigenous history.
This video is part of our award-winning series, Missing Chapter, now in its third season. You can watch more Missing Chapter episodes in this playlist.
You can find the entire library of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.
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