August 1, 2018

Borders: Season 1


I'm not even sure if this constitutes a season of television - blurred lines, baby - but Vox put out a series of six YouTube videos in 2017, called the videos "episodes" and the whole thing a "season," and, well, why not?

Borders is a show(?) about international borders and I absolutely loved it. Quick and easy and educational, to-the-point, not half as schlocky as most of Vox's video content - this whole series is extremely "for me," fam. Like, first episode they're focusing on Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and how two countries sharing one small island can be so vastly different when it comes to economy and stability and demographics. And I just listened to a dozen-hour podcast on the Haitian Revolution, so, that lined up quite nicely. Second episode they're talking about Arctic nations making claims on underwater continental shelves in the Arctic Circle, focusing significantly on an all-Russian outpost on a northern Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard - a place I desperately wanted to visit when I went to Norway a year ago, and where two friends are honeymooning as I type this! Final episode, they're in and around the Spanish city of Melilla, one of two cities owned and controlled by Spain but located on the northern coast of Africa. I was just in Spain, and became briefly fascinated by the history of why Spain owns tiny pieces of Africa, and why the UK owns a tiny piece of Spain in Gibraltar.

And the series isn't just "about" these places; narrator/host Johnny Harris actually travels to these places, generally to both sides of whatever border he's talking about, in what looks, at least from the outside, like the world's coolest job.

There's a second season - a spin-off, maybe? - going up in weekly installments right now about the non-international border between Hong Kong and China. I'm in!

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