chasing ice

Footage from the Chasing Ice project of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, at Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier in 2008. A 75-minute event is condensed to a few minutes of cameras watching ice collapse.

A 45-minute Flex Your Rights documentary on how to deal with police in three situations: traffic stops, encounters at home, and on the street. It presents practical advice on asserting constitutional rights and refusing searches.

A VICE documentary profiling Wim Hof, the Iceman, covering his feats of cold endurance, his breathing and meditation method, and scientific studies of his control over his autonomic and immune systems.

A VICE on HBO segment in which Thomas Morton joins a tour of born-again Christians in the Holy Land. It examines the end-times beliefs behind evangelical support for Israel.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day documents boarding a US Navy nuclear submarine in the Arctic during the ICEX 2020 under-ice exercise. It is the first of a series on life aboard a fast attack submarine.

A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

A compilation of police interrogations of innocent suspects who behave in very different ways yet are treated as guilty. It illustrates how interrogation tactics and detectives' assumptions can distort the truth.

A 1978 documentary hosted by Leonard Nimoy about the coming ice age, reposted with a framing that contrasts it with today's climate science.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

A two-minute CBC Firsthand clip showing UK police surrounding and capturing a distraught man holding a machete, then taking him to a hospital. It is an excerpt from the documentary Hold Your Fire.

Ben Anderson's VICE documentary shows embedded reporting on Afghan security forces and US Marines in Helmand during the troop drawdown, exposing incompetence, drug abuse and corruption.

Vice founder Shane Smith travels to North Korea, speaking with refugees in South Korea before crossing the DMZ. It is part one of a three-part documentary with rare on-the-ground footage.

VICE News reporter Isobel Yeung goes undercover as a tourist in Xinjiang, documenting heavy surveillance, policing and internment of Uighurs. It also covers children taken into state-run institutions.

VICE's Oobah Butler spends eight months using fake reviews to push a nonexistent restaurant, The Shed at Dulwich, to number one on TripAdvisor in London. The short documentary shows how easily review systems can be gamed.

VICE News reporter Elle Reeve investigates China's rollout of facial recognition and mass surveillance technology and what it means for citizens. The report originally aired on VICE on HBO.

A VICE report from 2011 in which Suroosh Alvi revisits the gun markets in Pakistan's tribal areas, a stronghold of the Taliban. It shows weapons being made and sold by hand and a country described as a powder keg.

BBC Earth shows killer whales working as a pod to create waves that wash seals off ice floes, with the producer explaining how the crew captured behavior once thought a myth.

Dan Olson's long Folding Ideas video on the GameStop meme stock phenomenon, its online community and the conspiracy thinking around it. It runs over two hours.

Official trailer for Eugene Jarecki's 2012 documentary The House I Live In, an investigative look at America's war on drugs and its effect on the criminal justice system. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.

Ava DuVernay's Oscar-nominated documentary on how the history of racial inequality in the US, from slavery through the 13th Amendment's exception clause, drives mass incarceration. It combines archival footage with testimony from activists and scholars.

A 1945 US Army educational film that dramatizes how demagogues use prejudice and scapegoating to divide people. It opens with fake wrestling matches and crooked gambling games to show how con artists work, then applies the lesson to racial and religious bigotry.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

Gaming Historian recounts how Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in the Soviet Union and how a fight over publishing rights spanned the West, Mirrorsoft, Nintendo and the Cold War. It runs about an hour with chaptered parts.

The first episode of Milton Friedman's 1980 Free To Choose series, on how markets and voluntary exchange organize economic activity and the price system. It includes visits to Hong Kong, the U.S. and Scotland and a panel discussion with critics.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.

A 1947 US military film that deconstructs how the Nazi regime used divisive propaganda and prejudice to split and control a population. It teaches viewers to recognise demagoguery tactics.

A Rare Earth explainer on Japan's criminal justice system and its extremely high conviction rate. It outlines the system's idiosyncrasies and how suspects are treated.

TechAltar's history of Philips, once Europe's largest tech company and a world leader in lighting, radio and physical media. It traces how the company sold off or spun out its businesses, until little remains but the licensed name.

An Asianometry documentary-style video on the rise and collapse of China's dockless bike-share boom. It covers the startups, the heavy subsidies and the price wars.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

A VICE documentary that visits Agafia Lykova, last surviving member of the Lykov family of Old Believers who fled into the Siberian taiga in 1936. It shows how she lives in remote isolation and the outside world encroaching on it.

An episode of the Norwegian documentary series Brainwash, in which a comedian interviews academics from different sides about gender differences and gender equality. It looks at why more equal societies can still show unequal career choices.

A 1940 Bell Telephone educational short teaching customers how to use their new dial phones and why the change was happening. It is a period piece about rolling out a new technology to ordinary people.

Karl Jobst investigates the retro video game bubble, examining who caused it, who profits, and how graders and auction houses like Wata Games and Heritage inflate prices. It runs almost an hour.

A documentary on the last day the New York Times was printed with linotype machines in 1978, following the process from the newsroom to the press. It marks the move to computerized typesetting.

A circa-1964 film showing AMF's AMFare system, which ordered, cooked and packaged hamburgers, fries, shakes and more automatically for a pilot fast-food operation.

Dan Olson's roughly two-hour video essay critiques NFTs, cryptocurrency, and Web3, covering their technical, economic, and ideological flaws. It is heavily sourced and ends with the advice to ask whether a project needs crypto to work.

Part one of Montemayor's animated-map documentary on the Battle of Midway, told using only the information available to the Japanese side. It focuses on Nagumo's dilemma.