Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
AARUSH LAL Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations most attached to liberty to repose. To be more safe, they become willing to run the risk of becoming less free.” - Alexander Hamilton The noun “prisoners'' is one of an intriguing etymology. It is most often thought to be derived from the 12th century French noun prisoun, a term commonly translated to obtain the meaning of a state of captivity, and therefore a state of being viewed today to be heavily linked with confinement. Yet, in a nation with a prison population as vast as the United States’ one, perhaps the most intriguing paradox is that of what so many individuals are being confined from. Perhaps most notably exists a confinement away from an ability to nurture and have a positive impact on others in the nation, one away from th...