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Showing posts from December, 2025

Politics: Attention Spans, Politics and Populism – Why Does It Work?

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...

Year 7 Budding Artistry: Madhav Makwani

  The reason that I enjoy comics is because comics and graphic novels are funny, entertaining,  suspenseful, full of action and they come in all sorts of genres. I started to like comics when one day I was at the airport and saw a book on the shelves for sale. With a peculiar look on my face, I looked at it and wondered "This looks like cartoon but on a book with funny looking characters and plenty of action - I shall go and check it out". I then walked to the shelve and saw the cover. It was magnificent! It was called "Dog Man". All the drawings on the inside were drawn in a cartoon-like fashion and so funny that I couldn't take my eyes off them! A few months later, I had read many of the Dog Man comics over and over. I then went to the store later on and saw another comic book with characters on the front cover drawn in a skilled and yet funny way. I then thought: "What is this superb piece of artwork with such magnificently drawn characters!". I yet...