Carpe Noctem

Having a criminal record has a profound impact on the formerly incarcerated long after they exit the lockup. For example, finding meaningful employment post-prison can be extremely difficult. More than 70 million people have criminal records in this country. This represents a huge pool of untapped talent, that could be leveraged in awesome ways. My organisation, Breaking the Bars , would provide an avenue for ex-prisoners to grow their own business through a series of seed investments. A seed investment would provide the initial capital to budding ideas, giving individuals the confidence and resources to pursue ventures that might otherwise go unexplored. These investments would range in size from $2,000 to $50,000, catering to the spectrum of ideas and projects that come up. A challenge to implementing this project could be struggling to find a large enough pool of applicants for investment. An elegant solution to this could be partnering with existing business schools and entr...

Deciding what issue to tackle isn’t trivial; the amount of suffering and unfairness in this world is huge; however, if we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the impossibility of the big picture, nothing will ever get done. With that said I decided to brainstorm a topic that I found passionately about-- choosing to focus on our prison system as a avenue for profound social change. The prison and criminal justice system in the United States is plagued with a broad range of issues. For example, tough, reagan-era drug laws and mandatory minimums ensure that people get locked up more often and stay in prison longer. Private-run prisons also exacerbate the problem by incentivizing the retention of prisoners. Additionally, as Michelle Alexander notes in “The New Jim Crow,” mass incarceration has become a modern version of the actions previously taken to disenfranchise large amounts of black men. Rehabilitation of prisoners is also an extremely pressing issue as recidivism of prisoners...

Fountains In preparation for the cross-town rivalry game, me and the rest of my freshmen class in the drumline were assigned a set of tasks to complete. One of these items instructed us to visit every fountain on campus and take a group photo with it. To my surprise there was an unreasonable amount of fountains on campus; more than 30 in total. This trip around campus got me thinking about the symbolism fountains and motivated me to learn more about what made them so ubiquitous on our campus. For this blog post I will talk about about fountains. In times of ancient greece, fountains served a much more functional purpose, allowing people to easily access water from nearby aqueducts for drinking washing and bathing. There was definitely a decorative element to these fixtures; however, they actually filled a need. Later, as indoor plumbing was introduced, the need for these types of fountains decreased, relegated now to something now much more ornamental. In developing countries wh...

In this second half of the book I noticed a distinct shift from justifying and framing the fight against inequality to actionable advice for readers whether they are in the 99 percent or top 1 percent. Collins started this section by showcasing some of the secrets of the “charity industrial complex.” I knew to an extent that wealthy people made charitable donations to reduce their tax burden, but I had no idea about the depth to which in went. He spoke about pseudo fraudulent behaviors within large foundations that allowed them to donate a tiny percentage of their intended charitable funds and instead spend it on expensive retreats and huge salaries for trustees. I never thought about how donations to wealthy schools influenced poor schools before this book; that tax deductable donations to affluent schools takes money away from poor schools who would have received a share of those funds through taxation. As someone who goes to a school heavily supported by its alumni body it was d...