A Blog on McConnell Center Life

By Tanner Morrow This summer, the McConnell Center sponsored my class on a long trip through Italy. Unexpectedly, one of my favorite parts was watching and riding the passenger trains. Connect all cities and towns with fast, cheap, reliable transportation accessible to everyone. I long to see passenger trains of that caliber return to Kentucky, and advocate for it to be so daily.  There are hundreds of practical reasons we need passenger trains in our country, but one of my favorite reasons is nostalgia. The practical reasons are only an internet search away, but nostalgia is a hard emotion to convey. I am too young to remember an extensive passenger railroad in Kentucky, so I have relied on the memories of others, through records and conversations, to gain a sense of nostalgia all my own. Kentucky does have a few active passenger railway stations still in use. Still, they are situated in small towns in far Eastern and Western Kentucky and either hardly have service or are dedicate...

By Sydney Finley After my morning of capturing bees, I spent the afternoon in the peach stand out on the highway , selling T. Ray’s peaches. It was the loneliest summer job a girl could have, stuck in a roadside hut with three walls and a flat tin roof. I sat on a Coke crate and watched pickups zoom by till I was nearly poisoned with exhaust fumes and boredom. Thursday afternoons were usually a big peach day, with women getting ready for Sunday cobblers, but not a soul stopped. T. Ray refused to let me bring books out here and read, and if I smuggled one out, say, Lost Horizon, stuck under my shirt, somebody, like Mrs. Watson from the next farm, would see him at church and say, “Saw your girl in the peach stand reading up a storm . You must be proud.” And he would half kill me. What kind of person is against reading? I think he believed it would stir up ideas of college, which he thought a waste of money for girls , even if they did, like me, score the highest number a human...

By  Claire Harmon Often in political science courses, we are asked to write policy briefs that explain a specific issue, provide data, and offer policy solutions. Last year, I took a course in state government, focusing on the differences between how states formulate and enact legislation, and for my policy brief I chose to focus on the lack of quality healthcare for incarcerated women in the United States and how Kentucky has failed to address the issue time and time again. This policy brief, while always relevant, crossed my mind again this semester when my class began a series of seminars on Angela Davis's iconic work  Are Prisons Obsolete?  led by Dr. Cherie Dawson-Edwards. In a country where we continually incarcerate millions of people for unjust reasons in heinous conditions, I hope that pressing this issue and discussing it in spaces like the McConnell Center will keep it in the forefront of our minds, especially as my classmates and I graduate and enter the "real...

By  Allison Boarman My class is special. We’ve been through a lot together. Our college careers have not particularly been easy, but I think I speak for everyone when I say it would have been a lot harder if we didn’t have each other. Regardless of what was going on around us at the time, I can’t think of a single moment in which I asked for help and they wouldn’t have been there in a heartbeat. When I was really struggling with a tough situation my freshman year, all 9 of them offered to roll up to my dorm room with blankets and pillows to sleep on my floor and give me company. I never got to see if they really would have, but I absolutely think they would’ve shown up if I had asked. When I have a really bad day, someone is there holding my hand, or telling me to count the things I can see, or standing on a park bench in the Kurz courtyard and reciting scenes from Hamlet to make me laugh. We are exceedingly resilient. We have difficult conversations that others could never have wi...

By Thomas Hulse      Overlooking a forest ridge out over the misted treetops, a rainbow rests lightly in the sky. With every color known to man, it pulls us back into our past, where our ancestors saw the same arc thousands of years prior. How is it that every rainbow is created just so, in the same way every time? Some act of divine beauty gracing our senses with awe? In fact, by measuring the angle that the rainbow makes with the sun rays, you can find that it always makes 42°. This is because, of all the rays reflected inside water droplets, the outgoing rays emerge more frequently around this angle, causing an increased intensity which we can see. And the different colors are caused by dispersion inside the droplets—different frequencies of light refracting at different angles.      A criticism often levelled unfairly at physicists is that they turn the beautiful world around us into a series of equations to be solved. It is true that there are few ques...

By Abigail Cheek The mentally ill have long been considered a dependent class within society. Throughout  history, communities and societies have been faced with the task of containing the adverse  effects of mental illness and providing relief to those experiencing mental illness. Societal  perceptions and speculations regarding insanity have undergone drastic evolutions throughout  the progression of time. As the circumstances and knowledge surrounding mental illness have  evolved throughout time societal responses have in turn shifted to reflect those changes with  treatment of the mentally ill reflecting the needs of society.             The earliest perceptions of mental illness are embodied by ancient texts which detail the  supernatural causes of erratic behaviors. Doctors attributed disturbances of mood, speech, and  behavior to supernatural causes. Early Christianity, for example, sanctioned centuri...