A Blog on McConnell Center Life

 By Claire Harmon   I love celebrity gossip. The drama, the intrigue, the excitement and pleasure that comes from judging someone you will never meet and who has no idea you exist. It’s my bread and butter, and the Met Gala is the Superbowl of celebrity drama. From the men’s boring tuxes to the show-stopping outfits of stars like Zendaya, Iman, and Rihanna, there’s always something to talk about on fashion’s biggest night of the year.  However, while a part of me enjoys the entertainment of seeing Bennifer reunited once again and complaining about no one following the theme, I am also a student studying art history. I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor to take a closer look at the fashion of the Met Gala as high art and its implications for politics, popular culture, and everything in between.  To keep me from getting too deep in the weeds of who wore what designer and who stuck to this year’s theme of “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” I want to focus on a single cel...

 By Abigail Cheek   As a college student, I do so much reading and thinking on a daily basis that sometimes I need an escape from it all. So, I watch the Bachelor. For two hours a week, I can get away with losing brain cells instead of gaining them and it is wonderful. Recently, my once mindless escape started making me think. As a psychology major, I started to wonder what types of predispositions and circumstances must combine to make these women do and say some of the outlandish things that occur on this show. So I began to think about The Bachelor from a  psychological perspective. The first explanation I found for their behavior was contained within the scarcity principle, this is the idea that when demand exceeds supply the limited supply suddenly begins to look very attractive. If you pay attention to the way things unfold on the show, you’ll notice that almost all of the women “fall in love” almost instantly despite only having met the bachelor for a few minu...

 By Allison Boarman   Throughout 2021, I’ve been trying something pretty radical (for me, anyways): listening to myself. Learning how to balance gut feelings with rationality. It took forever to learn the difference between something just not being right for me, and knowing that it was right for me but being afraid of the outcome. At the end of 2020, it started to sink in that I wasn’t in the right direction. I kept telling my friends that I had always wanted to be a lawyer, so there’s no way things could change, but it suddenly felt wrong to think about myself as a lawyer. I was terrified of this feeling, especially as someone who was nearing the end of her sophomore year. I had been comfortable before—knowing what was ahead of me. I would graduate with a political science degree, go to law school, and become a lawyer. so I stayed, and I worked through the feeling that something wasn’t right. The beginning of 2021 brought a lot of change into my life. I was grieving a few los...

 By  Sydney Finley   “I never quite understood those who chose the sea…” Staring death straight in the eye,   leaning in slowly,   with bated breath.   What’s to come, then? Memories from what is left behind? That would scare anybody, surely. But not them. For mourning comes when the heart and Flesh fail. But, What comes when the heart, Forced into submissiveness, numbness, Silence, Is not able to beat for itself? As it was always meant to be? Death is not unfamiliar, it comes with the rising and setting Of the Sun. The Son. He is the only thing connecting their soles to their souls. Sydney Finley is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2023. She is studying biology and political science at the University of Louisville.

 By Tanner Morrow   I n my first ever blog as a McConnell Scholar, in the autumn of 2019, I discussed a fascinating theoretical technology proposal that I believed would be the next great leap for our species. It was called a space elevator, and as hard as it was going to be to build, I argued that we should do it anyways because of all the problems it might solve. It is safe to say—based on the bizarreness of the structure alone—that I was a disciple of all things space exploration then. In the autumn of the next year, I criticized our system of elections by praising a place I believed was doing it better. This autumn, it only seems appropriate that the thought I cannot seem to get out of my head is my critical opinion of the system being established to facilitate space exploration. Heads up, expect as many farfetched ideas and passionate calls to action as my previous autumnal exposés. Oh, and take it with a grain of salt. At the time of this blog post, the world is dumping ...

 By Thomas Hulse  I love a good adage. Much might be said about the illustrious works of history’s greatest philosophical minds, but few hold a candle to a simple, elegant, true adage. Prudent verbiage is a virtue, and those proverbs which pass down through tradition do well to resonate with our spirits. How passionately am I stirred to be better when Marcus Aurelius exhorts himself, “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”   And yet, too often are we met with contradictory bits of admonition on how to live the better life. Taken in isolation, each rings true, but together they seem cobbled in a puzzling array of misaligned lessons. We are told, “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life,” but at the same time, we hear, “Don’t let life pass you by.” We are instructed, “Take time for yourself,” but, “A day spent with friends is always a day well spent.” We are instructed, “Think for yourself,” but, “If you want to be like the Greats...