As summer’s reality falls down dead around us, it seems appropriate to reflect on disillusionment and to seek the integrity that can disarm it. The distance that opens up between a soul and the world when something like a season’s end strikes it is a rich space, if risky. Each in its own way, the essays and features in this issue ask sharp questions, force integration. Chandler Ryd considers how Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” persona reflects our position between the Victorians and the moderns in our search for what’s missing, while Timothy Troutner seeks to set a recent pair of Collegian editorials in a broader historical context. The link between words and the world comes in for scrutiny as The Forum has the privilege of publishing Dr. Dwight Lindley’s on-campus lecture “What does literature have to do with reality?” and Co-Editor-in-Chief Madeline Johnson considers two parts of speech she finds too often out of reach.The issue turns next to a pair of essays reflecting on how we physically structure our world: Christopher Riley leads an expert tour through the architecture of Hillsdale County and Lara Forsythe zeroes in on one particularly significant architectural feature, the front porch. Managing Editor Emily Lehman offers a critique of the campus culture of busyness before Editor-at-Large Chris McCaffery concludes this issue’s collection of essays with the first installment of a three-part examination of irony—one enduring response to the perpetual betrayal that time brings to all earnest young things, as October does to May’s green sincerity.

The three pieces of art that our reviewers explore at the end of the issue are rich with the tensions of pathos and distraction. Stacey Egger explores the panoply of temporal perspectives that is Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon. Timothy Troutner doesn’t just recommend Inside Llewyn Davis; he articulates an elusive angle of its excellence, as Sarah Schweizer does with Richard Ford’s novel The Sportswriter. Stacey Egger explores the panoply of temporal perspectives that is Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon.

And should all the foregoing fail to galvanize a sincere response to absurdity, satirist Noah Weinrich offers us some humor as we give the world the cold shoulder it deserves.

Our hemisphere is tilting into darkness. Curl up with this magazine and decide how you’ll face it.

Co-Editor-in-Chief Madeline Johnson is a junior studying philosophy.

Co-Editor-in-Chief Sarah Reinsel is a junior studying English and classical education.