By Chandler Ryd

Take a walk down Broad Street in May. See the sky, blue after the winter grey, and feel the cool breeze, so pleasant after months of icy winds. Stop by the Coffee Cup for Thai around noon. Eat with your friends, off campus, away from the difficulty of the school year, anticipating the adventures of the summer. Spend an hour at Rough Draft in the afternoon, reading.

This is downtown Hillsdale after Hell Week, a respite from all the good things that our academic life offers. And this is also a picture of what I hope The Forum does for you.

I hope our magazine has provided thoughtful writing that exists somewhere just beyond the limits of lectures and papers, where the ideas of the classroom intersect with our experience outside Hillsdale. And in this last issue of the school year, I hope these pages bring you delight the way a walk down Broad Street in May does for me.  

Our issue begins with Emily Lehman reflecting on the multiplicity of goods that life sometimes offers and the necessity of affirming whichever one we choose without wondering what might have been had we chosen another. Next, Mark Naida explores one of the natural treasures of Michigan, Hartwick Pines State Park, the only patch of forest that wasn’t clear-cut during the 19th century logging boom. Leah Hickman considers why most of us are inordinately afraid of awkwardness and how we can “embrace the awkward” by losing our self-consciousness. Reacting to the controversy surrounding the homosexual relationship in the recent Beauty and the Beast film, Noah Diekemper evaluates Lefou in light of the notion of imitative desire. Andrew Egger also comments on a controversy, albeit a much longer standing one, arguing that Intelligent Design is a flimsy alternative to both creationism and evolutionary theory. In an essay of my own, I tell a few (hopefully) funny stories about my struggles as a writer wanting to be remembered. Joel Calvert ends the issue by opening a conversation about the ethics of design, a subject that impacts us daily but often goes unnoticed. 

Chandler Ryd is a junior studying English