ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM Thursday, January 28, 2016
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CITY
Flint crisis 2 reignites A well water concerns AVA RANDA/Daily
Rohit Chopra, senior adviser to the U.S. Department of Education, speaks about the population most affected by defaulting student loans at Weill Hall Wednesday.
Forum looks at populations affected by student debt Students with low income, less education most likely to struggle By KIRSTY MCINNES For the Daily
Cumulatively, nearly 40 million Americans carry 1.3 trillion dollars worth of student
debt and one out of every four Americans are either in delinquency or default, Susan Collins, dean of public policy, said to a full room of 100 at Weill Hall Wednesday. At the University specifically, she noted, last year’s graduating class cumulatively owed $35,000. In light of those numbers, Collins led a discussion with Susan Dynarski, professor of public policy, education and
economics, and Rohit Chopra, senior adviser of the U.S. Department of Education, about whether there is a student debt crisis in the U.S. According to Dynarski, University students often aren’t the ones at risk of defaulting on their student loans. “Erase from your mind the image of a Yale graduate, NYU graduate, a Columbia graduate or even a U of M graduate — in fact, anyone who graduates
with a BA is relatively unlikely to default (on their student loans),” she said. Rather, Dynarski said the average victim of student debt crisis is a college dropout from a non-selective, community or for-profit college. “(Those who) grew up poor, entered college late, in their 20s or 30s, to improve their job market skills,” Dynarski said. The amounts being borrowed See DEBT, Page 2A
Ann Arbor carefully monitors filtration systems to avoid potential harm By BRIAN KUANG Daily Staff Reporter
As the water crisis in Flint dominates national headlines, local attention has turned to Ann Arbor’s water system — specifically, a case of possible contamination in the city’s groundwater. From 1966 to 1986, Gelman Sciences of Ann Arbor manufactured medical filters using dioxane, a potentially dangerous organic compound, subsequently contaminating the city’s surrounding groundwater with the toxic substance 1,4-dioxane. Gelman, acquired by Pall Life Sciences in 1997, is
SPORTS
SCIENCE
Connecticut’s Warde Manuel to fill athletic director spot Michigan hires former UConn A.D. to same position, source confirms
By LEV FACHER AND SIMON KAUFMAN Daily Sports Writer and Daily Sports Editor
Warde Manuel, the current athletic director at Connecticut and a former Michigan football player, will become Michigan’s next athletic director, a source close to the Connecticut athletic department said Wednesday in an interview with the Daily, confirming earlier reports from the Detroit Free Press and ESPN. Manuel will replace interim Athletic Director Jim Hackett, who has held the post since Dave Brandon’s resignation in October 2014. Connecticut has yet to publicly confirm Manuel’s departure.
According to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not yet authorized to speak publicly on the matter, Manuel met with the university’s board of trustees Wednesday morning. Susan Herbst, the university’s president, acknowledged Manuel’s exit to donors and others close to the program following the meeting. In a November interview with the Daily at the Battle 4 Atlantis basketball tournament in the Bahamas, Manuel spoke effusively of Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh and Hackett, but declined to answer questions about his long-term interest in making the jump to Ann Arbor. Manuel was Harbaugh’s teammate in 1986, when the Schembechler-led Wolverines won the Big Ten, and he has made no secret of his love for his alma mater. “I can tell you, wherever we See MANUEL, Page 5A
currently held by the Danaher Corporation, who acquired it in 2015. Since 1992, Gelman Sciences has been held legally liable by the Environmental Protection Agency for monitoring and cleanup of the contamination; this responsibility has been passed on to Gelman’s successor companies. Currently, both Pall Life Sciences and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality independently test samples from monitoring wells several times a year. The plume of contaminated water is heavily monitored to avoid human consumption and is undergoing gradual cleanup. More than 120 private wells in the city have been closed since 1985 due to the contamination, but it is currently not considered a danger to the overall city water supply. “I was told there was dioxane here, and in my See WATER, Page 2A
‘U’ energy researchers receive $1.4 million grant Project to simulate power grid one of seven efforts funded
MARINA ROSS/Daily
Dr. David Fisher, director of the Museum of Paleontology, speaks about the wooly mammoth that was recently found near Chelsea Michigan at Connor O’neills Irish Pub and Restaurant on Wednesday.
Experts lead community event on mammoth finding Skeleton set to be displayed at Museum of Natural History By LYDIA MURRAY Daily Staff Reporter
After the remains of a mammoth were found in Chelsea, Mich. last September, Paleontology Prof. Daniel Fisher and Adam Rountrey, manager
of the Research Museum Vertebrate Collection, gathered to discuss the find’s significance and future plans for its display. Fisher worked with farmer James Bristle, who found the remains, and a team of both graduate and undergraduate students on the excavation, and over the course of a single day they uncovered a significant amount of fossil matter. The discussion, held at Conor O’Neill’s Traditional Irish Pub as one of UMNH’s
monthly science café series, consisted of brief presentations from Fisher and Rountrey on the story of the discovery and some of their work in the time following and included time for conversations at individual tables based on prompted discussion questions. According to Fisher, the mammoth specimen provides insights into the creature’s life and interactions with humans. Additionally, Fisher said the mammoth appears See MAMMOTH, Page 2A
By DESIREE CHEW Daily Staff Reporter
Researchers from the University have received a $1.4 million grant from the Department of Energy to help develop data on power system optimization in energy grids. The team will work to develop new test cases to formulate better software algorithms for transmission operators to run the energy grid — algorithms which regulate energy amounts. These operators are largely non-profit government agencies. The need for such research stems from the ongoing energy transition from traditional, emissionheavy sources such as coal and nuclear power to cleaner, renewable sources like wind See GRANT, Page 2A
Life and Death in A2 How two Ann Arbor institutions improve our lives by helping us cope with death
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INDEX
Vol. CXXV, No. 61 ©2016 The Michigan Daily michigandaily.com
NEWS......................... 2A OPINION.....................4A SPORTS......................5A
SUDOKU.....................2A CL ASSIFIEDS............... 5A B-SIDE ....................1B
News
2A — Thursday, January 28. 2016
MONDAY: This Week in History
TUESDAY: Campus Voices
WEDNESDAY: In Other Ivory Towers
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THURSDAY: Twitter Talk
FRIDAY: Photos of the Week
KICKING FOR CLUBS
Each week, “Twitter Talk” is a forum to print tweets that are fun, informative, breaking or newsworthy, with an angle on the University, Ann Arbor and the state. All tweets have been edited for accurate spelling and grammar.
Students are urged to stay motivated and inspired as midterms approach.
“We all had to take some risks and generate effort. That is why we are here. We will continue working hard to make an impact.” #ThoseWhoStay” —@UmichStudents
“ SINDUJA KILARU/Daily
School of Music, Theater & Dance freshman Ezra Gans demonstrates a kick during a fundraiser for U-M’s Tae Kwon Do club at Mason Hall on Tuesday.
“
Michigan is working to land new athletic recruits.
“Good day for Michigan so far. Hire a really solid new AD in Warde Manuel and land a recruit w/ an all-time great name: Eddie McDoom. #GoBlue “ — @saveitnerds_
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@michigandaily Gov. Rick Snyder (R) tweeted about accountability for the Flint Water Crisis.
“This is about continuing to take action & addressing the damage that’s been done. We’re committed to doing that” - @onetoughnerd
CAMPUS EVENTS & NOTES
Fred Korematsu Career crawl WHAT: Learn about nonrecognition clinical careers in health
Classical piano Faculty duo showcase
WHAT: Listen to a variety of speakers talk about Fred T. Korematsu, a Japanese-American who avoided internment camps during World War II WHO: Asian Pacific American Law Students Association WHEN: 11:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. WHERE: South Hall 1225
WHAT: School of Music, Theatre & Dance graduates and professional pianists Christine Choi and Kyoo Hye Lim perform classical works on the piano. WHO: Christine Choi and Kyoo Hye Lim WHEN: 12:10 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. WHERE: University Hospital-Main Lobby, Floor 1
UnMosqued WHAT: A viewing and discussion of a film exploring how mosques serve women and converts to Islam. This film is about American mosques specifically. WHO: Islamic Studies Program WHEN: 4:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. WHERE: School of Social Work Building-1636
care and meet with employers in an informal setting. This is a speed-networking event where students can engage with alumni and discuss their successes. WHO: Career Center WHEN: 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. WHERE: Michigan Union-Pond Room
Research information session WHAT: Learn about D.E. Shaw Research, a lab that explores computational biochemistry. Brannon Batson and Daniel Jacobson will present. WHO: The Career Center WHEN: 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. WHERE: Forum Hall-Palmer Commons
The Quipu Project WHAT: An interactive documentary presenting tales of forced sterilization in Peru, specifically during the Fujimori Regime. WHO: University Library WHEN: 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. WHERE: Shapiro Harold & Vivian Library Screening Room 2160
WHAT: Watch various members of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance showcase their talents in a concert. WHO: School of Music, Theatre & Dance WHEN: 8:00 p.m. WHERE: Earl V. Moore Building-Britton Recital Hall
Marketing Your Degree WHAT: A workshop at the Career Center about how to market a humanities degree to employers and emplasize unique skills. Learn how to talk to employers about your degree. WHO: Career Center WHEN: 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. WHERE: 1027 E. Huron Building
THREE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW TODAY
1
Community advocates claim that the water crisis in Flint arose as a result of racial issues, with the city being neglected because it is mostly black and about 40 percent poor, CNN reported. The advocates said residents may be suffering from “environmental racism.”
2
Daily Arts Writers explore our perceptions about our own mortality, through visits to a funeral home and a Buddhist temple. >>SEE B-SIDE, PAGE 1B
3
Hours after several members of an armed group were arrested and one was killed, federal agents sealed off an Oregon wildlife refuge that they were occupying, the Washington Post reported. The move came after an ongoing standoff.
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LSA-SG passes resolution to support BSU efforts in Flint $6,000 also allocated to SAPAC budget at weekly meeting By CAMY METWALLY Daily Staff Reporter
LSA Student Government passed several resolutions at a meeting Wednesday night focusing on community outreach and inclusivity. “We’re really beginning to make a difference and beginning to make a lot of change on campus, ” LSA-SG President Jason Colella, an LSA senior, said. “And that’s really heartening and makes me proud to be in SG tonight.” In response to the Flint water crisis, LSA-SG passed a resolution which authorized a $1,000 donation to deliver
clean water to the community. The money will be transferred from the Executive Discretionary section of the budget to the Black Student Union. The BSU created a GoFundMe account to buy and distribute clean water to the people of Flint. LSA-SG treasurer Patrick Mullan-Koufopoulos, LSA sophomore and co-sponsor of the resolution, stressed the importance of solidarity and support. “We do have a sister campus in Flint,” Mullan-Koufopoulos said. “They’re Wolverines. They bleed blue just as much as you and I do. They’re the leaders and best just as much as we are, and they’re in crisis.” Public Policy senior Hattie McKinney, vice speaker of BSU, spoke to LSA-SG prior to voting. She said BSU plans raise at least $10,000 to buy
water bottles and distribute them in Flint. McKinney explained that many of the minority populations in Flint don’t feel comfortable with officers coming to their doors, stressing the importance of student efforts in the city. “We’re figuring out a way to coordinate water donations with our connections with the schools,” McKinney said. LSA-SG plans to visit Flint next Friday as well to contribute to the cause. “You’re supporting our sister campus, you’re supporting the students who are there, you’re supporting the people of the town and really you’re just making the stance that says, ‘as Southeastern Michigan, we stand together,’ ” LSA-SG external relations officer Joey Hansel, an LSA junior, said. Supporting the immediate campus as well, LSA-SG passed a resolution to donate $6,000 from the budget to SAPAC. Of the total budget, $2,000 will be allocated toward three volunteer- and peer-led support groups to further raise awareness, enhance workshops and expand events. Another $2,000 will fund a new event SAPAC plans to host this semester that will involve other universities in the state. An allocation of $1,000 [COPY: they mention that there is $6,000 going to SAPAC, but only expand on $5,000 of allocations] will be made to a survivor care fund aiming to provide survivors with a greater sense of safety and security — the money can be used for hotel rooms, a new phone and lock changes. This money goes directly to survivors, and MullanKoufopoulos stressed the importance of this program. “I wanted to make sure we were making an
SINDUJA KILARU/Daily
LSA sophomore Joey Hansel discusses a new event at Mason Hall on Wednesday.
impact on campus,” MullanKoufopoulos said. “And something Holly RiderMilkovich said stuck with me — she is the director of SAPAC. She was talking about how one in three females on this campus will experience an attempted sexual assault.” LSA junior Laura Meyer, SAPAC Networking, Publicity and Activism program coordinator, appreciated the contribution and addressed LSA-SG Wednesday. She stressed that the donation would contribute to groundbreaking work. “It’s difficult to quantify the difference that an amount of money this size is going to make to what SAPAC does,” Meyer said. “It really is going to make a great amount of change.” Meyer also mentioned that more survivors are seeking services, and to accommodate the increasing demand, SAPAC plans to hire a new professional staff member. She said the increasing demand for services is a result of the greater accessibility and awareness on campus. Mullan-Koufopoulos asked how LSA-SG can participate in
non-monetary ways. Speakers mentioned ally training, funding and participation in SAPAC’s activism week in April. LSA-SG also passed a resolution in favor of naming the new Biological Sciences building after President Emeritus Mary Sue Coleman. LSA expects the construction of the building to be completed by Jan. 1, 2018. LSA-SG noted that Coleman and President Emeritus Lee Bollinger are the only two former University presidents without buildings named after them. It also highlights that there are no campus academic buildings solely named after a woman. Acknowledging the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields, the resolution supports naming the building after Coleman. Graduating with an undergraduate degree in chemistry and receiving a doctorate in biochemistry, Coleman was a woman in the biomedical field. It further outlines her qualifications and contributions to the University. The resolution recognizes her contributions to the
University, such as developing greater international and corporate partnerships. Numerous initiatives have benefited the University, such as her commitment to expanding sustainability research. Most of the members voted in support of the resolution, emphasizing the importance of such a resolution in furthering inclusivity on campus. However, LSA junior YongJoon Kim pointed out that some students on campus expressed reservations about naming a building after Coleman. While he was in support of the resolution and noted the importance of such a vote in the representation of women and inclusivity, he said certain constituents disapproved of Coleman’s practices, which they described as the “privatization of the University.” “I urge you to vote yes for this resolution simply because we are making history,” Kim said. “This is very important for diversity and inclusivity on campus … I ask you to honor people for the right things.”
News
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NEWS BRIEFS
University students receive Hopwood Awards The University Hopwood Awards program recently bestowed almost $29,000 to students who entered the Avery and Jule Hopwood Underclassmen Contest for creative writing. These awards are the oldest writing awards for college-level writers, and are supported by an endowment from University alum Avery Hopwood, a Broadway playwright from the 1920s. The writer gave one-fifth of his estate to the University in hopes of encouraging creative writing. The University has given over 3,200 students a total of over $3,000,000, according to the LSA Hopwood Awards Program website. Famous playwright and creative author, Arthur Miller has also won Hopwood Awards. Winners received awards based on categories such as fiction, nonfiction and poetry. A ceremony for the awardwinners was held Wednesday in the Rackham Amphitheater with a reading by Marge Piercy, fourtime Hopwood Award winner.
Children with half- and stepsiblings exhibit aggressive habits About one in six children living in the United States live with halfor step-siblings just before they enter kindergarten, according to recent University research. Paula Fomby, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research, conducted the study and found that these children also behave more aggressively more often than children who do not live with halfor step-siblings. Though many similar studies have focused on how family complexity affects children’s development and look at the marital status of the parents and their relationship to the children living in the home, Fomby said most of the children with complex sibling relationships do not live with step-parents. Rather, they often live with a single mother or both biological parents. The study used data from a sample of nearly 6,500 U.S. children and their families. Other factors that explained the increased aggression in some children include financial resources, the mother’s parenting style and the absence of either parent.
‘U’ endorses HPV vaccination as preventative measure for cancer The University Comprehensive Cancer Center joined 69 other top cancer centers across the country in releasing a statement encouraging people to receive the human papillomavirus vaccination as a preventative measure for cancer. The statement is in response to low vaccination rates among all demographics. Low national vaccination rates have resulted from a lack of physicians recommending the vaccine to their patients and a misconception in parents who do not realize the vaccine’s potential to be effective in preventing certain types of cancers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released information stating that HPV infections are the cause of nearly 27,000 cancer diagnoses in the country. Though girls have more often received the vaccine than boys, still no more than 40 percent of girls and 21 percent of boys have received all three recommended doses. Ted Lawrence, director of the University Comprehensive Cancer Center, said in a press release that the goal of the center is to conquer cancer, and by encouraging people to receive the HPV vaccine, the center becomes closer to achieving that goal. —ALEXA ST. JOHN
Thursday, January 28, 2016 — 3A
WATER From Page 1A opinion the state has done nothing on it,” Petainen said. “Today Snyder promised to work harder on these issues, hold him to it if he’s not recalled.” “He has consistently ignored the environment as he aimed for profits. But in the process, he forgot about his true customer. His customers should not have been the businesses, but the people of this great state,” Petainen added. 1,4-dioxane has been linked to cancer and can cause nervous, liver and kidney damage in large amounts. The Environmental Protection Agency linked a dioxane concentration of 3.5 parts per billion in groundwater to a one in 100,000 incidence rate of cancer in a 2010 report. According to Kristen Schweighoefer, the Washtenaw County Environmental Health director, computer models show the plume is also slowly moving eastward and northeast, which may reach Ann Arbor’s principal water sources of Barton Pond and the Huron River after an extended time frame. “There is some thought that the plume may eventually reach Barton Pond or the Huron River,” Schweighoefer wrote in an e-mail. “The timeframe is not known, but may be decades or hundreds of years or more away.” She added there are monitoring systems in place to prevent this contamination from reaching the public. During the public commentary period of the Jan. 19 Ann Arbor City Council Meeting, Ann Arbor resident Kai Petainen connected the Flint crisis to Ann Arbor’s contamination in urging the city council push for more state action regarding the underground hole of dioxane (called a plume), and criticized Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) lack of response to it. Ann Arbor Environmental Coordinator Matthew Naud said though dioxane has been detected in private wells, routine tests of city water have never detected any dioxane, let alone any near the hazard threshold of 3.5 parts per billion maintained by the EPA. “For anybody drinking city water, there is no risk,” Naud said. “That being said, there are areas in the county where it is showing up in private wells … in subdivisions outside the city there is a chance of contamination.” Despite assurances that there was no immediate risk and that this issue is completely separate from Flint, both Naud and Schweighoefer said the crisis in Flint has drawn more attention to their work regarding the dioxane plume. “(The 1,4-dioxane contamination) is a different situation from the lead contamination in Flint,” Schweighoefer wrote. “There has certainly been more attention to the situation here and the ongoing actions since the
DEBT From Page 1A by those individuals are usually small, she added — typically around $5,000 to $10,000. Thus, the “crisis” really only affects those who have a low income following graduation or an incomplete education, Dynarski said. “In my opinion, if there is a crisis of any sorts, it’s a crisis of low earnings in our country,” she said. “We lack a safety net to handle a very large number of people who are receiving very low earnings and who cannot handle even $5,000 in debt as a result.” Chopra said from his experiences, which he said had given him a “consumer financial market perspective, other bills and responsibilities contribute to the student debt problem and debt alone is not the issue. “When someone is delinquent on their student loans, it is often just one side of a broader array of shocks that are happening in their life: fighting to keep paying rent, struggling to make payments on their car loan … the trauma that they’re managing is something that we always have to keep at the top of mind,” he said.
MARINA ROSS/Daily
Owner of Antelope Antiques & Coins Karl Lagler poses in front of his merchandise at his shop on Wednesday.
GRANT From Page 1A and solar. Ian Hiskens, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said the energy transition has several impacts on the electric grid. “The main issue with renewables is variability,” Hiskens said. “Output for a coal power station can be fixed and controlled. If you deal with a wind farm, you have no control over the output. The energy grid needs to be upgraded to manage fluctuations and variability.” Pascal Van Hentenryck, professor of industrial and operations engineering and the leader of the project, said the change alters fundamentals about how energy grids function. “As we push the frontier as to how much renewable energy can be put in the network, the basic assumptions of the grids are no longer true,” Van Henternyck said. “We need to change the way the system operates by altering the algorithm that determines the balance of electricity in different places.” As an example of an alteration, he cited a possible need to import and ship solar energy from sunny places like Arizona to elsewhere in the United States. Most existing test cases that transmission operators draw from have become “toy problems”, Van Hentenryck said, making them not necessarily reflective of
Chopra also noted various policies currently being pursued to counteract his definition of the issues with student debt, specifically citing loan repayment plans. “This is a broad expansion of affordable loan modifications … that allow borrowers to pay a reasonable amount of income to manage those times of distress,” he said. Along with whether a student debt crisis exists, another question for Chopra and Dynarski came both from multiple audience members and online viewers: “Why not make college free?” Chopra said there is an effort to essentially make community college free or nearly free, arguing that if society believes getting a degree is critical for a person’s future, it needs to be readily available. Last January, President Barack Obama proposed making two years of community college free for students who met certain requirements. The proposal is currently stalled before committee in Congress, and faces a significant uphill battle in both chambers given that both are GOP-controlled. Chopra noted that how tuition is made free and also to whom it is made free needs to be taken into account when
today’s complex networks. To mitigate this dearth of realistic data sets, the team will embark on a multi-phase two-year project, one of the seven funded by the $11 million Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program run by the Department of Energy. The first phase of the project involves data acquisition and modeling. This includes monitoring the life of existing power networks to obtain a year-long series of data. Since retrieving real data from the United States is difficult due to security concerns, the group plans to partner with French utility firm, Réseau de Transport d’Électrique. The data from French and European networks then have to be modeled into an intelligible format. For the modeling phase, Hiskens, a former power engineer in Australia, said he hopes to use his knowledge about realistic power system domains. “We are interested in building data sets with numbers, parameters and variables that are sensible when evaluated from the perspective of a real power system,” Hiskens said. “I will be involved in making sure that formats and structures developed are sufficiently rich to capture the idiosyncrasies of power systems.” However, he noted the difficulty in capturing the uniqueness and intricacy of power systems. “Ultimately we need to establish a format that is
considering free college proposals, adding that people with lower incomes should not view cost as an impediment. Dynarski said historically college has been free, citing nominal costs in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Free community college, she said, would be a return to that era. Referring back to the discussion about the debt crisis, she added that free college would be an effective way of controlling it because many minorities and firstgeneration college students attend community colleges. Public Policy graduate student Joshua Rivera, who attended the event, said he enjoyed the back-and-forth engagement between the speakers regarding a relevant topic. “I am deeply interested in education policy and I thought that it was a wonderful event,” he said. “It’s nice to have Professor Dynarski, who’s been writing in the field very extensively in The New York Times, but also to have someone who’s going to work for the Department of Education (Chopra) give their perspective and so it was interesting and humorous to see them kind of engage in these issues and their respective roles.”
complex, flexible yet useable. This way, others who want to work on power system optimization can test new algorithms based on the data sets, building a community pool of information. Given the sensitivities of using real data, Van Hentenryck hiding some data while interpreting the overall picture will also be a challenge. “We will have to use the algorithm to obfuscate data that is sensitive, such that the real data is unrecoverable,” Van Hentenryck. “Sometimes we get aggregated consumption profile, meaning that we need to desegregate the data into as fine-grained as possible.” The next phase of the project would be to generate synthetic benchmark data that are not identical, but similar to reality. Subsequently, the team will have to validate its processes and findings, as well as place the test cases on an accessible portal. The University team will also work closely with researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has a long history of providing capability and support to the federal government in modeling and simulating power systems. Russell Bent, who works as a scientist in Los Alamos, said industry-academiagovernment collaboration is highly important in improving the United States’ power systems. “My role at Los Alamos is to develop underlying schemas that describe all the
MAMMOTH From Page 1A to be a hybrid between the two known North American mammoth species: the Columbian mammoth and the woolly mammoth. Fisher said he is most excited about what this discovery can uncover about early human’s relationships with mammoths. “I think the most exciting thing and most important thing is the nature of human impact on these animals,” he said. “The early people who immigrated to this continent were seeing these animals and they were critical to their livelihood. We are humans; we are interested in our own history.” As part of the discussion, the museum directors asked for suggestions from the public on how to display the specimen. The museum already plans to display the entirety of the skull and create a mold and cast of the tusk to place into the skull. The tusks were removed from the skull in order to safely dry and study them. Rountrey also said a
components of power systems in their complexity,” he said. “We hope to take a closer look at some of the synthetic problems and test cases being created and make sure there is a realistic flavor to them.” The ultimate goal, Bent said, is to build better, more efficient algorithms and computational methods for federal customers — the transmission operators. Van Hentenryck said the grant will largely go into recruiting and sponsoring manpower for the project. Currently, researchers from Columbia University and California Institute of Technology are working alongside the University team. He said he hopes to assemble a team of 15 to 20, comprising undergraduate, graduate, Ph.D. and post-doc students. Though there are multiple milestones that the team is expected to reach, the project’s ultimate success in power optimization is indeterminate at this point, researchers said. Van Hentenryck likened the project to an exploration phase. “We know where we are going, but we don’t know what we are going to find,” he said. “So here we are going to generate these test cases, but we don’t really know how well we can solve them or if the solution can be scalable for future networks that incorporate more renewable energy.” Nonetheless, he said, he is excited about the potential of the project. “It’s not every day that you can change the world.”
larger project on fossil display by the Museum of Natural History is currently underway, which aims to create 3D models of the University’s collection of fossils to be viewed online. Rountrey said this is important because it would allow researchers to examine fossils without having to physically move them, risking damage. “The models are valuable not just in making a nice website,” he said. “They serve in some ways to protect the specimen.” LSA freshman Bailey Rousseau said he found the concept of a hybrid species fascinating. “I think it’s pretty interesting how it might be a hybrid of the two known pachyderm-like species from the Ice Age,” he said. Kira Berman, assistant director of the Museum of Natural History, said the discovery is a thrilling one for the University. “It’s just so exciting to have such a large exciting fossil that’s found so close,” she said. “It has such an importance in terms of what we know about Michigan’s prehistory.”
Opinion
4A — Thursday, January 28, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
BEN KELLER | OP-ED Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com SHOHAM GEVA EDITOR IN CHIEF
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Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.
T
Foregoing the lottery
he current Powerball jackpot sits at a measly $75 million, and well outside of news coverage, too; it’s a mere fraction of the record $1.5 billion jackpot set a few weeks ago that dominated headlines and office watercooler conversations. Perhaps it’s out of the news for more pragmatic reasons as well. Mathematics is a form of pragmatism, in my opinion. For DAVID a mere $2, you can play HARRIS one in 292,201,338 odds to hit all six numbers and take the jackpot. Working out the expected value for such a play, or the return on investment in a sense, is difficult since it depends on the prize amounts and number of players, but excluding those factors gives an expected value of somewhere around negative $1.42. Once you include splitting the earnings with other winners in the same prize tier, as well as paying taxes on the earnings, reduced cash value if prizes are taken in the lump sum and inflation on prizes taken as annuity, at some point for the lower jackpots the cost of paper and ink for the ticket is worth more than its possible earnings value. Even at the record $1.5 billion jackpot, a ticket was only worth about $1.32. Nobody should be surprised at these figures. Like any form of gambling, the lottery is carefully formulated and mathematically plotted out such that the odds are against the players, so that the house, or in this case the state, can make money. The Powerball officials certainly know this, and use it to their advantage. Changes to the Powerball rules reduced the odds of winning the jackpot specifically so that it could grow to record heights and draw in more ticket buyers through the viral media billions of dollars tends to generate. With the odds in their favor, the Powerball makes more money, even if someone wins the jackpot. The odds are against the players in extreme ways at these lower jackpot values, and it’s these players playing at these low jackpot levels who drive up the jackpot of the Powerball. It’s unlikely there’s a winner anytime soon, as it takes more than 300 million tickets in play before the odds of a winner become more favorable, and thus the Powerball and lottery news will be out of the daily news cycle. But it’s the demographics of these players who regularly play and drive the jackpot up that show the nasty, predatory nature of the lottery. Citizens from impoverished counties play the lottery at much higher rates than residents of wealthy counties. Tickets are bought in significantly disproportionate amounts by those who are unemployed and lower class,
and those who lack secondary or post-secondary education. One study showed that 71 percent of lottery players would use the winnings to pay off debt, a clear sign of financial instability worsened by the poor investment strategy of playing the lottery. While the old adage of “the lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged” is somewhat demeaning, the regular players of the lottery, and those buying tickets that drive up the Powerball jackpot in its early stages of the cycle, are the ones who cannot afford the repercussions of playing. The lottery, like any form of gambling, has the potential to be addictive and destructive, and lower socioeconomic status has been shown to be a significant risk factor for developing into a problem gambler. This money, essentially a voluntary tax, goes directly to the state; on average, the lottery pays out 62 percent of its revenue as winnings, and thus represents a 38-percent tax rate on purchases. The moral dubiousness of fundraising at the expense of citizens who can least afford this tax would be offset by tying the lottery to the one cause people tend to be in universal favor of: education funding. Yet, studies show that the lottery fails to provide any benefit to education itself, as not only do non-lottery states provide more funding in their budgets than lottery states with lottery revenues, but after the implementation of a lottery, states tended to decrease education expenditures, and often directed the earmarked funds to other causes anyway. The lottery has become nothing more than an obstacle to instituting sensible tax policies and budgets that properly and morally support education, at the expense of an already marginalized lower class. The mantra that the lottery is good for education is nothing more than a fraudulent explanation to plug holes in a state budget with decreased debate. The lottery draws in a lot of money from a small pool of players: Depending on the state and study, 70 to 80 percent of lottery revenues come from 20 to 30 percent of the players. The lottery doesn’t affect the majority of tax-paying citizens and thus there is not much of an axe to grind with the process. It sets up the lottery as nothing more than a political ploy. Nobody is going to win the Powerball jackpot for some time. The amount will continue to balloon to some astronomical number, sparking a situation in which the media sends buyers into a frenzy, tickets are bought and news stories are written about how the lives of the winners are forever changed. Yet the important stories will come in the weeks after, in the stories of the lives of those who will buy the tickets in vain. Their lives, too, are changed, one loss at a time.
The mantra that the lottery is good for education is nothing more than a fraudulent explanation to plug holes in a state budget with decreased debate.
MICHELLE SHENG
—David Harris can be reached at daharr@umich.edu.
E-mail Michelle at shengmi@umich.edu
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What we created
I haven’t been a conservative forever. Until my junior year of high school, I considered myself an unavowed liberal. I won’t bore you with the entire story, but several factors contributed to me coming to the realization that I harbored many conservative thoughts — not an absolute ideology, however. Not surprisingly, I started to identify with the Republican Party — it seemed like the logical decision. I am now a proud member of the College Republicans here at the University — but of my party at large, I cannot express the same degree of pride. As I survey the current presidential primary battle, my choices have been narrowed down to the lesser of many evils. Call me a “slave to the establishment” or not a “true conservative” — frankly, I don’t care. I am not one to shy away from saying I adhere to some liberal ideas along with my conservatism. What!? A member of a political party who doesn’t agree entirely with their party’s platform? Such horror! Therefore, I’m sure you can understand that with the advent of the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and the other bloviating instigators who occupy Republican debate stages, I am filled with utter disgust at the state of our party. Not only is it a detriment to moderates like myself to have bigoted bombastic individuals holding the banner of the GOP, but it moves our nation further along a partisan divide that seemingly increases day by day. However, I want to focus on Trump as the true symbol of my current distaste. Yes, I know, he is discussed incessantly ad nauseam. But it isn’t the man I concern myself with, it’s what he epitomizes. The prospect of Trump as the Republican nominee is becoming increasingly viable — he was polling at 41 percent in the latest GOP primary poll. This means several things, but perhaps the most strik-
ing is this: Apparently, if you asked about two-fifths of GOP voters, they would consciously cast a ballot for a candidate who promoted a policy banning an entire religion from entering the nation, who suggested we deport 11 million illegal individuals “humanely,” who doesn’t have a shred of political experience, who attributed global warming to a Chinese hoax to somehow gain an economic advantage over the United States and who cannot answer
I am now a proud member of the College Republicans here at the University — but of my party at large, I cannot express the same degree of pride. basic questions regarding foreign or domestic policy. You really can’t make this stuff up. It is easy to pry for sympathy from those who aren’t Republicans, as Peter Wehner recently did. Bear in mind, Wehner worked for the previous three Republican administrations, and now he is clamoring to vent his frustrations in arguably the nation’s most liberal mainstream newspaper. As I read the comments section of that article, almost every single statement reflected the same principle: Sorry, GOP, but this one’s on you. Unfortunately, they are spot on. After years of unrelenting naysaying — at times, clear racism — a lack of basic knowledge about reproductive health, along with just plain ignorance about women and the election of congressmen who disrupt a State of the Union
address with exclamations of “you lie!” — just to name a few — we have formulated a party that would not only accept the likes of Trump as our standard-bearer, but fervently support him. As Wehner points out, there was a time when the GOP stood for conservative ideals, but wasn’t catering to prejudicial remarks or proposals. There was even an era when working with Democrats on legislation wasn’t taboo. I find it appalling that Marco Rubio is consistently attacked by his fellow candidates for being a member of the bipartisan coalition dubbed the “Gang of Eight” that tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform just a few years ago. Granted, many of these arguments are focused on the bill’s actual substance, but what irks me is the reality that Republicans charge at Rubio simply because he attempted to formulate policy in tandem with Democrats. There are times when I ponder the idiom “you are your own worst enemy.” Well, my fellow Republicans, this may be a time to discuss that idea amongst ourselves. If Trump or Cruz becomes the nominee, I’m not sure who I will vote for, if anyone at all. Just like Wehner, I believe this could be a watershed moment for the GOP — a point at which center-right individuals devoted to bettering the world along with our Democratic counterparts split with angry, mob-like “Republicans” who would rather see Muslims banned from the greatest nation on Earth than solving, as a united citizenry, the issues that grip our country. Nobody can predict the future, but we can look to the past for possible answers. We now know one thing for certain: We, the GOP, created the mess we are in. Now it’s up to us to either fix it or let the party run its inevitable course toward failure. —Ben Keller is a senior editorial page editor.
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala, Aarica Marsh, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel, Melissa Scholke, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie Trierweiler, Mary Kate Winn, Derek Wolfe, Hunter Zhao
CAITLIN HEENAN | OP-ED
Divorce disease
Psychologists, therapists, sociologists, etc. all claim through research to have the cure for what has become the modern-day disease plaguing relationships: divorce. There are many statistics out there for the correct and accepted divorce rate. Some sources claim the rate of all marriages ending in divorce is upward of 50 percent, while others cite it as being closer to 30 percent. Whatever the number, it is still disturbing and worthy of inquiry to study why so many marriages end tragically. Being divorce conscious and researching in depth what really makes a healthy marriage or relationship seems counterintuitive. People have maintained successful and happy relationships in the past, so why does divorce seem like such an issue now? Perhaps the answer to the question of why divorce happens is simpler than so much research tries to explain. My personal experience with divorced parents has shaped the way I view the study of relationships as well as these statistics that so many professionals try not only to explain, but also to prevent from increasing. My parents divorced when I was 10 years old, resulting in my mom leaving the house and moving to a neighboring city to be close to my brother and me. Each of my parents, prior to their relationship with each other, had divorced their first spouses as well. Now, both of my parents have moved on to third marriages. While this may seem insane to some who have no experience with divorce, it became very common to me as I grew up and began to develop as my own person. As a child, growing up in what is often termed a “broken household,” I quickly became aware that there was barely a difference between my parents and my friends’ parents who were still together after X years of marriage. My parents fought, their parents fought, too. My parents were able to be happy around each other for the sake of their children, and those other parents who were still together were able to be happy despite fighting, too. So what made my parents so different from those
other ones who were able to stay together? Only since moving out and coming to college have I discovered any real answer to this question. I can now view my own family from an outsider’s perspective after not living at home for six months or so, but still receive the details of what is going on and who said what in this fight or another. This has helped me realize that the secret to a lasting relationship may be easier to find than I originally perceived. Communication is key. Yes, I think the solution to keeping two people together indefinitely is as simple as being able to effectively
People have maintained successful and happy relationships in the past, so why does divorce seem like such an issue now?
communicate with each other. When referring to communication here, I am not suggesting that talking at one’s spouse will save a marriage. However, being able to objectively express one’s emotions, grievances and thoughts to another person, hearing and allowing the other person to reciprocate and be listened to is the huge secret to the successful maintenance of any relationship. This communication, if completed in a manner that allows both people to feel heard and respected, can resolve any issue that may arise and create an air of intimacy between people. The research done on the subject of divorce that most parallels this idea of communication being the most important aspect to a healthy relationship comes from the work of psychologist John Gottman,
who has studied relationships for more than four decades. His work has shown that when comparing groups of couples who have maintained their relationships to groups of couples who have split up, there are a few defining characteristics that separate and explain why the people who stayed together were able to stay together, and why those who separated were not able to stay together. From this research, Gottman found that physiologically, those who stayed together maintained calmer and more trusting states during conversation while those who had split up were continually showing flight-or-fight responses, even when discussing simple events from the day. The ability to trust and feel respected and happy during conversation comes directly from practicing effective communication. Proper communication extends further from the topics that are most important to couples, the ones that may cause arguments into silly little conversations that seem mundane. Gottman’s research continued to say that those couples who stayed together were more likely to indulge in their partner’s “bids” or attempts at getting the other person’s attention with some seemingly insignificant occurrence, such as wanting to talk about something funny that happened at work that day. In Gottman’s research, those couples who listened and recognized the need for this simple form of communication were able to make their partner feel heard and emotionally fulfilled. Those couples who split up were less likely to humor their partner and disrupt their own lives to discuss these kinds of topics. Proper communication for both important and unimportant topics has become a sort of lost art in relationships. People either do not know how to communicate effectively or are not willing to put in the energy to do so, and the institution of marriage has suffered for it. — Caitlin Heenan is an Editorial Board member.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Sports
Thursday, January 28, 2016 — 5A
Michigan set for ‘M’ looks for season sweep pivotal weekend ICE HOCKEY
By BRAD WHIPPLE Daily Sports Editor
Wolverines take on No. 15 Penn State in State College, then in New York City By JASON RUBINSTEIN Daily Sports Writer
Michigan’s top line is the best in the country. That could seem like a sweeping statement, but the stats tell the whole story. In the 10 Michigan at games that Penn State juniors Tyler Matchup: Motte and JT Michigan Compher and 14-3-4; Penn freshman Kyle State 16-5-3 Connor have When: skated as a Thursday trio, they have 7 P.M. accumulated 64 Where: Pegula points. Ice Arena “You can’t create those TV/Radio: BTN Plus things,” said Michigan coach Red Berenson. “It’s special.” No team has shown the ability to stop the three forwards together so far, but this weekend will be the toughest test. Thursday night, No. 6 Michigan will travel to No. 15 Penn State to play one game, and both teams will head to Madison Square Garden in New York City two days later for a second matchup. In previous seasons, Penn State has had the Wolverines’ number. Two years ago, the Nittany Lions ended Michigan’s season in the Big Ten Tournament, as the Wolverines needed to beat them only in that game to advance to the NCAA Tournament. Last season, Penn State beat Michigan three out of the four times they played, including a road sweep at the Pegula Ice Arena — one of the toughest venues in the country with its nightly sellouts, committed fans and vertical bleachers that seem to be on top of the ice. “Definitely a rink we want to
keep quiet,” said senior forward Justin Selman. Look for Michigan’s first line to do just that. With Motte and Compher being two of the Wolverines’ hardest-working players, and Connor perhaps the their most skilled player, no line has found an answer for them. “It’s worked well with Connor’s skill, his ability to make plays and finish opportunities,” Motte said. “JT’s grinding ability — he’s a good two-way center man — helps a lot in the D-zone and on faceoffs. (Compher’s) ability to make plays is unbelievable, and I just try to give those guys the puck, and try to put away my opportunities when I get them.” The trio is the biggest reason for Michigan’s astounding, nation-leading 4.86 goals per game. However, that offense can only take a team so far when the same team ranks 44th in team defense, surrendering 3.10 goals per game. For this reason, Berenson has emphasized team defense in the weeks leading up to this weekend. The Wolverines have prioritized clearing pucks out the zone and limiting any rebound chances — something Ohio State capitalized on a couple of weeks ago. Selman said the team knows its goaltending can handle the initial shot. It’s the team’s job to make sure there isn’t a second. Michigan will feature a bit of a different lineup this weekend — sophomore forward Dexter Dancs is suspended for Thursday’s game, while sophomore defenseman Cutler Martin is suspended for the weekend. Freshman center Cooper Marody will also be out this weekend due to illness, meaning junior forward Max Shuart will likely slot up from his fourth-line role to the third-line center position. Regardless, the Wolverines know what’s at stake this weekend. With their biggest test to date and a depleted lineup, look for the first line to lead the charge.
“You can’t create those things. It’s special.”
MANUEL From Page 1A were, when Michigan was playing football, we stopped whatever we were doing, and we were watching,” the source said. “During some of (Connecticut’s) football games, when he was focused on our game, he would have the Michigan game recorded at his home. Nobody was allowed to tell him what the final score was.” Among Manuel’s more notable achievements at Connecticut is the men’s basketball program’s remarkable resurrection following a postseason ban issued by the NCAA in 2012 for a low academic progress rate. “It didn’t take Warde long to not only fix the APR but bring it to a perfect 1,000,” the source said. “The guy is a no-nonsense guy. He knows what needs to be done, and he gets it done.” Despite his impressive resume, Manuel still inherits a high bar from Hackett. Since assuming the position, Hackett hired Harbaugh in December 2014, inked a record-setting apparel contract with Nike in July and extended men’s basketball coach John Beilein to a contract through the 2020-21 season in November. Manuel’s hiring bucks a recent trend of hiring former corporate executives to run athletic departments. Former Michigan
athletic director Bill Martin, who held the post from 2001 to 2010, founded First Martin Corp. in 1968 and remains chairman of the Bank of Ann Arbor. Brandon was the CEO at Domino’s Pizza before he replaced Martin. Manuel, 47, has no corporate experience, but he has built an impressive resume in athletics. He previously served as an assistant athletic director at Michigan under Tom Goss and then Bill Martin. He also served as the athletic director at the University of Buffalo from 2005 to 2012. University President Mark Schlissel told reporters in a December teleconference that corporate experience, while a potential plus, was far from critical. “I’m looking for the best person for the job,” Schlissel said. “It is a $151-million enterprise. It’s a complex enterprise that requires somebody with business, accounting and leadership skills and experience. … The bottom line is we’re going to hire a spectacular person.” Many with ties to Connecticut’s program had long feared that Manuel would return to his alma mater, the source said, but his timeline for doing so was uncertain. “He is an incredibly capable administrator, but more than that, he understands people,” the source said, lamenting Manuel’s departure. “He’s a freakin’ incredible guy — it sucks to be us.”
“He knows what needs to be done, and he gets it done.”
It is said lightning never strikes twice in the same place, and that could spell trouble for the Michigan women’s basketball team. Thursday, the Wolverines Michigan (3-5 Big Ten, 11-8 overall) will at Iowa face Iowa for Matchup: the second time Michigan 11-8; this season. Iowa 13-7 Both teams left When: off two weeks Thursday ago in dramatic 8 P.M. fashion, when Where: CarverMichigan Hawkeye completed a stunning Arena 17-point TV/Radio: BTN Plus comeback against the Hawkeyes in Crisler Center. Now, the Wolverines are hoping to earn their first season sweep of Iowa since the 2009-10 season. But on the road, comebacks are much harder to muster. “If you get in a hole that deep on the road, it’s gonna be tough to come back,” said Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico. “Playing at Iowa, they always have great crowds, and they’ll have a great atmosphere, so that’ll be a little bit challenging.” A struggling Michigan defense won’t make it any easier. Though the Wolverines are scoring 81.5 points per game, good for eighth nationally and third in the Big Ten, offense can’t win games alone. Michigan is 10-2 when scoring 80 points or more, but its two losses have come in its most recent games. Sunday against Nebraska, Michigan gave up 93 points and
MATT VAILLIENCOURT/Daily
Sophomore guard Katelynn Flaherty enters Thursday’s game ranked 13th in the nation with 21.7 points per game.
allowed the Cornhuskers to take a 21-6 lead just five minutes into the game. The game prior, the Wolverines lost to No. 7 Ohio State by just four points after allowing four Buckeyes to reach double digits in scoring. “We really do have to get better defensively,” Barnes Arico said. “We have some really great offensive-minded kids, but none that really — maybe Siera Thompson, maybe Danielle Williams — that want to defend. Other than that, they want the ball in their hands and want to score. “We have to get them to believe that playing defense is just as important to our program as playing offense. For us to be successful, we need some defensive stoppers and defensiveminded people.” Considering that the
Wolverines were barely averaging 60 points in Barnes Arico’s first year at the helm, scoring 80 points is not necessarily a bad thing. But Michigan will need to make a similar improvement on defense to make the NCAA Tournament. According to Barnes Arico, it’s the younger kids who “don’t really understand defense yet” — a sentiment she shared with men’s basketball coach John Beilein. Freshman center Hallie Thome, for instance, scored a game-high 24 points against Nebraska on Sunday, but fouled out of the game in the fourth quarter. Thome is a major piece of the Wolverines’ lineup, especially under the glass, and without her, senior guard Madison Ristovski had to take on the Cornhuskers’ bigs in the paint. Considering Ristovski is 5-foot-10, it was a defensive mismatch.
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Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
ACROSS 1 Takes shape 6 Military installations 11 Armonk, N.Y.based tech company 14 Quarterback with the 2011 autobiography “Through My Eyes” 15 Tell’s target 16 PBS funder 17 Downpour 19 40-yr.-old NBC show 20 Mature insect 21 Singer Vannelli 22 Fairy tale word 25 Weasel relative 29 Horned Frogs’ sch. 30 Spot 31 Forward, in a way 32 Ankle bones 34 Put up 35 1980 sci-fi thriller, and a hint to this puzzle’s circles 40 Sister of Clio 41 Drive respondent 43 It’s usually taken in twos 46 Rival 48 Reason for adolescent angst 49 1988 Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner 51 Only 52 Mythical arrow shooter 53 Key 55 2014 FIFA World Cup champion: Abbr. 56 Christmas, for many 62 “Wheel of Fortune” buy 63 “__ Grows in Brooklyn” 64 Carrot family herb 65 __ jacket 66 About 17 of them equal a United States dollar 67 Toyota’s luxury division
DOWN 1 Former Ford model 2 Poetic preposition 3 Japanese sash 4 Tinseltown vehicle 5 Show off a butterfly, perhaps 6 Snack sack 7 Grilling garment 8 Place to kick back 9 Whitney, by birth and by education 10 D.C. VIP 11 As found 12 “Pride and Prejudice” family name 13 NBA great Karl 18 Scruff 21 Underground chamber 22 Polo Grounds slugger 23 Univ. sports organizer 24 Circular lock 26 Drops the ball 27 Track competition 28 Penny __ 30 “The Treasure of the __ Madre”: Bogart classic 33 Beer orders
34 Tokyo, long ago 36 Vice squad tactic 37 Peak south of Stromboli 38 Automaker Ferrari 39 Get dirty 42 Map abbr. 43 Generation-togeneration span 44 Calm 45 Illinois county or its seat 46 Drops a line
47 European capital 50 Tape, maybe 51 “Goosebumps” series author 54 Ben Gurion carrier 56 Drivel 57 Emptied the feedbag 58 Govt. collection agency 59 Twice cinq 60 Pac-12 sch. 61 “Of course”
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01/28/16
To work out some of the defensive kinks, Michigan has placed a large emphasis on it at practice throughout the week. Heading into Thursday, the Wolverines have the advantage of already playing Iowa once this season. “It’s nice having an opportunity to go back and watch us play against them and see where we really need to improve for the next game,” Barnes Arico said. “Iowa’s a great team. They were off to a tremendous start, and then they hit a little bit of a bump in the road. I think that’s what our conference has kind of been all year long — everybody’s beating everybody. “(Iowa’s) on a little bit of a skid.” With two straight losses, the Wolverines are in similar danger. They’ll need to steal a win on the road to break out of it.
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Sports
6A — Thursday, January 28, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wolverines fend off Rutgers, 68-57 Michigan beats another sluggish start to earn win at Crisler Center By JACOB GASE Daily Sports Editor
After eight and a half seasons coaching in the Big Ten, Michigan men’s basketball coach John Beilein has learned not to take any game RUTGERS 57 for granted. MICHIGAN 68 When Minnesota and its winless Big Ten record came into Crisler Center last week and the Wolverines struggled to secure a slim fivepoint victory, Beilein merely shrugged. He knows that in this conference, any team can beat him on any given night. So when Rutgers came to Ann Arbor seeking its first Big Ten win Wednesday night, Beilein knew better than to look past it. Sure enough, Michigan started slow again — but this time, it woke up more quickly. Despite missing their first five shots and not taking the lead until late in the first half, the Wolverines (6-2 Big Ten, 16-5 overall) took over the game with a 12-0 run in the first frame and cruised to a 68-57 victory. In contrast to the win over the Golden Gophers — in which junior forward Zak Irvin and junior guard Derrick Walton Jr. almost single-handedly took over — multiple Michigan players stepped up their play in the winning effort. Redshirt sophomore guard Duncan Robinson led the way with 18 points on four 3-pointers, sophomore guard Aubrey Dawkins spurred the first-half offensive resurgence and finished with 11 points, and Irvin flirted with a triple-double with a final line of eight points, 12 rebounds
and eight assists. Though the Wolverines finished with four double-digit scorers, things didn’t look so easy in the beginning. In fact, Beilein had a bad feeling before the game even started — just minutes before the game, his scouting report, which was between four and five pages, went missing. “I always religiously go over it one more time, and I couldn’t find it,” Beilein said. “That was a bad omen to start, because after 1,100 games, I have the same ritual, and I couldn’t find it.” That bad luck quickly spread to the court, where Michigan shot just 25 percent (including 1-for-6 from 3-point range) in the first 12 minutes of the game. The Wolverines managed to stay in the game thanks to nine first-half Rutgers turnovers — including one Scarlet Knight falling out of bounds with the ball and another throwing a pass into the first row of courtside seats near the basket. With Rutgers (0-8, 6-15) clinging to a 16-12 lead at the penultimate
first-half media timeout, Dawkins — who dropped a career-high 31 points against Rutgers at Crisler Center last season — was the one to manufacture that energy. After Dawkins cut into the lead with a 3-pointer and a two-handed slam dunk, junior forward Mark Donnal blocked a shot and later found Dawkins for a wide-open 3 on the other end for his eighth straight point to tie the game at 20. Dawkins’ spark propelled the Wolverines to a 12-0 run, with Irvin and Robinson both hitting 3-pointers to give Michigan a seven-point lead at the half. Walton hit two straight 3-pointers soon after the break to push the lead to 12, but Rutgers marched right back with a 7-0 run. The teams traded offense for the next several minutes before sophomore forward Ricky Doyle hit two straight layups, Dawkins and Robinson nailed two more triples and Walton converted three straight free throws to extend the lead to a game-high 14 points — a deficit the Scarlet Knights couldn’t erase.
Dawkins comes off bench to deliver spark, put Michigan in front for good By SIMON KAUFMAN Daily Sports Editor
After the Michigan men’s basketball team came out flat against an unheralded Minnesota team last week, Crisler Center looked like it might been experiencing déjà vu Wednesday night as the Wolverines hosted Rutgers — a team still looking for its first conference win. In the first half, Michigan (6-2 Big Ten, 16-5 overall) did its best to allow the Scarlet Knights (0-8, 6-15) to forget they were riding a seven-game losing streak into Ann Arbor — including five losses by more than 20 points. The Wolverines started the game shooting 5-for-20 from the field and trailed the Big Ten’s second-worst team 16-12 with
eight minutes left in the first half. Enter Aubrey Dawkins. After coming off the bench with just under 12 minutes left in the frame, the sophomore forward wasted little time in making his presence felt. Following a string of three straight misses from junior guard Derrick Walton Jr., Dawkins hit on his first try, knocking down a 3-point attempt from the corner. Thirty seconds later, Dawkins used a pick to lose his man at the top of the key. He cut toward the hoop and met eyes with Walton, who had the ball just beyond the arc. Walton threw a bullet to Dawkins, and the 6-foot-6 sophomore caught it and threw down a dunk, swinging his legs beneath him for a split second in ‘How ya like me now?’ fashion. Less than a minute later, after junior forward Mark Donnal blocked a Rutgers shot attempt on one end, it was Dawkins again on the other end, hitting another 3 to tie the game at 20. Two minutes. Three shots. Nine points.
LUNA ANNA ARCHEY/Daily
Junior forward Zak Irvin flirted with a triple-double against Rutgers on Wednesday, scoring eight points, pulling down 12 rebounds and dishing out eight assists.
Michigan took the lead on its next possession and never looked back, ultimately picking up a 68-57 win. “(I’m) just trying to provide energy in whatever way I can,” Dawkins said. “If it’s making shots, if it’s rebounding, if it’s making the right pass — whatever it is — just trying to give the game a different kind of vibe, a different energy. That’s what I pride my game on right now, just trying to make something happen.” Dawkins’ electric entrance provided the spark Michigan needed to flip the switch. After missing his first three tries from deep, junior forward Zak Irvin hit from beyond the arc with just more than four minutes left and hit two free throws late to salvage an otherwise forgetful first half and help send the Wolverines into the locker room with a 34-27 lead. In the second half, Dawkins came close to changing the energy in a big way again. With Michigan up nine, Dawkins streaked through the paint after catching a Walton pass from the baseline. Two Rutgers players split as Dawkins charged toward the basket, elevated and attempted to throw down a one-handed, jaw-dropping dunk. But the ball caught too much of the back of the rim and ricocheted past half court in the opposite direction. “I jumped too far,” Dawkins said of the dunk. “I thought the guy in the paint was going to jump, but he didn’t jump, so I was expecting the contact, but it wasn’t there, and I was like, ‘Wow, I’m too far away so now I can’t land it, so I just gotta throw it and hope it goes through.’ Blake Griffin-esque. But it didn’t go in.” Despite the blooper-reel miss, he didn’t hesitate to fire from the corner when he had an open look on the next trip down the court, hitting his third 3 of the night. Dawkins finished 4-for-6 from the field for 11 points — the margin of Michigan’s win.
the b-side B
The Michigan Daily | michigandaily.com | Thursday, January 28, 2016
LIFE and DEATH in ANN ARBOR Design by Anjali Alangaden
the b-side
2B — Thursday, January 28, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
COMMUNITY CULTURE COLUMN
COVER STORY
Dealing with loss Finding purpose in a college town in a youthful city Muehlig, Ann Arbor’s funeral home since 1852 By MATT GALLATIN Daily Arts Writer
In youthful Ann Arbor, a city known by some as “the best college town in America,” death can be a foreign language. As much as smoking commercials and PSAs attempt to remind us of our mortality, the widespread youthful delusion of invincibility can be hard to shake for a population that has little experience to the contrary. Students cross the street without looking both ways, drink more than they probably should, smoke cigarettes in the name of hipsterdom and yet, more often than not, still see the light of day tomorrow. But death is a very real part of life in the ostensibly invincible Ann Arbor. We recently mourned the death of Chad Carr, the 5-year-old son of former University quarterback Jason Carr and the grandson of former University football coach Lloyd Carr. Last July, a 21-year-old student fell to his death after climbing onto the glass ceiling covering Nickels Arcade. And of course, as with any city, there are people who pass every day. For transient young students — for young people in general — it’s easy to absorb these deaths as one would anything else on the daily news cycle. When murders in Chicago are treated with more stoicism and banality than the morning traffic report, it becomes hard to see the emotion in death. For those who aren’t close to the individuals who pass away on TV, there likely isn’t a lasting impact from these tragedies. Loss is not a part of the local young adult vernacular. For a few, however, death and grieving are their livelihood. Muehlig Funeral Chapel is the only funeral home within the city limits of Ann Arbor. Founded by Florian Muehlig in 1852, it is the oldest funeral home in the state of Michigan, originating in an upper floor office along Main Street and eventually moving into its current building on South Fourth Avenue in 1928. Once a private hospital, the history of Muehlig Funeral Chapel is the history of Ann Arbor. Thomas Jensen, director of the Muehlig home, has worked in the field for the last 34 years. While many enter the profession because of family ties, Jensen explained in an interview with The Michigan Daily that he entered the field “totally by accident.” “Over a summer during high school I got a part time job at the local funeral home washing cars, working at ceremonies, answering the phone and such,” Jensen said. “I went to college, and in my third year I decided that this (the funeral businesses) was what I wanted to do.” As a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Jensen continued working at funeral homes, and lived in one nearby during his later college years. Aside from the social strain that comes with living in a funeral home, Jensen explained that it was little different than living in your average apartment. “It’s hard to get your friends to come over,” Jensen said. “And forget about girls, I didn’t even try.” According to Jensen, social stigmas are common for funeral directors. With the prominence of TV shows like HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and fantasized horror films like “After.Life,” there’s a tendency to focus on the morbid and tantalizing,
By BAILEY KADIAN
regardless of accuracy. “People are very intrigued by it (the funeral profession),” he said. “There’s two ways it goes if you’re on an airplane. They’ll say something like ‘I work in accounting,’ and I respond with ‘I’m a funeral director.’ Either they’re not going to say another word to you, or they’re never going to shut up. People have a curiosity of what goes on. They focus more on the technical, backroom things that aren’t actually as scary or creepy as people think they are.” “There is a technical, medical part to the job,” he added. “It’s an important part, but it’s a really small part. It’s not the majority of our time.” Rather, Jensen said, a lot of time is spent helping families. “For the first few weeks we’re getting them through the stages so they can move on. We’re not grief counselors, but we educate people on what to expect, what they might go through emotionally.” It’s this, not the cadavers, that drew Jensen to the business. With his intimate place within the Ann Arbor community, Jensen offers a unique perspective on both our ever-changing modern society and the lives of Ann Arbor residents. Whereas the funeral ceremonies that Jensen officiated when he began his career over 30 years ago were often religious, traditional and perhaps cookiecutter, today’s ceremonies are remarkably personal. “Now, people are telling us what they want, and it’s our job to make it happen,” he said. “We’ve had people bring in motorcycles and put them up with the casket. We’ve had them bring old cars in and park them outside. We’ve had them bring boats and park them outside. We had a gentleman who had participated in the Mackinac Races for over 30 years, and they had all his flags from all his races all the way around the room, with pictures of his boat everywhere.” And, because this is Ann Arbor, pride for the University finds its way into the most intimate part of a person’s life. Funerals are not to be held in Ann Arbor when there is a football game. Families hang the University flag over their loved ones, and often request for the home to be decorated in maize and blue for the service. Some even manage to incorporate the Big House into their commemoration: “It’s not unusual for people to request we drive past the stadium,” Jensen said. But with emotions running high, funeral ceremonies are not always flowered with family unity. Jensen said everyone handles loss individually, but often one family member’s idea of how to commemorate a loved one differs from another’s. In some families this leads to passive aggressiveness, though in others it can be much more overt. “We’ve had fist fights, we’ve had yelling, we’ve had the police show up,” Jensen recalls, noting a particular quarrel over a seemingly innocuous portion of a ceremony “With one family, there were two daughters arguing over flowers, and they were throwing them at each other,” he said. “Not just the flowers, but the vases. So sometimes you’ve got to step in and separate that.” Beyond stepping into physical altercations, funeral directors have the daunting task of handling the emotional weight of other’s grief on such a consistent basis. Jensen said there is no doubt that the job is draining. Indeed, there is an element of separation that the funeral director must have. “You have to deal with that (loss),” he said. “But I tell people, not that we don’t have feelings
or don’t feel for them, but we’re not emotionally connected to the people who pass like those who come for our services are. They’re paying us a lot of money, and they’re not paying us to cry with them. Not that we don’t do that, but that’s not what we’re here for them to do. We’re just here to help them any way we can, to help them get through their grief, so that they can hopefully move on.” Jensen explained that the most difficult part of the job is — perhaps surprisingly — the long hours. “For me personally, the families always come first,” he said. “I’ve missed a lot of my family things.” He added that with modern technology, it’s become almost impossible to truly remove yourself from the job. But, as he points out, that is little different than most careers, and the satisfaction that he receives from helping a family through the process of loss is rewarding enough to make the profession worth it: “I love what I do,” he said. For a profession so rooted in death, Jensen says that his job gives him an important perspective not just on loss, but on life. “We just had a 17-month-old yesterday whose parents are from Alaska,” he said. “They came down here just for U of M, with their son, and he didn’t survive the surgery. Life’s not so bad compared to all the people I’ve worked with. It keeps things in perspective that way, not to sweat the small stuff.” But when it comes to the big stuff, Jensen says that he isn’t worried. “I don’t want to die yet, but if I die tomorrow, I’m OK with that,” he said. For Jensen, faith is an important element in facing any fear of passing. “It (the job) affects my belief in life after this; I hope, so yeah, it affects a lot,” he said. “Again, treat the body as just a vessel. The soul is then going to live on.” Last October, a close friend of mine died in a drunk driving accident. I won’t lie and say that this gave me some kind of epiphany about valuing my own life. Everything didn’t suddenly become clear. I didn’t “see the light.” Rather, I drank to blackout the following weekend and missed the service. A moral low-point? Probably. For me then, and likely still, it’s easier to embrace the ignorance of death as an abstract. I offer this not for sympathy, but to recognize the shortcomings of one-size-fits-all clichés. We’re constantly assailed with the importance of each day of our lives. We’re supposed to accept that we can be gone at any minute, and therefore need to enjoy every moment of our days here. “Thank God it wasn’t us,” people say. But if each day could be our last, should we attach such gravity when a day doesn’t fit the bill for “best day ever?” The idea that we can be extinguished like a candle isn’t an enjoyable concept. It seems in ignorance there is far more bliss. Jensen’s proximity with death reminds him, and us, that we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. To me, this extends to the things we cannot change. I can’t change that someone texting down I-94 could leave me, or anyone, six feet under. But what good is there for it to weigh on myself, or anyone else? People enter funeral homes each day. Worrying about when we’ll go can’t change that. For me, embracing each day doesn’t come from the fear the it could be the last, but because so far it isn’t. “It’s going to be OK,” Jensen says. If a funeral director can believe this, we sure as hell can.
DO YOU BUY UBERS FOR YOUR FRIENDS’ COURSE PACKS? WE ALWAYS WILL. E-mail ajtheis@umich.edu and katjacqu@umich.edu for information on applying.
Community Culture Columnist
“Ann Arbor? What a great college town.” How many times have we all heard that? No doubt, it’s true. Ann Arbor is populated with an incredible variety of people; this city is built on passion, intellect and drive. Recently I realized that the more time I spend in AA, the more I forget that. Outside of this town, it’s easy to see how it stands out. There is a type of energy at school you can’t find anywhere else. When I speak to alumni about Ann Arbor, the conversations are endless: Where do you go to eat? What shows have you seen? Sports, events, classes — everything. We will all be at the point when we eventually leave this city, (some never do, but you might) and appreciate all these elements that composed what we called home. With two years almost completed, and only two to go, I realize there is potential to miss the point. I feel like we’re so immersed in it — whether that it is classes, clubs or relationships — it’s hard to really appreciate the vastness of this place and recognize all the opportunities here. There are thousands of students in this city studying so many different subjects, with so many different talents and pas-
sions. It’s absolutely crucial we use that towards something. I feel like I get stuck in this routine (understandably so) of classes, clubs, friends, résumé, career … the list goes on. It takes something extra to get myself out of this mindset and recognize that I, along with many others, could be missing exactly what Ann Arbor asks us to find. Find our passion, yes. But ultimately, find its purpose. I came across a video the other day posted by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital with SMTD Senior Christina Maxwell singing to children in the hospital. She decided to use her talent and passion for performing to brighten the day of children. I realized then — that is exactly what we should be doing here. You could see this forced reflection as clichéd, or maybe you think you’re already doing this. This video made me question if I really am. Ann Arbor hands you the opportunity to find what you love, but often we see that as something applied to a career and not everyday occurrences. We should use what we’re learning, seeing and experiencing not only toward future goals, but toward what’s in front of us. Simply, to do something beyond ourselves. Maxwell’s Friday visits to the hospital illustrate exactly what I’m talking about. It’s so easy to
get fixated on everything we are committed to, and in turn lose moments we don’t even realize we had. We have a rare opportunity to be in a place that offers the ability to simultaneously learn and give. “What performing is about is that connection,” Maxwell said. “It’s about sharing that gift of joy, that give of love, that gift of happiness.” The kids at Mott are so excited and happy by these Friday visits, and the musical theatre students who perform are simply doing what they love. This service isn’t some résumé booster, or way to showcase talent. It’s sharing a gift with those who need a little more joy. I’m not telling you to drastically change your schedules to accommodate this idea. I am, however, suggesting you start recognizing the moments that are in front of you to give back. The gratification from those efforts is inexpressibly glorious, whether you are the one doing it or witnessing it. Maxwell admitted that her Friday visits provide the best work she will ever do. So Ann Arbor, the great college town, what else do you have to offer? Kadian is skipping through the streets. To take her on a night on the town, e-mail bkadian@umich.edu.
MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW “Give me the landscape of the moon,” Wolfmother’s lead singer, Andrew Stockdale, probably said. “Yes, give B me the landscape of the Victorious moon and then give me Wolfmother a couple different outfit options. Give me a full-body cape to wear, but also give me a stereotypical ‘cool hipster rock god’ outfit to wear as well so that I can still have the option of maybe getting laid.” “We’ll work with the Star Wars hype that the world is still coasting on,” Stockdale said to his band. “Put the resident ‘hot girl’ in the video in something that the sci-fi nerds can masturbate to later. But let’s leave the viewer with an impression, however so small, that we understand and appreciate feminism. So make sure you give her a sword of some sort to emphasize that underlying ‘strong female role’ that we hope to emulate.” And so the Princess Leia wannabe runs around the galaxy, lazily slashing into the sides of men in alligator masks. She is destroying them before she has to face the dark
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Galactic warlord who, armed with bushy goatee, looks like the opposite of a Sith lord. He looks like your neighbor down the street who waters his lawn too much. It’s so wildly entertaining in its simplicity, and it’s so dumb that it has done something right. So the Aussie band is either secured tightly to the Earth, or they are far, far away on the moon of their minds. With this music video, they are either brilliant or insane. With the inescapable notes of sexism and tinges of selfobsession aside, Wolfmother’s newest music video for “Victo-
rious” off of their recent album Gypsy Caravan is an homage to the bad sci-fi movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. The music video’s director, Brother Willis, describes this tongue-in-cheek video as “a lost space movie” that is mysteriously found and popped into a VCR somewhere. It’s a groovy concept that manifests itself into an entertaining video. But the greatest reveal of the Wolfmother video? You can’t hide a bad, Muse-wannabe song behind the strangeness of a music video. - AMELIA ZAK
SINGLE REVIEW Macklemore is a rapper who, in the past, has released songs about penises and thrift shop clothing. He Bhas been dismissed White as phony, illePrivilege II gitimate and a sellout. Macklemore Regardless of MacklMacklemore LLC emore’s reputation, he’s always been socially conscious. He first rapped about racial inequality in 2005 on “White Privilege.” Now he’s back with “White Privilege II,” the second single from his upcoming album This Unruly Mess I’ve Made. At times, Macklemore’s message is rambling and repetitive. Choosing to make a song about such a culturally relevant issue is great, but the song is eight minutes and 45 seconds and the instrumentals are all over the
MACKLEMORE LLC
place. The somewhat discombobulated political statement is interspersed with soulful samples/dialogue and vocals from Jamila Woods, all complemented by typically piano-heavy production from Ryan Lewis. Despite the blemishes, Macklemore still has thoughtful commentary. He acknowledges the cultural appropriation some might see in his music, saying, “You’ve taken the drums and the accent you rapped in / Your brand of hip hop it’s so fascist and backwards / That Grand-
master Flash’d go slap it, you bastard,” and taking it a step further by reiterating his genuine interest in making racial progress. At best, he’s using his platform to bring more light to an important social issue. At worst, he’s using such a serious matter to add to his success/street credit as a social activist and entertainer. What results from his efforts may not be a well-executed attempt, but it is an attempt. And in times like these, in this social climate, that’s worth something. - JOEY SCHUMAN
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
the b-side
Thursday, January 28, 2016 — 3B
baked.buzzed.bored.
COVER STORY
in this series, three daily arts writers in varying states of mind do the same activity and write about their experiences. this week’s event:
‘Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones’ RUBY WALLAU/Daily
The Ann Arbor Zen Buddhist Temple offers placid sanctuary to “everyone nice.”
Community and 2 meditation in A
Ann Arbor Buddhist Temple a haven of calm energy. By MADELEINE GAUDIN Daily Arts Writer
Nestled between a defunct bike shop and a vacuum store, the Ann Arbor Zen Buddhist Temple is easy to notice and just as easy to miss. The bright yellow Victorian and the adjacent brick building don’t scream “temple.” But once on the other side of the stone wall, the pair of buildings, connected by a small garden, feel very much like a sacred space. There’s a tremendous calm energy hanging in the air. The street noise, though minimal on a Sunday morning, all but disappears. Once inside the temple, the calmness I felt in the courtyard is intensified exponentially. After passing through an entrance room, I walk into the main temple room in silence. It’s packed. Most of the mats are taken already, but I find one in the back and sit down. Trying to meditate is really hard, and I guess the whole trying part defeats the purpose of meditation. At first, I find it difficult to keep my eyes closed. Something in my brain keeps flicking my eyes open nervously. When my eyes are closed I can’t help worrying that I’m doing this wrong. Is there something I should be thinking about? And then, nothing changes except it gets easier — I think about less. Mostly, I don’t think about trying to keep my eyes closed. Then, a bell rings and we begin chanting a prayer that’s easy to pick up. While we’re chanting, the children who attend a kid’s service in the yellow house next door file in wearing animal masks. They perform a play about Buddha’s enlightenment that’s endearing and extremely informative. Haju Sunim, the resident priest of the temple (known to the temple community by her first name, Haju), said a few words about meditation, mindfulness and strengthening our practices. Incredibly poised and gentle, Haju is the spiritual and community leader of the Ann Arbor temple. One of her congregants described her as “the North Star” of their temple. She greets everyone as they exit with a bow and introduces herself to any new attendees. In a conversation later that day, Haju described her congregation as “an increasingly diverse community of people from all walks of life … an increasingly supportive community of people who help each other.” It is also an incredibly welcoming community. At the service I attended, many, like myself, were at the temple for the first time; a few were even rookie meditators too. But after the service, lifetime members and newbies conversed about mindfulness, meditation and the upcoming women’s basketball game. The temple also offers services outside Sunday services like the one I attended. Haju said the temple “offers means for people to go through the various
aspects of the life cycle, you know, in a spiritual way.” They “conduct baby blessings, have marriage ceremonies, divorce ceremonies even, and house blessings and funerals and memorial services” to give members of the community means of commemorating spiritually each milestone in their lives. The entire temple community has a strong focus on activism and community service. “We also try to do services in the community so we work in the prisons and we help with hunger relief, and we do some fundraisers,” Haju said. Next door, I attend a meeting with members of the community who focus on environmental consciousness. They practice a sort of sacred activism: activism driven by the teachings of mindfulness. The group attends conferences, participates in marches and goes on meditation retreats. In the meeting I attended, they discussed opening these retreats for nonBuddhist member of the Ann Arbor community who share their passion for conservation. “We do interfaith work, too … we try to have meetings with people from other religions,” Haju said. “We don’t think Buddhism is the only religion on the planet or the most worthy.” Involvement in the greater Ann Arbor community is central to the temple. Practice extends far beyond the services. “We say everyday life is the way; the way of the Buddha is everyday life; everyday life is the way of the Buddha,” Haju said. Members of the community agreed, saying their practice was “not always conscious.” Dog walks and grocery store visits alike serve as everyday reminders of mindfulness. At lunch, I discuss the impact of the temple outside the stone walls with Haju and some of the temple’s congregants as residents. The great consensus is that it’s hard to tell the difference between their practice at Sunday services and in their daily lives. “It’s not about being here or not being here,” one member said. Others commented on the joy that comes with having a community that you can both take from and give to. The temple clearly has a strong, often subconscious impact in the daily lives of its members. In their jobs, classes and social lives, the members said “mindfulness follows you everywhere.” “This is not about some kind of monastery that has nothing to do with the secular world,” Haju said, in reference to the temple’s reach within the greater Ann Arbor community. “It’s about helping people so they can contribute wholesomely and ethically and artistically … to community and society.” As much as the temple helps its members in their lives, it helps them equally in their deaths. Death is embraced as an important and necessary event in the lifecycle. “We do not keep death under cover,” Haju said. “We try to be really open. It’s the nature of our existence; there isn’t anybody that doesn’t die. So if we embrace
that we die it means we have to embrace that we’re living, that we’re alive, because it makes our lives so precious and important while we have them.” That acceptance of death can be extremely painful and difficult and Haju acknowledges that. “It feels like, ‘What can we do?’ ” she said. “So, during the time before that they die, we just do all the basic things — take them soup and take them to hospital appointments and do whatever needs to be done,” she continued. “And, then talk about this end of life that they are approaching and what they what to be done and how they want things to be. “Usually it’s very calming for the mind and so there’s a sense of being able to relax with the journey.” They aren’t afraid to “talk about this end of life that they are approaching” because honest conversation can sometimes be more comforting than warm soup or casseroles. “Usually (this conversation) is very calming for the mind and so there’s a sense of being able to relax with the journey,” Haju said. For those left behind in the wake of a death, the temple does offer funeral and memorial services. It usually includes a photo of the deceased on the altar surrounded by small items of importance to the person; the community meditates and chants to help the deceased with their journey. Services continue in this manner for 49 days after their death. “In Buddhism, we say it takes 49 days for the essence of a person to find its next rightful place in the universe,” Haju said. Services on the 49th day are commemorated as being the day the person’s spirit finds a new home in the universe. These memorial services extend to the four-legged members of the temple community as well. “Dogs have died and people of course love their animals,” Haju said. Because, no matter what, death is a really difficult and for many people a spiritual practice can help with accepting death. Especially when that spiritual practice is contained within a community like that of the Ann Arbor Zen Buddhist Temple. When the temple has these services for the sick, dying or deceased they are really, as Haju puts it, “sending compassion, sending strength and courage” to the living left behind. The community of the Zen Buddhist temple manages to be extremely tight-knit and at the same time open, so new and old members alike feel comfortable to practice side by side. As “The public is welcome to the temple on Sundays, and we certainly invite people who are interested or curious to come along,” Haju said. “And we’ll be happy to have them experience the service as well as answer questions and all of that.” The Ann Arbor Buddhist Temple, no matter where you come from, takes you into its arms and lets you, even if only for a morning, experience the power of a purely accepting community.
When the hell is the Pizzzza coming? For fuck’s sake. This movie sucks so bad. I can’t stop laughing. Y’all fuckin look like PS2. Look at this green screen. John Williams must be rolling in his grave. “He’s dead” says matt. I literally cant believe how much of a Blade Runner ripoff this goddamn movie in. But it’s not even as good. This just shows how great the force awakens really is. Literally nothing interesting has happened in this movie and it’s bad. 20 minutes into Netflix and chill and Padme says “please don’t look at me like that.” (ACTUAL LINE FROM THIS MOVIE ISN’T IT FUCKING ROMANTIC) I would so much rather be watching the red letter media review than this. The pizza got here, and it was literally the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m so full but I just want to eat more of it. Can we talk about how great food is? “A kiss that you should never have given me…” this movie sucks so bad. I’m actually appalled, insulted even. “Duel of the fates” started playing. This is the best part of the prequels. The only other things I liked in this movie so far were the obiwan vs. djanfo unchained fight and the noise the seismic chargers made. Everything else sucks. Watto is definitely a jewish gstereotype. HEEEEEEEEYYYY ANNNNIIIIIEEEEEEE YOU GIVE ME SHEKELSSSSS ( EDITORS LINK TO “IF I WERE A RICH MAN FROM THE GREAT FILM FIDDLETR ON THE ROOF) There’s this sequence where Anakin raids the Tuscan raiders camp and it’s stolen completely from The Searchers (John Ford, who cares?) shot and all. George lucas is such a remix xulture. “Stay with me mom” no I want to die rather than talk to you more you little shit Meesa no like this movie. Meesa want to die. —DAILY ARTS WRITER
Yoda’s CG brown eyes still can’t sparkle with the sexual lustre of Natalie Portman’s lip gloss. WAIT, Anakin has a RAT-TAIL? Buns have never been hotter. Why does no one talk about how sexy Obi-Wan is? God, I want to cut Jar Jar into sushi and eat him with sriracha. This plan is so convoluted. Gratuitously sexual assassin. Unnecessarily complex assassination plot. Say what you want about hayden Christensen, the speeder scene is still dope to the nines. Anakin’s enunciation is too goddamn good. Lightsaber used as pickaxe You’d think the Force would allow you to maneuver through a crowd withoutr looking like a sexually conflicted goofball. Deathsticks scene: don’t do drugs, kids. Even the moments of inspiration in this film are dopey. It’s trying to rip off bladerunner but it’s joggin’ and trippin’. CG cheeks jiggle weirdly. Are the women’s hair INTENTIONALLY stupid? Every time Padme’s hair comes onscreen I feel like it should be announced by the John Cena theme. “Please don’t look at me like that” — Padme, to Anakin. No Netflix, no chill. If that kiss weren’t in the script, it never would have happened. That come-hither look was gameless. Anakin Skywalker is a masterclass in how NOT TO act when you have absurd power as a young white cis jedi male. Chubby loser nerd padawan answers important question. Wipe transitions are the grape drank of cinema. Anakin is a White Knight Nice Guy. He just said Milady, for crying out loud! Don’t play that game Ani. You only want to tap that. I don’t like sand either Anakin. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the … sand.” Romance scene in field. Is this a rom-com? Because go fuck yourselves. You’re trying too hard. Seismic charge — the reapers noise in Mass Effect. Boba fett is Aussie? Okay, the emotional shenanigans with respect to Anican’s mom’s death — key! wHERE ARE WE? WHAT’S GOING ON NOW? MY AMERICAN ATTENTION SPAN CAN’T TOLERATE THIS LACK OF ACTION. —NOAH COHEN I actually haven’t seen this movie in a long time, now I’m reminded why. As we sit down to watch the film, tensions are already high as I watch the first few minutes of the movie through smoke — unfortunately it didn’t block the screen. Baked just started to fight me over something (I think over how shitty Yoda looks). He knocks over the chair I’m sitting in and I pin him to the ground. Needless to say I won and our fight choreography is better than most of this movie’s. I honestly forgot how boring this whole assassination plot was. “I mean, a plan that involves phallic death worms, an assassin lizard woman and a speeder chase can’t be that boring,” I think to myself as the cold, hard reality sets in. And all of a sudden we’re dividing our main cast (for how good of friends Anakin and Obi-Wan are supposed to be, they sure don’t spend a lot of screentime together). Also, why are we giving responsibility to Jar Jar Binks? That’s a worse move than electing Donald Trump — or maybe Jar Jar is more like Sarah Palin with their unintelligible dialect. Thankfully the pizza has come to give us relief, thank the midichlorians! Now we get to watch the cringe-inducing awkwardness of Anakin and Padme’s “romance.” Buzzed is starting to drink whenever Anakin stares creepily at Padme, and I lament for his poor liver. We get the iconic, “I hate sand” double entendre (poor Hayden Christensen, Daniel Day Lewis couldn’t make that line work). Buzzed chugged his drink for the duration of that first kiss (note: that was hard liquor). Now Anakin’s talking about dreaming about her every night, and I think Natalie Portman (who is gorgeous in this movie) is genuinely uncomfortable. If anyone is in need of relationship remix, it’s Anakin Skywalker — no means no, buddy. Oh well, nothing a little testicle cow riding can’t fix. As much as I rip on this movie, the sound design for the seismic charge is a work of goddamn genius. Unfortunately the rest of the dogfight between Obi-Wan and Jango Fett is ruined by Boba Fett providing commentary over the whole thing. Baked has decided to go to bed after Anakin’s nice little genocide — Padme seems way too OK with this. Let’s just get this over with. This movie is bad. It’s an overly complicated mess of weird names and characters we never see, the dialogue is painful and hardly any of the special effects hold up (Yoda is particularly bad). It’s like the filmmakers took Phantom Menace as a template, asked “What did we do wrong?” kept those things and ruined anything that worked. Somehow, against all odds, they were able to make a battle featuring like 100 Jedi boring and the final duels with Count Dooku (R.I.P. Christopher Lee) are even worse. Just watch the two “Clone Wars” animated series that aired on Cartoon Network, somehow these cartoons are more mature and realistic than this green screen mess. —MATTHEW BARNAUSKAS
the b-side
4B — Thursday, January 28, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
DESIGN BY GABY VASQUEZ
FOOD COLUMN
The longtime butcher of Sparrow Market By GIANCARLO BUONOMO Daily Food Columnist
When I first moved to Rome last winter and began walking around the neighborhood that would be my home for the next four months, it wasn’t the ancient, crumbling Aurelian walls that made the biggest impression on me. It wasn’t the preponderance of Vespas, or the number of Apollo and Venus lookalikes. It was that within two blocks of my apartment, there were four butcher shops. Four busy, expansive butcher shops, staffed by greying men in blood-stained aprons. At home in Boston, I knew of only one devoted butcher shop in the whole city — most people just went to the supermarket. Sometimes, I’d tiptoe into one of the shops, listening to the thump of cleavers against wooden boards and breathing in the heavy, ripe aroma of raw flesh, until someone finally asked me if I was going to buy something. That these shops all thrived despite their proximity, and that everyone seemed to shop there, fascinated me. Whenever I walk into Ann Arbor’s Sparrow Market, I think back to happy moments in Rome. One of the only dedicated butchers left in the area, Bob Sparrow has presided over his shop for 32 years now, and has become the main source of high-quality meat for both home cooks and restaurant chefs alike. And for me — I recently began curing meat in my basement, and Sparrow was the only place in town where I could find pork cheeks. I dropped by the shop recently to get the skinny (and the fatty) from Bob himself. When I arrived the other morning, Bob was behind the long glass display case, working on a mound of shell-pink chicken breasts. With a scimitar-like knife, he trims off the ragged edges, and then butterflies the meat open with a practiced swipe. Above him, two tanned hams and a bone saw hang from the ceiling. Beneath him, the tile floor sparkles, clean as a surgical theater. “How are we doing, brother?” he said, rhyming “brother” with “udder.” “You don’t mind if I
work while we talk, right?” In person, Bob doesn’t look like your stereotypical butcher. Jerkythin, with a shaved head, thick black glasses and a soft voice, he gives off a somewhat monkish aura. But Bob’s been at the cutting board his entire life. He grew up in tiny Willis, Michigan, 20 miles outside of Ann Arbor, on a working farm. He’d help his parents slaughter the animals they raised and taught himself knife work by trapping and skinning fox, mink and raccoon. He moved to Ann Arbor 34 years ago, and apprenticed for a bit with another butcher, but he liked being his own boss better. After two years, he and his wife opened up Sparrow Meat Market in Kerrytown, and they’ve been there ever since. In his time, Bob’s seen more than a few local butchers go under, as supermarkets with pre-cut and packaged meat become more popular with harried shoppers. Even when a small-time butcher hustles, it’s hard to compete with megamarts. “I think it’s just too much work and not enough profit. You have to be much more involved — we’re open seven days a week, and I also own all of this,” he said, gesturing to the main space of the market, which holds produce and dry goods and other specialty products. “The only day we’re closed is Christmas.” For a while, American butcher shops seemed destined for the slaughter. According to the Chicago Tribune, there was an 18 percent decrease between 1997 and 2007. In Britain, it was even worse — by 2008, 23 butcher shops were closing every month. As profits decreased, and fewer and fewer people were interested in apprenticing, many butchers were forced to retire or sell their businesses. When I asked Bob if the number of customers had decreased in recent years, he gave an amused smile. “No, it’s gone waaaaaayyyyy up. Especially younger people,” he said. “Definitely it’s the younger crowd, not people my own age, who are more open-minded.” As gourmet cooking, local ingredients and an overall obses-
sion with craft become more and more popular in America, butchers like Bob are experiencing a needed boost in both sales and appreciation. Not that the work itself has gotten any easier — butchery requires lifting heavy hunks of meat, and wielding blades sharp enough to cut them (or a finger) straight in half. But Bob sees his role as a butcher as more than just a fabricator of flesh. He’s the link to their food that most people don’t realize they want until they enter the butcher shop. “I know it’s the internet age and all, and everyone’s always walking around on their phones, but they still want human interaction,” he said. “You can’t kill that.” “I’m not a picky eater, but I want to see where my food came from and who’s handled it,” he added. He takes this role so seriously that he’s willing to slice through popular appeal and forgo boutique farms in favor of larger, better established meatpackers in Detroit, if he doesn’t think the product meets his standards. “I’m reluctant if someone calls me up and says ‘I’ve been an organic or grass-fed farmer for two years,’” he explains. “I don’t think you really know enough at that point to be selling to the public.” Bob has increased his business by supplying meat to various restaurants around town. But he’s also become the go-to guy for anyone in town interested in preparing the more overlooked animals and organs — suckling pigs, pheasants, sweetbreads, pork cheeks, Bob can find pretty much anything if you ask him. As I prepared to leave, Bob asked me if there was anything special I wanted him to order for me. “Can you get me beef bung?” I asked. Beef bungs are the stomach lining of cow, used to encase large pieces of meat during curing. “Beef bungs? You serious?” “Shit,” I thought. “That was too weird of a request.” Bob reached into a cooler and pulled out of bag of bone white tubes. “How many do you want?”
FILM NOTEBOOK
WALT DISNEY PICTURES
Motherf*ckers act like they forgot about Rey.
Where are our Rey action figures, Walt? By ANA LUCENA For The Daily
You’ve probably seen the story on social media about how the merchandise for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” angered longtime fans of the franchise when the protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley, “Scrawl”) was not depicted in most of the promotional toys. The way Rey has been left out of the toys used to promote the seventh installment parallels the lack of toys made depicting Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, “Lucy”) when “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was released last year, which went so far as to replace her with Captain America in a Lego set based on a scene she starred in. Even “The Force Awakens” director J.J. Abrams has expressed his disapproval at the lack of Star Wars merchandise depicting Rey, according to Entertainment Weekly. After Leia made the change from princess to general for the Resistance in “The Force Awakens,” there is no doubt in my mind Abrams and his team expanded the possibilities for women in this cinematic universe and beyond. I hope filmmakers follow his lead to provide characters that female moviegoers can relate to and be inspired by just like their male counterparts.
I longed for such representation growing up and never got it. The few movies with heroines who made it to the big screen — like Jennifer Garner’s “Elektra” and Halle Berry’s “Catwoman” — were critically panned as some of the worst movies ever made. I thought it was unfair these characters were so poorly adapted, as it robbed me of fictional dogooders I could see myself in as I strived to become someone who could take care of herself. This was always apparent on Halloween, when us girls would be pushed to dress like demure princesses or pretty fairies, while the boys got to emulate butt-kickers like Superman, G.I. Joe and other men who made a difference. Those who dared demonstrate their connection to the good role models presented in these male-dominated genres were ridiculed for wearing a “boy’s costume.” Obviously, just because someone has a different gender than you doesn’t mean you can’t relate to them. However, I found it deeply discouraging that the women in these films only served as a distracting love interest, such as Mary Jane in the “Spider-Man” franchise, or an administrative sidekick that provided emotional support as a man struggled to save the day,
such as Pepper Potts in the “Iron Man” franchise. I want the toy industry to know they are wrong if they believe the horribly outdated stereotypes that boys won’t support a female hero and girls only want to be princesses. Many of my female friends growing up owned merchandise of the male heroes they wanted to be like in spite of their gender. Once, when we were little and playing make-believe, my brother was upset he couldn’t play as the tomboy Buttercup from “The Powerpuff Girls” because he was of the opposite sex, even though he identified with her brash nature and admired her confidence. Moms, aunts and grandmas have shown me pictures of their adorable little boys in Princess Elsa costumes from “Frozen” simply because they love her character. Though the landscape of female heroes is changing, with Marvel’s “Jessica Jones” and “Agent Carter” making a splash in the TV world, there still are not enough women leading films as heroes. As girls have every right to be represented and addressed in the media as any other demographic, we need to embrace the few heroines we have to build a space in this market for more to come.