ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Ann Arbor, Michigan
michigandaily.com
RESEARCH
Men more susceptible to impact of daily stress University scientists find link between mental health and gender
ALLISON FARRAND/Daily
Migos presented together with former Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland at Signing of the Stars at Hill Auditorium February 3, 2016.
Migos slated to perform at annual SpringFest concert
Proceeds from benefit festival to help fund Detroit summer youth camp
on National Signing Day, and now they’re coming back to the University to give an even bigger show. Migos, an Atlanta based hiphop trio, will perform at Hill Auditorium April 13 for Music Matters’ annual charity concert, according to a statement from Music Matters. The group is best known for their chart-topping hits “Versace” and “Hannah Montana” and their viral single “Look at My Dab.”
By ALYSSA BRANDON Daily News Edtior
Campus saw them hit the dab with University of Michigan football head coach Jim Harbaugh
Comprised of rappers Quavo, Takeoff and Offset, Migos are self-proclaimed University of Michigan football fans, having released videos on their Twitter account proclaiming their support for the Wolverines. Quavo and Takeoff were also at the University in February for the “Signing of the Stars” event, during which the two dabbed with Harbaugh and former Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland. The concert will serve as a part
of Springfest, a daylong festival featuring food, performance and activities for the community during the day. In a statement, Music Matters President Jibran Ahmed, a Business senior, said Migos’ popular acclaim made them the perfect fit for this year’s charity concert. “With Migos becoming an international rap icon, we felt that their energy and popularity See MIGOS, Page 2A
By ALEXA ST. JOHN Daily Staff Reporter
Recent University of Michigan research suggests men are more vulnerable to long-term depression than women, citing a decreased willingness in men to talk about mental health issues. Using data collected by the Institute of Social Research on nearly 4,000 nationally representative participants from 1986 to 2011, Dr. Shervin Assari, psychiatric research investigator and lead author of the recent study, found differences between longterm stress and subsequent depression in males and females. This research, Assari said, could have implications regarding the way mental
SPORTS
ANN ARBOR
Downing signs NHL contract with Panthers Junior D-man forgoes senior season, inks threeyear pro deal By JASON RUBINSTEIN Daily Sports Writer
The Michigan defensive corps just got even thinner. With sophomore defenseman Zach Werenski already out the door to the Columbus Blue Jackets organization, junior defenseman Michael Downing is also leaving, forgoing his senior season. Downing has agreed with the Florida Panthers on a three-year entry level contract, he confirmed to The Daily on Tuesday afternoon. “I thought it was the best decision for me and my hockey career,” Downing said. “I talked to Red this morning and he said he thinks I’m ready to go. And I guess we’ll have to see what happens. “Red told me this morning
that I’m leaving as a man.” The team has not yet announced whether Downing will be assigned directly to the Panthers or to the club’s AHL affiliate Portland Pirates. Downing has been a top defenseman for Michigan since his freshman year. In his first year, he played with Mac Bennett and they formed the team’s top pairing. In his sophomore season, he grew a reputation for laying down punishing hits and he became the team’s spark plug. “It helps in a lot of facets,” said junior forward JT Compher about Downing’s hits last season. “You have to know when he’s on the ice as a forward on the other team. He makes them more and more hesitant coming through the ice. When he throws a big hit, it gets the bench going, and we rally behind it. They’re questionable calls at times, but we’re not going to tell him not to be physical, because that is the way he helps our team.” Added sophomore See NHL, Page 3A
health is stigmatized between the two genders. Assari said his interest in studying how groups differ in vulnerability and their resilience to stress led him to pursue the research. He said he believes exposure to stress helps build resilience to it, but this build-up occurs differently in people of different backgrounds, genders and social groups. “Historically, most of the research looked at or has tried to explain group differences in health through differential exposures, meaning that if women are more depressed, it’s because they get more stress,” Assari said. “If you get a lot of exposure, you build resilience. It’s not women who might be more susceptible to the effect of stress on depression; it might be men who have high levels of stress and be most vulnerable to the effect of it.” Daphne Watkins, associate professor of Social Work, said oftentimes gendered differences based on “gendered stressors” See STRESS, Page 3A
A 2 narrows candidates for city exec. replacement Pool for administrator position down to four individuals ANDREW COHEN/Daily
Bailey Oland, administrative assistant at the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial Office, discusses involvement opportunities in the University’s upcoming bicentennial celebration at the Central Student Government meeting at Pierpont Commons Tuesday.
Central Student Government may eliminate joke write-ins Resolution brought to assembly Tuesday amends election code By JENNIFER MEER Daily Staff Reporter
A new resolution proposed at Tuesday’s Central Student Government meeting could make write-in candidates during elections a thing of the past.
Partially in response to a trend in recent years of writing in Jim Harbaugh as a candidate for various CSG positions, the litigation would amend the CSG election code so that write-in candidates can be screened for their prospective positions before receiving votes. It would also emphasize that disqualified or ineligible candidates cannot be elected. Rackham student Jared Ferguson, chair of the CSG rules committee and co-author of the resolution, said the litigation was
crafted in response to the recent election results. During this year’s election, Harbaugh received 215 votes, and a slate of other write-in candidates — like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Darth Vader The code currently says any write-in candidates who receive votes from at least three separate and eligible students and are enrolled in the University and reside in the college in which they are voting will be considered viable to fill a vacant position. As well, under the proposed See CSG, Page 2A
By BRIAN KUANG and LYDIA BARRY Daily Staff Reporters
The City of Ann Arbor announced its four final city administrator candidates Tuesday: Thomas Couch of Georgia, Paul Fetherston of North Carolina, Howard Lazarus of Texas and Christian Sigman of Ohio. The announcement comes five months after the previous city administrator, Steve Powers, left his position to become the city manager of Salem, Oregon. Tom Crawford, Ann Arbor chief financial officer, has been acting as interim administrator during the search process. City Communications Manager Lisa Wondrash declined to comment beyond the city’s press release. See CITY, Page 2A
the statement Mcity: How the University is changing automated transportation
» INSIDE WEATHER TOMORROW
HI: 65 LO: 38
GOT A NEWS TIP? Call 734-418-4115 or e-mail news@michigandaily.com and let us know.
NEW ON MICHIGANDAILY.COM Thirty-four seconds changed Michigan’s season MICHIGANDAILY.COM/SECTION/SPORTS
INDEX
Vol. CXXV, No. 99 ©2016 The Michigan Daily michigandaily.com
NEWS......................... 2A OPINION.....................4A S P O R T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7A
SUDOKU.....................2A CL ASSIFIEDS...............6A S TAT E M E N T. . . . . . . . . . . 1 B
News
2A — Wednesday, March 30, 2016
TWITTER TALK
“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.
“
Tuesday afternoon.
@michigandaily
Show your support for the two @UMich startups at #rbpc! Vote for @neurable & @PreDxionBio
“Let your voices and ideas The University promoted national reading month in a tweet Tuesday.
A little love goes a long way #NationalReadingMonth —@UMich
3
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
1
#beheard today and tommorrow at the Rackham Diversity Forums # Working Together @umich —@markkamimura
2
In its first tie since Antonin Scalia’s death, SCOTUS upheld a law Tuesday mandating half of public employees to pay a “fair share fee”—a tax paid by non-union members that contributes to union activities, the Los Angeles Times reported. No confirmation hearing has been scheduled for nominee Merrick Garland.
Daily News Editor Allana Akhtar explores how at Mcity, the University and private industry have worked together to change the industry of automated transportation in this weeks’ Statement. >> SEE STATEMENT ON 1B
CAMPUS EVENTS & NOTES
Consuming data Women in lecture astronomy
Future of music industry panel
WHAT: John H. Johnson,
WHAT: Visiting orchestra administrators and School of Music, Theatre & Dance Dean Aaron Dworkin will discuss challenges facing the music industry today. WHO: School of Music, Theatre & Dance WHEN: 7:30 p.m. WHERE: Earl V. Moore
CEO of Edgeworth Economics, will discuss how to understand everyday data acquired from news reports and media.
WHO: University of Michigan Law School WHEN: 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. WHERE: South Hall, room 1225
Chinese text performances WHAT: Scholarperformer Zhang Weidong will discuss chanting classical Chinese poetry and prose as literarymusical training. WHO: Confucius Institute WHEN: 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. WHERE: Michigan League, Koessler Room
WHAT: Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, will commemorate the successes of female astromers. WHO: Department of Astronomy WHEN: 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.
WHERE: Rackham Amphitheater
Two University of Michigan student startups are being considered in the Rice Business Plan Competition.
—@InnovateBlue
3
Two months after the murder of Georgia Lottery winner Craigory Burch Jr., seven people have been charaged with his murder, the Atlantic JournalConstitution reported. Burch was shot to death in January after three or more people broke into his home. All seven suspects have been charged with assault.
S T I C K T O T H E B E AT
on Women and Gender
WHEN: 4:10 p.m. WHERE: Lane Hall, room 2239
SHOHAM GEVA
Newsroom
Letters to the Editor
Arts Section
Editorial Page
4
arts@michigandaily.com
Laura Schinagle
MANAGING EDITOR
Emma Kerr
MANAGING NEWS EDITOR
3
6
schlaura@michigandaily.com
emkerr@michigandaily.com
Senior News Editors: Allana Akhtar, Alyssa Brandon, Jacqeline Charniga, Katie Penrod, Emma Kinery Assistant News Editors: Riyah Basha, Marlee Breakstone, Desiree Chew, Anna Haritos, Tanya Madhani, Camy Metwally, Lydia Murray, Caitlin Reedy, Alexa St. John. Brandon Summers-Miller
Claire Bryan and Regan Detwiler EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
opinioneditors@michigandaily.com
Senior Opinion Editors: Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Stephanie Trierweiler
Max Bultman and Jake Lourim
MANAGING SPORTS EDITORS
sportseditors@michigandaily.com
Senior Sports Editors: Minh Doan, Jacob Gase, Kelly Hall, Simon Kaufman, Jason Rubinstein, Zach Shaw, Brad Whipple Assistant Sports Editors: Betelhem Ashame, Chris Crowder, Sylvanna Gross, Leland Mitchinson, Ted Janes, Kevin Santo
Kathleen Davis and Adam Theisen MANAGING ARTS EDITORS
arts@michigandaily.com
Senior Arts Editors: Caroline Filips, Melina Glusac, Jacob Rich, Ben Rosenstock Arts Beat Editors: Matthew Barnauskas, Christian Kennedy, Rebecca Lerner, Natalie Zak
Amanda Allen and Grant Hardy MANAGING PHOTO EDITORS
photo@michigandaily.com
design@michigandaily.com
statement@michigandaily.com
copydesk@michigandaily.com
Senior Copy Editors: Taylor Grandinetti, Jose Rosales
Nivedita Karki
MANAGING ONLINE EDITOR
nivkarki@michigandaily.com
Senior Web Developers: Dylan LawtonBob Lesser
Levin Kim
video@michigandaily.com
MANAGING VIDEO EDITOR
Senior Video Editors: Michael Kessler, Abe Lofy, Emma Winowiecki
Demario Longmire and Toni Wang MICHIGAN IN COLOR EDITORS
michiganincolor@michigandaily.com
Senior Michigan in Color Editors: Sabrina Bilimoria, Christian Paneda, Ashley Tjhung
Michael Schramm Emma Sutherland
SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR
BUSINESS STAFF Hussein Hakim
Chris Wang
Claire Ulak
Colin Cheesman
Jordan Yob
Anna He
Matt Pfenning
Claire Butz
FINANCE & OPERATIONS MANAGER PRODUCTION MANAGER MARKETING MANAGER UACCOUNTS MANAGER
CLASSIFIEDS MANAGER NATIONAL ACCOUNTS MANAGER SPECIAL GUIDES & ONLINE MANAGER
LAYOUT MANAGER
Asja Kepes ELIZABETH XIONG/Daily
Drummer and composer Kendrick Scott teaches a student at a masterclass at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance on Tuesday.
6 1
9 4 1 6
6 7
classified@michigandaily.com
EDITORIAL STAFF
MANAGING COPY EDITORS
9
3
Classified Sales
dailydisplay@gmail.com
Emily Campbell and Alexis Nowicki
5 7
2
photo@michigandaily.com
Display Sales
Deputy Statement Editor: Nabeel Chollampat Statement Photo Editor: Zoey Holmstrom Statement Lead Designer: Shane Achenbach Statement Creative Designer: Emilie Farrugia
8
2
Photography Section
sports@michigandaily.com
STATEMENT EDITOR
7
7
opinion@michigandaily.com
Sports Section
Karl Williams
6
7
tothedaily@michigandaily.com
Senior Design Arts Editor: Jacklyn Thomas
Building, Watkins Lecture Hall
WHAT: Students will learn to make pop art prints resembling those of Andy Warhol from Ann Arbor Art Center instrutors. WHO: Maize Pages WHEN: 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. WHERE: Michigan Union
news@michigandaily.com
corrections@michigandaily.com
MANAGING DESIGN EDITORS
SUDOKU
8 1 5
News Tips
Corrections
LOCAL ACCOUNTS MANAGER
The Michigan Daily (ISSN 0745-967) is published Monday through Friday during the fall and winter terms by students at the University OF Michigan. One copy is available free of charge to all readers. Additional copies may be picked up at the Daily’s office for $2. Subscriptions for fall term, starting in September, via U.S. mail are $110. Winter term (January through April) is $115, yearlong (September through April) is $195. University affiliates are subject to a reduced subscription rate. On-campus subscriptions for fall term are $35. Subscriptions must be prepaid. The Michigan Daily is a member of The Associated Press and The Associated Collegiate Press.
budgets in economic troubles obtain this position besides being a CSG that resulted in the loss of competent, well-versed individual From Page 1A one-third of the county’s with the community. The person workforce. He holds a master’s that is running for UMPD Couch has been the city degree in public administration change, when a write-in candidate Oversight board member should manager of Bulloch County, from Indiana University and wins a position but is deemed be removed from discussion about Georgia for the past 12 years. undergraduate degree also from ineligible, everyone else running funding, doing this with Maize The county has a population of Indiana University. would be shifted up a spot. Rage, or whatever the platforms more than 69,000 residents and The final four candidates were “The second thing we do, are. They have nothing to do with is home to Georgia Southern identified by a headhunting firm which I’m now going to call the any of that.” University. Under his leadership, contracted by the city. A series Jim Harbaugh rule, since it’s what One of the two other resolutions the county has expanded their of hiring interviews will now be happened, when the candidate to pass unanimously was a local airport, improved public carried out by city staff through is disqualified the seat is not left resolution approving the financial transportation and increased mid-April, and the City Council vacant,” Ferguson said. “Instead, it sponsoring by CSG for the first recycling and energy efficiency will publicly interview them would shift everyone else up.” Mental Health Day. CSG will now efforts, according to the city’s on April 16 using procedures He explained that in the past this partner with student organizations website. Couch holds a master’s agreed upon by the council’s procedure was done regarding the and the LSA Student Government, degree in public administration administration committee. executive ticket; when the leaders among others, to host the event on from Georgia State University The search process began in were disqualified, the runners up Oct. 10. and an undergraduate degree October 2015 when the council would take the position. LSA sophomore Nicholas from Eastern Michigan voted to raise the position’s “In Rackham, Jim Harbaugh Meier, LSA-SG representative and University. salary from $160,000 per year placed seventh — he gets a seat, co-author of the resolution, said Couch, along with other to $175,000 after a professional but he doesn’t because he’s his goal in partnering with CSG is candidates, could not be reached search firm concluded the disqualified, which would make to raise awareness about mental for immediate comment. average annual salary for that person who’s in eighth place health resources on campus. Fetherston is the assistant administrators of similarly sized become seventh and so on and so “CAPS is great, but there are a city manager of Asheville, cities is $167,000. forth down the line,” Ferguson bunch of other things on campus North Carolina and former During his exit in 2015, Powers said. that not enough students know deputy city manager of Boulder, told the council he wishes for his Resolutions about,” he said “Through this, we Colorado. The city of Asheville, successor to continue to uphold Also at Tuesday’s meeting, hope to advocate for their resources where Fetherston currently the values of the city. the body passed three pieces that they have here.” Sudoku Syndication http://sudokusyndication.com/sudoku/generator/print/ works, prioritizes continuous “An administrator needs to of legislation including one to The event will consist of tables improvement through integrity view the city as more than just financially support the University’s set up both in the Diag and on police and fire,” Powers said. “It first Mental Health Day, one North Campus to promote those is a community that has values removing party affiliation from resources. that are very important to a candidates for the University of Guest Speaker council and the administrator Michigan Police Department The meeting’s guest speaker is expected to believe in an Oversight Committee and another Bailey Oland, administrative EASY organization that is consistent to mandate identity training for all assistant senior of the University’s with those values.” CSG members. CSG also heard a Bicentennial Office, gave a brief presentation about the University presentation regarding the of Michigan’s Bicentennial. importance of student awareness Additionally, three new resolutions and involvement in Bicentennial MIGOS regarding the CSG election code festivities. From Page 1A and its operating procedures were The Bicentennial Office brought to the floor. coordinates and encourages After some debate, the assembly Bicentennial-related events across will make them the perfect act passed legislation stipulating campus, particularly by student to headline SpringFest,” Ahmed that candidates for the UMPD organizations. said. Oversight Commission are not to Oland said student voice Past performers for the annual run with political parties. Students should factor into the decisions charity concert have included hold two spots on the commission, surrounding the event because Common, Two Chainz and one elected each CSG election. they are the most important part of Common. LSA sophomore Jacob the University’s 200-year history. According to Music Matters, Pearlman, one of the co-authors “Without students we don’t ticket prices will start at $10 for of the resolution, responded to have a University. It’s a plain and students and $20 for the public opposition by saying that though simple fact,” Oland said. “You are with all proceeds going toward political parties provide a necessary our biggest constituent for the the organization’s summer platform for the representatives to Bicentennial. We talk a lot about leadership camp for Detroit show their own qualifications and the future impact of the University. youth, which is set to launch in alignments, the UMPD position is If we don’t know what students summer 2017. Tickets can be not political in nature. want and what students are © sudokusolver.com. For personal use only. FETA BREAD AND CHILL. puzzle by sudokusyndication.com purchased on the MUSIC matters “This is not a political position,” interested in... then future students website beginning Thursday at 10 he said. “There is really nothing may not be interested and we can’t a.m. that you would advocate for to move forward.”
3 7 2 1
Business Manager 734-418-4115 ext. 1241 rfilipp@michigandaily.com
Anjali Alangaden and Mariah Gardziola
and diversity. According to the press release, Fetherston holds a law degree from Western New England University School of Law and an undergraduate degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Lazarus has been the public works director as well as the interim assistant city manager of Austin, Texas, as well as director of engineering for Newark, New Jersey. Currently, Lazarus supervises 730 full-time and part-time/seasonal employees as the public works director of Austin, Texas, overseeing a department that has an annual operating budget of $80 million. Lazarus holds a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and an undergraduate degree from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. Sigman is the city administrator of Hamilton County, Ohio and former budgeting director in Cincinnati and the District of Columbia. During his time as city administrator of Hamilton County, he prepared balanced
CITY From Page 1A
ROSE FILIPP
Editor in Chief 734-418-4115 ext. 1251 sageva@michigandaily.com
Senior Photo Editors: Zoey Holmstrom, Zach Moore, James Coller Assistant Photo Editors: Claire Abdo, Robery Dunne, Sam Mousigian, San Pham, David Song
LGBT citizens in Mochas and Masterpieces USSR politics WHAT: Alex Kondakov will discuss why LGBT community members rarely participate in Russian political rallies, petitions and parades. WHO: Instute for Resarch
420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1327 www.michigandaily.com
734-418-4115 opt. 3
“
“
#TMD
“
“
FOLLOW US!
The Rackham School of Graduate Studies held a diversity forum
“
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
5
1
Generate and solve Sudoku, Super Sudoku and Godoku puzzles at sudokusyndication.com!
University to test out emergency alert system By RIYAH BASHA Daily Staff Reporter
The University of Michigan’s Division of Public Security and Safety announced Tuesday afternoon that it will run a test of its emergency alert system Thursday at noon. The test will be broadcast to the Michigan App, U-M Gateway and Division of Public Safety and Security websites, interior building digital signs, Twitter and web feeds. In announcement, DPSS said they have been working on the emergency alert feature on the Michigan mobile phone app, and hope to gain more feedback about the app’s effectiveness through Thursday’s test. “It will be an additional method for the campus community to receive alerts, as well as a method for individuals not affiliated with the University, such as contractors working on campus and parents,” the University’s statement read. In a February e-mail interview with The Michigan Daily, DPSS spokeswoman Diane Brown stressed the importance of the emergency alert system to notify students of threats and emergency reductions in staff. “We strongly encourage all students, faculty and staff to register to receive the text and voice messages in order to quickly be informed of an imminent threat,” she wrote.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 — 3A
AFRICAN ART
NEWS BRIEFS
UHS tests artificial heart technology The University of Michigan Health System is testing the Transmedics Organ Care System (OCS), a high-tech heart box that circulates blood from the donor to the heart, according to the University Health System. The OCS Heart system will nourish the heart with oxygen and nutrients and keep it at normal body temperature. The current method of storing the heart on ice keeps it viable for only four hours . This new technology aims to keep the heart beating while in transit. “With this method of transplantation, hearts are kept beating, allowing for organs to be transplanted longer distances so that more opportunities may arise for our patients to receive the organs they desperately need,” said Francis Pagani, cardiac surgeon at the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center, the study’s lead investigator According to UHS, there are about 4,000 people in the United States in need o f a heart transplant. This new technology will allow many more donor hearts to be transplanted because hearts can travel longer distances, allowing for more potential recipients. Also, surgeons will be able to examine the heart because it is kept functional during transportation.
Flint lags in water plan to fix infrastructure The Fast Start program, a 30-day initiative to replace infrastructure at 30 homes by the March 31, is far from completion, according to MLive. So far, less than 10 homes have been completed. In early March, engineer teams identified the 30 priority homes. Part of the project includes the removal of pipes made of lead and galvanized steel. Flint officials have attributed the delayed progress to rain, snowstorms and paperwork issues. Weaver’s spokeswoman Kristin Moore said they will continue infrastructure replacement even after the date passes. There are potentially 5,000 homes in Flint in need of new infrastructure. Currently the program is funded by the $2 million the state gave to reimburse Flint’s expenditures in 2015 when the city had to switch back to the Detroit water system. Weaver said she is looking for more funding to continue the project.
Detroit Public School official charged for bribery
ANDREW COHEN/Daily
LSA sophomore Julia Pompilius examines a Nigerian mask up close in UMMA’s object study room for Art History Prof. David Doris’s Yoruba Visual Culture class. The University’s art museum is in the process of assessing its African Art collection following the recent addition of their first African Art curator.
STRESS From Page 1A affect the availability of mental health information for men. “I find that the majority of research on stress and health has focused primarily on women,” Watkins said. “I think it does negate the importance of understanding the ways in which stress differentially affects men’s health, especially vulnerable groups of men and boys.” Assari’s study found over time women adapt to stress in ways men do not. He said women are better able to manage their stress, while he also noted that men experience depression at higher rates due to a number of factors inclduing inability to deal with stress, while women are exposed to higher levels of stress at a younger age than men, levels of depression in men are delayed. Yet women are more prepared than men to manage their stress and depressive symptoms, and are more likely to seek help. “The literature says yes, women get more stress,” Assari said. “But, from the other side, we know that women get used to stress in the way that they can mobilize the psycho-social resources. They can better communicate or talk about their emotions. They don’t stigmatize using health care … As men, we think that’s not appropriate, that reduces our power or control over life. We don’t talk about our emotions and our difficulties.” Watkins said long-term stress can lead to a range of health outcomes, such as more severe problems with mental health, susceptibility to diseases and risk of chronic conditions. “Stress can be detrimental to everyone’s health and well-being,” Watkins said. “Its effects on health are evident, directly through more physiological pathways, but also indirectly through health behaviors and practices.” In particular, Assari said
The principal of a Detroit Public School that was set to receive more than $500,000 worth of donations from TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has been charged with bribery in an unrelated criminal case, according to the Detroit Free Press. Federal court records show that Ronald Alexander, the principal at Charles L. Spain Elementary Middle School, allegedly appropriated $23,000 in kickbacks from Norman Shy, in exchange for using Shy’s company Allstate Sales as a school supply vendor. Allstate Sales sells school supplies and items such as auditorium chairs. This is part of a larger saga involving $1 million worth of kickbacks and at least 12 NHL Detroit Public Schools that From Page 1A contracted Allstate Sales in exchange for money. Charles L. Elementary Middle School gained defenseman Zach Werenski: prominence when DeGeneres “Someone who can hit like that announced, in a show segment definitely brings energy to the that aired in February, that the bench. You can see guys on the school would receive more than other team don’t want to go his $500,000 worth of donations, way.” construction materials and Downing’s junior season technology. was no different. On top of his continued massive hits, he became a focal point of the offense. He led the second power —DESIREE CHEW play unit, and he had an uncanny
hegemonic masculinity — a traditional belief among men that identifies being a man as needing to show power and dominance can lead to showing higher vulnerability to higher effects of stress because they do not seek professional help. Expressing a similar sentiment, Watkins said men usually abide by the general social codes set for their gender so as to avoid the stress associated with doing otherwise. “Because men tend to adhere to those more traditional definitions of manhood they won’t go and seek physical health care or mental health care because, despite all these risks, they’re saying, ‘I’m the man, and because I’m a man, I can handle that,’ ” Watkins said. Jill Becker, professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, who studies sex differences in motivation and drug abuse primarily using rat models, said the study was a needed contribution to the field. Becker said when subjecting the rats to restraint stressors repeatedly for a long period of time, female rats show better capabilities for learning, while male rats do worse following repeated restraint stress. Becker said this concept could be applicable to human males as well. “The ability to use these large data sets to begin to answer questions about where are there sex and gender differences in how stress is affecting us makes this a very important article,” Becker said. For Assari, this research ultimately suggests men are less likely to take care of their emotional problems, an issue that could have adverse effects on mental and physical health in their future. “We need to work with this gender identity, help them to seek care, reduce stigma associated with mental health care organizations and (increase) communication about emotion among men,” Assari said.
ability to get his shots through traffic and toward the net, which often led to goals. The junior finished the season with three goals and 17 assists and was one of two defensemen to reach 20 points. Now, Downing is eager to get his professional career started. “I am going to go in and prove myself to my coaches and teammate,” Downing said. “There’s a lot to prove and do go in there and do what I do and gain the respect of my teammates.”
STEP UP
ELIZABETH XIONG/Daily
A Phi Beta Sigma member performs at the National Pan-Hellenic Council Step Show Tuesday.
Opinion
4A — Wednesday, March 30, 2016
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
CLAIRE BRYAN AND REGAN DETWILER EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
LAURA SCHINAGLE MANAGING EDITOR
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
Dear Depression
here is something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while now, and I’m not sure how you’ll take it, so I’m just gonna come right out and say it. I know we’ve been practically inseparable all these years, so I hope you can understand that now just feels like the right time to finally call it quits once and for all. Your loyalty is admirable. No, really. Your presence has outlasted even my closest LAUREN friendships (though, to be SCHANDEVEL fair, I think you may have had something to do with that). I still remember when I met you in sixth grade. At the time, I thought you were just a passing acquaintance (after all, how many 12-year-olds can say they have a friend like you?), but your company was so persistent, I couldn’t help but accept that we would be together for a long time. Now, I couldn’t imagine having grown up without you. You’ve accompanied me through all the major milestones. Remember when I switched schools after freshman year and you followed me to my new one? We spent that first day together as I ate lunch alone, and you told me I would never make friends there. That was true for a while, because whenever people reached out, you assured me that they were just being nice and didn’t really want to hang out with me. I appreciated your pragmatism at that critical point in my life — I would have mistakenly believed that my friends genuinely liked me if it weren’t for you. Senior year, I was so excited when we got into the same college, and even more so when I found out we would be rooming together. Our interests were so similar, we joined all of the same organizations, though you were a little less outgoing than I was. After every club meeting, no matter how well it went or how many friends I made, you would warn me that no one there was really interested in what I had to say, and I would believe you. I’m glad I stuck with it despite your
advice, because most of the time, being involved gave me a nice little break from your company. Oh, and when I got a boyfriend here, you were so jealous! I know it’s just because you missed spending time with me, but rest assured that every minute I spent without him, I spent with you. Sometimes I couldn’t even enjoy my time with him because I was thinking about you too often — that’s just how intertwined our lives are, I suppose. Funny how that works. Now that he and I are no longer together, you and I have been closer than ever. You attend every party with me as my wingman, convincing me to drink excessively and hook up with strangers. In the morning, you follow me home as I walk from their place to mine. You shroud the sunrise and make the air piercing cold. You tell me that this week, the temperature won’t get above 50 degrees. In a way, you make it less lonely to be alone. And you know, it’s not often I can say a friend of mine really hits it off with my mom, but you’ve been there for her, too, just like you were for her mom. You’ve even started to work your charm on my brother. My dad still isn’t fond of you, and admittedly I’m kind of glad. I don’t think you guys would have gotten along very well anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is although you’ve been with me through thick and thin, it’s just not working anymore. To be completely honest, you’re kind of an asshole, and I think I would be just fine without you. I’ve come to realize that my friends really do care about me, and being actively involved here at the University makes me feel more fulfilled than you ever have. You only weighed me down, and I often think of what I could have accomplished if I weren’t spending so much time with you. I know you’ll be tempted to reach out, but I would really appreciate it if you didn’t contact me. Like, ever. I’ll probably be too busy to hang out anyway. After all, I have to make up for all those years I wasted with you somehow. Love, Lauren —Lauren Schandevel can be reached at schandla@umich.edu.
JACOB DECKER | OP-ED
Finding sobriety
Throughout my time in college, I’ve learned that living independently is mainly an exercise in taking mental inventories. Each day, I find myself cataloging lists of how many pages of reading I have to do by tomorrow, how much money I spent the night before and how many hours of studying I can get in before my exam if I start being productive right that second. List-making became a subconscious part of my daily life, but as my time as a student comes to a close, I feel my lists starting to change. Instead of assignments and personal finances, I’ve turned inward, and considered how many relationships I have ruined while I was drunk, and if what surrounds me now is really all I have to show for four years. In response to these disquieting inventories, and driven by the accumulative shame I’ve felt when my roommates filled me in on a previous night’s belligerent behavior, I started going to local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The only previous exposure I’d had to AA was from reading David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” which coincidentally I read during a five-month stretch when I lived at home, at the request of my parents, in response to a litany of underage drinking tickets. During those five months, I attended treatment and was “sober” in the sense that I didn’t drink while in my hometown, but drank to excess whenever I came to Ann Arbor to visit my now-ex-girlfriend. After attending a few meetings, I was surprised at how exactly spot-on Wallace was when he wrote about AA. All the clichés are there: free coffee in little Styrofoam cups, chain smokers and old blue-collar guys who have been sober for 10-plus years but still keep coming to meetings. Wallace calls these gentlemen “the crocodiles” on account of their weathered and scaly faces from years of hitting the bottle and subsequent years of smoking cigarettes outside of AA meetings. The first time I went to a meeting, I was met with pithy nuggets of wisdom that scared me when I realized how closely they hit home — “It’s the ants that make us drink, not the elephants.” I haven’t experienced any great tragedy like some of my more experienced AA fellows, and I don’t have any felonies that mandate my attendance to meetings, but I go nonetheless. Most of the time, I feel like I don’t belong, and I know it’s because I have a stockpile of excuses and rationalizations for not accepting my drinking as alcoholism. In the spirit of making lists, here are some of the most popular: I work a shit job on top of a brutal class schedule, it’s my senior year and I should be having fun, and other people drink way more than me and are fine. I can’t escape this feeling that sobriety is somehow wrong for me.
The classic AA big-book response to this sort of backsliding is that a lifetime without drinking is such an overwhelming thought that it will defeat even the most dedicated seeker of sobriety. This fear is what inspired the central tenet of AA, that sobriety is maintained one day at a time. But even this outlook, which in many ways is the be-all and end-all of AA, doesn’t make the thought of sobriety any less terrifying. Each day I add to my list of sober days feels more like a brick than an accomplishment, and I feel these bricks stacking up precariously higher with each passing day. I’m tempted to just take a drink and throw it all away, because it makes rational sense that the collapse of 30 bricks would be much less damaging than the collapse of 90 or 365. This pseudo-rationality is how I’ve gone about my entire college career. I’ve tried to justify my destructive relationship with alcohol by saying to myself that I’m just a normal college binge drinker, that every party needs a drunk wild card, or more severely, that I have an emptiness inside me that prevents me from feeling happiness without alcohol. At one of my first meetings, a true crocodile approached me at the night’s end and asked me when my “Sober Birthday” was — an AA term for the date of your last drink. He could tell I was new to AA because most, if not all, newly sober people at an AA meeting have a familiar expression of quiet, doe-eyed apprehension and shame. Embarrassed, I told him that it was only a few days ago. To my surprise, he smiled and explained that it was great, as an old AA veteran, to be able to pay forward the help that he received back when he was only three days sober. He gave me his phone number and told me to call him “before the drink, not after.” After the first week of attending meetings, I had a new inventory of names and faces that shared a common hope with me — names and faces that were willing to share their wisdom and experiences in a meeting or over the phone with a near stranger. They say in AA that in order to be successful and attain sobriety, you have to concede to your innermost self that you’ve lost control. I’m struggling to take this vital first step; I think the current driving force behind my sobriety is an abject fear of feeling like a hypocrite, rather than a genuine desire to adopt a new way of living and shed an old way of dying. Sobriety won’t miraculously bring me happiness, and I know I may have to try and fail before being successful, but I’ll keep attending meetings, and I’ll wait. I’ll wait until my stack of bricks assembles into a real foundation or collapses on itself. — Jacob Decker is an LSA senior.
W
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
An incitement to experiment
hat are we meant to do on this campus? Why do we come to the University of Michigan? Why is this part of our lives — our late teens and early 20s — glorified in movies and TV shows like “The Breakfast Club,” “Animal House” and “Blue ISAIAH Mountain State” ZEAVIN-MOSS and considered the “best time of our lives”? When I imagine my future self assessing the time I have spent and will continue to spend in Ann Arbor, I will use, as a barometer of success, the level to which I experimented, tried new things, branched out. Because never again in our lives will we be at such a place, a place whose very foundation rests on the principle of education. Well, what does that look like? What does an education look like? I suppose the opposite of using our time here to experiment might be to settle into a situation that feels comfortable, and then to ride that out for our entire tenures at Michigan. But I would argue that settling into such a comfortable situation does not promote or even aid our learning; instead, a comfortable environment inhibits it. We do not learn in situations that are entirely familiar to us; we do not learn by surrounding ourselves with the same people and inhabiting the same spaces every day of the week. In these situations, we are not testing ourselves. We are not examining who we are, what we prefer, our tendencies, inclinations, fears, etc. Instead, we have settled, we have decided all of these things already, or, more likely, we have deemed them unworthy of further investigation. Perhaps one reason why our various cultural media has deemed college as the best time of our lives is precisely that: Never again in our lives will a situation promote more readily this kind of free-flowing experimentation. From here, we will be expected to
begin our career “paths,” and, in just a few years, perhaps, to settle down with a family, have kids and cease experimenting all together. And while I myself anticipate something like this in my own life — of course, allowing for nuance, personalization, etc. — what a tragedy it would be to have to settle down in this way before fully examining who I am, before having tried all that has been available to me in the years I have been alive. I do not mean to deride comfort entirely — of course, there are moments for all of us when we want nothing more than to relax, to surround ourselves with our best friends in our most familiar spaces and turn off our minds. I support and see the value in this wholeheartedly. I just do not think this should be the predominant atmosphere that we try to carve out for ourselves. Comfort is relative — in order for something to be comfortable, there also have to be moments of discomfort, of experimentation. Otherwise, what we deem comfortable eventually becomes overly familiar and normalized. In Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel, after returning to her stagnating routine at home when she had just spontaneously spent a day outside on a long walk, Jane Eyre describes, “an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating.” In order to appreciate moments of comfort and ease, we need to experiment, to challenge ourselves, to fully feel and acknowledge moments of discomfort. Life on a college campus allows for exploration and experimentation in all of their forms: intellectual, social — as we are surrounded by tens of thousands of bright, engaging minds — or, finally, aesthetic, since we live in one of the most renowned-for-itsbeauty states in this country? Throughout my time here, I have had plenty of conversations with friends where at least one of us is expressing visceral contempt for some aspect of this university. One of us might say, “I hate social life here.” Fortunately, though, this statement is relatively meaningless because there
are so many different social lives here, all subject to our investigation. This, I think, is the biggest lesson to be learned from studying at such a behemoth university as this one: We are meant to constantly dig deeper, to continue investigating, to find out who we are. We are not meant to know who we are just yet — I believe that is impossible this early on in life, since most of us have lived with our families for most of our lives. Without different experiences and experiments, we will never attain a full picture of ourselves. Why is it, do you think, that playwrights, novelists and screenwriters put some of the most iconic characters in literature through such immense challenges (think “Macbeth,” “Madame Bovary” or “Invisible Man”)? It is through fighting and learning from these challenging experiences that these characters learn about themselves? I have learned more about myself through scrupulously investigating my complex, topsy-turvy relationship with this school during the last year and a half than in my entire life before I got to Ann Arbor. The best moments during this time have been those when I challenged myself: going into a room where I know nobody and striking up a conversation or taking a class about something I have never studied. Through my professors and my peers, I began to understand my mind and to expand it. I do all of this because I believe this is how I will measure and assess my time here. And, furthermore, I do this knowing very well that I have a comfortable place to return to, one where I will be able to anticipate everything, where there will be no disruptions to my routine. Let us explore all that this place, this time in our lives, has to offer. Let us ask questions of ourselves — even ones that feel challenging — and attempt to answer them through all that this place contains and all the layered multitudes that we, ourselves, contain. — Isaiah Zeavin-Moss can be reached at izeavinm@umich.edu.
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala, Kit Maher, Madeline Nowicki, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel, Melissa Scholke, Kevin Sweitzer, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie Trierweiler, Hunter Zhao CAITLIN HEENAN | OP-ED
Roe v. Wade didn’t solve it all Since the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade — the controversial Supreme Court case over abortion rights — women have had the right to choose what happens to their bodies in regard to unwanted pregnancies. However, legalizing abortion was not the only significant milestone this case promoted. This ruling revolutionized the health care system for women, paving the way for more accepting and less stigmatized views of women’s health and placing a continued emphasis on autonomy in such choices. Prior to this case, women who wanted to get an abortion often pursued very expensive and dangerous procedures by backstreet providers who were often not medically trained. One study estimates between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions were completed per year from the 1950s to 1960s. The same study cites abortions as the official cause of death for one-fifth of maternityrelated deaths in 1930. Though the legal status of abortions has changed since the 1930s, even now, decades after Roe v. Wade, advocates have to fight to keep the right of women’s safety a priority for lawmakers. The Supreme Court has begun preparations to make a ruling on the legality of a Texas law passed in 2013 that places stringent regulations on abortion clinics. The ruling is expected to take place sometime in June. The Court’s decision could alter the ways in which abortion is viewed and carried out in not only Texas, but also in other states that choose to adopt this law. The law requires physicians to have admitting privileges, or the capability of placing and treating a patient in a hospital. The law would require such a hospital to be within 30 miles of the clinic. The law would
increase requirements for the buildings housing the clinics, such as expanding the width of hallways and adding showers and lockers in certain areas. Adhering to these requirements could end up costing millions of dollars. Such measures would assess clinics on similar standards to the ways in which surgical centers are assessed. These requirements would be enforced even if the clinic does not offer surgical abortions, instead inducing abortions by medication, making the requirements unnecessary and excessive. Supporters of these regulations claim they will prevent unnecessary health risks to women who seek an abortion. However, continuation of this law could have detrimental effects for women seeking abortions in the coming years. Many advocates for this law are pro-life supporters who are simply aiming to severely limit the right a woman has to choose to terminate a pregnancy. Coercive action, which is often used to place increased pressure on women to not go through with an abortion, is already mandated by laws not only in Texas, but across the country. Women are consistently discouraged from making the personal choice to go through with an abortion. Fourteen states require women to attend two separate appointments, which often use unnecessary ultrasounds and other scare tactics to place doubt in the choice to terminate the pregnancy, before being authorized to receive an abortion. These appointments are often aimed to place doubt in the choice to end a pregnancy. Reports have indicated that sections of the Texas law that are already in place have decreased the number of clinics legally authorized to offer abortions from 41 to 19. If the law is upheld after the Supreme Court decision, the number of
clinics open could drop to only 10 statewide to service a population of 27,469,114. Such a dramatic decrease in the opportunities women have to get an abortion will likely have negative effects. Those who are not willing or able to travel the increased distance to a state-approved abortion clinic may find more dangerous, black-market alternatives to end a pregnancy. Some in Southern Texas would potentially have to make a 150-mile journey to make it to the nearest abortion clinic. Without a ride to get to such a faraway place, enough money to stay or return to the area for two visits, and no insurance to cover the cost of the actual procedure, attaining the ability to exercise the right to have an abortion would be impossible. In these areas where abortions are especially difficult to accomplish legally, many have taken to a medication prescribed for ulcers in order to induce a miscarriage. The drug, if taken properly, is still only 80-to-85percent effective and if too much is taken, can be fatal. This drug, called misoprostol, is actually one of the safer nonclinical methods used by those who desperately seek an abortion if traveling to a clinic is out of reach. It is not unheard of for women to go to extreme measures in order to give themselves an abortion when their access is extremely limited. Even in the days after the legalization of abortion, women feel forced to resort to unsafe measures in order to act upon their rights to autonomy. If the government will not allow women to receive an abortion legally and in a safe facility in a reasonable way, they will find a way to give themselves abortions. Caitlin Heenan can be reached at heenan@umich.edu.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW
SMTD performs adapted ‘Invalid’ By KELLY MARTINEK Daily Arts Writer
The School of Music, Theatre & Dance’s Department of Theatre & Drama will close their 20152016 season in the coming weekends with The a production of Imaginary “The Imaginary Invalid,” direct- Invalid ed by Daniel Mar. 31 & April Cantor, associ7 at 7:30 p.m., ate professor of April 1, 2, 8 & Theatre, Acting 9 at 8 p.m. and Directing. April 3 & 10 at “The Imaginary Invalid” is 2 p.m. Arthur a farce written Miller Theater by 17th century $28 GA, $12 w/ French play- Student ID wright Molière, one of the “iconic playwrights of the Western canon,” according to Cantor. The play tells the story of Argan, a severe, albeit fiscally cheap, hypochondriac who devises a plan to receive free healthcare by marrying his daughter off to a doctor. SMTD will be performing a 1999 translation and adaptation of the piece by James Magruder for the Yale Repertory Theater. Since Magruder’s adaptation includes musical interludes that reference New Haven, Connecticut and other specific references to the Yale Repertory Theatre,
Cantor and his team got permission to change those references to pertain to their production on campus. Cantor has 30 years of professional theatre experience under his belt, both acting and directing. He has chosen to set this production in the period of the Belle Époque, between 1890 and 1900, instead of the 17th century, in which it was originally written. “Based on my interpretation of the themes in the play, it encouraged me to set it in this period,” Cantor said. “This period has a particular kind of aesthetic, so the set, costumes, the music are all influenced by that period and that aesthetic.” To create the aesthetic, Cantor has the help of an artistic team made up of both undergraduate students and faculty. According to a press release, the show’s lighting designer is School of Music, Theatre & Dance junior Abbey Kojima and the costume designer is School of Music, Theatre & Dance senior Lindsay Balaka. Both are BFA design & production majors in the Department of Theatre & Drama. Vincent Mountain, associate Professor of Theatre & Drama Vincent Mountain is the play’s scenic designer. The sound design is by School of Music, Theatre & Dance and Business senior Billy Cedar with music direction by School of Music, Theatre & Dance senior Alex Bonoff.
After the performance on Friday, there will be a “Curtain Call,” a post-performance discussion about the play with Cantor and members of the cast and production team, which will be free and open to all. On stage, the cast is made up of 18 actors, including an ensemble of seven who will sing, dance and play instruments during the musical interludes throughout the play. “It’s a heightened style. It’s somewhat broad; it’s pretty fast,” Cantor said. “It requires a certain degree of actors really having chops, like having technical, mechanical chops to be able to perform almost with a kind of athleticism, and it’s very physical, too, so you need physically skilled performers. So it requires a high degree of skill, but like with any comedy, there’s the style of it, and then inside the style of it you still have to be a character who is trying to get something and who wants something and who really feels things.” The play includes elements of true satire and social commentary, but most of all, Molière is known for his comedy. “He’s one of the greatest comic writers who ever, ever lived,” Cantor said. “So if you do his plays well, and hopefully we’ll do them well, it is just an absolutely great time … I think seeing a really highenergy, vital, hilarious, smart, fun play makes you feel good.”
FILM REVIEW
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 — 5A
FILM REVIEW
JEVA FILMS
“Paint me like one of your French girls.”
UK sex-fueled metahorror comedy ‘Nina’ By MADELEINE GAUDIN Daily Arts Writer
Your exes will haunt you forever — literally. In the debut film from directing duo brothers Chris and Ben Blaine, “Nina Forever,” B the afterlife meets this life Nina in the bedroom. Forever Emotionally haunted by the Jeva Films untimely death of his girlfriend Google Play, Nina (Fiona O’ iTunes, Amazon Shaughnessy “Outcast”), Rob Instant Video (Cian Berry “Help Point”) finds love again with his coworker Holly (Abigail Hardingham “Sasquatch”). Then the emotional haunting becomes literal haunting, as Nina returns every time the couple tries to have sex. For a horror/romantic drama with a whacked-out plot, “Nina Forever” is shot beautifully and cleverly. Shots of the three leads in bed show the messiness of their relationship. Holly and Rob are always, in some way, obscured by Nina. As the two bicker about what to do with the corpse in the room, the classic over-the-shoulder shot is played with, shooting the
dialogue over Nina’s shoulders. The film begins dangerously close to Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory. Holly thinks Rob’s suicidal depression is totally hot. The pair first interact in the storeroom of the grocery shop over a shared pair of headphones. Rob is dark and brooding. Holly is desperate to show him how dangerous and free she can be. At first, the looming question in “Nina Forever” is “when is Zooey Deschanel going to show up?” But then things get weird and it’s great. After the initial horror of ghosts not only being real, but also watching you have sex sinks in, the three fall into a weird, semipolyamorous relationship. Oddly enough, Nina’s bloodied corpse lying on the bed next to them doesn’t seem to be a mood-killer. But what haunts them more than Nina’s physical presence is the implications it carries. What happens when someone you love dies? What happens when you try to love again? Through attempts at answering these questions, “Nina Forever” transcends campy horror and becomes something philosophically charged. While it asks more questions than it answers, when the film does come to terms with the harsh truths of
love, it soars. The pair must grapple with how to both honor Nina and move on from her. Holly gets Nina’s name tattooed on her lower back (weird) and the pair try having sex on Nina’s grave (even weirder). There is no real resolution for this problem, and that is why “Nina Forever” is so wonderful. It doesn’t have all the answers and it doesn’t pretend to. While most of the questions “Nina Forever” leaves unanswered are large and profound, some simple plot points are left untouched. There’s quick mention of a weird flirtation between Rob and Nina’s mom and a glazing over of the large age gap between Holly, who seems to be a college freshman, and Rob, who already has a PhD. Yes, these aren’t the questions “Nina Forever” wants to spend its time answering, but why further complicate an already twisted plot? The elevator pitch of “Nina Forever” could easily sound like another sex-fueled horrorcomedy of the post-“Scream” era. But because it chooses to wrestle with the hard questions that underlie any film in this genre, it becomes something beautiful, heartbreaking and wholly its own.
ALBUM REVIEW
ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
Stacey’s grandma has got it going on.
Unconventional romcom ‘Doris’ a success By ANA LUCENA Daily Arts Writer
An elderly woman pursuing her hot, younger coworker could sound like a straightforward, uncreative story, but “Hello, My B+ Name Is Doris” creates an arc Hello, My as much about Name is an endearing Doris woman exploring society as Michigan it is about her Theater lust. The film is Roadside about Doris Attractions Miller, a shy packrat in her late 60s who works at a hipster fashion company in New York City, played wonderfully by Sally Field (“The Amazing Spider-Man 2”). She hasn’t had much of a chance to live freely as she has been dutifully living with her mother, a hoarder who passes away at the beginning of the film. After attending a lecture by a motivational speaker, Doris is inspired to make a change. Right from the get-go we see Doris’s internal conflict. Her world is turned upside down with the timely arrival of new handsome coworker John Fremont (Max Greenfield, “Veronica Mars”). After being sensually squished together in a cramped elevator at work, Doris becomes smitten with John.
At first I was concerned she would wreak havoc on John’s life as she becomes obsessed with her love for him, like in the 2003 French film “He Loves Me … He Loves Me Not” that also has a plot sparked by a chance encounter. Thankfully, Doris’s integrity as her own person is consistent throughout, keeping her from seeming silly as she chases a man decades younger than her. The way she falls in love at first doesn’t feel so cliché after knowing her restrained past, keeping the focus on Doris growing. With her tough best friend Roz (Tyne Daly, “Judging Amy”) and Roz’s granddaughter (Isabella Acres, “Sofia the First”) by her side, Doris successfully enters a friend group of millennial coworkers who appreciate her interesting fashion sense. These millennials provide much needed insight into the younger generation as she navigates spending time with John. The plot takes dramatic turns, keeping Doris from feeling wacky. It also grounds her in the real struggles of reaching old age, making her story go beyond the surface humor to incorporate striking perspectives on aging as well. Sally Field is completely lovable as Doris, one of the best elements of the film in spite of her eccentricities and far-fetched goals. Not even her addiction to romance novels can make the way she
tackles her affection for John predictable, nor the outcomes of her attempts to pursue him. Her frequently amazed face conveys a delightful optimism you would expect to have been extinguished by her age. Seeing an older woman so resolved to enjoying life and loving more reminds me of another talented actress, Ruth Gordon as Maude in “Harold and Maude.” I’m happy that Field is able to land another stellar role in her long career as she nears 70, knowing that actresses tend to struggle to find leading roles as they age. Though Field is very funny, the humor of the film fell flat at times. As Doris makes friends with young adults, there were jokes about the growing reliance on technology and the increased visibility of the LGBTQ community. While never mean-spirited, they did a poor job of showing the difficulty of Doris’s dream to get with her young coworker by illustrating how wide the age gap is between them. The most exciting thing about “Hello, My Name Is Doris” is Field’s return as a leading lady. The film revolving around Doris to incorporate its commentary on millennials and New York City, is successful overall, though not overwhelmingly so. But with the lead being as comic yet realistic as Doris, rooting for her is entertaining from start to finish.
WARNER BROS. RECORDS
They should faceswap.
Evolving Cardiknox By CATHERINE BAKER Daily Arts Writer
“Just another girl from a small town with big dreams / Just another wild heart who’s looking to break free / And the locks on the doors only make me want more of the crown / In the black of the night, there’s a hum you can feel in the ground.” The opening lyrics of Cardiknox’s breakthrough full-length album Portrait set the stage for the inventive and experimental tracks that follow. Breaking free of traditional pop guidelines, the New York-based electronic pop duo set a new precedence of mixing ’80s beats with modern pop elements. Raised in the suburbs of Seattle and introduced through a mutual friend, Lonnie Angle’s classical piano training and Thomas Dutton’s punk roots combined to release the synthinfused Portrait on March 11, 2016. Starting off soft and steady, “Earthquake” tests out new instruments and electronics to find Cardiknox’s voice. As Angle’s vocals soar over the
background beats, multiple layers and echoes make the duo sound like a full band. “Doors” leads with a cappella and a steady drumbeat, slowing things down for a vocal showcase. With untraditional and catchy hooks, the methodical and repetitive chorus puts the listener in a trancelike state as Angle sings, “I cannot be defined by the present or the past.” Channeling The 1975, “Into the Night” mutes its intro and speaks of regrets and moving on. As Angle croons, “Baby, I remember everything you forgot to say to me / Left me feeling blue / I’m thinking that maybe I was looking for something that could save me / But it wasn’t you,” the juxtaposition between simple verses and a heavy, ’80s inspired chorus is the perfect example of the kind of music Cardiknox makes. “Bloodlust” takes on the role of an experimental rock song with dense electric guitars and constant drumsticks. It’s seductive and captivating, using quick-witted lyrics like, “I see you in my sleep / A vision in the heat / I want to see what
you’ve got,” to draw the listener in. Closing with piano-based “Shadowboxing” gives Angle a chance to showcase her classical training while still adding electronic elements to supplement Dutton’s style. The swelling vocals feel like an appropriate culmination to the edgy and innovative album, bringing the listener down from the preceding fast-paced tracks and providing a chance to reflect on the experience. The sweet and clear vocals talk about fighting off demons as Angle sings, “I’m fighting someone / But no one’s there / I’m throwing punches into the air / I’m shadowboxing.” It simultaneously feels nostalgic and hopeful and leaves the album on a bittersweet note, ready for Cardiknox’s next project. “Earthquake’s” closing lyrics about sum up Cardiknox’s next move when Angle proclaims, “And when my feet land on the dirt / You’ll feel the ground shake / I’m gonna make my mark / I’m coming like an earthquake.”
Arts
6A — Wednesday, March 30, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
FILM COLUMN
ALBUM REVIEW
A
ATLANTIC RECORDS
Some people put their kid’s artwork on the fridge.... K. Michelle takes it a step further.
‘Vogue’ a pop flop By SHIMA SADAGHIYANI Daily Arts Writer
You would expect that an album titled More Issues Than Vogue would vaguely resemble Britney Spears in the early 2000s: C fun, sponMore Issues taneous and fucking wild. Than Vogue Instead, K. K. Michelle Michelle’s latest 12-track Atlantic Records album vaguely resembles the terrain of Kansas: flat, repetitive and prone to causing drowsiness. K. Michelle begins her album with a trap; “Mindful” is upbeat, fast-paced, entertaining and completely different from the other sluggish songs on More Issues Than Vogue. The contrast between “Mindful” and the rest of the album is discerning at best and brings an unfinished, unconnected quality to the album as a whole. Nonetheless, it’s not that the songs themselves are bad. On the contrary, K. Michelle’s voice brings a very Adele-esque quality to classic R&B beats, creating soothing, girl-positive, power ballads. For example, “Ain’t You” has an organic, hazy rhythm layered well underneath lyrics like “Oh, I got my own shit, don’t want your money / Nope, I drop a hundred bands like it’s easy money.” K. Michelle’s honey-sweet voice makes you think she’s blowing a kiss when she’s really swinging
a punch, which, when paired with the minimalist beat, produces the perfect amount of likeable “fuck you.” The same persona is seen in “Nightstand.” K. Michelle proudly croons “just being honest I promise that jewelry you gave me / I never even wear it and I like Drake better than you.” Throughout More Issues Than Vogue, K. Michelle is unapologetically both a powerful singer and a powerful woman, creating compositions that are simultaneously sensual and centered around female empowerment. However, there is no differentiation between different songs’ tempos, styles and rhythms. More Issues Than Vogue, when listened through start to finish, seems to be one behemoth song instead of a conglomeration of varying songs paired together in complementary ways. A majority of the album is structured the same way: a steady beat in the background supplementing K. Michelle’s soaring vocals. And while the individual songs are beautifully crafted, they are all beautifully crafted in the exact same way, resulting in a monotonous album that has no zing or any level of excitement. For example, from “Ain’t You” to “If It Ain’t Love” or from “Nightstand” to “Time,” are stretches of time in the album where the songs are so similar they all blend together to the point where you don’t know where one song ends and the other song begins. Accompany this unclear and uncertain discernment between songs with
a painfully slow tempo, and you get music to fall asleep to (or music you wish you were asleep to avoid listening to). K. Michelle, take a page out of Missy Elliott’s book and get ur freak on. The only two songs from More Issues Than Vogue that stray from the dreary norm are “Rich” and “Make The Bed.” With the help of both Trina and Yo Gotti, K. Michelle upped her game in “Rich” and produced an attention-grabbing song that stood out from its sea of surrounding tedium. Although “I got rich people problems / only way to solve ‘em / keep on gettin’ rich” is a bit unoriginal, it at least provides some variation that stops the album from truly becoming the epitome of lackluster. With the help of Jason Derulo, K. Michelle finally increases the speed of the dying tempo in “Make The Bed” as she asks the age-old question of “why do we, why do we, why do we / make the bed?” By the end of the song, she still hasn’t found the answer, but at least we, as listeners, are revived and energized enough to make it to the end of the album. Overall, K. Michelle is an amazing singer with a monumental voice, but she doesn’t push her potential or her talents. Instead, she stays well within her comfort zone. While that ensures she doesn’t make any truly horrible songs, it also results in products like More Issues Than Vogue — an album uninspiring and unremarkable in its uniformity.
Classifieds RELEASE DATE– Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle DOWN 1 Choose paper over plastic? 2 Ill-fated 1967 moon mission 3 Made even, to a carpenter 4 “__ your pardon” 5 Cheerios descriptor 6 “Give it a go” 7 Blood-typing letters 8 Kick up a fuss 9 Uber competitors 10 Platte River tribe 11 The majors 12 Online guide 13 Enter gradually 18 Muffin mix additive 19 Con job 24 Orders with mayo 25 “Les __”: musical nickname 26 PCs’ “brains” 28 Karen Carpenter’s instrument 29 Member of the fam 30 One who helps you find a part? 34 Prom partner
35 Fallopian tube traveler 36 Rejections 37 Drink on credit 38 Noise from a 55Down 39 Multi-platinum Steely Dan album 40 “I was so foolish!” 41 Pays for cards 42 Old salts 43 Get hitched
44 Viral Internet phenomenon 45 Two-horse wager 46 Go up in smoke 51 Yemeni port 52 Capital near Zurich 53 Supplements, with “to” 55 Type of pen 56 Tech giant 57 Cube that rolls
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
FOR RENT ! NORTH CAMPUS 1‑2 Bdrm. ! ! Riverfront/Heat/Water/Parking. ! ! www.HRPAA.com ! 1 & 2 Bedroom Apts on Wilmot Avail Fall 2016‑17 $975 ‑ $1575 Plus Electric to DTE Coin Laundry Access, Free WiFi Parking Avail $50‑$80/m CALL DEINCO 734‑996‑1991 1, 2 & 3 Bedroom Apts on Arch Avail Fall 2016‑17 $1050 ‑ $2500 + electric contribution CALL DEINCO 734‑996‑1991 2, 3 & 4 Bedroom Apts @ 1015 Packard Avail for Fall 2016‑17 $1400 ‑ $2700 + gas and water; Tenants pay electric to DTE; Limited parking avail for $50/mo; On‑site Laundry CALL DEINCO 734‑996‑1991 4 BEDROOM HOUSE NORTH CAMPUS/HOSPITAL 1010 CEDAR BEND ‑ $2400 + utilities PARKING & LAUNDRY 734‑996‑1991
xwordeditor@aol.com
03/30/16
4, 5 OR 6 BEDROOM FALL 2016‑17 Central Campus House ‑ 335 Packard $2800 ‑ 3500 based on # of ppl Parking, Laundry, Lots of Common area www.deincoproperties.com 734‑996‑1991 4, 5 OR 6 BEDROOM HOUSE 1119 S. Forest ‑ May or September $2800 ‑ $3500 based on number of ppl Tenants pay all utilities. Parking and laundry available Showings M‑F 10‑3; 24 hour notice required. www.deincoproperties.com 734‑996‑1991 5 BEDROOM APT Fall 2016‑17 $3250 + $100/m Gas & Water + Electric to DTE, 3 parking spaces 1014 Vaughn #1 ‑ multilevel unit w/ carpet CALL DEINCO 734‑996‑1991 ARBOR PROPERTIES Award‑Winning Rentals in Kerrytown, Central Campus, Old West Side, Burns Park. Now Renting for 2016. 734‑649‑8637. www.arborprops.com
By Bruce Haight ©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/30/16
s far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a superhero. When I was younger, I read a few comics, but mostly I played superhero video games and watched cartoons (my favorites were JAMIE “Batman: BIRCOLL The Animated Series” and the 1994 “Spider-Man”). With my boundless imagination extrapolated into reality, I believed it was possible to receive superpowers. When I was seven or eight I was at a playground and saw what was probably a small mosquito bite on my wrist, but managed to convince myself that it was, in fact, a bite from a radioactive spider. It would only be a matter of minutes, I thought, until I collapsed from exhaustion as the new spider DNA worked itself into my own, and I would be reborn as the wall-crawler himself. I was incredibly disappointed when this did not happen. I own two superhero Under Armour dri-fit T-shirts (Superman and The Punisher, if you were curious), and when I wear them I feel just a little bit stronger and more powerful. But that’s about as close as I can get to realizing my superhero dreams. Anything more must be lived vicariously through the never-ending string of superhero movies that get pumped out each year. I’m hooked on this genre, along with a huge proportion of American filmgoers. I saw a Rolling Stone article the other day titled “How Superhero Movies Became Too Big to Fail,” and, though I did not read the article given this publication’s track record of embodying
Call: #734-418-4115 Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
ACROSS 1 Vanna’s cohort 4 Smidgens 9 Thicket 14 Boston Marathon mo. 15 Meat and greet patio party? 16 Skylit courtyards 17 Yes, to a cowboy? 20 Sunday service providers 21 Switz. neighbor 22 Pollen carrier 23 “M*A*S*H” Emmy winner for acting, writing and directing 24 German autos 26 Women’s undergarment, briefly 27 Yes, to an architect? 31 __ joint 32 Cracker with a scalloped edge 33 [uh-oh] 34 Provides with a soundtrack 35 Components of many tips 37 Give in to wanderlust 39 Shakespeare’s river 40 Stockholm carrier 43 Yes, to a traffic court judge? 47 Author Rice 48 Final, e.g. 49 Medicine Hat’s prov. 50 Shoot the breeze 51 Org. for docs 52 Exited quickly, in slang 54 Yes, to the Magic 8 Ball 58 “Divine Comedy” poet 59 “Fun, Fun, Fun” car in 1960s hit 60 Make faces for the camera 61 Labor day doc 62 Church chorus 63 Mini-albums, briefly
A slave to the superheroes
NOW AVAIL. FOR FALL 2016! Hill & State, fully furnished 1 & 2 bdrm apts w/ heat, water, parking, laundry & A/C ‑ 734‑904‑6735 or 734‑497‑0793
NEAR CAMPUS APARTMENTS Avail Fall 16‑17 Eff/1 Bed ‑ $750 ‑ $1400 2 Bed ‑ $1050 ‑ $1425 3 Bed ‑ $1955 Most include Heat and Water Parking where avail is $50/m Many are Cat Friendly CAPPO 734‑996‑1991 www.cappomanagement.com
SERVICES THESIS EDITING, LANGUAGE, organization, format. All Disciplines. 734/996‑0566 or www.writeonA2.com
HELP WANTED ATTRACTIVE WOMEN For Semi‑Nude Victoria’s type lingerie photography. Great $! For interviews call the studio 734‑369‑5300 or email photos to crimsonapplestudios@gmail.com HIRING TEMP. ASSISTANT Needs exceptional computer skills incl. Apple and Microsoft word. Problem Solving. Bookeeping and accounting background. Small familiy owned business. Weekdays only. No weekend. Part time, Flexible hours. References needed. $13/hr. (734) 995‑5575
SUMMER EMPLOYMENT
WORK ON MACKINAC Island This Summer – Make lifelong friends. The Island House Hotel and Ryba’s Fudge Shops are looking for help in all areas beginning in early May: Front Desk, Bell Staff, Wait Staff, Sales Clerks, Kitchen, Baristas. Housing, bonus, and discounted meals. (906) 847‑7196. www.theislandhouse.com
the worst parts of pop culture journalism, the headline is not wrong. This genre is so safe because the sizeable population of people like me will continue to throw gobs of money at it, regardless of the quality of the product. “Batman v Superman” represents the pinnacle (or perhaps the nadir, depending on one’s perspective) of the superhero event movie phenomenon. This movie was universally panned and still made $166 million at the box office in one weekend. Hell, I read some 10 negative reviews and had three different friends and my brother tell me to save my money, and I still went. I am a slave to this genre.
My blind devotion to the genre has its limits. And it is of course that very devotion to the idea of superhero films that will continue to generate mishaps like “Batman v Superman.” If there’s a profit to be made, then studios will simply throw together a half-thought-out story, give it a gimmicky little title and proceed to rip my heart out with its shoddy content. But for as much as I disliked “Batman v Superman,” one scene in particular stood out to me: the day “the world is introduced to the Superman,” the fight between Superman and General Zod that took place during “Man of Steel.” This first action sequence finds Bruce Wayne, clad in his pleated pants, vest and tie, frantically traversing downtown Metropolis as the city collapses around him in an attempt to save his friends at Wayne Enterprises. With the events of Brussels still fresh in my mind, I could not help but view the scene as a parable of urban terrorism. I’ve read a lot of criticism of this franchise because it attempts to ask the question: what would happen in a world where the Superman existed? These critics say a comic book movie is escapism and shouldn’t attempt to portray our world. While I find this assessment fair, it deprives us of a very captivating potential cinematic experience. This opening sequence very effectively captures the complete horror of the spectators of a cosmic death match, who peer up from the streets and catch two small figures wreaking havoc on our world. This scene, at least, is a superhero movie for a post-9/11 world, a world embroiled in seemingly never-ending terror. While the rest of “Batman v Superman” falls decidedly flat, this one scene possesses incredible power. Cartoonish fun and zany characters in “Ant-Man” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” can be enjoyable, and in fact I liked them very much, but they do not resonate on a more visceral level in the
same way that this opening sequence did. The only other superhero film that accomplished this same visceral experience that I’ve seen is “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” This was less a superhero film, more an espionage thriller that happened to star Captain America, and it offered an overt metaphor for surveillance in the age of terror. Replace SHIELD with the NSA and replace hovering warships with surveillance programs and the result is, essentially, the modern world. This compelling take on the balance between liberty and security is and will continue to be relevant for years — the recent Apple v. FBI showdown was yet another example of the issue. Like the Western genre before them, superhero movies have become so pervasive that to simply see another good guy-bad guy showdown with explosions, or (god forbid) another origin story, wastes the very rich superhero framework that raises thought-provoking questions relevant to our world. Superheroes are not simple characters; often their motivations are ill founded, their actions are suspect and the consequences of those actions can be quite profound. To relegate them to the basic good guy framework flounders the potential to tell a modern cinematic allegory. I believe this is the direction to which superhero movies are starting to turn. The superhero movie as a closed-off comic book film (and the pulp and tone that the medium offers) was perfected by “Spiderman 2” and “Sin City,” and has since been run into the ground. This next series of superhero films will fall more in line with “Captain America 2” and the first “Iron Man” in that they can be fun but also tackle and reflect our real world. I know some will find this disappointing: as I said above many believe that superhero films are peak escapist entertainment. But entertainment should not mean unchallenging and unintelligent, nor should it mean naïve and ignorant. The best superhero film will have something to say and will execute its message strongly, while offering a compelling cinematic experience. This is the most important lesson of “Batman v Superman,” a film that had something to say but couldn’t execute its message or provide the entertaining experience. It takes a strong creative mind to balance these many aspects — not a director with an eye for visual flair — and studios would be wise not push out these minds in favor of a quick buck. Because though I enjoyed the eight-minute short film tucked into “Batman v Superman,” my blind devotion to the genre has its limits.
Bircoll may be a superhero behind the glasses and journalist gig. Jamie doesn’t have a bat signal, so email him at jbircoll@umich.edu.
THIRSTY FOR MORE ARTS CONTENT? QUENCH YO’ SELF AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM/SECTION/ ARTS
Sports
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 — 7A
Berenson in no rush to decide future Blue Jackets sign D-man Werenski ICE HOCKEY
By KEVIN SANTO Daily Sports Writer
The Michigan hockey team’s season ended in Cincinnati on Saturday with a 5-2 loss to North Dakota in the regional final of the NCAA Tournament. At his first media availability since that loss, Michigan coach Red Berenson predicted which rising seniors he could see having breakout seasons in 2016. And he discussed how the power play unit would adjust next year after losing its point man — sophomore defenseman Zach Werenski — to the NHL. The focus on what lies ahead for the Wolverines made some wonder whether Berenson was leaning toward returning for another year with the program. He quickly dispelled that notion, though. “(Talking about next year), that’s what I do,” Berenson said. “This week is a week of losing players and trying to fit together our group for next year. We’re talking about spring term and that’s what I have to do. I have to help plan what’s going on. “Then, at some point, I’ll have meetings with my administration and we’ll talk about whether I’m going to be here or not. But we definitely have a plan (for next year). We’re not going to just walk away and take the keys with us.” As for the timeframe for his decision, Berenson expects he will reach a consensus with Michigan Athletic Director Warde Manuel well before the end of June. Berenson plans to meet with Manuel within the next few days to have an in-depth conversation about his future, before taking some time to make a final decision. “I want to let the smoke clear a little bit from this season,”
By JUSTIN MEYER & JASON RUBINSTEIN Daily Sports Writers
JAMES COLLER/Daily
Michigan hockey coach Red Berenson will take his time before deciding whether to return as coach next season.
Berenson said. “I don’t want to make an emotional decision because I’m pissed off at somebody or something. I want to make a decision that’s good for the program.” Berenson did admit that attrition could sway his decision, though. He has already lost Werenski and junior defenseman Michael Downing to the Columbus Blue Jackets and Florida Panthers, respectively. And it’s unclear what freshman forward Kyle Connor will decide regarding
his professional future with the Winnipeg Jets — who drafted him 17th overall in the NHL draft last summer. But none among that group could swing the pendulum of Berenson’s decision to return to Michigan. Two players who could sway Berenson, though, are junior forwards Tyler Motte and JT Compher. Compher captained the Wolverines this year, but could potentially leave Ann Arbor to join the Colorado Avalanche
“I’m not going to lose sleep over it at this point.”
organization. Motte — who was second on the team in goals with 32 — faces a similar decision with the Chicago Blackhawks. But if the duo decides to return for their senior seasons, it could foreshadow Berenson’s future at Yost Ice Arena. “I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it at this point, but I would feel better about our team moving forward (with JT and Tyler),” Berenson said. “They’re the leaders of this team and they would be the leaders of next year’s team. … Let’s face it, they’re the guys that are going to drive the bus.” But those are individual decisions Motte and Compher must make for themselves. As for Berenson, all we can do is wait.
With the talent the Michigan hockey team brings in each year, early NHL defections are inevitable. And this year is no different. Tuesday morning, sophomore defenseman Zach Werenski agreed to a three-year entry level contract with the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets and signed an amateur tryout contract with the American Hockey League’s Lake Erie Monsters — the Blue Jacket’s minor league affiliate — for the remainder of the season. The Daily first reported Werenski had been in contract talks with the Blue Jackets organization on Monday night. Werenski, the Big Ten Defenseman of the Year, was drafted eighth overall in the 2015 NHL Draft. In a breakout sophomore season, he tallied 11 goals and 24 assists during the season, and his 35 points ranked fourth on the team. He also anchored the Wolverines’ nation-leading power-play unit. Werenski came back to Michigan for his sophomore season after a strong freshman year, which he said was a difficult decision. “I wanted to come back here to learn as a player, just grow my game in all three zones,” Werenski told the Daily earlier this year. “The main thing is learning and becoming a better player. I think I did a good job of that in the first half (of the season). I think that really showed at World Juniors — how good of a job Michigan has done developing their players.”
Werenski played his best at the end of the season, drawing praise from Wolverines head coach Red Berenson. “I think he played the best hockey of his two-year career at Michigan in these last couple months and showed Columbus that he was a real serious prospect. If they could sign him, they were going to sign him, and they did,” Berenson said. “He started to play like he could play. He loved the puck more, he got his shots through, he was more involved in the whole game physically, defensively. He broke up big plays. He really played like he was trying to take it to a new level. “He needed to be reminded sometimes that he’s got the green light to go.” Added Weresnki: “I kind of realized it after (this season’s) World Juniors. I don’t know why it didn’t register in college hockey for me earlier on. “The coaches have so much faith in me. I just had to go out there and believe it.” The 18-year-old reported to Lake Erie on Tuesday, and is set to face off against senior Michigan forward Justin Selman — who signed with the Chicago Wolves — on Friday. Werenski said he has not had any discussion about the timing of his move to the Blue Jacket’s roster, but that it would depend on his play. “There’s a lot of unknowns and things I’ve never been exposed to in the pro lifestyle,” Werenski said. “But I think going to Michigan, and going to college anywhere, really prepares you for the challenges ahead. “Michigan does a really good job of making you a better person.”
Aggressive offense key Wolverines top Chippewas in Michigan’s 9-7 win By SYLVANNA GROSS Daily Sports Writer
Slater leads Wolverines’ offensive charge in home debut By ETHAN WOLFE Daily Sports Writer
In the bottom of the first inning of the Michigan baseball team’s Tuesday game against Central Michigan, Jake Bivens smacked a line drive to left center field. As the junior third baseman turned the corner around first base, his run turned into a slow jog on his way to a stand-up double. Bivens’ leadoff hit set the stage for the rest of the game, which saw the 20th-ranked Wolverines’ lineup have little trouble getting on base, powering Michigan to a 9-7 win over the Chippewas. Bivens’ hit helped the Wolverines (17-5) take the early 1-0 lead, as he scored after two consecutive groundouts pushed him home. Junior right fielder Johnny Slater, who made his first home start of the season, made a powerful impression when he crushed the ball for a two-run double off the left center field wall in the second inning. “It felt good,” said Slater. “My swing is starting to feel better and it’s getting better every day.” Added Michigan coach Erik Bakich: “He’s been working hard. He had some tough luck earlier in the season, but nobody has lost any confidence in his ability. It was good to see him drive a ball to the fence, get a couple RBIs and get on the bases. He can change the game with his speed.” The offense continued to pour on runs in the second inning. Slater stole third base standing up and Bivens grounded into a fielder’s choice to drive him in. Bivens followed suit, stealing second base and eventually crossing home from a single by
fifth-year senior left fielder Matt Ramsay. Overall, six Wolverine batters recorded RBIs on Tuesday. But more notably, they stole a seasonhigh six bases. “We saw that our opponent had given up a lot of stolen bases, so we thought that would be something to push and take some chances,” Bakich said. “We talk a lot about getting extra bases and getting into scoring position. Our guys did a good job of getting those opportunities.” After encountering trouble from Central Michigan (1-2 Mid-American, 5-20 overall) in the seventh inning that resulted in a tied score of 6-6, Michigan responded immediately. Ramsay walked and junior first baseman Carmen Benedetti singled to start the frame. They executed a double steal with no
throw from the catcher. With both runners in scoring position, junior catcher Harrison Wenson hit a sacrifice fly and scored Ramsay to recapture Michigan’s lead. The play after, the Wolverines again showcased their speed, as Benedetti scored on a wild pitch to extend their lead, 8-6. “We have a team that understands that you’re going to have to a take a punch and you’re going to have to get back up,” Bakich said. “Multiple times now, we’ve had to find a way (to win). It’s a sign of a team that’s tough and resilient.” Unlike most of the team’s previous games, it was not Michigan’s pitching that carried the team. Rather, the Wolverines swung consistently and had their best day of the season so far on the basepaths. And it paid dividends.
The Michigan baseball team shuffled its lineup on Tuesday and let junior Johnny Slater hit eighth in 7 CMU the rotation, 9 MICHIGAN and the move turned out to be beneficial for the Wolverines. Slater, in his first appearance at Ray Fisher stadium this season, knocked in two runs with a double to left-center field in the bottom of the second inning. “It felt good,” Slater said. “I’ve been working on my swing, and it’s starting to feel better. We don’t worry too much on who we’re playing, we just focus on us.” Slater’s double allowed sophomore designated hitter Drew Lugbauer and senior centerfielder Cody Bruder to make it home safely. Then, the junior right fielder scored as well, and the inning finished out with a run by Jake Bivens, leaving the score 5-0.
And the Wolverines never looked back, riding Slater’s strong home debut to defeat Central Michigan on Tuesday, 9-7. Junior pitcher Keith Lehmann contributed to Michigan’s hot start after throwing a quick first two innings. It was the first time he’s started at home, but that didn’t phase him. “Regardless of the role, I don’t look at it as starting is bigger than coming out of the bullpen,” Lehmann said. “It’s the same thing and you prepare the same way. ” The only hiccup in his performance was a wild pitch that hit Chippewa second baseman Jason Sullivan in the cheek. Sullivan quickly went down and it took a couple minutes before he was able to stand up and walk off he field. Sullivan’s classmate Jarrod Watkins pinch ran for Sullivan to first. “That was not what I wanted to do,” Lehmann said. “I don’t know what happened. It looked like (Sullivan) didn’t see it. I clearly
EVAN AARON/Daily
The Michigan baseball team depended on its aggressive offense in a 9-7 win over Central Michigan on Tuesday afternoon at Ray Fisher Stadium.
wasn’t trying to do that, so I went up and apologized. But that’s baseball, it happens.” Michigan coach Erik Bakich, following the hit, took out Lehmann — the first of six pitching substitutions. According to Lehmann, that’s the beauty of the Wolverine pitching staff. Every athlete is able to come out of the bullpen and be effective on the mound. It helps that Michigan is strong offensively, too. “It’s fantastic,” Lehmann said. “The team itself, offensively, this year is a very good offensive team. No matter who you are as a pitcher, if you have a good hitting team, it makes your job a lot easier.” In the top of the third inning, Central Michigan scored its first runs when sophomore Zach McKinstry doubled to left field and batted in two runs. Michigan (16-5) has played the Chippewas (5-20) every year since 1991, compiling an overall record of 39-28 and the Wolverines have won the last six consecutive games. Despite a bind in the seventh inning, this contest was no different. Michigan was tied 6-6 with Central Michigan in the bottom of the seventh. But after two stolen bases, a run on a wild pitch and a single RBI, the Wolverines scored three runs to assure the Chippewas’ defeat. Junior first baseman Carmen Benedetti and fifth-year senior left fielder Matt Ramsay stole second and third, respectively. Following the play, junior catcher Harrison Wenson flew out to right field, allowing Ramsay to make a run. Benedetti soon scored on a wild pitch to make it 8-6. Wenson, who is the cleanup hitter, went 0-3 at bat, but still managed to keep his batting average at .400. The slump comes after an impressive weekend, but according to Bakich, “That’s baseball.” “We have a team that knows how to find a way and respond,” Bakich said. “We know you’re going to get knocked down and you’re going to have to get back up, which is what we’ve done.”
Sports
8A — Wednesday, March 30, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
O’Korn ready for action after sitting out 2015 Now eligible, Houston transfer hopes to make on-field impact By JACOB GASE Daily Sports Editor
John O’Korn hasn’t played in a football game since Nov. 28, 2014, but his year away may have been the most important one of his career. The redshirt junior quarterback arrived at Michigan last fall after a tumultuous career at Houston that ultimately led to his transfer. O’Korn won the starting job as
a freshman and threw for 3,117 yards and 28 touchdowns, but he lost his spot to converted receiver Greg Ward Jr. after just five games the next year. “It was just a (comfort) thing,” O’Korn said. “I kind of felt out of place there at times. Part of that’s my fault, and part of that is just the nature of playing in a spread offense as a pro-style quarterback. I think that’s the number-one thing, just (comfort) — I think this system fits me a lot better and allows me to be the best player I can be.” Of course, O’Korn wasn’t able to get back on the field right away. Per NCAA transfer eligibility rules, he had to sit out the 2015 season. But now, with
EMPLOY MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR YMCA DAY CAMPS P/T and F/T Counselors Wanted STEM camps to sports camps offered View the job brochure and apply at: www.annarborymca.org/employment NOODLES & COMPANY is hiring for our friendly & fast‑paced atmosphere! If you’re passionate about great food & ser‑ vice, visit noodlescareers.com to apply! Flexible hours, competitive pay & 401K. NORTHERN MICHIGAN’S premier co‑ed summer camp is looking for counselors for the 2016 season. Visit www.campwaldenmi.com and click on “Work at Walden” to apply
THE MICHIGAN DAILY is hiring for the SUMMER. contact jobs.tmd@gmail.com for more information
the Wolverines in the heat of spring camp, O’Korn is finally a factor again as he competes with redshirt sophomore Wilton Speight and redshirt junior Shane Morris for the starting job. He didn’t just sit idly on the sidelines for a year, though. Working as a member of the scout team all season, O’Korn was an extremely active practice player, and he was present in just as many meetings and drills as a starter would have been. After six months of inactivity since he lost the job at Houston, O’Korn’s role in the fall was a welcome return to normalcy. “Any time you spend time away from the game, you appreciate it more,” O’Korn said. “I started to miss the little things that I didn’t really realize I would miss — chalk talk, drawing up plays, watching film hours on end in a dark room by yourself.” It wasn’t long before O’Korn started to feel settled in at Michigan. And even though he found himself surrounded by a decorated coaching staff — including a quarterback guru of a head coach in Harbaugh — O’Korn’s biggest resource ended up being his roommate: 2015 starting quarterback Jake Rudock. In many ways, Rudock and O’Korn have parallel stories. Rudock was also a starter at his former school, Iowa, before unceremoniously losing his job and departing as a transfer. Rudock, too, began his career with the Wolverines embroiled in a preseason quarterback competition, which he ultimately won before going on to throw for 3,017 yards — the second-highest single-season total in Michigan history. The two quarterbacks even went to the same high school, St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
AMANDA ALLEN/Daily
John O’Korn sat out last season after transferring from Houston and is now in a three-way quarterback competition.
In his time as the starter, Rudock gained a reputation as a quiet leader who rarely made crucial mistakes. As O’Korn tried to acclimate to his new team, he quickly realized that his roommate was setting the perfect model to follow. “With Jake, he’s not really the type that’s gonna say a whole lot,” O’Korn said. “But just watching him, how he operates, how he prepares for games, how seriously he takes everything — the minute details, everything
is so important — just watching him was really good. I could sit here and talk all day about things I learned from watching Jake.” A few months later, Rudock — who flew under the radar for much of his collegiate career — is preparing for a potential career in the NFL. And O’Korn, no longer relegated to the sidelines, might be on his way to becoming his roommate’s successor. A prostyle quarterback with the
“This system allows me to be the best player I can be. ”
ability to use his feet to get out of trouble, he brings a unique skill set that will certainly have him in the mix. To win the job, though, he’ll have to beat out two other quarterbacks who have already played meaningful snaps for the Wolverines. O’Korn, Speight and Morris are very different players, and Harbaugh has said the player who separates himself from the others will have done so by limiting his big mistakes. O’Korn has had a year of preparation to figure out how to do that. And if he continues to follow the Rudock model, he’ll be taking the field on Sept. 3 for the first time in nearly two years.
Speight determined to stay in starting QB conversation By JAKE LOURIM Managing Sports Editor
Throughout last summer — and, really, well into last fall — Wilton Speight felt overlooked. Then a redshirt freshman for the Michigan football team, he was a solid third on the depth chart at quarterback. There was Jake Rudock, a graduate transfer brought in from Iowa to be an immediate solution. And there was Shane Morris, a former four-star recruit who had been touted as the starterin-waiting for his whole career. Morris seized the job coming out of spring camp, and Rudock took hold of it during fall camp. That left little attention for Speight. He would talk to his parents about feeling left out. They told him not to worry about it, so he didn’t. He came into the season knowing what he was capable of. Slowly, he began to edge his way into the conversation. Morris planned on redshirting if he wasn’t starting, so Speight took the “mop-up duty” at the end of blowout wins. He used that to gain the trust of the coaching staff. But on Halloween, Speight was no longer an afterthought — he couldn’t be. With Rudock injured, he came in and led a gamewinning touchdown drive to help the Wolverines to a 29-26 victory at Minnesota. He then returned to his No. 2 spot on the depth chart and waited for his opportunity, newly confident and no longer overlooked. “It would give anybody confidence, to be able to go into a game like that and make an impact and eventually win the game,” Speight said. “To carry that with you, not that you’re living in the past, but you know you can do it going forward.” Now it’s a new season, with Rudock gone and Houston transfer John O’Korn into the mix. But Speight denies that he’s back to square one in the competition this time around.
AMANDA ALLEN/Daily
Wilton Speight took the first QB reps at the team’s open practice on Saturday.
“With all respect, I was going to approach it with the mindset of, ‘I’ve got to build off of the spot I left off in the Minnesota game or the bowl practices,’ ” Speight said. “I wasn’t going to go down to wherever (the coaches) expected us to, because I just wanted to stay up there and keep working.” Speight may not be overlooked anymore, but he is still unheralded. He acknowledges Morris has the strongest arm, O’Korn the quickest feet. But he knew after he finished the season last year and went through bowl practices that he’d be in the mix. The team treated the bowl practices as an audition for spring camp, reiterating that at every turn. For the first two weeks of spring practice, all the quarterbacks took equal reps. Then, they began to separate themselves. Speight said that throughout spring camp, the coaches tracked how each quarterback did moving the ball down the field in drills. “Just looking at the stats,
I guess that’s where I kind of distance myself,” he said. Saturday at Ford Field in Detroit, Speight was the first quarterback to take snaps with the first team at open practice. Tuesday, he said that has been the case in other recent practices, too. “Coach follows a pattern, and unless you mess it up, it pretty much stays the same,” Speight said. “The practice before that, I did what I needed to do, and before that, and before that. I pretty much knew that was going to happen.” But he also knows what being first — especially by the slimmest of margins — means. He has, after all, been on the other end. “It means there’s people at my feet and they’re wanting to take the spot I’m in,” Speight said. “If I don’t keep doing what I have to do and keep working my ass off, then they’re going to fill me in. “Because you’re replaceable at anything you do in life. That’s all it really means — I’m getting the job done, but someone else is trying to do it better.”
the city that runs itself
statement T H E M I CH I G A N DA I LY M A RCH 3 0, 20 1 6
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 / The Statement
3B
on the record: actual quotes from ‘batman v superman: dawn of justice’ “Close, but no cigar! A boy’s best friend is his mother. Ah, but she’s a witch. What else would you call the mother of a winged demon? And do you know what happens to witches? Death. Death by fire!” — LEX LUTHOR, played by Jesse Eisenberg, to SUPERMAN, on the impending fate of his mother.
“He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there is even a one percent chance that he is our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty.”
“Be their hero, Clark. Be their angel, be their monument, be anything they need you to be...or be none of it. You don’t owe this world a thing. You never did.
—BATMAN, played by Ben Affleck, about the all-powerful SUPERMAN and the —MARTHA KENT, played by Diane Lane, on SUPERMAN’S ability to do what possibility that he may, in fact, be evil. he wants.
Zooming In: Invisible Bruises BY L AR A MOEHLMAN
I
t’s Spring Break of my freshman year of college and my dad and I slip into the Ford Fusion in our apartment building’s parking lot. I had no intention of ever driving again after my accident, but my parents insisted. Our building sits on a major road that cuts through the heart of our town. The turn out of the parking lot scares me, so I sit in the passenger seat and watch my dad drive us to a nearby residential area — a quiet neighborhood with tree-lined streets and cozy houses that sit close together. Calm down, I tell myself. It won’t happen again. ••• When my doctor asked me what it felt like, I told her it was kind of like being naked — a thick blanket of security I didn’t even know was there had suddenly been ripped from my shoulders, leaving me in a hyper-cautious and vulnerable state. I fought back tears as I tried to explain, but she told me this was good, so I continued: Each time I crossed the street, entered a moving vehicle or heard balloons pop or glass bottles hit the ground, I felt all at once entirely exposed and defenseless. I would cringe, close my eyes, clench my fists and wait for the feeling to pass. Not long after this feeling took hold, I began doubting my own common sense. I convinced myself that if I didn’t look both ways, three times each, before letting my feet leave the sidewalk, I would surely miss an oncoming car. If I didn’t close my eyes from the passenger seat as my friend made a left turn, my mind convinced my body it would happen all over again. The left window would shatter as the car turned over, and there I would be: hanging from my seatbelt, my tears dripping sideways onto the shirt of my friend who had been driving. My ears were stinging from the blast of the air bag and my torso was achingg from the pull of the seat-belt. People rushed into the intersection, tapped on the windshield and called 911, but I was screaming and no one on the outside could hear me.
est people on Earth. “The car did exactly what it was supposed to do; it took the impact,” the police officer told my parents, who were staring at the vehicle, tipped over on its side and compressed like a thin sheet of paper. The emergency room doctor assured me after several X-rays that my pain was simply bruising that would fade in time. Some gross black and blue marks, and sporadic stiff aches that made it difficult to crane my neck or fall asleep, and that was it: I really am one of the luckiest people on Earth. But in some sense, both the sheriff and the ER doctor, who each gracefully dealt with my family’s collective hysteria, were wrong. There was an impact that none of the latest safety features could absorb. There were bruises that wouldn’t fade for months — maybe even years.
It’s been almost two years since the accident, and I still find myself clenching my fists as I cross the street and letting out small gasps from the passenger’s seat in the middle of busy intersections. The most painful part is not the moment itself, but the memory: When crossing the street to meet friends for coffee or in the car on the way home from a movie, the feeling comes back to me unexpectedly. The memory hurts, but I’ve noticed it’s gradually faded. With help, I’ve realized the most important part of the healing process is to let myself be upset — to let myself remember the accident without crying over the fact that I’ll never be able to fully forget about it. In time, I tell myself, it won’t hurt as much.
•••
••• I constantly remind myself that I’m among the lucki-
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA
4B
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 // The Statement
“We have been the top, if not one of the top, automotive engineering research education providers among other universities in the world,” he said. “We will continue to do that; there is no reason we give up that tradition of strength.”
Mcity and the future of autonomous vehicles How the ‘U’ has worked with a private sector to develop driverless cars
Michigan as a hotbed for mobility transformation
By Allana Akhtar, Daily News Editor
ZOEY HOLMSTROM/Daily
The backside of blown-up photos (as seen on cover) of businesses on Liberty Street in Ann Arbor, which are used as backdrops in Mcity to resemble typical city streets that cars might drive through. The backdrops are installed with real glass and brick and closely resemble those used in a movie set.
Far away from the hills and hot weather of Silicon Valley, where Google has made headlines with their driverless car testing, the University of Michigan is helping bring the national spotlight on the national race to build driverless cars to the state. On the University’s North Campus there’s a 32-acre urban environment with freeways, dirt roads, road signs and highway tunnels — known as “Mcity.” The field grabbed national and international attention when it opened in July 2015, becoming the world’s first site designed for the purpose of testing driverless cars. But why here? The University did not build Mcity alone. Mcity was designed and developed by the University’s Mobility Transformation Center, a research partnership between industry and government to improve transportation safety and sustainability. The Michigan Department of Transportation partnered with MTC to create and help fund Mcity, and the site is currently led by corporate partners like Ford, Toyota, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance and General Motors. In partnership with prominent auto industries in Southeast Michigan and the city, state and federal governments, Mcity
represents the ways local leaders are working to usher in a new era of transportation in the same area that Henry Ford redefined mobility over a century ago. How the University leads driverless car development Alongside Mcity’s various highways, intersections and dirt roads sit graffiti covered road signs, steep hills and building facades that can be brought just inches away from the road — all details meant to create life-like scenarios to challenge autonomous vehicles. Ford became the first motor company to test an autonomous vehicle in Mcity in November 2015, and they used the site again to challenge their technology in snowy conditions in January 2016. Jim McBride, Ford technical leader for autonomous vehicles, said Mcity was an ideal site because of its simulated imperfection, creating odd scenarios driverless cars might experience in the real world. “Mcity allows us the ability to create that situation and find a safe environment and test it repeatedly,” McBride said. Creating all kinds of life-like challenges for driverless cars is exactly what Mcity was
designed for, according to Huei Peng, director of MTC. MTC and Mcity were created in an effort to expand development of automation and connected vehicles both at the University and in the state. Gradual steps in advancing non-driver controlled technology, as well as in connecting cars to each other and their environment like an Internet, are ways in which engineers are moving toward fully autonomous vehicles. “Mcity is a test track designed to have future connected automated vehicle concepts in mind,” Peng said. Cars on the market today already have partially driverless vehicle features. Cruise control, automatic braking and assisted parking systems are features in a vehicle that occur without direct driver input, referred to as “automated.” SAE International — originally founded as the Society of Automotive Engineers — characterizes the degree of automation in on-road vehicles in six levels, zero being completely driver-controlled and five being completely system-controlled. A driverless car is a vehicle with a system that controls all dynamic driving tasks under all roadway and environmental conditions.
Many cars on the road are at a level one standard for automation, and include features such as cruise control and automated braking. In the next few years, however, Peng said there will be an emergence of level two and level three features — like highway cruise, traffic jam assist and automated valet parking — in production vehicles. Engineers of driverless cars are also developing wireless connection channels, called dedicated short-range communications, to allow cars to communicate with each other on the road. Peng explained that when personal computers are connected to each other, every PC becomes more useful; similarly, cars can reduce risk and improve efficiency if they connect to other vehicles. “If we continue to broadcast the vehicle’s motion to other cars, it will make traffic safer, potentially more efficient, and (lead to) less energy consumption,” Peng said. Even before Mcity garnered international attention, the University had been a pioneer in mobility transformation research. Noting research on tire dynamics, engines and vehicle safety developed at the University, Peng said vehicle design and vehicle manufacturing have been pillars of strength at the College of Engineering for years.
Since being elected to Congress in 2014, Sen. Gary Peters (D–Michigan) has joined the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and has actively promoted legislation to allow for more funding to implement for vehicle-to-infrastructure technology. According to Peters, these efforts are to ensure the state of Michigan’s influence in the future of mobility. “This technology is incredibly important for our safety and it represents the future of the auto industry,” Peters said. “We have to make every effort to make sure it continues to be centered in Michigan.” Alongside Peters’ efforts at the federal level, MDOT and state legislature have been proactive in allowing for driverless car testing on the roads. In December 2013, Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed into law a bill approving the testing of driverless cars on Michigan roads, joining only a handful of other states in approving such legislation. Matt Smith, program manager at MDOT, said because of the auto industry’s location within the state, the Michigan state legislature has allowed for automated vehicle research on state roads long before driverless cars existed. “The state of Michigan has allowed experimental technology on roadways for many, many years,” Smith said. Even within Ann Arbor, local government has pushed for testing experimental automated technology. In 2013, Ann Arbor City Council approved a $622,884 federal grant to install telecommunications fiber, sensors and electronic equipment in public intersections to allow for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in driverless cars. Peters said the reason legislators are interested in pursuing autonomous technology in the state is to keep jobs related to the auto industry within Michigan. Kevin Kerrigan, senior vice president of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, noted that the automotive industry continues to be the largest industry in Michigan, attracting many businesses and growing local jobs. Currently, one out of every 24 jobs in the state comes from the auto industry, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Jobs within the auto industry increased by 67 percent after the recession ended, compared to 10.6 percent gain in all jobs. “A big percentage of jobs in Michigan are directly related to the auto industry,” Peters said. “If we were to lose some of the technological advantage of advanced computer systems related to cars, I would be concerned we would start losing automotive jobs to a different region of the country.” McBride said Ford’s interest in pursuing driverless car development was in part to ensure the company stays relevant when the
5B
technology advances. Kodak and Nokia, he said, are examples of companies that could not adapt to the changes in the telecommunication and digital world, which led to their breakdowns. “It’s very relevant right now that we maintain ownership of the software and ownership of the technology if we want to be viable in the future of transportation industry,” McBride said. “Every company wants to be relevant in the long term, and that’s not different for Ford.” Michigan has recently taken a step further in leading the charge for automated and connected vehicles by announcing the American Center for Mobility in January — a joint partnership between government, business and University leaders to help build another driverless car testing site — this time, at 335 acres. The new site will be placed in Willow Run, where B-24 bombers were made for troops in a Henry Ford factory during ZOEY HOLMSTROM/Daily World War II. John Maddox, assistant director of MTC Mcity features a freeway section with an on and off ramp. The cars cannot go typical speeds, but get practice and recently named president and CEO of entering and exiting. ACM, said the new testing site was designed due to the success and demand of Mcity. While Mcity is primarily designed to test early stage research, once vehicles “graduate” from the smaller testing site, they can use the larger testing site for product development. Maddox said Michigan’s location as the birthplace and home to the auto industry is one of a kind in the world, and puts the state in the center of driverless car development. “There is a significant concentration of expertise and activity happening in Southeast Michigan,” Maddox said. “In fact, I would say it’s unique in the world, not just in the United States, for having such a concentration in a local area of so many companies and individuals and universities working on this automotive technology.” The future of autonomous vehicles and robotics When asked whether the emergence of ZOE Y HOLMSTROM/Daily connected, autonomous vehicles will lead to MDOT provides road signs with graffiti to test cars’ ability to read abnormal road signs that they may a transportation revolution similar to when encounter in daily driving situations. Henry Ford helped bring cars to the mass market in 1908, Maddox said no — it would be Peng also highlighted the safety benefits Atkins said even aside from high-profile bigger. of driverless car technology, noting how autonomous technology like driverless cars, He equated the growth of connected, right now motor vehicles currently kill about small, low-powered sensors and computers driverless cars to how the Internet helped 33,000 people in the United States and 1.2 will allow for a flurry of autonomous connect people in new ways, and brought million people in the world per year. He said by technology. about new job opportunities. In the same connecting cars together and allowing them to “There are a lot of opportunities for robots way, he said, autonomous vehicles have the “speak” to each other and to the infrastructure that never get tired, and are very patient with potential to transform mobility to allow for a around them, we can dramatically reduce people not only in driving their cars for them, whole new economic sector. risky behavior like emergency braking, illegal but also in helping them with everyday tasks,” “We will see an Internet for transportation turns, wrong way driving and running red Atkins said. and an Internet for cars,” he said. “Just like the lights can be dramatically reduced. Peng, too, noted the way autonomous Internet brought tremendous new business “All those behaviors, in theory, if we technology beyond self-driving has the opportunities, new business models, the continue to broadcast the vehicle’s motion potential to reduce ever-increasing human same thing will happen with the Internet for to other cars, it will make traffic safer, errors like drunk driving and texting on the transportation. potentially more efficient, and (lead to) less road. Though he cautioned driverless cars are With driverless cars, mobility will also energy consumption,” Peng said. still far from the mass market, the technology come to groups unable to drive vehicles like However, machine autonomy does not have is advancing rapidly and exponentially. the elderly and disabled, Smith said. to stop at vehicles. “We humans are distracted more and more “We do believe that automated vehicle Aerospace Engineering prof. Ella Atkins, every day,” Peng said. “Robots are improving technology is certainly going make the roads who chairs the graduate program for Robotics every day. Guess who will win the race?” a lot safer,” he said. “It’s going to increase at the University, said students have a lot Check out additional multimedia content at mobility, allow more traffic flow and probably of interest and excitement for autonomous MichiganDaily.com/section/statement allow mobility access to people who can’t machines. particularly in autonomous drive.” machines.
6B
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 // The Statement
Selfies and the Self By Rachel Premack, Daily Staff Reporter “Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference. Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary.” -Julien Smith, The Flinch I tried to be good at Instagram. Really. Over Spring Break, I met a group of girls who were all good at Instagram. Like, tens of thousands of followers good. When we hung out, we would stop every now and then to take pictures, which were swiftly edited and posted at the best times for optimal likes. One of them told me that her life is awesome, and her Instagram would be too if she just took quality pictures of her terrific life. This is a good perspective, I thought. Crafting some sort of Instagram presence in which I take excellent photos of me adventuring or wearing cute outfits for some reason stood out to me as a necessary action. As I began to realize, it’s important to craft one’s image and present to the world what you want your aesthetic to be. It’s good to show that you’re confident, pleased with your appearance and proud of your life.
Selfies are important! Online identity is crucial! I took this to heart, dreaming of a polished exterior that others might aspire to. New Rachel! Confident Rachel! The majority of my presence is some sort of cobbled-together, selfdeprecating spaz whose shirt might have guacamole stains. Maybe Instagram Rachel could be cool, sleek—contoured, with frizz-free hair. So I tried to ‘gram. The problem is, you have to take pictures to have an Instagram. Then you have to come up with some sort of caption that indicates that you didn’t try that hard at
any of it, even though you’re about to spend the next 90 minutes frantically refreshing your notifications for likes and the other part of your day strategically liking other people’s pictures on your feed in hopes that they’ll like your stuff back.
How am I supposed to Instagram a funny moment with my friends? When I returned from Spring Break, my friend and I talked about our vacations over a $3 bottle of wine. Unlike my Instagram revelation, she was frustrated that her friends spent the majority of break trying to position themselves perfectly for ideal photos to post. More than that, they would stare at their phones at dinner and at the beach, checking Snapchat stories and ensuring they were getting enough likes. They cared more about how their life appeared than their actual life. I brushed off my friend’s comments, and decided she sounded like Mother Skeptical about my frequent Snapchat usage. Millennial communication is innovative! Selfies are important! Online identity is crucial! We are positioning ourselves to the world, seeking to explain ourselves to others and to ourselves! I took this nuanced, subversive perspective to heart. The weeks wore on after my ‘gram revelation. I posted pictures. Nothing seemed fun or cool enough. I took shots in the Ann Arbor streets, but who the hell wants to see Ann Arbor? We all know what it looks like. And who wants to see me and my friends drunk at Rick’s? It’s really only entertaining to us. And who cares about the Eggs Benedict that I ate? I do like my life. But I don’t know how to portray it on this fundamentally shallow website. How am I supposed to Instagram a funny moment with my friends? Or a book that’s fascinating? Do I demand my friends take pictures of me when I look good, because someone who is good at Instagram told me selfies are not “Instagram-worthy”?
PHOTO COURTESY OF NATALIE GADBOIS
ILLUSTRATION BY SHANE ACHENBACH
I’ve noticed most captions of photos are self-referencing to Instagram itself, explaining with a smirk how they asked someone to take the picture or the photo credit or why they’re posting it. All of the humor is the same tongue-in-cheek shit that I saw on Tumblr in 2011 that I guess people in Greek life have just recently adopted. Unless I travel or suddenly develop a visually artistic side, my ‘gram can really only be contrived pictures of me and my friends. It’s a little bit too
much effort. There must be some reason everyone I know loves this social medium, but I can’t quite figure it out. Today, I’m not destined for good selfies. My self is in flux, constantly being created and remade, though that won’t be shown through Instagram anytime soon. Maybe it will change tomorrow. That’s the beauty of social media and the Internet — I can always delete everything from the past and start anew.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 // The Statement
7B
Life as a Junior Transfer Student By Hannah Sparks, Daily Arts Writer Finally, you did it. You got into the University of Michigan, and this is cause for celebration. After two and a half years of being envious of every game day picture your friends posted on their Instagrams, now is your time to shine. Community college was rough — the lack of a real campus, the constant checking to see if the credits would transfer — and going through the application process again was a real drag. Now it’s over, and I’m here to tell you about my first-hand account as a junior by Alyssa Brandon, transfer student. First of all, my orientation Daily News Editorexperience wasn’t great. I had to be in Ann Arbor at the Michigan Union at 8 a.m. sharp. Now, that’s not a big deal, except for the fact that there is literally nowhere to park in Ann Arbor. Plus, the stupid parking meters were just way too advanced for me. Whatever happened to just using coins? I ended up walking in about 10 minutes late because of the lack of parking. It would have been nice of the University to give the newbies a warning about the parking (or lack thereof ) situation. Next, all of the transfer students were put into a room with two student tour guides. First, they gave us a run-down of the day ahead, then taught us the fight song (which I still don’t have a handle on), and finally the students who had to take language placement exams (like me) went off into another room, while everyone else toured the campus. My fellow transfer acquaintances and I, who were also taking language placement exams, were told we’d be toured around the campus later on. Spoiler alert: The tour never happened. Once the exams were finished, we met back up with the other students. Again, we were put into a room, but this time we had a group of students who acted out what it was like to be a transfer student at the University. They were fairly good and probably the best part of the day, aside from the free lunch. Later on, when it was finally time to schedule classes, I went to go and meet with my advisor and was quickly informed she was ill. Now what? I waited about half an hour until the leaders decided whom I’d be reassigned to. Once reassigned (side note: my advisor is amazing), we attempted to sign up for some classes. Long story short, the system crashed and because we tried to wait it out, I missed my opportunity to walk around campus. To sum it up, orientation ended up being no help at all. In fact, it made me more stressed because I didn’t know my way around campus, I had to figure out how to do scheduling on my own and there was really no time allotted to meet the other transfer kids. Rant over. After the winter holidays came to a close, it was finally time for me to move out of my family home for the first time, and into my new college home. I had a feeling of excitement and shellshock. Suddenly, I was hit with a whole new set of responsibilities. First of all, trying to navigate my way across the campus to get my bearings (because I didn’t get a tour) was one of the most confusing parts. Why in the world are Haven Hall, Mason Hall, Angell Hall and Tisch Hall all in the same building? What’s an MLB? Why do people keep calling the library UGLi? Since when is Yost an ice arena, and not a breakfast place? These were a few of the many questions that would circulate in my mind on a day-to-day basis. Walking into a 200-person lecture hall for the first time was intimidating. The teacher had to speak with a microphone. I’ve never experienced any classroom environment so intense. It’s clear to me that there are two types of students— those who are incredibly attentive and those who sleep through the whole lecture. I’d like to say that I’m the first type of student, but I’d be lying. Don’t get me wrong, I try my best to give my full attention to the professor, but I can’t deny the fact that on more than one occasion, I’ve slipped in and out of sleep. Luckily, all of my professors and classes this semester are fantastic. Having said that, I wish someone had warned me about the amount of reading that’s required for each class. Stupidly, I signed up for English and history classes only. I keep telling my parents, not only will I be paying back loans for years, but I’ll also be catching up on all of my readings. I’ve talked enough about readings, classes and the confusion/frustration of it all. The last thing I want to touch on is the topic of making friends — an intimidating topic. First of all, making the move into a house where three out of the four girls were in the same sorority was a little scary. I was pretty nervous and felt like a total outsider. These girls had known each other for a long time. They’ve lived together for at least one full semester, so how will they act toward a new girl? Not only am I a “new girl” but I’m also someone who is not into
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA
Greek life. Are they going to be OK with that? Are they the type who are way too invested in the sorority? Do they disapprove of non-sorority girls? These questions were weighing heavily on my mind before I met my new housemates. I mean, we’re juniors, will they even try to befriend me, or am I just going to be someone they live with? Lucky for me, the girls I live with are awesome. They were so welcoming and were always offering to include me in their plans. What a relief it was to realize I’d be living with such cool people. As for making friends outside of the house, it’s been a little tricky, and I blame part of it on the gross, cold winter weather. Who really wants to be outside and social when it’s 15 degrees outside and snowing? I do have to take some of the blame and admit that I could be trying harder to put myself out there, but I also have to say it’s harder than I thought. I’ve snagged some phone numbers here and there, and I’ve even hung out with some people outside of class. Slowly, I’m making progress. Coming to the University is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Although it comes with challenging academics and lots of work, the payoff is worth it. Being on a real college campus is so exciting, especially for someone coming from a small community college. It’s been a little difficult and I hope the next group of transfer students have the opportunity to attend a better orientation. Other than the unfortunate orientation process that I experienced, Michigan has been awesome. I love that it’s located in the heart of Ann Arbor, I love everyone’s enthusiasm for their school, the buildings are beautiful and I couldn’t picture myself anywhere else. Working my ass off to get here — still working my ass off to stay here — was a challenge like none other. Being a junior transfer student, at first, felt a little weird. Now, I’m happy to say that being here and being a fellow Wolverine feels just like home.
8B
Wednesday, March 30 2016 // The Statement
V I S U A L S TAT E M E N T:
MUSICAL CURRENCIES Photos by EMILIE FARRUGIA
Tucked neatly away above the Pastry Peddler on Packard Ave. is a rather modestlooking store called PJ’s Records — tucked maybe so neatly that you could walk past the speckled shingles of peeling paint and weathered sign every day for a year without ever really acknowledging its existence. Hidden inside, however, is a towering collection of records of all genres and ages, DVDs, CDs, cassettes and a group of remarkably vibrant sixty-somethings.
HALEY MCLAUGHLIN/Daily
Lead vocalist Tyler Joseph performs “Holding On To You.”
Members of the Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives lead a walk in the memory of Aura Rosser from the League to the pedestrian bridge over Washtenaw Ave on January 20, 2016.