Thursday, December 5, 2019
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Thursday, December 5, 2019
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Students talk benefits, costs of recreational marijuana sales
Commencement comes after passage of Proposal 1 in Michigan last November KATHERINA SOURINE Daily Staff Reporter
RITA VEGA/Daily A group of 10 students come together to discuss trans healthcare discrepancies at U-M during the Trans Care Town Hall at the University Spectrum Center Wednesday evening.
Town Hall proposes informed consent gender-affirming care model at UHS Students call current Health Services policy outdated, difficult to maneuver at U-M. The students explained that at UHS, individuals who wish to receive gender-affirming care must first obtain a letter of support from a licensed mental health provider, following the standards of care outlined by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. In place of receiving a clinical diagnosis, town hall attendees advocated for UHS to begin using an informed consent model. This would let individuals receive treatment on
BARBARA COLLINS Daily Staff Reporter
University of Michigan students gathered at the University Spectrum Center Wednesday evening for a town hall discussion on creating a plan to implement an informed consent model for gender-affirming care at University Health Services. At the event, ten students worked to identify and address health care disparities for transgender students
a consensual basis instead of having to receive a diagnosis. LSA senior Camomile Honey lead the town hall meeting. In an interview with The Daily, she said the WPATH Standards of Care followed by UHS puts up unnecessary barriers for students wishing to receive hormone therapy. “When it comes to the WPATH Standards of Care, the big word that comes out is gatekeeping,” Honey said. “It’s fundamentally difficult for students, more difficult than an
informed consent model, but it also sends the wrong message in a lot of ways.” According to the UHS website, UHS currently follows the WPATH Standards of Care to give individuals the best care possible. The website also points users towards the Corner Health Care Center in Ypsilanti if they wish to receive genderaffirming care using the informed consent model. See UHS, Page 2A
Following Sunday’s opening of six dispensaries officially selling recreational marijuana in Michigan, three of which are based in Ann Arbor, students are considering the impact of this new legislation in a historically cannabisfriendly city. The commencement of recreational sale comes a year after Michigan passed Proposal 1, allowing adults over the age of 21 to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana. Under the proposal, recreational sales of marijuana are subject to a 10 percent excise tax in addition to Michigan’s six-percent sales tax. Students like LSA senior Luke Gaines feel this new supply of recreational marijuana won’t change life on campus much since the
USC Dean Businesses, student influencers requests discuss Instagram hiding likes help for Platform changes garner mixed responses, concern over impact on branding engineers ACADEMICS
JASMIN LEE
Daily Staff Reporter
Brandi P. Jones calls for support for Black engineering community at DEI series lecture
For Business junior Dajana Korcari, Instagram is more than just a social outlet. As a brand ambassador for several companies — including Tinder and Ulta Beauty — Instagram is also her job. Koracari, an influencer, relies on revenue from her posts. But potential changes to Instagram’s format could impact her work on campus. Instagram has started testing a new feature where users will no longer be able to see the number of likes on
ANCHAL MALH For The Daily
The University of Michigan College of Engineering welcomed Brandi P. Jones, Vice Dean for Diversity and Strategic Initiatives at University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering as a part of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion lecture series in Pierpont Commons Tuesday afternoon. Jones spoke to Michigan faculty about supporting Black engineering students at the University. About 50 faculty and students attended the event. Jones has over twenty years of experience working in higher education. Her job consists of overseeing the graduation and retention rates for underrepresented students at USC. During her talk, she highlighted the problems American institutions often fail to address when working with Black engineering students. “I think it’s critical to understand specific populations particularly when there are differences in the way those populations are experiencing colleges of engineering,” Jones said. See ENGINEERS, Page 3A
with so far, most of them have been with me posting rather than amount of likes I get on a picture.” Instagram had been testing the new feature in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand as early as April 2019. In an email, Seine Kim, product communications lead at Instagram, said the company began a global expansion of the test eliminating the option to view likes on photos and videos on Nov. 14, including in the U.S. market. “While the feedback from early testing has been
positive, this is a fundamental change to Instagram, and so we’re continuing our test to learn more from our global community,” Kim wrote. The results from other countries who have undergone the testing have been positive according to Kim, but creators are still concerned about how the change will impact their work through the app. In response to concern regarding influencers, Instagram has said the company is evaluating ways to ensure creators are able to keep their sponsorships. See INSTAGRAM, Page 3A
See MARIJUANA, Page 3A
COMMUNITY AFFAIRS
Senior at ‘U’ starts fundraiser for tuition
Design by Maggie Huang
Undocumented student unable to obtain state resident prices, creates page on GoFundMe SONIA LEE
Daily Staff Reporter
While Juan Muñoz should be in the final stretch of completing his Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture, the wouldbe Taubman senior is instead launching a GoFundMe to help pay the University of Michigan’s out-of-state tuition despite being a resident of Michigan since age four. Muñoz, who is undocumented, is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program enacted under former President Barack Obama’s administration protecting undocumented child immigrants from deportation if they met certain requirements. President Donald Trump announced plans to rescind DACA in September 2017. Muñoz transferred to the University as a junior after completing his associate’s degree in Architecture Technology and Industrial Design Technology at Henry Ford Community College. As the first person in his family to attend college, Muñoz completed his associate’s degree in a little less than five years, paying for his tuition out of pocket while balancing a job on top of his courses. See FUNDRAISER, Page 3A
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other users’ photos. Users will still be able to see the people who liked the post and the number of likes on their own photos, but no definite number will be attached to photos and videos posted for others to see. While Korcari does not think that getting rid of likes will stop her from working as a brand ambassador, but said it would change how companies work with Instagram influencers. “I think brands are going to come up with a different way to choose who they work with,” Korcari said. “However, with the brands I’ve worked
University must still abide by federal laws regarding the possession, use and distribution of marijuana. He likened the restraints on its usage to those placed on alcohol use on campus. One of the greatest positives, he believes, is a generally safer use of the drug. “I think weed is healthier than alcohol — period — but also, now it’s regulated; people aren’t worried about it being laced with anything,” Gaines said. “I think it will be safer overall. I think people like to know where they’re getting it from and will like to know that it’s safe and regulated by the government, as opposed to needing to buy it from whomever.” Exclusive Brands — one of the three businesses selling the drug in Ann Arbor —
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INDEX
Vol. CXXIX, No. 41 ©2019 The Michigan Daily
NEWS.........................2 OPINION.....................4 CLASSIFIEDS................5
SUDOKU.....................2 SPORTS...................5 ARTS.................1B
News
2A — Thursday, December 5, 2019
MONDAY: Looking at the Numbers
TUESDAY: By Design
WEDNESDAY: This Week in History
incorrect 5fgwz quotes @5fgwz why does michigan have both a michigan state university AND a university of michigan how many do you need
Fun Girl. @crowned1_ The more college campuses I visit the more I realize the University of Michigan is mad pretty (AprilSeptember)
Uj @imagepoor I started my personal statement with “I talked about myself a lot”. My counselor deleted it. Now UMich is going to miss a huge part of my personality
Amanda @ammargolis Hey, anyone know of any good voids I can scream into @UMich?
his enrollment status, applying for scholarships and revising the policy, Muñoz said he exhausted all efforts and had to start the GoFundMe, his last resort and an option he wished he did not have to use. “I tried everything,” Muñoz said. “I tried changing the policy, I tried scholarships, I tried everything else that I could and that didn’t work. This is why I’m doing it. It’s not like, ‘Give me money.’ That’s not what I’m trying to say. I just want to finish my education.” Muñoz said taking an extended amount of time to complete an associate’s degree and transfer to the University was a common situation for undocumented students who often come from lower income backgrounds. According to a University Record article on the July update, Kedra Ishop, vice provost for enrollment management, said there was sufficient evidence supporting a residency time limit extension. “It’s not surprising that these students often need to take longer to finance and achieve their eventual successful application and enrollment,” Ishop said. “We need to make sure that we maintain reasonable access for those who need to stop along the way, for instance to work, but who continue to achieve and are great candidates for U-M.” University spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen wrote in an email interview with The Daily that residency rules apply to all of those who qualify and noted the appeals process for students and families who wish to have their residency decision considered. “Residency rules apply to all students who qualify,” Broekhuizen wrote. “Additionally, an appeals process exists for students/families who wish to have their residency decision reconsidered.” Muñoz said he tried appealing the decision, but his case was rejected. The University is now requiring him to pay approximately $106,000: the remaining balance of his fall 2018 tuition, which is $26,700 per semester, and $80,000
SUDOKU
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FRIDAY: Behind the Story
B Crichton @CrichtonBrad University of Michigan graduates 79% of students. Ohio State 59%. Good to know they have a good football team
for the three remaining semesters. and if a Democrat wins the 2020 LSA senior Barbara Diaz, presidential race, Trump may lose co-founder and outreach chair his chance to end the program of Student Community of altogether. Progressive Empowerment, a Muñoz echoed Diaz’ sentiments, Muñoz has been a Michigan student organization supporting noting in his senior year of high resident ever since his family left undocumented students on school he was unaware he could Mexico 20 years ago. campus, said many states already attend the University as an “I got here when I was four have in-state tuition policies undocumented student. Fear of years old, I turned five here,” specific to undocumented students. revealing his immigration status to Muñoz said. “I stayed in Detroit, These policies often require a the University restrained him from Michigan. Literally from there certain number of years attending asking for help, he said. forward I never left state. I’ve a middle school and high school in “My dream in high school was to been going to Michigan schools the state and ask the student to sign get here as a freshman, but I didn’t since then and I’ve been going an affidavit agreeing to apply for even think that an undocumented to school continuously. Even citizenship as soon as they are able. person could come here,” Muñoz after graduating (high school), I “Michigan for some reason said. “Disclosing status is very never stopped, but I’m still being doesn’t have a policy like that,” scary, so I didn’t try and ask anyone considered out-of-state.” Diaz said. “It’s really up to each here. It’s a big institution, it’s also a When Muñoz was accepted to university to come up with its public institution which has ties to the University, he was ecstatic, own policy on how they want to the government, so I wasn’t going to but it was not until he was already move students in. U of M is in a disclose. If I could have come here enrolled in Taubman College very complicated situation because as a freshman I would have done of Architecture and Urban there is such a large difference so. I couldn’t, also, financially so I Planning in fall 2018 he found between in-state and out-of-state decided to go through community out he did not qualify for in-state students. In terms of coming up college.” tuition. At the time Muñoz with a way to amend the policy, it Muñoz said starting his entered the University, residency was trying to find a way to increase GoFundMe was terrifying eligibility required students to access, but not too much where because he had to disclose his have attended an accredited people who aren’t from the state undocumented status — possibly Michigan high school for at least are able to apply or get in-state endangering his family by openly three years, attended a Michigan tuition.” sharing his status with strangers on middle school for two years and Diaz is also a DACA recipient the Internet. to enroll at the University within and noted the importance of “I was terrified, I had fear of 28 months of graduating high showing prospective students backlash, I had fear of failure,” school. Muñoz satisfied the first who are undocumented they can Muñoz said. “Now that my status two requirements, but because apply to and attend the University. is disclosed, at first it was okay, but he enrolled 60 months after She emphasized the significance after a day, I got a hateful message. graduating high school, he was of building community in a time And then more and more started told he owed the University outwhere the continuation of DACA is just showing up … I see that it’s of-state tuition for the fall 2018 uncertain at the federal level. getting shared more and more and semester. “You always hear about students that means more people are going “I was already in the fall thinking that they can’t go to college to know my status. I knew this came program when it turned out that because they’re undocumented,” with it, I knew it was a risk, but this there was nothing that could Diaz said. “Something with SCOPE was my last resort … I don’t want to be done,” Muñoz said. “Even is how do we reach out more to give up on being an architect.” with my appeals … I was already In October 2017, the U-M Student enrolled. That meant that I had to people? How can we mentor other for Progressive pay that tuition. We went to try students? How can we form those Community and get it resolved with Regents. connections? Sometimes it feels like Empowerment held a rally The policy was not resolved in our goal is just to survive … especially with four key requests: clearer the fall. For winter semester, my right now with DACA going back resources for undocumented students, an professors allowed me to attend to the Supreme Court … We’re prospective the classes, do the work, get an worried about what happens if we extension of the requirements to qualify for in-state tuition, a point informal grade, but I couldn’t lose status in a couple months.” register, so it’s not formally on my While acknowledging the person within administration for transcript.” potential benefits from Muñoz’s undocumented students and fully In July, the Board of Regents GoFundMe would outweigh the met financial aid for those who approved a revision extending risks, Diaz noted the mental and qualify. Broekhuizen cited the the enrollment time limit from emotional burden of being an University’s resources for 28 months to 40 months, but undocumented student. Sudoku theGenerator policy revision still does not “Just byhttp://sudokugenerator.com/sudoku/generator/print/ being undocumented, DACA recipients and other apply to Muñoz. After appealing and you being in this country, undocumented student as Sudoku Syndication http://sudokusyndication.com/sudoku/generator/print/ that inherently makes you not continued engagement with entitled to anything,” Diaz the undocumented community said. “You spend your whole and organizations like SCOPE. existence trying to prove other “The University maintains people wrong about that.” a dedicated site specifically Muñoz and Diaz said the designed to address the needs EASY current hold on DACA puts of our undocumented student MEDIUM immense pressure on DACA community,” Broekhuizen recipients, many of whom feel wrote. “Furthermore, the left in the dark about their University has actively immigration status. The DACA engaged with the DACA/ application halt has not stopped undocumented community all undocumented students through the Office of from enrolling at the University, Enrollment Management; but they are now enrolling as Office of Diversity, Equity undocumented and not DACA- and Inclusion; Student Life; documented. the International Center; CEW+; “Currently, the program Office of Government Relations, is still there,” Diaz said. and others to identify resources “Hopefully it stays safe and and to make transparent how expands and allows more DACA/Undocumented students people to apply.” can navigate these issues.” The U.S. Supreme Court Additional resources is currently considering if Broekhuizen highlighted included President Trump can continue undocumented-specific sites for with a shutdown of DACA for admissions, financial aid and nearly 700,000 undocumented Rackham, as well as the Spanishimmigrants, and the decision language sites for admissions and would determine if DACA financial aid. © sudokusolver.com. For personal use only. © sudokugenerator.com. For personal use only.has an immediate end as LA VIE EN ROSE CHAPPED LIPS puzzle by sudokusyndication.com opposed to a gradual windRead more at down. However, a decision Generate and solve Sudoku, Super Sudoku and Godoku puzzles at sudokusyndication.com! MichiganDaily.com is not expected until 2020, Generate and solve Sudoku, Super Sudoku, Godoku, Samurai Sudoku
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Craven Moorehead @McPlvce I hate being a University of Michigan fan. I HATE IT
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ENGINEERS From Page 1A Jones drew on data from the 2017 University of Michigan Campus Climate Study. According to the study, Black engineers have different experiences compared to other engineering students. “In the area of feeling that they are treated fairly and equitably by others, Black students report much lower than the overall population,” Jones said. “When asked if they feel that they belong at University of Michigan the majority of students said ‘yes.’ In this case the outliers were Black students.” Rackham student Jocelyn Jackson, a first-year Ph.D. student in Engineering Education Research and the national chair for the National Society of Black Engineers, attended Jones’s talk. She reflected on how she hopes faculty will take initiative to bring about change in the engineering community. “I think that the people who are really curious to learn and everyone that did come to the seminar I hope that they are able to hear diverse perspectives, but then think about what they’re going to do and how they’re going to be a change agent,” Jones said. Jones said students would most likely be engaged in engineering and STEM fields if they had the support of their community. She recalled that students she spoke to often felt isolated by peers in large lecture halls and revealed anonymous quotes from students at the school of engineering. “‘No one wants to partner with me in class. I’m always the last choice because I’m Black,’” Jones recalled the student telling her. Jones then went on to explain how professors and advisors at the University of Michigan can communicate with Black engineers in order to provide a more supportive and welcoming community. “When you see them isolated if there’s group work then perhaps this is where you make the groups, perhaps you go in and you say ‘I know this is going to be an issue, so I’m going to create a situation where we’ve got to be inclusive,’” Jones said. Rackham student Corin Bowen attended the talk and expressed how she hopes the face of engineering at U-M and in America will change. “The demographics that currently exist in the College of Engineering does not represent this local area, they don’t represent the state, they don’t represent the country, and they don’t represent the world. We have to move in that direction and we need the kind of structural changes that we started touching on today in order to do that,” Bowen said.
MARIJUANA From Page 1A was the first to apply for a recreational marijuana license upon its availability on Nov. 1. The operational marijuana facility prepared before Proposal 1 was passed, anticipating the eventual outcome. Narmin Jarrous, executive vice president of business development, explained Exclusive Brands used the general template for approval of a medical facility to apply for recreational sale. “We knew recreational marijuana would eventually be approved, so we always had that kind of in our sights,” Jarrous said. “Once it got approved, we went into overdrive. We used the medical facility application as a g uide and kind of g uessed our way through to fig ure out what we’d anticipate on the application. It was really a year-long process.” The process involved working with city officials, local businesses and the Ann Arbor community. According to Jarrous, all players have been very receptive to working with Exclusive
Thursday, December 5, 2019 — 3A
Professors, students reflect on online voting registration system Electronic option will save costs on paper and mailing, increase accuracy of voter profiles their reg istration through an online tool. Those without a driver’s license or state ID are able to use the streamlined website to learn more about the means by which they can reg ister. LSA junior Caroly n Chen, director of voter reg istration for College Democrats, ref lected on the importance of enacting leg islation that eases the burden of ten associated with reg istering to vote. “ Voting reg istration laws are the number one reason why A merican voter t urnout is low,” Chen said. “In a cost benef it analysis, the benef its of voting— having your one vote sway the entire election. (These benef its) are way less than the costs of having to reg ister— ta king the initiative to print out reg istration forms and mailing them into the cit y clerk. A ny thing that will help ma ke voter reg istration easier will be a g reat step for democracy.” Chen went on to discuss how Michigan leg islators should be cautious in the prog ram’s implementation, inasmuch as it may hinder some citizens from reg istering. “There are still some issues that need to be solved since the online reg istration is so new,” Chen said. “Some states are including new ID laws with online reg istration which will just suppress
more voters as well as some issues with mista kes in the system purg ing some voters, but nothing is perfect and this will be a g reat step for ward.” The voting announcement came af ter Michigan began automatic voter reg istration in conjunction with the distribution of driver’s license and state ID cards in September. Despite these recent changes, longstanding methods of voter reg istration, like reg istration by mail, will remain options for citizens. Benson’s public statement claimed that young voters were particularly likely to ta ke advantage of the online voter reg istration system. In 2017, the Universit y of Michigan launched the Big Ten Voting Challenge, a nonpartisan ef fort to incite civic engagement among younger citizens and st udents across Big Ten universities. Edie Goldenberg, U-M political science and public policy professor, spearheaded the movement at the Universit y. In an inter view with The Daily, Goldenberg noted that while she was happy with the implementation of online reg istration, she wanted individuals to remember the prog ram was only for in-state st udents. “I am delighted that this is going to be implemented,”
Goldenberg said. “It ’s going to ma ke things much easier, especially for st udents. But it ’s important to remember that it ’s only available for st udents who have either a Michigan driver’s license or a Michigan state ID.” While this prog ram could open doors for Michigan residents, it does not apply to out-ofstate st udents, who ma ke up a large portion of the st udent body, Goldenberg said. “ We have st udents from outside the state of Michigan who might want to vote in Michigan, they have the right to do that — any college st udent may choose to vote either at home or where they ’re st udying,” Goldenberg said. “So for those st udents, they can’t use electronic reg istration.” She concluded by ref lecting on the importance of leg islation that allows for more streamlined voting reg istration, as it enables citizens to exercise one of their most f undamental rights. “I think that voting is one of the most f undamental rights that citizens have,” Goldenberg said. “A nd I think that young people haven’t participated as much as I wish they would, and therefore … their priorities and interests are not being heard as much as older people’s priorities and interests are.”
“We acknowledge and affirm that you are the expert on your own body, identity, and experience,” the website reads. “As the initiation of hormone therapy is a new service at UHS, for now, we are following the WPATH Standards of Care to ensure that you receive the highquality care you deserve.” In an interview with The Daily after the event, Engineering senior Violet Boyse-Peacor said she was concerned when she found out UHS still uses the WPATH Standards of Care, as she feels it is an older practice. “It’s easy, but it’s also a pain to get informed consent because you have to get to Ypsilanti (to Corner Health Care Center),” BoysePeacor said. “When I learned that
you had to use WPATH (at UHS), I was slightly surprised.” Boyse-Peacor said she has previously traveled to Corner Health Care Center to receive gender-affirming care under the informed consent model. Engineering junior Caitlin Beach told The Daily telling students to travel to Ypsilanti for hormone therapy has caused the Corner Health Care Center’s waitlist to become months long, preventing them from quickly receiving the care they desire. “(The WPATH model) doesn’t give respect to the people looking for the service,” Beach said. “It gives respect to people who are practitioners, who are psychiatrists, not the patient.” Beach said sending students elsewhere for care using the informed consent model could potentially cause students to lose
trust in other UHS services. “When you’re going that far to avoid that process, you’re not going to be as confident when you go for a surgery (at the University) and you need three letters (of consent) to do that,” Beach said. “Right now, it’s inefficient and overall increases the number of hours put into a patient when it shouldn’t need to be that way.” At the town hall, attendees discussed their own experiences when attempting to receive gender reaffirming care at UHS. Individuals voiced concerns regarding the current WPATH model, saying it puts up unnecessary barriers for those wishing to receive genderaffirming care. To address this issue, the attendees plan to reach out to the Trans Care Team and set up a meeting early next semester
to discuss the possible steps to achieving the informed consent model. By talking to the team along with other professionals at UHS, the group said they hope to continue the conversation of informed consent, discuss ways the team is helping them as well as ways they would be able to improve their care. Honey said she has received care from the Trans Care Team at the University and had a positive experience. She hopes the group can help them better serve the LGBTQ+ community on campus. “I found that the doctors were really supportive,” Honey said. “They are open to talking to students, I felt heard … In a lot of ways, this whole meeting is about helping them out as well.”
Brands and other businesses. “The city made sure everything was in reg ulation, and we worked closely with them to understand the city’s rules and city’s reg ulations and their concerns,” Jarrous said. “And then we tied that into our application, and we made sure that everything from our building, to the traffic f low, to our hours of operation, were in reg ulation with the city and convenient for the businesses around us. We only want to have a positive impact on this community, and I think we’re doing a pretty good job at it, and we’re hoping that it only grows.” LJ Horowitz, Kinesiolog y senior, is president of Green Wolverine, a student organization that educates students on the medicinal advantages of cannabis, discussed the growth of the cannabis industry and current policies revolving cannabis. While he believes Ann Arbor is one of the best places in the world to use cannabis, he expressed concern with the rollout of recreational marijuana in regards to possible shortages. This, he said, was one of the topics of the Michigan Cannabis Leaders Summit,
which took place last week. “We already had a weak harvest in Michigan, and then with the adult use, that is surely going to run out very quickly,” Horowitz said. “Just because there’s no limit on how much you can really purchase, and there’s only really three stores in the Ann Arbor area. It’s going to be a real supply issue pretty soon, and you’re going to see the prices sky-rocket probably after the new year. In which case they probably won’t come down again until the summer. At least that’s the prediction.” He emphasized while recreational purchase is a step in the right direction, there will need to be a consistent effort to ensure a stable supply for medical patients. He also emphasized the importance of setting a good example model for other states on the path to legalizing recreational marijuana. “With regards to recreation, I don’t want it to seem like I have a negative viewpoint on it because of this price raise, I think it’s great; it’s going to be really great for the city and state,” Horowitz said. “It’s more so that they really need to
MADELINE MCLAUGHLIN Daily Staff Reporter
Michigan’s Secretar y of State Jocely n Benson announced Monday that Michigan residents can now reg ister to vote and update their voter reg istration stat us online. In a statement, Benson announced the online option was implemented primarily as a means of enabling more streamlined, convenient means of reg istration for citizens. “This fast, convenient, cost-ef fective and secure option to reg ister to vote will enable many more people to participate in democracy and help Michigan’s clerks maintain complete, accurate and up-to-date voter rolls,” Benson said. In the statement, Benson’s of f ice outlined a number of benef its to implementing online voter reg istration, namely cut ting costs on paper applications and mailing, increasing accuracy for applicant f iles, facilitating more frequent voter updates and allowing for ease and convenience for voters tr ying to reg ister. Michigan is now one of 38 states to allow electronic reg istration. Leg islation to implement online voter reg istration was passed by the state leg islat ure in 2018. Af ter identif ying their residency from a driver’s license or state ID, users can reg ister or update
UHS From Page 1A
fig ure out the supply chain and make sure that that’s 100 percent safe and equitable for the medical community as well as equitable for the recreational community. Just because right now it’s being rolled out really inefficiently.” Jarrous said Exclusive Brands is receptive to these concerns and will always prioritize its medical patients first. “Our number one priority, we’ve said this time and time again, is always going to be to our patients,” Jarrous said. “Above the recreational entry, above the recreational users, who we love and appreciate, we’re dedicated to the patients who use this as medicine and need this to live comfortable lives.” Students such as Public Health senior Sydni Warner have mixed feelings on recreational sales. While dispensaries will produce a higher quality product, Warner wonders if this increased access could extend possible underage purchase of marijuana with fake IDs. She also emphasized the need for currently incarcerated individuals under marijuana charges to be considered for early
release, especially where Black people are much more likely to be arrested. “Often those in jail for these charges are Black men, an already historically marginalized community when it comes to drugs and crime,” Warner said. “While I recognize that at the time of conviction they had committed a crime, I believe that the time they have faced up until now should be ample time to serve for a crime that is no longer illegal.” Warner, an Ypsilanti resident, believes that legalization could widen racial socio-economic gaps between Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, as well as other Michigan areas. “Gentrified areas such as particular regions in Detroit are projected to have a large number of dispensaries in the next coming year, most of which is owned by whites,” Warner said. “This to me shows that white owners are taking advantage of a system that was previously, and still in most places, used to reprimand and discriminate against poor, low socioeconomic status Black men. I just simply think it’s unfair to have large percentages of young Black
INSTAGRAM From Page 1A As the implementation of the feature expands, some users are finding ways to get around it to show off their likes. LSA freshman Lucas Felpi is an international student from São Paulo, Brazil. Felpi’s Instagram account is verified as a result of internet fame from being of the few students to receive a perfect score on the National High School Exam in Brazil. Instagram had started testing the new feature in Brazil months before Felpi left for Michigan. Even after coming to the United States, the version of the app on his phone still does not show likes on his posts. Felpi said being unable to see likes did not affect how often people used Instagram in Brazil and predicted that it will have a bigger effect in the United States. “From my knowledge, I don’t think it changed,” Felpi said. “I don’t think anyone uninstalled Instagram because of it. I don’t think usage stopped. I think it has the same importance as it had before, but it was like an enforcement that they’re not gonna have likes anymore and people complained for like a week or a few days and then it was over. Everyone just continued using it. I think this is going to be bigger here. I don’t think the use is changing because Instagram has a strong, solid user base and people are not letting go now.” As an alternative, Felpi said users were posting the number of likes a post got on their Instagram stories, since they were able to see the number of likes on their own posts. However, some influencers think the change will significantly impact users. Business sophomore Alyson Koh, who runs the food account @AllySnacks, believes this new feature will be detrimental to Instagram’s business model. “To be honest, I think it’s detrimental to Instagram’s business model because if people don’t have that measurable statistic, what is Instagram going to do next?” Koh said. “I actually appreciate their move toward wellness and mental health with their platform because it makes people more self-conscious when it should just be about the picture and the gallery of photos you are posting and not how many people are viewing it. But I think people think will jump to another platform instead if they don’t have the concrete measurement of statistics. I think it will affect it in a sense that people will not use Instagram as often, but I think that the people who stay will still be there for the content.” Korcari agreed. She thinks a new app will come up in response to Instagram getting rid of likes. “This might cause for another app to come out to try to do what Instagram was doing. If another app does come out, then I believe people will jump on that like how people left Facebook or Twitter to jump on Instagram,” Korcari said. “However, I’m interested to see if taking away the likes is going to increase the use of Instagram or decrease it. I feel like it could go either way.” Kim said the testing is still going on and that there is no set date for this new feature to be released. “We are testing and have yet to come to a final decision about private like counts,” Kim wrote. Businesses themselves have also used Instagram to promote their products through exposure through social media influencers and advertisements. Bivouac is one of those companies which emphasizes social media in their marketing. While Instagram’s new feature may not affect how Bivouac markets its products, there are concerned about the use of other businesses marketing with Instagram. Coco Herreria, a social media manager at Bivouac, said she thinks Instagram has been moving towards forcing businesses to purchase ads since they first launched. Herreria noted Instagram has changed the algorithm to control what photos are being viewed by users.
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Opinion
4A — Thursday, December 5, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MARY ROLFES | COLUMN
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RILEY DEHR | COLUMN
A
No water, no air, no rights
s I explored campus those first few daunting and lonely weeks of college, I discovered the Nichols Arboretum. A patch of historic forests and prairies sitting in the center of Ann Arbor, it’s arguably the most beautiful part of the city and a rare peek at what the area may have looked like 300 years ago. I’ve spent many of my days watching the wildlife scamper through the grass and fly about the trees and underbrush as I do my homework. While each part of the Arb is beautiful, the stretch of the Huron River that gently runs along its northern border and throughout the rest of Ann Arbor is particularly spectacular. I have countless fond memories of dipping my toes into the cold water or watching the stars with friends to the sound of its gentle babbling. What I didn’t know about this beautiful river is that it hides a toxic secret. From the ‘60s through the ‘80s, 850,000 pounds of the chemical dioxane was improperly dumped by Gelman Sciences on their property in the outskirts of town. Longterm exposure to dioxane can lead to liver and kidney damage and can cause cancer. This toxic pool, now known as “the plume,” threatens Ann Arbor’s access to clean drinking water. Floating under Ann Arbor in its groundwater, the plume has pushed the city to shut down more than 100 private drinking wells. The city has also become increasingly worried that the plume will reach Barton Pond, where the city gets its water and where trace amounts of dioxane were detected earlier this year. There are currently “virtually undetectable levels” of dioxane in Ann Arbor’s drinking water (which is why I now steal water from my roommate’s Brita). The problem will be one the city grapples with for decades. Gelman, now Pall-Gelman, is undertaking a process to minimize the spread of the pollution, with their level of effectiveness being described as “the least amount possible” by former Ann Arbor City Councilmember Chuck Warpehoski, D-Ward 5. The city has filed for the plume to be designated as a Superfund site in order to acquire more funds for the cleanup, a lengthy process to say the least. When I learned of this vagrant threat to the Huron, I was shocked by not only how little was being done to stop it but also by how little punishment had been doled out to the polluter. It was unfair for the city having to beg for a company’s illegally disposed mess to be cleaned up. What seemed fair to me was to make Pall-Gelman pay to restore the groundwater to the way it was before they ruined it for everybody. We teach children to clean up after themselves, so why aren’t corporations held to the same standard? While Ann Arbor is forced to
struggle with the pollution of its water, natives of Southwest Detroit’s Mexicantown can’t escape the reeking air pollution that fills their homes. Residents of this tourist and transportation hotspot, with the Ambassador Bridge right around the corner, have their air contaminated by toxic pollutants released from 150 sites. It is the most polluted section of the most polluted ZIP code in the U.S. The sky over Mexicantown is filled with chemicals released from coal and gas-powered power plants, the Marathon oil refinery, a steel mill and a wastewater treatment plant. The toxic chemicals being dumped into their community has decreased the air quality so severely that natives are three times more likely to be hospitalized with asthma than the average Michigander and face significantly increased rates of cancer and respiratory diseases. Instead of investing in cleaning the community, Detroit’s government has chosen to add another source
We teach children to clean up after themselves, so why aren’t corporations held to the same
of pollution to the mix. After destroying major parts of the historic neighborhood to build the new, six-lane Gordie Howe International Bridge, even more light, sound and air pollution will stream into the community. Detroiters, like Ann Arborites, are left with almost no recourse to fight the dumping of toxic chemicals into the resources they need to survive. This lack of rights is caused by the basic legal document that should ensure them: the United States Constitution. While the Constitution promnises the right to life, it gives people no rights to the elements needed to live: clean air and water. It is a nonsensical legal paradox that keeps marginalized and prominent communities alike from using the courts to assert their basic human rights. With a Congress that has passed no major environmental legislation in decades, the Constitution might offer the only viable solution to a problem that is costing thousands of Americans their lives. America’s Constitution is one of the most important documents in human history, but even so, it seems like the Founding
Fathers were in a hurry to get it done. It is one of the shortest national constitutions and is riddled with spelling errors, like “Pensylvania”. Written hundreds of years before conservation and ecology were concrete concepts, the writers also neglect to mention the environment, with all the power the government has to regulate it coming indirectly from the Commerce Clause. This is in stark contrast to almost any other nation, with 177 of the 193 United Nations member states giving their people the right to the environment in their constitutions. The effects of a constitutional right to the environment are farreaching, forcing governments to more tightly regulate polluters and more strongly protect communities from pollution. Most importantly, a constitutional right to the environment gives people the power and standing in court to fight back against polluters. In Argentina, the onceheavily polluted Matanza River once ran red with the blood from the slaughterhouses that lined its banks, along with everything from mercury to oil. The millions of people that live along its shores saw decades of pollution take a toll on their health. In 2004, citizens from “Villa Inflamable”, a city deeply affected by the overwhelming pollution, filed a lawsuit against the governments of Argentina and Buenos Aires and 44 businesses for damage to their health caused by the pollution of the river, and won. Once named one of the most polluted places on Earth, the Matanza is still an industrial river, but the government of Argentina now works to ensure it gets a little cleaner every day. People from The Netherlands, where the right to a survivable climate was secured in court, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where communities are suing Chevron for over $9 billion for polluting the rainforest, have used their constitutional rights to protect themselves from corporations and their own governments. A constitutional right may very well be the solution to environmental injustice that runs rampant through our nation and especially our state. This would make courts the level playing field on which all Michiganders – from Ann Arborites, to Southwest Detroiters to those affected in Flint – could fight back against the state and federal governments on issues from the Line 5 pipeline to the constant corruption impeding justice for wrongfully poisoned communities. A constitutional amendment for the environment is the best chance Americans have at ensuring their lives are not sacrificed for profit.
Riley Dehr can be reached at rdehr@umich.edu.
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L
The im-Pact of the nuptial narrative
ike many students across the University of Michigan’s campus, on Monday, Nov. 11, I spent the evening distracted from my work in anticipation for a special inbox notification. It wasn’t related to an internship update, a grad school application or even a dreaded Canvas posting. On Monday night, I waited with bated breath for the results of an online dating survey — the Michigan Marriage Pact. Created by U-M students for U-M students, the survey originated as a project for a psychology class and quickly became so much more. Word of this matchmaking service spread across campus, and within a few weeks, it seemed like everyone had taken part — even those of us already in relationships. Soon after the results were sent out on Monday night, the U-M Facebook meme page was flooded with Pact-related content, including lamentations over large age differences, mismatched gender preferences and the algorithms’ failure to pair them with anyone at all. Unfortunately, after all the anticipation of the evening, I found myself among the unmatched. Despite my previous successes in online dating, the Marriage Pact left me loveless — well, within the boundaries of campus, at least. My relationship journey with the Michigan Marriage Pact ended that Monday night. But for the survey takers who were properly paired up, the question changed from ‘So, who?’ to ‘Well, what next?’ The project’s title implies a motive of tying the knot. Of course, this response would be a bit extreme — even the survey’s creators acknowledge this, disclaiming on their website that while ‘Marriage’ is in the name, they “never said it applied to your match.” And, yes, it does seem excessive to jump from an email notification to a nuptial celebration. But if a Pact match does happen to create a spark, shouldn’t the ultimate goal be to fan it into a lifelong flame and validate it with a legal ceremony? Whether one dates via swipe, soirée or online survey, there is an ever-present push towards the finish line of a marriage certificate. Any relationship that doesn’t achieve this end is regarded as not having worked out — as a failure. And every connection is, at some point, evaluated on its ability to be ‘the one’ leading to marriage. In the United States, the popular
narrative of love is one of dating to marry. The domination of this single story normalizes an expected progression of relationships, leaving out the many alternative, equally valid pathways for lifelong love. The popularity of the Michigan Marriage Pact presents the perfect opportunity for us to reexamine and challenge the expectation of marriage and to promote the diversity of relationships and the expression of love in whatever form it may take. There is no questioning the prevalence of marriage in the United States. While it certainly has decreased since the mid20th century, the percentage of adults who are married has stayed about 50 percent for the past decade. According to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, love and lifelong commitment are cited as the two most important reasons for tying the knot. This sentiment may seem beautiful at first glance, but a deeper look at these high proportions naturally leads to the question of why so many people feel that marriage is such a crucial validation of love and commitment. There is nothing inherent about the relationship between love and marriage, yet through the domination of legal regulation in the realm of love, they have become inextricably intertwined. The same 2013 survey also pointed out the reality of the financial and legal benefits of marriage, which approximately a quarter of respondents claimed were important motivators for getting married. It’s difficult to deny these motivations when public and private institutions offer numerous advantages which can only be achieved through marriage, including tax deductions, Social Security benefits and health insurance savings. These benefits not only incentivize marriage, but also further normalize it as the ultimate form of a relationship when the same perks are not extended to other long-term commitments that don’t, or can’t, involve marriage. Though the necessity of nuptials has remained a dominating idea in the U.S., the beginnings of a challenge to this norm are already underway, and millennials are the ones starting it. That’s right — the nation’s most vilified generation is back to kill yet another industry. And this time, they’re after the marriage
complex. Millennials are the first age cohort to drop below a 50 percent marriage rate for 25 to 37-year-olds. The progression of love, then marriage, then baby carriage is also beginning to break down — the proportion of unmarried parents who cohabit nearly doubled from 1997 to 2017, and a recent study revealed 55 percent of millennial births are occurring before marriage. It’s nearly impossible to investigate this trend without running into discussions of its negative consequences, such as financial hardship, on parents and children. But what these fearful arguments fail to recognize is that marital status itself does not produce these negative consequences — it is the social institutions that prefer married parents to unmarried ones. As late Gen Y and early Gen Z babies move into phases of serious dating and relationships, it’s important to continue challenging and restructuring the oppressive social structures that uphold marriage as the most valid expression of love. The institutional regulation of relationships and repression of love has been slowly but surely decreasing in the past few decades. In June 1967, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that laws prohibiting interracial marriage are unconstitutional. In June 2015, the court made a much closer 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges declaring the right to same-sex marriage to be guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. These decisions were, without a doubt, crucial steps in terms of both civil rights and the liberation of love. But if we hope to move further in these fights, we must move beyond legalization and begin to question the need for a legal regulation of love in the first place. Instead of pacts, certificates and ceremonies, let’s focus on partnership, consent and communication. Let’s make freedom of love accessible to all by freeing love from regulation. To those of you who caught a match through the Marriage Pact, consider what you’re ultimately looking for in this and any dating venture. And for those of you who didn’t, just remember there are plenty of flexible fish in the sea. Of course, you may not even want to go fishing — and that’s fine, too. Mary Rolfes can be reached at morolfes@umich.edu.
SAMANTHA SZUHAJ | COLUMN
T
A need for nostalgia
here is something comforting and cozy about watching a show or movie from your childhood. A familiarity envelops the experience. You may remember every line, the introductory song or one episode that you really loved from a decade previous. Nostalgia is a beautiful thing at times. It is not a new concept for me, but nostalgia is something I did not really appreciate until I gradually made my way through high school and college. When we are all home on break, my friends and I regale each other with times from elementary school, middle school and all the in-between. There is a sense of comfort in the shared experience that, despite the seeming insignificance at the time, holds weight as memory in the present. I remember as a kid, my parents always played their classic rock CDs throughout the house, and as an elementary schooler, I did not understand the appeal of “old music.” As a lover of classic rock now, this lack of understanding feels out of place upon reflection, but in the moment, I was genuinely confused as to why they wouldn’t play the music popular on the radio and instead opted for their CDs. The ability to connect a memory or feeling associated with a period of time in one’s life is truly remarkable. Little did I know it then, but there was an element of nostalgia when my parents put The Beatles or Pink Floyd or U2 on. Television shows, movies, songs, pictures — they
can hold tangible memories encapsulated within them, like accessible personal supercuts made from some point in our lives. This sense of nostalgia is prominent within today’s popular culture. Whether it be the inception of Disney+ or the fact that “Victorious”, a popular Nickelodeon show from the 2000s, was just put on Netflix, there is accessibility and focus among many high school and college students to re-watch things from our childhood. In the grand scheme of things, shows and movies from a decade ago may not be considered “nostalgic,” given that not much time has passed, but there is a sense of comfort in familiarity. As college students, we are always undergoing change. There is always something happening, something being shifted out of its place of normalcy to a place of obscurity,. I think the onslaught and accessibility of shows and movies from our childhoods reflects something similar to what my parents sought in their classic rock CDs — a sense of familiarity amongst a vast newness. Recognizing a line from a show or a movie or being able to sing along to the opening theme gives us comfort in knowing exactly what is coming next. Personally, I find the excitement and chatter regarding the new Disney platform simply a manifestation of something that has always been there, and now, college students are finding it. Nostalgia is something that we all search
for in some capacity. For some, it may be the Disney movies of their childhoods, for others it is music. Feeling nostalgic can be brought upon by something as simple as a three-minute song or a 21-minute episode of a television show. It is both good and bad to look back on things. Heavy reliance on looking back or attempting to relive parts of the past is not a healthy practice. Overindulging or fixating on things that have happened inhibit an individual’s ability to continue on in the present. There is a level of nostalgic indulgence that is appropriate but surpassing such fails to allow people to live in the moment. Not all songs bring good memories, and not all television show episodes remind me of happy times, but that is the humanity of nostalgia. Not all moments are inherently joyful or upsetting, but that is what makes each individual who they are: The past shapes the present which builds the future. With that I think there is a human aspect surrounding the excitement of Disney’s new streaming service or Netflix’s newest additions. There is comfort as we move into adulthood, with so many question marks regarding differing parts of our lives, in reliving the familiar. As my parents did with their music, and I do with mine, we use nostalgia as a necessary means of comfort and warmth when so many things are changing around us. Samantha Szuhaj can be reached at szuhaj@umich.edu.
Sports
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Thursday, December 5, 2019 — 5A
Granowicz learning from emotion-driven error Uche declares for NFL, Anthony enters portal MOLLY SHEA
Daily Sports Writer
Nick Granowicz could only watch. The freshman forward saw Wisconsin forward Cole Caufield skate with the puck from the right side of the boards over to center ice. Caufield spun to face the net as senior forward Nick Pastujov slid on his knees to try and block the shot. A shot never came though — Pastujov fell for Caufield’s fake shot deke. Then senior defenseman Luke Martin dove on one knee attempting to do what Pastujov couldn’t, but it was too late. The puck had already left Caufield’s stick. A moment later, it connected with the back of the net. The penalty box door swung open, and amid Wisconsin’s celebrations, Granowicz skated back to the bench — dejected at his costly mistake. He’d served just 56 seconds of his two-minute minor penalty for roughing. The call was the result of a punch Granowicz had thrown at a Badger play after the two had a battle on the boards. As he sat on the bench, the reality of the situation hit him. The Wolverines’ two-goal lead was gone, and the Badgers were clawing their way back into the game because of his penalty. “I felt horrible right after I did it,” Granowicz said. “I knew I messed up right away. I let my emotions kind of get the better of me. It was just a bad feeling. After they scored, it just made it even worse. I felt really bad because I let my teammates down at that point.” After having a front-row view of Caufield’s goal from the box, Granowicz spent the remaining five-and-a-half minutes of Sunday’s 3-1 watching the game from a different vantage point — the bench. But the decision wasn’t a punishment, rather a learning
ARIA GERSON
Daily Sports Editor
ALEC COHEN/Daily
Freshman forward Nick Granowicz took a key penalty on Sunday, though Michigan won, 3-1, over the Badgers.
moment, according to Michigan coach Mel Pearson. Pearson pointed out at that point, Wisconsin had all the momentum and was threatening to repeat a second comeback effort after scoring three unanswered goals to beat Michigan 3-2, on Saturday. So he used the repercussions of an untimely penalty as a way to teach the players what to do in the situation. It was an opportunity to show not only Granowicz, but the entire team, the importance of emotional control. “We’ve all done some things, taken some bad penalties,” Pearson said. “It’s a good learning lesson for our whole team, it’s an emotional game, we want guys to play with emotion, but it has to be controlled emotion.” Caufield’s goal didn’t end up mattering. Forty-five seconds later, Ty Emberson received a five-minute major and a 10-minute game misconduct for contact with Pastujov’s head. The Wolverines caught a break and finished the game on the power play. When senior forward Jake Slaker scored an empty net, power play goal, Granowicz breathed a sigh of relief. His momentary lapse
in emotional control proved to be relatively inconsequential. But still, Granowicz felt he owed his team an explanation. So in the locker room, he addressed his teammates. “It’s just accountability and ownership for your actions,” Granowicz said. “If you mess up you should apologize to your teammates and tell them you’re sorry. Telling them you know you messed up. You’re sorry that you let them down, and you’re going to try and change and not let that happen again.” No one on the team placed any blame on him. Slaker recalled two weekends ago when junior forward Michael Pastujov took a penalty after the whistle and negated a power-play opportunity for Michigan. The team wasn’t mad then, and it isn’t now. Sometimes players lose control of their emotions. The important thing the Wolverines have chosen to emphasize is their willingness to reflect on the situation and learn from it. “We were going to kill the penalty for him no matter what,” Slaker said. “(Granowicz) came in, and I thought he played a great game which is the most important
part.” For Granowicz, learning emotional control is part of the adjustment from junior to college hockey. At the junior level, referees are sometimes more lenient with physical play. But in the NCAA, referees are more strict and aim to keep the game well controlled. This strictness hurt Granowicz especially — he hasn’t seen much lineup time this season, so the adjustment has been harsh. He’s only dressed four times, but he’s not using that as an excuse for his loss of control. Pearson’s message for him was well-received and well-understood — mistakes are okay, but it’s critical to grow from them. Granowicz’s penalty aside, Pearson and his teammates were impressed with his performance. And while Sunday night proved an important learning moment for Granowicz, it granted Pearson a chance for reflection on the lineup decisions he’s been making. “I thought he had a really good game,” Pearson said. “For a kid who has only played three games, we’ve got to play him more, coach isn’t playing him enough. We’ve got to get him involved.”
Linebacker Josh Uche has announced that he will declare for the NFL draft, though he will still play in Michigan’s bowl game. “Me and my family have made the decision to forego my final season of eligibility and enter my name in the NFL Draft,” Uche said in a statement on Twitter. “I am still working hard with my teammates to win our 10th game of the season in the Bowl Game and I am excited to represent Michigan one last time. “I want to thank Coach (Jim) Harbaugh, Coach (Don) Brown, and all my coaches for believing in a kid from Miami, Florida and giving me a chance to come to Michigan. Thank you for pushing me to be my very best in every way and for giving me the chance to be a Wolverine.” One of the Wolverines’ top pass-rushers the past two years, Uche played in all 12 games this season and finished with 11.5 tackles for loss, 8.5 sacks, six quarterback hurries and two forced fumbles. He
was named to the All-Big Ten second team by coaches and the third team by media. Uche is officially listed as a senior on Michigan’s roster but played in just four games his freshman year. With the new four-game redshirt rule coming into effect last year, Uche potentially could have earned an extra year of eligibility should he have chosen to remain with the program. Additionally, redshirt sophomore linebacker Jordan Anthony has entered the transfer portal, per reports. Anthony was a four-star prospect out of IMG Academy in Florida but has played in just 16 games in two years and had little impact on the stat sheet. In 2019, he appeared in nine games and finished with 11 tackles and a quarterback hurry. Anthony has not commented publicly on his decision, but his spot in the linebacker rotation was in question due to redshirt freshman Cameron McGrone’s emergence at middle linebacker and junior Josh Ross’ decision to redshirt this season after injury.
ALEXIS RANKIN/Daily
Linebacker Josh Uche declared for the NFL Draft on Wednesday.
First-half scoring woes cripple ‘M’ Wolverines looking for signature win BRENDAN ROOSE Daily Sports Writer
ALEC COHEN/Daily
Senior center Jon Teske was unable to dominate the paint on Tuesday against Louisville as Michigan lost, 58-43.
ABBY SNYDER
Daily Sports Writer
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Not much about the KFC Yum! Center in downtown Louisville is quiet. The coaches who shout directions at their players from the sidelines? Not quiet. The teams’ benches, which cheer on their teammates, protest every call against them and urge for the whistle in indignation every time one of their players is touched? Not quiet. And 22,000 screaming Cardinals fans, decked out in white and waving matching rally towels above their heads? Definitely not quiet. But No. 4 Michigan’s firsthalf offense on Tuesday night? Quieter than the Law Library before finals week. Gone was the efficient ballscreen offense. Gone was junior forward Eli Brooks’ success from the arc. Gone was senior center Jon Teske’s dominance in the paint. Gone, for all accounts and purposes, was the Wolverines’ offensive attack. “A lot of the shots just weren’t falling,” Teske said
after the game. “I told the team, just keep shooting those same shots.” In the first half, Michigan shot for a dismal 17 percent on its three-point attempts, and an even worse 11 percent on its layups. The Wolverines shot only 33 percent in the paint and 11 percent on second-chance scoring attempts. They just couldn’t find the bottom of the net. Some of it could be attributed to the Cardinals’ defense, which was effective all night at shutting down Michigan’s ball screens — plays that have set up much of the Wolverines’ success on offense this season. But not all of Michigan’s offensive woes can be credited to Louisville. The Wolverines had plenty of scoring opportunities, and even managed to open up a few easy shots for themselves. Even then, it seemed they were only hitting rim and backboard. “We missed some shots that normally go in,” said Michigan coach Juwan Howard. In the second half, Michigan had at least somewhat more success offensively, even drawing within a fourpoint margin at one point.
But by then, it was too late. The Cardinals had taken a 10-point lead into the break, and from there, the game was never really in question again. Though the Wolverines drew closer at various points in the second half, the damage was already done. The outcome of the game was, by then, unavoidable. The Cardinals were far from the juggernaut they’ve been at times this season on Tuesday night. It’s a credit to Michigan’s defense that they weren’t. But on offense, the Wolverines just couldn’t quite do enough. As low-scoring and as gritty as this game was, Louisville was, simply put, the better team. And for this game — Michigan’s offense the only quiet thing about it — that was enough. “We messed up a lot of assignments that we had coming into the game,” said junior forward Isaiah Livers. “We’ll keep taking the same shots. They fall, they fall, they don’t — let’s get back and defend. “We’re looking to the next game on the schedule. We just gotta stay positive, stay locked in.”
The Michigan women’s basketball team has made short order of most of its opponents. Mid-major teams like Morgan State, Eastern Michigan and Bradley have offered little resistance, and as a result, the Wolverines’ six wins came at an average margin of 23 points. But against Notre Dame — the only real challenge Michigan has faced — the Wolverines fell, 76-72, their only loss so far this season. While the loss has little impact on the team’s goals for the remainder of the season, it raises question marks about whether it can truly compete in Big Ten play this year. Michigan has an opportunity to answer some of those questions at Crisler Center Thursday night, when it hosts Syracuse in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge. Though the Orange dropped out of the rankings after consecutive losses to Stanford and Green Bay, they received the most votes outside the Top 25 in both the AP and Coaches’ Polls, effectively making them the No. 26 team in the country. Much like the Wolverines, they’ll be looking to notch their first signature win and build some momentum going into conference play.
Offensively, much of Syracuse’s production comes from beyond the arc. Despite shooting just 31 percent from three so far this year, the Orange rank 13th nationally in 3-pointers made, sinking 9.6 triples per game. Guard Gabrielle Cooper exemplifies this average efficiency, high volume style of play. So far this year, she has sunk 14 of her 51 attempted 3-pointers — both numbers the most on the team. She is followed closely by forward Digna Strautmane, who has shot a slightly more efficient 13-for-41, good for 31.7 percent from beyond the arc. But Syracuse’s most valuable offensive weapon by far is guard Kiara Lewis. The Ohio State transfer was thrust into the starting role after ACC Player of the Year candidate Tiana Mangakahia was forced to redshirt to recover from chemotherapy treatments. Lewis has shined in her new role, leading the team in both points and assists per game — 15.9 and 6.0, respectively. Her ability to drive the lane and draw fouls adds diversity to the Orange’s offensive attack and forces opponents to play tentatively to avoid fouling out. “They can go inside-out, and they shoot a ton of threes,” said
Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico. “So it’s going to be a real test for us (defensively).” Syracuse also boasts a defense that matches up well against the Wolverines’ struggles to take care of the ball on offense. Michigan averages over 16 turnovers per game, and its 24 giveaways were crucial in the loss to Notre Dame. The Orange’s signature zone defense — as well as their length and quickness in the guard spot — could cause similar problems for the Wolverines’ turnoverprone offense. “We have to limit our turnovers,” said senior guard Akienreh Johnson. “(We have to) score on the offensive end on the best shot every single time we’re on offense. Take pride in our possessions.” Michigan showed promise against Morgan State on Sunday, when it followed up a 12-turnover first half with only three in the second half. That change will need to stick if the Wolverines want to pick up their first signature win Thursday night. “They’re a tremendous team,” Barnes Arico said. “We need to be able to handle their pressure, their length, and their zone defense … It’s going to be a great opportunity for us to get another great opponent at home.”
ALEC COHEN/Daily
Senior guard Akienreh Johnson wants Michigan to limit its turnovers against Syracuse on Thursday night.
Sports
6A — Thursday, December 5, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
After losing two All-Americans, Wolverines look toward their future LANE KIZZIAH Daily Sports Writer
Walking into the Donald R. Shepherd Gymnastics Center, it’s near impossible to miss the maize and blue championship banners that hang in rows all across the ceiling. The flags — 26 in total — create an imposing image against the white interior of the building, a constant reminder of the program’s success. Freshman Gabby Wilson felt the weight of those banners long before she came to Michigan. Growing up in Ypsilanti, Wilson was always in the stands for the Wolverines’ home meets, watching AllAmericans like Sarah Curtis and Natalie Beilstein. Since being recruited her freshman year of high school, she’s been waiting in the wings, seeing Michigan rack up wins year after year. Now continuing that legacy falls on Wilson’s shoulders. “The hardest part (of the transition to collegiate gymnastics) was getting used to the pride of the ‘block M’ because in high school, we did club gymnastics,” Wilson said. “We weren’t representing our school and our sport at the same time. You don’t want to put too much pressure on yourself, but you also want to give your school a reputation.” Michigan has quite a reputation already, clinching five of the last seven regularseason Big Ten titles and 17 Big Ten championship wins since
2000. With 24 titles, Michigan coach Bev Plocki is the most decorated gymnastics coach in the conference by a mile. The runner-up has just five. Last year, the team continued that success all the way to the NCAA Championships where they finished third behind UCLA and LSU. In recent history, the Wolverines’ dominance of the Big Ten can be largely traced to All-Americans and recent graduates Olivia Karas and Emma McLean. They held 60 event and all-around titles, four NCAA Championship appearances and 100 routines scoring 9.90 or higher. The duo set the bar high in the gym and out of it, serving as leaders and helping to create the team culture. “Last year was a pretty specially year,” Plocki said. “I think for a lot of reasons, but one of them was definitely the leadership we had with Emma and Olivia. You can lead vocally and you can lead by example. Both of those two did both. They walked the talk. They were committed. They worked hard everyday. I think that they gave everything that they had and then some.” After losing two dominant members of the team, Plocki and the rest of the coaching staff got right to work making plans for this upcoming season. In the end of year meetings last spring, the coaches analyzed the Wolverines’ strengths and how they could be replicated the following year. They came to the consensus they had to recreate
You don’t want to put too much pressure on yourself.
You can lead vocally and you can lead by example.
MADELINE HINKLEY/Daily
Senior captain Maddy Osman says her class has started to embody the leadership of Olivia Karas and Emma McLean, who graduated at the end of last year.
the culture developed by Karas and McLean. “They laid the framework for us (current) seniors,” said senior captain Maddy Osman. “My whole class has kind of taken what they’ve done. We’ve taken their leadership, their skills, the way that they cheer, the way that they embodied the ‘block M’ and transitioned it into this year.” Plocki is confident in the team’s ability to pick up where they left off, both in terms of
team chemistry and depth of talent across the squad. The returning athletes have a strong track record with three AllAmericans, including Osman and second-time captain, senior Lexi Funk, still on the roster. Purely looking at the numbers, the freshman class, considered one of the best recruiting classes in the country, balance out the loss of Karas and McLean. With three freshmen who compete for the all-around title replacing two seniors — one of whom didn’t always perform every event — the team should statistically be
We’ve taken their leadership, their skills, the way they cheer.
in a better spot coming into this season. “The potential is huge,” Plocki said. “Gabby Wilson and Sierra Brooks are just straight up rockstars. Nicoletta Koulos is going to be the secret weapon of our season. She doesn’t have quite the level of difficulty in her skills, but I think she’s a competitor. She’s beautiful to watch and she’s very clean. I think those three freshmen can make a huge impact.” While Wilson and the rest of the newcomers may feel the pressure of those banners now, Plocki thinks they’ll feel differently after their
first competition this weekend, an exhibition against Central, Eastern and Western Michigan. “It’s a big responsibility to represent the ‘block M’,” Plocki said. “This is the hard part. It’s all the preparation for the fun part that starts with competition. Then — all of the pressure of representing that ‘block M’ — you get to see the reward of that. All of the sudden, not only is it easier, but that pride starts to bubble up inside of you. The next thing you know, you’re preaching that to the next class of freshmen.”
Gabby Wilson and Sierra Brooks are just ... rockstars.
Simpson, Michigan struggle to overcome Louisville’s ball-screen defense DANIEL DASH
Daily Sports Writer
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — When Michigan hired Juwan Howard, it wasn’t much of a secret that the Wolverines would try their hand at an up-tempo, pro-style offense grounded in the pickand-roll. Leading up to Tuesday night’s game against topranked Louisville (8-0), the No. 4 Michigan men’s basketball team (7-1) had found its callin
card in exactly that. Coming off wins against then-No. 6 North Carolina and No. 8 Gonzaga at the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament in which they averaged over 75 points per game, the Wolverines’ ballscreen offense was rolling. As for what Michigan had to show for it, senior point guard Zavier Simpson — a preseason All-Big Ten selection — entered Tuesday night leading the nation in assists. His effectiveness in both
Release Date: Thursday, December 5, 2019
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
ACROSS 1 Distillery mixture 5 The Flyers’ Gritty, e.g. 11 Poke fun at 14 __-inflammatory 15 Corrida figure 16 Important card 17 *Line never spoken by James Cagney 19 Cutting remark 20 4,300-mile range 21 Novelist Waugh 22 “In __ of gifts ... ” 23 *Rock pile at a prehistoric gravesite 26 Protect with a levee 30 Canon SLR 31 Gorilla expert Fossey 32 A pop 36 Sail (through) 40 *Like Juárez, vis-à-vis El Paso 43 MGM part 44 Cork’s place 45 Racing legend Earnhardt 46 Brouhaha 48 Held to account 50 *Far-fetched, as a story 56 Car rental giant 57 “Royal” seaside bird 58 Spare 63 GQ or EW 64 “__, Batman!”: Robin’s cry upon spotting the ends of the answers to starred clues? 66 Lyft driver’s ballpark fig. 67 Café option 68 Real estate ad number 69 Anthem contraction 70 “Hard to Stop” air conditioners 71 Use one’s outside voice
3 Poker choice 4 Keep out of sight 5 Debussy’s “La __” 6 Chancel feature 7 Tablet accessories 8 Chick with Grammys 9 Soothsayer 10 Little one 11 Circle lines 12 Less approachable 13 Started 18 Library ID 22 Hall of Fame Dodger manager Tommy 24 Luau strings 25 Estée contemporary 26 Mild cheese 27 Nursery rhyme trio 28 Frequent prank caller to Moe’s Tavern 29 Arctic garb 33 Snacked, say 34 McBride of “Hawaii Five-0” 35 Sailor’s pronoun
37 Very little 38 Market 39 Walnut or pecan 41 Bar mixer 42 Round signal 47 Like a band in a bus 49 “The Sopranos” actor Robert 50 Brief appearance 51 Egg-shaped 52 Cuban export 53 Street of mystery
54 “Trumbo” Oscar nominee Cranston 55 Set free 59 CT scan component 60 Run out of gas 61 Traditional dance 62 Mostly depleted sea 64 Party accessory 65 UFO passengers, supposedly
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
DOWN 1 “The Good Place” Emmy nominee Rudolph By Mark McClain ©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC 2 In a trice
12/05/19
passing and finishing at the rim out of the pick-and-roll was a driving force to the Wolverines’ undefeated November. But on Tuesday night, the Cardinals made it difficult for him to do either from the start. They hedged hard on some screens and sagged off of others, leaving Simpson uncertain of what to expect. Ultimately, Michigan’s offense struggled to adapt in its 58-43 loss. In the Wolverines’ first seven games, Simpson shredded opposing defenses with three actions coming out of ball screens: taking it to the rim himself, dishing to the rolling or popping screener, or swinging a cross-court pass to a shooter. With an arsenal of chest passes, hook passes and bounce passes, his success rate at even the most damning angles made Michigan’s offense an efficient work of art. For Cardinals’ coach Chris Mack, game-planning against the nation’s assists leader proved to be the most challenging aspect of facing the Wolverines. “(Simpson) is very, very quick,” Mack said. “He’ll reject a lot of ball screens, he’ll act like he’s using it and then drive the space and kick. Teams have tried to go under, and Zavier is so clever, he just plays peek-aboo and figures out which side you’re trying to catch him on then he goes down the lane with that Kareem (AbdulJabbar) hook.” Regardless of which move Simpson tried in the early going, all 6-foot-10 of Louisville
center Steve Enoch stood in his way. The Cardinals began the game by hedging high on ball screens, making Simpson’s passing angles difficult. The impact was easy to see. Michigan missed its first five shots. Soon, it was 1-of-10 from the f loor. Then the struggles amounted to a 2-for-17 stretch and a double-digit deficit. By the end of the night, the Wolverines were staring at a 15-point loss, and the zero in their loss column was no longer intact. On the other bench, all Mack could do was smile and fold his arms. “It starts with Zavier,” Mack said. “The deeper he gets in the lane, the more it puts your off-ball defenders in a bind. How much do I help in? In the Bahamas, he’d just get in the lane and spray it out, and ( junior forward Isaiah) Livers and ( junior guard Eli) Brooks, they couldn’t miss. And so all we talked about was keeping him out of the lane, and then hard closeouts, hands are early. I really didn’t think they generated a whole lot of good looks.” For the first time all season, Michigan struggled to get the ball into the paint. And for the first time all season, an offense that entered Tuesday night averaging over 80 points per game went silent. “Our goal was to make sure that we could get those paint touches that we were comfortable with getting throughout the year thus far,” Howard said. “ … (Louisville) did a really good job of compacting the paint, keeping us out of the paint going downhill.”
... (Simpson) goes down the lane with that Kareem hook.
Our goal was to make sure that we could get ... paint touches.
12/05/19
ALEC COHEN/Daily
Zavier Simpson struggled in ball-screen situations on Tuesday night.
Thursday, December 5, 2019
Design by Maggie Huang
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2B — Thursday, December 5, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
B-SIDE: MUSIC NOTEBOOK
The fear, fame and faces of black metal in the 2010s JIM WILSON
Daily Arts Writer
For better or for worse, black metal broke the mold in the 2010s. It was a long time coming, too. From its inception in the early ’80s until shortly before 2010, black metal, with regard to both its sound and its culture, had barely budged. In any other genre, this is a completely foreign idea — artists are supposed to live and breathe, experiment and develop. But not in black metal. In black metal, bands are supposed to live within the common sounds of the genre, nudging up against the boundaries but never pushing (or even breaking) them. Before, artists were supposed to look, sound and carry themselves a certain way, or else they were doomed to a lackluster, dead-end career. In the past 10 years, though, bands suddenly stopped caring and started doing their own thing, and some bands became very popular as a result. To some, this was a long time coming. To others, though, this was damn near the end of the world. You see, metal purists (especially black metal purists) want to be familiar with every piece of music they hear. They want to be surprised by how each artist bends the genre to meet their desired sound, but they don’t want any curveballs. They want what they know, and they don’t care about anything else. So when black metal began to turn outward in the early 2010s, heads from every corner of the music world turned. Critics began to find themselves drawn to new black metal musings. Casual music fans began to dip their toes into the subgenre. Notably, though, metal heads began to turn a blind eye to the progress that lay in front of them. As black metal began to turn to the sky, the heads began to look to the stagnant pond that is metal, pretending their world remained unaltered. The first band to really break the mold was Liturgy, a group of Brooklyn hipsters (largely unversed in black metal) led by vocalist/guitarist/theorist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. In 2009, Hunt-Hendrix released a
manifesto titled “Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism” at a black metal theory conference. The manifesto explained the idea of transcendental (American) black metal, a subgenre of metal that could transcend the “Haptic Void,” the imaginary boundary that contains all other forms of metal, a task that Hyperborean (Scandinavian) black metal could never accomplish given its fixation on death, executed through its signature pummeling and lifeless drum technique, the blast beat. Transcendental black metal, focused instead on life and growth, was to be accomplished through the burst beat, a drum technique that lives and breathes as each song progresses. Don’t get it misconstrued, though: the music is still heavy, but it attempts to reach a higher plane. Given the radical ideas and rampant experimentation they fostered, Liturgy was met with some serious backlash. In fact, some claimed that they were nothing more than hipsters set out to ruin another good thing. Others claimed that they were too pretentious and didn’t carry the spirit of black metal. Liturgy came close to realizing transcendental black metal with the release of 2009’s Renihilation (the opposite of annihilation), but it didn’t quite meet the mark. It was still heavily influenced by the so-called Hyperborean black metal, but moments like the chilling, evolving “Ecstatic Rite” show the potential of transcendental black metal. The band came even closer with 2012’s incredible (and incredibly polarizing) Aesthetica. The album broke the boundaries of black metal with songs like “Sun of Light” and “Red Crown,” but it didn’t quite transcend the Haptic Void. After 2015’s misstep The Ark Work, the electronic and hip hop influenced release that left fans flustered, it seemed that the band had run its course. The Ark Work simply was not metal, nor could anyone consider it to be metal. Liturgy, specifically Hunt-Hendrix, jumped too high and inevitably missed the mark. However, after an electronic release from Hunt-Hendrix and four years away from the genre, 2019’s surprise release, H.A.Q.Q., set Liturgy back on the
right course, keeping things metal as hell but correctly introducing electronic and glitch elements. From heavy hitters brimming with life and humanity like “GOD OF LOVE” and “HAJJ” that utilize electronic stutter steps in lieu of sonic progressions to challenging yet palate-cleansing interludes like “EXACO I,” H.A.Q.Q. is evidence that even though it will not be easy, eventually, Liturgy will transcend the Haptic Void. Black metal purists be damned, the band has already begun to transform, and there’s no reason for them to stop in the next decade. Similarly, the advent of atmospheric black metal has ruffled the feathers of many metalheads. Bands were creating rock and alternative-infused black metal that more resembled the Cure than it did Darkthrone. Expectedly, metalheads were largely unhappy, and no band made them more unhappy than San Francisco’s Deafheaven. Formed in 2010, the band released Roads to Judah in 2011. Musically, the album was typical blackmetal fare, but with a twist. Rather than an onslaught of destruction, the violence was often broken up with glistening piano and acoustic guitar ballads. They are, like so many other boundary-pushing black metal acts, inspired by Japan’s Envy, one of the first bands to blend black metal with countless softer, more accessible genres. Lyrically, the album diverged from black metal’s typical depictions of the wilderness and critiques on various religious and governmental institutions, instead focusing on vocalist and lyricist George Clarke’s substance abuse and general tomfoolery. The album was generally a success, finding a home on several yearend lists, but it started to make purists grumble. Once again, the hipsters were dead-set on ruining yet another good thing. Deafheaven didn’t stop there, though. Their next release, 2013’s Sunbather, blew the iron gates
of black metal wide open. First of all, the album cover was vibrant peachy-pink. Never has this color ever been associated with black metal. Second, the music — it was beautiful, often crushingly so. Just listen to “Dream House,” far and away the band’s most popular song. Guitarist and songwriter Kerry McCoy introduced elements of shoegaze and new wave (two very un-blackmetal genres) to the band’s sound (hence The Cure comparisons). Third, and finally, the lyrics. Similar to the idea of Transcendental black metal, Clarke writes about life. However, he writes about man’s never-ending pursuit of perfection and man’s accompanying, inevitable failure. Critics adored this album, which made black metal purists hate it even more than they already did. On top of this experimentation, the members of Deafheaven are conventionally normal looking and could potentially function normally within society, which is inherently not very metal. Worse yet, the members of Deafheaven like other genres of music, including hip hop, a genre generally disliked by metalheads for its materialism and supposed lack of lyrical depth.
To Ricardo & our friends at the printer: Words aren’t enough to express how grateful we are to you. As far as best-ofs go, you’re it. XO, Arts.
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B-SIDE: STYLE NOTEBOOK
Daily Style doing the decade’s best sustainable fashion DAILY STYLE WRITERS Daily Style Beat
The thoughtful thrifter On Aug. 27, 2012, Macklemore released his hit single, “Thrift Shop.” In it, the Seattleraised rapper lists the gems he’s discovered at his local thrift store, from a leopard-print mink to a f lannel button-up donated by someone’s grandpa. He pities all the jerks who waste money on designer clothes and f lexes by telling us how little his pre-worn pieces cost (“I’m gonna pop some tags / Only got $20 in my pocket”). Bragging about saving money was a massive lyrical departure for the mainstream rap of 2012 — the year’s other chart-topping songs included Drake’s “Started From the Bottom,” an anthem for getting rich or dying trying. Still, “Thrift Shop” soared high, spending six weeks at the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100. “Thrift Shop” didn’t do well in spite of its anti-mass market messaging; it did well because of it. Just two years into the second decade of the millennium, the youth of America were ready to embrace a new form of conspicuous consumption, one that finds more allure in a pair of old gator shoes than a $50 T-shirt.
The 2010s introduced the U.S. to a wave of conscious consumerism. National media warned us to watch out for greenwashing, or misguided marketing schemes from corporations hoping to appear ecofriendly. Once a burden to mass production, sustainability became the focus of a new generation of Instagram-friendly clothing brands like Reformation and Girlfriend Collective. Perhaps the most accessible sustainable practice to gain traction during the decade? Secondhand shopping. From 2010 to 2019, my wardrobe has transformed from a collection of mallpurchased clothes to a mish-mash of mostly preowned pieces. If my estimates are right, I’ve purchased no more than 30 new garments in the decade, which isn’t a lot considering I went through puberty during that time frame. In my 10 years shopping at predominantly vintage and thrift establishments, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three kinds of secondhand shoppers: those who know it’s the most sustainable way to shop, those who want to save money and those who, like Macklemore, just want to wear your grandad’s clothes. All are valid reasons to choose used over new clothing, and they’re not mutually exclusive. You can thrift because you fear climate change and because you’re tight on funds and because
industry shifted gears some time in the past you love the look of an ’80s windbreaker. As the 2010s draw to a close and the impacts few years, and the spotlight shifted to clean of climate change become more dire, I realize ingredients, “no-makeup” looks and more that no motive for secondhand shopping is positive associations with concepts like the more dignified than the next. If you’re doing aging of the body. This is ref lected by the it, you’re hurting the earth a little bit less than changing popularity of brands, as shown by you could be. It doesn’t matter why. companies like Glossier and Philosophy gaining traction while demand for traditional industry — Tess Garcia, Daily Style Writer The cosmetic leaders like Olay and Estée Lauder has slowed down. connoisseur The past decade has Additionally, terms such as “sustainable,” “ethical” witnessed a shift in and “vegan” are now more consumer preferences to commonplace than ever, beauty products that are with a 175 percent increase better for the environment and society. The 2010s in the launch of vegan products between 2013 and saw us moving toward 2018. However, the impact brands that contain more of these shifts has been ethically sourced, natural ingredients that provide restricted by a single factor: the price tag. Even in 2019, sustainable packaging. The the most popular products decade started off with that meet the golden trifecta companies prioritizing of being clean, ethical and performance above all else, characterized by sustainable tend to be way out of the price range for an color cosmetics and pop COURTESY OF EMMA CHANG ordinary college student. looks. However, the beauty
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B-SIDE: BOOKS NOTEBOOK
B-SIDE: COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK
Instapoetry, then and now Identity, through the years SEJJAD ALKHALBY For The Daily
The best selling poet of 2017 wasn’t Shakespeare, Homer or William Blake. It was Rupi Kaur, a 27-yearold Indian-Canadian woman whose success can be largely attributed to her following on Instagram. In fact, so-called “Instapoets” made up 12 of the top 20 best selling poets in 2017. Anyone with a passing interest in poetry has likely encountered Instapoets in their social media feed. They’ve come to define much of the literature of the decade. Their poems often deal with themes like relationships, loneliness and mental health. Their meanings are clear so a reader can usually “get it” on the first read. Most importantly, they’re short, making them perfectly suited for the brief encounters social media was structured for. Instapoets have almost single-handedly brought poetry back into the mainstream, and yet they’re taken less seriously than “real” poets. There’s a tacit assumption that their poems are about just feelings and emotions and can’t be compared to their print-only counterparts. The critique, when fully thought out, is that Kaur and other Instapoets too often oversimplify their work, hoping to appeal to a large audience, and supposedly resulting in poetry that’s hollow and boring. While there’s truth to this claim, it would be irresponsible to dismiss Instapoets without asking why a social media presence seems to diminish their legitimacy. One similarity among many popular Instapoets is that their pages aren’t simply free spaces where they casually share new pieces; these pages are polished, deliberate and well thought out. More than just a platform to share poetry, they are an effective marketing tool. There are promotional materials, book release dates and clear intents to build a brand. They’re reminiscent of the pages of Instagram models — they blend a carefully curated marketing message with an intimate space to share and
interact with fans. The use of social media as a business tool isn’t an innovative practice. It is difficult to find a sizable company without a twenty-something “Social Media Specialist” in its marketing department. It would simply be an oversight to sell anything without having some kind of social media presence, so any poet trying to make money will follow suit. Social media, however, tends to favor smaller units of content as many accounts compete for the limited attention of users. Platforms reinforce this tendency with character limits, dense layouts and systems of ranking posts with an eye for maximizing advertising revenue at the expense of long-form content. What we find is that medium dictates form. Poets have to meet their audience where they are, and where these readers reside is a space that is hyper-commodified. Everything, right down to a user’s attention, can have a price tag and be sold to the highest bidder. Poets, whose content can’t cleanly fit into this paradigm, are forced into the impossible task of competing with actors willing to instantly gratify a user’s base impulse in search of profit. It is then unsurprising that Rupi Kaur’s specific brand of poetry is notoriously able to capitalize on social media’s potential for content promotion. That being said, the success of Instapoets on social media is not an affirmative indictment of their quality. Despite what a tenured English professor might have to say about them, Instapoets have attracted an otherwise disinterested audience to poetry. In doing so, they’ve expanded into subject matters that were previously ignored, and have been highly inclusive of marginalized communities. These are poems that are worth something to many people, and there’s no reason to be concerned about that. Instapoets as they exist aren’t the issue. It is the limiting constraints of social media that keep so many Instapoets from ever being called poets.
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ZOE PHILLIPS Daily Arts Writer
In January 2010, I sat in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, squirming impatiently in an oversized chair — the entire room was designed for adults, but I was only 11. On the side table next to me sat the obligatory vase of fake flowers and pile of severely outdated magazines. On top was the previous December’s edition of TIME. The front cover offered a sneak peek of the issue’s topic: a decade in review. The rest of that memory is quite blurry. I don’t remember where the office was or what I was there for, but that red cover sticks out like a bright light. Barely older than a decade myself, the concept of 10 years was hard to wrap my young head around. I remember wondering where I’d be the next time TIME had to make another decade in review. And here we are. I haven’t checked in with the offices of TIME, but The Daily will do. Despite my ongoing disbelief and denial that 2020 is right around the corner, I will acknowledge that I feel quite removed from that girl in the doctor’s office. She is hidden deep inside the dustiest of my brain’s file cabinets. I don’t remember the specifics of her day-today thoughts, but in retrospect I do know that she was in for a whirlwind of a decade. In 2010, the iPhone was barely three years old. None of my friends nor I owned any sort of cell phone and the only screens in my house were an old box TV and a desktop computer. Later that year, Instagram came to fruition. In 2011, Snapchat would be founded by a trio of friends at Stanford University. Vine started in 2012, only to receive an ongoing international mourning upon its demise in 2016 — that same year — TikTok was born. All of this is to say: my 2010-childhood world was teetering on the brink of an unprecedented social media revolution. At the same time that our parents
and grandparents grappled with a world turned upside down, my generation became tasked with finding our places within the rubble. This challenge came alongside a decade of pop culture that would permanently define our coming of age. Such experiences made for many interesting debates, a handful of seriously influential events and a constant cascade of new memes. I gave up on my attempt to list all of them. Instead, here is my highlight reel. Consider it my own version of a Vine compilation. 2010: At the MTV Music Awards, Lady Gaga walked the red carpet in perhaps the most infamous fashion statement of all time: her meat dress. I was barely old enough to be deciding on middle school dance outfits, none of which involved steak. 2011: The final Harry Potter film hit theaters and ended a full childhood of fandom. 2012: I was in eighth grade when a man shot and killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I remember sitting in my morning English class the day that the story broke, looking up at a teacher who I worshipped. He’d been teaching for far longer than I’d been alive, but I still remember the look of his eyes that day, searching for answers that he did not have. 2013: The Jonas Brothers cited “creative differences” upon announcing their breakup, wreaking havoc on pre-teen fans across the world. 2014: Over Thanksgiving vacation I watched my cousin, a St. Louis native, stream the footage of Missouri v. Darren Wilson after the police shooting of Michael Brown. After the officer’s acquittal, I saw friends and strangers rally behind the newly formed Black Lives Matter. At the time, I did not realize or understand the importance and longevity of the anger that sat behind the hashtag.
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Thursday, December 5, 2019 — 3B
B-SIDE: TV NOTEBOOK
Lyricless theme songs, featuring orchestras ... also horns SAMANTHA DELLA FERA Senior Arts Editor
Television shows can be immortalized in a number of ways. Perhaps it’s a character like The Fonz from “Happy Days,” who haunts our lives and Henry Winkler’s to this day. Or maybe it’s a catchphrase like “You got it dude!” uttered in “Full House” by a much-less-terrifying Olsen twin. Even a setting, like the Central Perk coffee shop of “Friends,” can launch a TV show into everlasting fame. But among these quirks and traits, there is one element of television that is both wildly important and vastly underrated: the theme song. Like the score to a movie but arguably much more important, a TV show’s theme song sets the tone for the entire series. Take one of the most famous, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” of “Cheers” fame. The soft piano, banging chorus and melancholy lyrics perfectly mirrors the escape from the brutality of life the show’s bar provides its characters. Or the catchy rap of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” that literally details the entire background to the series. How could we possibly understand what was going on if we didn’t hear that Will Smith got into one little fight and his mom got scared, so he had to move in with his auntie and uncle in Bel-Air? Theme songs are a unifying force among people who love a show and those who hate it. Even if the characters and plotlines of “Friends” send you spiraling into a fit of rage, you’re still going to do the four claps when called for. Does “Full House” make you want to punch Bob Saget a little? Too bad, you’ll be wondering whatever happened to predictability everywhere you go. Every theme song I’ve mentioned so far is just that — a full-blown song. The themes of pre-21st century were long and cheesy, featuring some band you haven’t heard of singing vague references to the show. This changed in the years approaching the 2000s. With some exceptions, most contemporary shows rely on an instrumental to define themselves; it’s a brilliant display of sound association. What was before just some dramatic orchestral music will have you thinking of “The Simpsons” for the rest of your life. All one has to do is look at the impact that “Law and Order”’s dundun has had on society to understand this phenomena. But some shows are more successful at this than others, and some theme songs will fall from the public’s mind while others will be associated with their series forever. In the past decade, some of the
best theme songs of all time have kept us from clicking “Skip Intro” on our streaming services. For the sake of options, I’ll be talking about (not ranking) shows that may have started before 2010, but that ended in this decade or are still airing today. So as much as it kills me to have to leave out the absolute banger that is the “That ’70s Show” theme, it won’t be included here. All of these themes are also solely instrumental, so Zooey Deschanel will have to remain locked up in her fairy castle for yet another day. “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Frolic” by Luciano Michelini Leave it to Larry David to use a short and springy theme that perfectly captures the mediocrity of life. “Curb Your Enthusiasm”’s bouncy theme combines a tuba and a mandolin to accent the ridiculous mishaps and embarrassments of David’s life. The way the tuba pomp pomp pomps in before the strings take over is pure genius, capturing a human emotion of absurdity that words cannot. The theme song has taken on a life of its own, becoming a meme and the go-to music to edit over any stupid event that occurs. The title of the theme, “Frolic,” further embodies the essence of “Curb” as Larry David scampers through life in yet another show about nothing. “Bojack Horseman,” “Bojack’s Theme” by Patrick and Ralph Carney Similar to “Curb,” “Bojack” is a mildly depressing show that’s
thematically centered around the mundanity of life. The theme song’s psychedelic synths are drowned out by horns as the colors of Bojack’s life flash behind him while he stares, emotionless. The theme embodies the confusion that Bojack faces as he tries to turn his life around, bouncing back and forth between who he once was and who he is now. The theme is slightly mournful, rounding out an artistic commentary unexpected from a show in which people and animals coexist, have sex and use drugs. “30 Rock,” “Theme from ‘30 Rock’” by Jeff Richmond Comedy theme songs love their horns, and “30 Rock” is no exception. The theme to this “SNL”-based sitcom is rushed and upbeat, as though New York City has been turned into sheet music. The unmistakable rise and fall of the baritone sax works its way through the hectic background of the drums. Anyone that’s ever walked outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza or worked in entertainment knows exactly the sentiment being conveyed: Everything is chaotic and a disaster, but hey, at least we’re having fun. “Game of Thrones,” “‘Game of Thrones’ Theme” by Ramin Djawadi Yes, the show is overrated, but the music definitely isn’t. The intense orchestral intro to “GOT” sounds both modern yet fitting to the medieval setting to the series. The battling of string instruments that start low and eventually crescendo is able to represent many aspects of the show without saying a word. The listener can feel the battle raging between dark and light, good and evil. There is a sense of urgency to the sound that brings the viewer through a journey before the first scene. If you’re not about the gore and assault that this show is rooted in, at least watch the first two minutes for some good music. “Mad Men,” “A Beautiful Mine” by RJD2 Just as comedies love horns, dramas love strings. Set in the ’60s, “Mad Men” could have easily picked a jazzy piece from the era, but they went a different way. While Beck was originally contracted to make a theme, the singer dropped out due to little faith in the success of the show. After hearing this RJD2 song on NPR, show creator Matthew Weiner scratched the words and edited the instrumentals to get the theme song for his showpiece. The suspenseful strings in the beginning suggest danger is near, and when the drums come in it’s as if someone’s running to get away. The song is sexy, polished and mildly unsettling — everything you would get if you took starring actors Jon Hamm and John Slattery and turned them into a HBO composition.
B-SIDE: MUSIC NOTEBOOK
B-SIDE: COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK
A case for King Kendrick The evolution of #MeToo DYLAN YONO Daily Arts Writer
Hip hop is the most popular genre in the country right now (when lumped together with sister genre R&B). YouTube data geek Data Is Beautiful shows hip hop and R&B becoming most popular around ’08 or ’09 by measure of record sales; Nielsen places its ascendancy at 2017, with hip hop and R&B dominating in sales, charting and Grammy nominations. Either way, by most measures, hip hop has become the genre of the nation in the 2010s — and the decade’s ruling rapper has never been clearer. The meteoric rise of a decade-defining rapper Even though he got his beginnings in ’04 under the moniker K-Dot, Compton-based Kendrick Lamar wasn’t on anybody’s radar until Overly Dedicated in 2010. The little-known mixtape earned Kendrick a spot in XXL’s 2011 Freshman Class, an accolade that meant a lot more back then than it does now. His first independent album Section.80, like Overly Dedicated, remained low-key outside of Los Angeles and hip-hop circles. Still, Section.80 was acclaimed for its dark and thought-provoking lyricism. While others, inspired by West Coast legends like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, wore their Compton background like a brand of toughness, Kendrick used his experience to develop a socially aware message. At the end of 2012, good kid, m.A.A.d. city was a hurricane in hip hop. Kendrick’s debut studio album sparked heated online arguments about the concept of an “instant” or “modern” classic. Storytelling was already Kendrick’s greatest strength, but he amped it up to the max for one of hip hop’s most cinematic albums of all time. Every music journalist made it their mission to explain what a “concept” album was and why GKMC was the greatest one of all time. By the time To Pimp A Butterfly dropped in 2015, Kendrick was one of rap’s most universally acclaimed emcees, the holy hip-hop prophet. Few albums have combined so much artistic experimentation and conscious, clever songwriting while remaining smooth and accessible. President Obama himself deemed “How Much A Dollar Cost” his favorite song of 2015. Since then, Kendrick has been eating Grammy awards and Platinum certifications like candy. Somehow untitled unmastered., a compilation album of TPAB demos, sounds better than most records from 2016, even without any unifying theme or message. DAMN. in 2017 was a little more divisive among hip-hop superfans, but critics and the mainstream rallied behind it for album of the year. It even won a Pulitzer Prize. Masterminding the hype of Black Panther: The Album in 2018 was just icing on the cake of Kendrick’s decade of domination. He didn’t need to release another album in 2019; there was no rapper who could do anything in 2019 to make a difference to the record. If Kendrick hadn’t sealed the deal halfway through the decade with TPAB, then DAMN. put the nail in the coffin. What makes for a “decade-defining” rapper? My gut instinct is to say that when you think of hip hop in the 2010s, the recording artist that naturally comes to mind is the one who defines that decade. But that’s who defines your decade in hip hop. Who defines the decade? Some point at the numbers: Kendrick has numerous awards and sales accolades and chart positions, all the stuff that only kind of
matters. But that has little to do with his dominance. Not much of Kendrick’s work has shown direct influence in terms of the type of music that’s coming out. That’s something we’ll probably see in the next 10 or 20 years. But there is something to be said for the way every move Kendrick makes creates an earthquake in hip hop. Like when his aggressive throne-claiming verse on Big Sean’s “Control” sparked an enormous backlash. Or when his chorus, “We gon’ be alright,” was adopted by police brutality protesters to show solidarity in the Black community. What really made Kendrick the king of the ’10s is simple: Prolificity, consistency and quality. In 10 years he’s had two masterpieces and four other amazing albums. His versatility has led to songs that are dense, layered works of art while remaining accessible in the mainstream (see “Swimming Pools”). And his writing is some of the most thoughtprovoking across all genres of music, whether it’s intricate metaphorical storytelling or gripping lines that could be broken down and analyzed for days on end. My personal favorite: “If a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?” No real competition The strongest defense for Kendrick as the rapper of the decade really comes in just two words: Who else? Looking specifically at the 2010s, the competition immediately slims down. Kanye West and Lil Wayne have arguments for the 2000s, but not the 2010s. Many rappers that started to gain traction in the beginning of the decade haven’t been as consistent or maintained their relevance, like Big Sean or A$AP Rocky. So who does that leave? Who first started to pick up steam in 2010, and has had an enormous impact going into 2020? Tyler, the Creator is one of the first to come to mind, especially in terms of influence. His work with Odd Future has already done so much for hip hop — there’s no BROCKHAMPTON without Odd Future. I don’t think his pre-Flower Boy material is near good enough for him to qualify, though. One of the few artists who has enjoyed as much mainstream popularity over the decade as Kendrick Lamar is J. Cole. He’s also similarly celebrated by his peers. That’s where the argument for Cole ends, though. Among hip-hop fans, his fame has always been divisive — so divisive that it wouldn’t be fair to consider him. That only leaves one real competitor. Someone who first rose to prominence this decade and stuck in the popular consciousness ever since. Whose influence on hip hop can be seen far and wide. A pop culture icon of the decade: Drake. This is the closest call to make, and the only real threat to Kendrick’s title. Drake came up in the 2010s, he has popularity and influence that transcends Kendrick Lamar, he is easily the best-selling rapper of the decade and has numerous awards and records. But there is one thing that really holds him back. When you stack the best Drake album — If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late or Take Care — against the worst Kendrick Lamar album — DAMN. or Black Panther: The Album — there’s a very fair argument to be made that Kendrick’s worst is better than Drake’s best. I think about what will stand the test of time. What will be a celebrated classic, and what will become a relic. I don’t know if Drake will be a relic or a celebrated classic of the 2010s. Kendrick Lamar though — he will never be a relic, and he will certainly be a celebrated classic.
SAMMY SUSSMAN Daily Arts Writer
Canadian-born violinist Lara St. John made headlines this past July when The Philadelphia Inquirer published a 5,000 word exposé detailing St. John’s allegations of sexual abuse against former Curtis School of Music faculty member Jascha Brodsky. The article also contained allegations that St. John had told Curtis administrators of this abuse, first in 1986 and more recently in a letter she wrote to the school’s president in 2013. The Daily spoke to St. John by telephone about the #MeToo movement, classical music, her allegations of abuse and others that have rocked this industry. The Daily: How do you think the #MeToo movement has affected classical music as a whole? St. John: I think pretty strongly in the past two and a half years. It started with Levine and then there were some other conductors like (Charles Dutoit) and then William Preucil in Cleveland. I came out with my allegations against my teacher in Curtis. I don’t think I would ever have been listened to back then. And I probably would have been blacklisted … I’m sure it still happens but hopefully those would-be perpetrators are shaking in their boots at this point. TMD: Your allegations spoke to institutional culpability that extended a lot beyond one person. How has the structure of the industry at large dealt with this? St. John: I don’t think the institutions have been dealing well with it. I think every school is hoping that this will just go away, that we’ll just forget about it. It’s like the anonymous commenters that are just like, “Get on with it. Go on with your life.” And it’s just like, “No!” TMD: How have people who don’t have an institutional tie and don’t have a reason to be scared been responding to you? St. John: I sort of became a hotline this past summer. I heard from a lot of people for a couple of months. People are afraid because it’s their livelihood and if they do come out with their name, it’s still possible that presenters or orchestral representatives will blacklist them. People will say to me, “Look I’ll talk to you but it has to be off the record.” Of course I won’t ever out them but it’s really upsetting. It shouldn’t have to be that way. That’s what I want to change and that’s what hasn’t ever changed. If you look at Placido Domingo, for example, who was one of the latest who was accused of harassment — everyone’s known that. It was an open secret. But only two of the many women came out with their own name. It was something like 10 percent of (the women) came out with their name and it hurt the other 90 percent. The Daily: You came forward so publicly with this allegation and you refused to stop speaking about it. How has your role in the industry evolved? St. John: People talk to me a lot,
which is why I am working on a documentary about this. I feel like people will speak to me long before they will speak to some interviewer like you or Katie Couric or one of those people. It’s an understanding that I have that maybe the average person doesn’t have. I have yet to see what’s going to happen. It’s totally probable that there’s going to be some dude in Kentucky that doesn’t want to hire me because I said this or that, but in that case I don’t want to work with someone who won’t work with me because I was raped as a child. The Daily: Right. St. John: (Laughing) And I shouldn’t have said Kentucky! I mean any place, of course. The Daily: If you look back ten years and then come back to the present, what has changed over the past ten years? Do you think institutions have made changes? St. John: There’s no question that these institutions wouldn’t have changed without the pressure of the press … Without sunlight as the disinfectant nothing would have changed. They would keep trying to pretend that nothing happened. And I think that people are less and less willing to allow that to happen. And this is not to say that only women are abused by their teachers, but women have had a lot more recognition in the past ten years. And as women get more chances these things start to change. You see a lot more women composers being recorded, being performed. Women conductors are (becoming more common) as well. It’s not great but it’s a start. And it’s much, much better than it was ten years ago. The Daily: And here we’ve had the allegations against David Daniels and Stephen Shipps and we’re in the same state as Larry Nassar. How do you think education has been affected by this too? St. John: I know when I was a kid there was this mentality, especially in music, that your teacher is God. I think it’s changing now, especially because a lot more teachers are women, especially in the violin world. If you look at Curtis right now, for example, (many) of the teachers are women. And none of the teachers think “in order to teach you I need to break you down psychologically.” I’m hoping that, given what’s come out in the past two years, it will scare potential perpetrators from doing these things. And windows in doors — I mean how hard is it to put windows in doors? These are simple steps that need to be taken. The Daily: And what do you see going forward? If this movement were to continue to evolve, how do you hope it would? St. John: In music … we start so young. It’s all one-on-one and it’s so intense and it’s so much practice from such a young age. It’s so ripe for abuse. I just hope we can keep future 14-year-olds from having this happen to them. And if it does happen — when it does happen — they won’t be ignored, and mocked, for what someone did to them. I want people to be listened to and I want people to be believed.
The Daily spoke to St. John by telephone about the #MeToo movement, classical music, her allegations of abuse and others that have rocked this industry.
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4B —Thursday, December 5, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
B-SIDE: TV NOTEBOOK
B-SIDE: FILM NOTEBOOK
‘Bojack’ is bright, always SOPHIA YOON Daily Arts Writer
Each year, the quality of content released to the public from the entertainment industry hits new highs and lows. With every sequel and prequel released, I sink further into doubt that Hollywood can surprise us anymore. After all, what can shake audiences to their core the way that “Arrival of a Train” did? Or the “firsts” of every genre? Thankfully, something always comes along that proves me wrong, and after all these years that Hollywood has gifted me with pleasant surprises and whirlwinds of emotion, it would be an absolute shame if I didn’t take a moment to thank the shows that shifted my perspective on the industry and society as a whole. I’ve been blessed by the entertainment industry a countless number of times, but the most memorable gift was my introduction to the depths and bounds that animated shows can reach in their content, spirit and artistry. People have a tendency to associate animation with children, failing to realize how animation allows creators to push boundaries with more flexibility and ease. When you start to realize just how far they can go, it completely changes the way you view television. My proper introduction to a good animated show was “Avatar: The Last Airbender” in the basement of my childhood home. My memories of it are hazy — it was long ago when the show was still on Netflix. As someone who grew up on Disney and Nickelodeon sitcoms, it was rare to see a normalized version of Asian culture in a mainstream television series. There’s still an ongoing debate as to whether “Avatar” counts as anime — if it does, the show blows my whole article wide open. So let’s say it doesn’t. As a Nickelodeon-produced show, “Avatar” displays astonishing layers of cultural sensitivity and inclusion with tact and ease. It quickly became my personal standard for what I can expect from a good animated series, and few animated shows over time have been able to stand beside or surpass its predecent. The first to do it was “Bojack Horseman.”
Anyone who knows me has likely been pestered to watch the show several times, and those who I can force to get past the first season never regret it. At its best, it’s a surprise. Like most first time watchers, I began the series with a halfhearted effort. Even though I had been told it was better than it appeared, good shows aren’t appreciated until they’re lived and experienced. I had subconsciously categorized it under the expectation that it would be a jaunty, vulgar adult cartoon like the rest, and while it starts that way, it finds its footing and maintains its excellence throughout its nearly-concluded six season run. Its existentialism is gradual, and the depths it reaches are wholly unexpected but entirely welcome. The creators somehow made this animated anthropomorphic horse such a heartbreaking yet alarmingly relatable character, not to mention the other side characters, each of whom have complex, three-dimensional features that the majority of secondary television characters lack. It’s extremely predictable of me to stamp this as the best animated show of the decade, but I can’t help it. There aren’t many shows that’ll make you feel the same way that this one does, and it’ll draw out any buried existential dread that you might have hoped to get rid of by early adulthood. But that’s not to say that there are only two good animated television shows out there. This decade had much to offer in the realm of animation and its various art styles, which advanced quickly throughout the decade. 2019 alone has had amazing animated shows start, end and get cancelled by cruel shifts in streaming and entertainment. A notable mention is “Undone,” a show by the same creator as “Bojack.” It’s a quick eight episodes on Amazon Prime Video, and breaks barriers of genre like I’ve never seen before. Its run is too recent to label as the best animated series of the decade, but it’s a beacon of hope for those who fear that the new decade will have nothing to offer but terror and moral panic. Apart from some select real-life issues we might have to face head on in the very near future, at least we can be soothed in the fact that good television is out there, and likely won’t be going away for some NETFLIX / YOUTUBE time.
B-SIDE: BOOKS NOTEBOOK
The dystopia of the decade EMILIA FERRANTE Daily Arts Writer
The stories all follow the same general outline: A girl lives her whole life thinking her society is normal. She prepares for the day when she is old enough to be be categorized by a system prescribed by her society. She meets a boy. She begins to realize something is off with the world she lives in, that maybe it isn’t as perfect as she thought it was. She discovers the truth and she and the boy lead a reformatory revolution. Split that story up into three young adult novels, and you have the “Divergent” series by Veronica Roth. Or the “Delirium” series by Lauren Oliver. Or the “Matched” series by Ally Condie, or the “Uglies” series by Scott Westerfield, or a variant of “The Hunger Games” or any of the young adult female-led trilogies that hit stores and teenagers between the years of 2010 and 2015. This literary phenomenon was mostly ignored (as most young adult fiction is) by older generations. But the weird Millennial-Gen Z mashup generation that went to middle school in the early 2010s received the full brunt of its force. Dystopian novels took bookstores and middle schools by storm, and even self-professed seventh-grade literary snobs (like my past self) could not ignore the love. This specific breed of young adult fiction had a remarkable ability to hold the attention spans of tween and teenage readers, even in a period when this age group was, for the most part, getting their first smartphones. Something made them magnetic, even after reading was no longer considered “cool.” These series achieved the effect in two ways: They organize their stories into a series format, which kept readers reading, and they employ just enough plot twists to keep the reader engaged without feeling tricked. Their prose is simple, usually in the first person, and involves more action than description, which is perfect for a book written for a mass of thirteen-year-olds. Furthering their popularity, series like “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games” were turned into movies with attractive leading actors and aggressive marketing teams. Much of the tension in these novels stems from governmental restriction and control. In “Matched,” the government controls who you love; in “Delirium,” the government controls whether you can love at all; in “Divergent,” the government controls your behavioral traits (which determines who you love), and so on. Almost every young adult has problems with some form of authority figure. These novels paint these figures in an overwhelmingly negative light, but family and guardians often remain relatively unscathed. The family, in fact, is usually a source of support and an object of devotion and love. Even when it seems like parents are the “bad guys,” setting boundaries and enforcing curfews, novels from this specific subgenre remind the reader that they have our
best interests at heart. Perhaps this comes from the writers themselves being parents — they are more inclined to show characters that are most like themselves in the most positive light possible, even in a story where they are writing from a 16-yearold’s point of view. The dystopian novels of the 2010s take the universal fears and frustrations of young adults and cloak them in science fiction and dramatic action. Middle school is a constant battle to fit in and find out who you are. It’s probably the first time you had a real crush on someone else. These books, with their categorizations and romantic subplots, frame these problems not as inconsequential — how most middle schoolers are told — but instead as absolutely crucial. In the same way a sixth grader might be choosing which table to sit at for lunch, Tris chooses which faction she will call her new home. Young teenagers do not need fiction to solve their problems — people of this age have been having the same issues, in one form or another, for a very long time. Instead, young adult readers simply need fiction to validate their emotions in a world that tells them those very emotions are superfluous. Looking back, a sixth grade crush or choice of dress for the eighth grade formal seems utterly insignificant. But at the time, it feels like the decision of a lifetime. Middle school years are defined by big emotions attributed to little things: Being melodramatic and crying because a paper fortune teller told you your crush would never like you back is an integral part of being a young adult. The role of these dystopian novels, then, is to give readers a space in which they can fully experience those emotions without being condescended for their “unimportance.” At their core, all these series rely on the idea that human nature cannot be categorized, no matter how hard humans try. The evil authoritarian societies try to confine human nature to one aspect. In the beginning, before the main character and the reader uncover the sinister underbelly of the particular society, this seems perfect. After all, categorization makes things so much simpler: Imagine a world without all the messy emotions and trial-and-error of trying to find yourself. Life would be much more straightforward if we all knew our explicit, definite role in society — where, exactly, we fit in. It would be nice if we all knew exactly where we belonged by our early teens, but these books gave our middle school selves the answer we didn’t really want to hear: That easy categorization might seem like utopia, but is actually just a gross oversimplification of human nature. This dystopian literary phenomenon, though perhaps unoriginal and overly romanticized, validated the larger existential and emotional frustrations our generation experienced at the time of their peak popularity.
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The Final Girl’s final demise ANDREW WARRICK Daily Arts Writer
In her 1992 book “Men, Women, and Chainsaws,” Carol J. Clover coined the term ‘Final Girl,’ referring to female leads in horror movies who survive as the other characters are killed off. Carol writes that they “shriek, run, flinch, jump or fall … (and) sustain injury and mutilation” until they escape or, infrequently, kill the attacker themselves. Clover explains that they are less people and more “abject terror personified,” existing solely to be afraid. The tormented female protagonist has existed almost as long as horror has, with ‘Scream Queens’ like Ann Darrow in 1933’s “King Kong” shrieking their way through the plot, a stereotype that transformed into the ‘Final Girl’ through the decades. The concept coalesced in the 1970s, with characters like Laurie in “Halloween” being hunted by powerful villains like Michael Myers. While they do fight back, every ‘Final Girl’ spends most of their stories terrified, trying to escape the villain. This lasted until the new millennium, when cinema began to embrace new ideas and voices. In 1999’s “Scream,” Sydney is still a ‘Final Girl’ but violently fights with almost no fear when compared to Laurie from “Halloween,” and even terrifies her attackers. Then there is Sarah in 2005’s “The Descent,” who hits another character with a pickaxe, leaving them for the monsters so she can escape with her own life. A weirder example is 2006’s “Inland Empire,” where Laura Dern (“Blue Velvet”) plays both the hero and villain, and it is sometimes unclear who is who. While the roles of ‘Final Girl’ and villain were still obvious in these movies, the inhumanity stretched to both. In the 21st century, The ‘Final Girl’ didn’t just flee the monsters blindly. She made ambiguous, brutal choices that ran against the ‘Scream Queen’ stereotype. In the 2000s, the ‘Final Girls’ strained the trope’s limits, with a horrific action here or a murky decision there. In the 2010s, however, they transformed entirely. In 2014’s “Under The Skin,” an alien stalks the streets of Scotland, abducting humans for food. While this seems like the perfect set up for an “alien terrorizes Final Girl” scenario, like 1979’s “Alien,” the extraterrestrial instead takes the form of a woman played by Scarlett Johansson (“Marriage Story”) and
does not fit the typical role of the antagonist. This time, the alien is the main character. The female protagonist in “Under the Skin” is no ‘Final Girl,’ though. She is intelligent, powerful and unafraid. She murders people but develops shades of kindness, creating an empathetic push and pull that’s impossible with simple heroes and villains. While the alien is chased by an assailant in the final minutes of the film, it’s by an average man, not a monster like the usual ‘Final Girl’ adversaries. After being assaulted by said man, the alien sheds their female skin and stares into its human eyes. An alien, a creature usually depicted as a monster in horror, holds the skin of an assaulted woman, a trait that typifies the ‘Final Girl,’ as if contemplating, why wear the skin if it only brings terror and injury? Subsequent characters chose not to. In 2015, Thomasin in “The Witch” survives as her family is killed off, but, ultimately, doesn’t fight back or even run from the witches. She joins them. 2018’s “Suspiria” is similar: Susie triumphantly becomes the leader of a sinister witch coven in 1970s Berlin. Like “Under The Skin,” these women break the ‘Final Girl’ mold and become something far more complicated. They are attacked by horrific forces and fight back, but don’t do it out of fright; their violence is imbued with deep power. They also embrace violence and the supernatural, without being confined to the role of a villain. Without the ‘Final Girl’ trope, horror can tread new ground, forcing audiences to empathize with dark, complex characters and examine their own capacity for evil. What happens after losing one’s humanity? Can violence be healing and redemptive? Can one escape the patriarchy by joining a coven of witches? These questions, and many more, could be asked only by discarding the ‘Final Girl’ stereotype, and are mostly unique to the 2010s. In no other genre, and at no other time, have the roles of hero and villain converged in this way, to such profound and horrific effect. In 2018’s “Halloween,” everything comes full circle. Laurie and Michael Myers return, and the ending is shot to mirror the original. Yet it’s Myers that hides, as Laurie hunts for him with a shotgun. She is ferocious in a way that approaches that of a serial killer, like Myers. It may have taken almost half a century, but Laurie finally isn’t afraid.
B-SIDE: COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK
Love, an anxious generation NINA MOLINA For The Daily
After recently being added to the Subtle Depressed People Traits group on Facebook, I enjoyed laughing in my room late at night, scrolling from a macabre Winne the Pooh joke about mental illness to a self-deprecating tweet complaining about being lonely but never leaving the house. These are the jokes for the generation of kids who are trying to cope. The past decade saw a rise in mental illness and mental health awareness in schools and in my own life. I was officially diagnosed with anxiety and depression in early 2016. At first, I was embarrassed about the stigma, worried that others would not want to associate with someone so unstable. Going into college, I felt like I had “ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION WATCH OUT” scrawled in black Sharpie on my forehead. However, the more I opened up to others, I found that many students were struggling with what I was. Generation Z, those born from 1997 onward (according to the Pew Research Center), has grown up amid the divisive politics, mass shootings, sexual harassment and climate change of the 2010s. The American Psychological Association’s October 2018 study “Stress in America: Generation Z” wrote, “America’s youngest adults are most likely of all generations to report poor mental health, and Gen Z is also significantly more likely to seek professional help for mental health issues.” The APA survey found that a major stressor for Generation Z was gun violence caused by mass shootings and school shootings. By the time the Pulse (2016), Las Vegas (2017) and Parkland (2018) mass shootings had happened, our generation grew anxious of the reality that it could happen at any of the malls, high schools or concerts that we were attending. The panic over continued mass shootings opened up a conversation about gun control, followed by the backlash for politicizing a tragedy, ultimately burying the discussion of gun laws until the next mass shooting. The resilience of Gen Z activists like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, survivors of the Parkland school shooting, sparked the March for Our Lives movement and a national conversation. A few days after the Walmart shooting in El Paso, I remember being on the second floor of a Target and wondering how I would escape if there was a shooter. It is this kind of anxiety that proliferates around
our generation. While politics in America were forever changed in the 2016 elections, Gen Z-ers continued to charge through childhood and adolescence surrounded by the white noise of this divisive political era. The normalization of acts like deportation and family separation has led our generation to become almost numb to the news cycles and Twitter battles. The #MeToo movement opened up an entire system of sexual harassment and oppression of the powerless by the those in power, unveiling the systemic levels of silence and cover-up, a rude awakinging for young women espeically. I hope I can speak for most college students when I say I can remember holding my breath during the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh hearings. It felt like “he said” would eventually trump “she said,” and it was enraging to witness. All the while, climate change’s detrimental effects continue to escalate to unprecedented levels by anthropogenic causes, like air and water pollution. Even with the overwhelming support and evidence from the scientific community, leaders within our country and around the world continue to ignore how pressing and dire our climate crisis is. Another Gen Z activist, Greta Thunberg, is leading the charge and inspiring Generation Z and others to become more vocal and steadfast in fighting for our beliefs. Generation Z is known for their mental health, but maybe our identity stems from more than just increasing levels of anxiety about our changing world. I believe it also displays our generation’s ability to show vulnerability about our anxieties and the effects they bring, leading to mental health awareness popping up as a conversation topic and, sometimes, outright theme at college events and high school pep rallies. A Wall Street Journal article this past May stated that companies are now implementing mental health seminars and protocols for their employees in the wake of Gen Z’s enterance into the workforce. The rise of stress management apps and programs is just the start of the major de-stigmatization of mental illness and the embracing of the importance of mental health in overall well-being. When a tumultuous world called, Generation Z bit back with internet culture blended with creative genius and a sharp sense of humor. We are the generation that cuts darkness with humor and wit, attempting to diffuse the tension and fear, to allow ourselves to bond over shared anxieties and feel less alone in these chaotic times.
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Thursday, December 5, 2019 — 5B
B-SIDE: TV/FILM CROSSOVER
The crossover of the decade: 2020 in film and television ANYA SOLLER Daily Arts Writer
STEPHEN SATARINO Daily Film Editor
Comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler began their night as hosts of the 2015 Golden Globes with a joke that would define popular media in the 2010s: “Only at the Golden Globes do the beautiful people of film rub shoulders with the rat-faced people of television.” This line, while intended to poke fun at the persistent belief that film is a higher and more prestigious art form than television, actually exposes a recent trend that has made this belief obsolete. The Golden Globes aren’t the only place where faces from both film and TV cross paths; in fact, the worlds of the two mediums have become so enmeshed that the distinction between movie star and TV actor is no longer clear-cut. In a decade where streaming services like Netflix and Hulu dominate cable television, the idea that TV has no artistic value has faded away almost entirely. When sitcoms and procedurals were the most popular shows on television, it was easy to say that the medium may not be as impactful or meaningful as cinema. However, with billions of dollars spent every year on original content for streaming services, television has evolved far beyond its small-time roots. While bitingly funny, Fey and Poehler’s suggestion that the worlds of film and TV are overlapping fails to acknowledge that, in the past ten years, these worlds have become nearly identical. Rather than pushing “serious” actors to film, renowned television series have pulled top-billed names into the TV industry and made the careers of countless new stars. With the stigma towards TV as a lower-budget medium effectively erased, talent has sprawled across its native platforms. In fact, the Golden Globes are the perfect representation of how the film and TV industries have intersected. The award show, which has categories for film and TV productions, has seen steady ratings in a time where more niche award shows like the Emmys and the Oscars have experienced a significant decrease in ratings over the past few years. The Golden Globes have also been lauded for their commitment to coming through on promises of diversity on-screen and on-stage.
The blurring of lines between TV and film has opened doors for new stars and new representation that was previously unseen in the nearly all-white films and shows before the 2010s. While minorities and women are still underrepresented in pop culture, the push for more varied stories and faces to tell those stories has intensely affected both industries. By acknowledging the growing similarities between the forms of media, the quality of TV shows and films has responded to the other’s respective success with more thought for the consumer. As the demand for representation has increased, each platform has raced to make that goal a reality. While there is still much work to be done in improving the entertainment industry as a whole, it is undeniable that the reactions of TV and film producers will be similar. With content and public interest becoming more closely aligned, the two formats will continue to merge as reflections of the calls for social change in popular media. Soon, it won’t be just the Golden Globes where TV and film are in the same room together. It’ll be in every aspect of their production and use. — Anya Soller, Daily Arts Writer In sum: The 2010s have been a decade of convergence for television and movies. “Movies,” here, means specifically the Scorsese-would-spit-on-their-graves type, all the “Potters”, and Marvels, and “Star Wars” and “Jurassic Parks.” The “television” I’m referencing is not the latest CBS sitcom — not “God Friended Me,” not “Man with a Plan.” The convergence of movies and television has been brought on by that other class of TV, those script-driven-dramas that aim to rise to a higher artistic occasion, reckoning themselves serious and important, and receiving crucial praise that would validate them as such. High-brow television has, as Richard Brody put it in his recent New Yorker article on the 27 best movies of the decade, taken the place of the “so-called mid-range drama for adults,” filling the niche in entertainment for script-driven narratives, often “(subtracting out any) discernable directorial originality or inventiveness.” At the same time, movies have stolen a core tenet of the television show: the serialization. Every single one of the top twenty movies in the box office this decade, as well as the most profitable film from each year this decade (minus 2014’s ticket-stub crown going to
“American Sniper”), has been a remake or a franchise film. If it’s true that there’s been a resurgence of box office numbers, if it’s true that people are getting back to the theaters, it’s cinematic, extended universes and nostalgia trips that are putting butts into seats. The decade-long period that started in the mid-2000s and ran through the middle of the 2010s, often called the Golden Age of Television, was headlined by television shows that aimed to reach past what was narratively expected of them, working with literary aspirations, even, in some cases. As Adam Wilson noted in his reflective essay in Harper’s on the many Golden Ages of television earlier this fall, critics aren’t afraid to pass around the idea of the visual medium as a literary one, pulling a quote from writer Brett Martin, who called “The Wire” “one of the greatest literary accomplishments of the early twenty-first century.” If you ask the average, avid fan of television, you’ll hear that it’s TV, not cinema, that’s taken the seat as the rightful artistic heir to the novel, the play, the poetic epic — not that there needs to be a successor, not that it was necessarily going to be cinema in the first place. What does it say that the evolution of each of these forms — of television and of movies — seems to have come at the hands of the other? More so in the past decade than ever before, industry creativity and talent has been pumped into prestige dramatic television, with every studio, cable channel and streaming service looking for their spiritual successor to “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” Just so, we’ve seen Hollywood rear its ugly (and obviously profit-driven) head — the advent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the sequel-
storm that followed, making explicitly clear what the industry values: Selling tickets at any cost, even if that means the end product tends toward unoriginal, repetitive, increasingly vapid. Hollywood’s major model to this end has been to franchise everything, to jam anything they can into a cinematic, extended, multi-movie universe. All of a sudden, the slate at your local multi-plex begins to resemble the schedule of a cable television channel. Installment after installment after installment of stories that seem like they’ll never advance, nevermind end. *** Throughout this decade, streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have further blurred the line between television and film, releasing Oscar-contending features directly onto laptops and living room televisions, a type of direct, front-facing access with the content that used to be reserved for TV. Big name directors like Noah Baumbach, Alfonso Cuarón, Bong Joon Ho and Martin Scorsese have turned to Netflix to make movies, in many cases bypassing a theatrical release wholesale. Just a few weeks ago, the Department of Justice released a statement declaring that they would be terminating the Supreme Court decision from 1948 which broke up vertical integration — the monopolies that studios like Paramount had — in the entertainment industry. The historic Paramount decision prohibited studios from owning their own theaters, creating competition by ensuring that each local theater, maybe the only one in a city or region, wasn’t showing movies made by only one company. The timing of the DOJ’s decision comes with more than a hint of irony.
As we move into the next decade, I can’t help but believe that cinema — in the Scorsese-wouldNOT-spit-ontheir-graves sense — will be further banished from the studio system.
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B-SIDE: TV NOTEBOOK
B-SIDE: COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK
Laugh, TV is funny Growing up with multiple moms JUSTIN POLLACK
ZACHARY M.S. WAARALA
Daily Arts Writer
Daily Arts Writer
ALIX CURNOW Ranking television shows is an impossible task, one that’s only gotten more difficult as there are fewer and fewer shows that everyone watches. There is little difference between number five and number three, so I am opting to chronologically rank them instead. Binge-watching television shows, as opposed to viewing them week-to-week, makes it harder to recall the details as you don’t have any time to process. As we near the end of the decade, here is a list of the shows no one should forget. 5. “30 Rock” (2006-2013) Available on Hulu 138 Episodes Bizarre, hilarious and witty. Loosely based on Tina Fey’s experience as a head writer
HBO
for “Saturday Night Live,” “30 Rock” follows Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, as the head writer and showrunner of the NBC sketch comedy show “TGS with Tracy Jordan.” She supervises the cast and crew, which includes her best friend Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”), the difficult-to-manage Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan, “Green Eggs and Ham”) and network executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin, “Saturday Night Live”). Episodes often feature arguments between Donaghy’s conservative views against Lemon’s liberal ones, Maroney’s attempts to become a film star, Jordan’s poor behavior and their romantic and personal lives. It is extremely reflexive, making jokes about NBC and even satirizing Comcast’s acquisition of it. 4. “The Office” (2005-2013) Available on Netflix 201 Episodes Based on the British show of the same name, “The Office” is a mockumentary-style sitcom that depicts the everyday lives of office employees in Scranton, Pennsylvania at the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. It employs a huge ensemble cast, most notably Steve Carell as Michael Scott, the well-intentioned yet often misunderstood regional manager who frequently ends up annoying his employees. The first season was met with mixed reviews but was followed by several seasons of critical acclaim. Although the final two seasons did not feature Carell (resulting in a large dip in quality), the show will always be remembered for being one of the first comedies in the United States without a laugh track to have solid ratings. There may never be a character like Michael Scott on television again, so get your last couple re-watches through because the show is heading to NBC’s own streaming platform in January of 2021. Until then, “The Office” remains Netflix’s most streamed show. 3. “Parks and Recreation” (2009-2015) Available on Netflix 125 Episodes “Parks and Rec” is often compared to “The Office,” and people will get in heated debates about which show is better (I am, personally, Team Leslie). This mockumentarystyle political satire sitcom stars Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, the deputy director of the Parks and Recreation Department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana alongside her best friend Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones, “Angie Tribeca”). Additionally, it features a strong supporting cast that includes Aziz Ansari, Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Pratt.
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Daily Arts Writer
I come from a family of five: a brother, a sister and two moms. “Two moms” is an interesting way to express the different and historically complicated relationship of being raised by a lesbian couple, though “two moms” is how I have always described my family situation. This is often followed by “oh, you have a stepmom.” Nope. “Your dad remarried?” Wrong again. “Then were you adopted?” Sperm donor. It took some time before I was able to comprehend why my situation was so confusing. To be raised by an openly gay couple is rare. Alix, the co-writer of this piece, is the first person I have ever met who shares this experience. Rare experiences make for interesting writing, and I am happy to share as we reminisce on the decade and the legalization of gay marriage that came with it. One question I often receive, as a heterosexual male, is what it was like to be void of fatherly influence in my upbringing. My response to this, for the majority of my life was, “Well, I have uncles and grandfathers,” which is a response I regret to have ever given out. The question itself is problematic, for what is fatherly influence? Is it knowing how to play football? My mother taught me how to throw a tight spiral. Is it having some older representative of male anatomy? My parents are both physicians — they know more about male anatomy than most dads. I call my brother my brother and my sister my sister even though we share no genetic connection. I call them my brother and my sister because we grew up together, under the same roof, calling the same people our parents. I call both my parents mom, because that is who they have always been to me and my siblings. This is not in defense of gay marriage, because we have nothing to be defensive of. My family and I lack anything to be sorry for, we bear no burdens for having lived the way we always have. Gay marriage should have never have had to be legalized, because it never should have been illegal in the first place. I was provided a safe home, a childhood I am fond of, a space for creativity and freedom of ideas. My lesbian parents raised three children and did a fine job doing so. We are all healthy, in a good state of mind, with goals and aspirations: I’m not sure what else a straight family could provide. For years, I was silent at school about our family situation, especially since my siblings and I grew up in a fairly conservative area. After the legalization of gay marriage, it felt as though there was some national recognition of our family after years of rejection and fear of exile. The legalization of gay marriage meant a great deal for my family, though it was more symbolic of national and political acceptance. My parents had been together for over twenty years and had raised three children before their partnership was legally recognized. In this sense, the act was more an affirmation than a permission slip, but it was celebrated nonetheless. In 2015, my mother proposed to my other mother at our family home, despite already having been together for twenty years. There are many stories like my parents’ because the legalization was a chance to renew an already solid partnership, in a bond familiar to those who had disavowed them for millennia. — Zachary M.S. Waarala, Daily Arts Writer *** Growing up with lesbian moms meant that there was a routine of phrases I had plenty of practice saying. “Yes, I really have four moms.” “No, they are not in a polygamous relationship.” “No, I’m not adopted, I had a sperm donor.” “No, I don’t really care to meet him.” The list goes on. I’ve told the story of my familial life so often, I could say it in my sleep. My parents are lesbians. When I was three they separated and each met new partners. My two lesbian mothers multiplied into four and boom, I have four moms.
When I was in third grade, I came up with nicknames for all of them in order to make conversations about my moms less confusing when I was talking with my friends. The nicknames stuck and now, whenever I talk about my moms I refer to them as “Broken Ankle Mom” (because she had a broken ankle at the time), “Police Mom” (because she is a policewoman), “Taco Bell Mom” (she used to work at Taco Bell) and British Mom (she’s British). Growing up, my familial life never seemed out of the ordinary. Even though there was only one other kid in my town who had gay parents, I didn’t feel any different. I grew up in a pretty conservative area, yet nobody made fun of me. At least, not to my face. I’m sure they might’ve said some things behind my back. In fact, one time in high school, a football player whispered to me, “I know your secret … your parents are gay.” Which I found pretty hilarious at the time (and still do). The only thing I found weird was that before June 26, 2015, my parents were never married. My birth mother and my British mom were together for ten years before they separated. If they could have legally gotten married, they would have. Sure, all of my mothers acknowledged that marriage wasn’t a defining factor of their love. Yet, the numerous legal issues that came along with not being allowed to marry was quite frustrating. I remember once, when my Birtish mom was hospitalized, the hospital did not allow my policewoman mom to visit her during “family only hours.” She had to sit outside in the waiting room, unable to stand beside the love of her life during what was quite a traumatic experience. In the eyes of the law, they were just two women who lived together. It was because of this that I so desperately wanted gay marriage to be legalized. In fact, I even wrote a letter to President Obama asking him to make it legal. I still have the “letter” he wrote back to me framed in my childhood bedroom, complete with the everpersonal phrase, “Dear Student of America.” The day gay marriage was finally legalized was a visceral experience. I was on my first ever date with a girl when I heard the news. We were at the local zoo and my phone exploded with texts from all of my moms. I came home from my date to the rainbow flag flying outside of our house. Our family had always been valid to us, but now we were seen as valid in the eyes of our country. The five remaining years of the 2010s were complete with both sets of mothers tying the knot with one another. While the love between my parents was omnipresent during the first half of the decade, it was the legalization of gay marriage that made the latter half of the decade something to celebrate. After gay marriage was legalized, there was a sense of hope that both Zach’s and my family shared. A hope for the future. A hope that families like ours wouldn’t feel the insecurity we felt. Because there is no reason to feel insecure. Families like Zach’s and mine have love at their core, just as other families do. Love that has always existed and will continue to exist, regardless of what any law could ever say. — Alix Curnow, Daily Arts Writer
In 2015, my mother proposed to my other mother at our family home, despite already having been together for 20 years.
6B — Thursday, December 5, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
B-SIDE: FILM NOTEBOOK
Sorry! My Prada’s at the cleaners: “The Social Network”
the first scene. And the precision of those words stings. Moreover, Fincher’s attention to immaculate set design and Daily Arts Writer tendency toward claustrophobically immersive camerawork never falters. In particular, the Henley While there’s no cut-and-dry definition of the best film of the Royal Regatta race is an adrenaline shot decade, some measures are better than others. For me, a decade- of a scene, depicting the athletes as vivid, defining movie must be more than technically, critically or imperfect figures amid blurry, dreamlike commercially successful. Many films from the 2010s met all of scenery. While every other scene in the film these criteria, all competent, some more memorable than others. is essentially a conversation, Fincher never After all, even the most holistic and unambiguous appreciation is no misses an opportunity to let his characters’ guarantee that the product will persist in our collective conscious violent undertones rudely shift the camera, or their positions in the frame tell us something for years to come. So what makes the difference then? What sets apart the new. It’s an easy movie to direct with obvious choices. But momentarily Fincher’s direction great from the takes more than transcendent? enough risks to In a word, impress. dynamism. How “What sound is can art, film he making? Is that or otherwise, like a tsk?” define its time A scrawny unless it pulls college student off a magic trick with a backpack of transforming and a hoodie is and warping sprinting across right before campus. He weaves our very eyes? through arches For a film to and alleyways, say something a shortcut here, meaningful a sidestep there. about its era is His humility is present; several trios one thing. To of piano notes that seem to float and still have an hover in your ears. His rage is palpable incessant voice, too — it’s a sinister, soul-shaking hum in a stamp on the background. Together, these sonic culture several textures communicate the tender darkness years after SONY MOTION PICTURES / YOUTUBE of Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve studied to Trent its release, is Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar-winning another thing score more than I’ve studied to anything else. It is a thrumming entirely. With that broad metric in mind, there is a clear winner here. electronic abyss peppered with deeply comforting melodies. The It might not even be a close contest — the best movie of the industrial-techno beat of “In Motion” is followed promptly by the decade is David Fincher’s “The Social Network.” As both a wildly squeaking grittiness of “A Familiar entertaining tragedy of deteriorating friendships and a diagnosis on Taste.” Hopeful chords can exist, the impending future of technological communication, “The Social if only for a fleeting moment, taken Network” perfectly straddles the line between watchability and over by dissonance. Our characters cultural dynamism in a way that no other film from the decade does. chase their ambitions and only Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin once admitted, “I’ve heard of falter when those ambitions incite Facebook, in the same way I’ve heard of a carburetor. But if I opened sour consequences. Dreams can the hood of my car I wouldn’t know how to find it.” This information reach only so far, long enough is important; Sorkin explicitly distinguishes his story from reality. until that droning buzzy emptiness Not once do the words “Based on a true story” appear across the subsumes all, until friendships are screen. Yet that fact is what makes the film so compelling as an only burdens. While Reznor and Ross have artifact of this decade. What Sorkin intended as a human drama with Facebook in its periphery ultimately speaks for itself about identified a style to their score the woes, dangers and evils of the tech conglomerates that rule compositions, they are probably our lives. In this way, “The Social Network” is an unintentionally better known for their work in oracular statement more than it is a testament to Sorkin’s predictive Nine Inch Nails. But what I find most remarkable about the movie’s instincts. score is how little of a departure “Gretchen, they’re best friends.” The collaboration of Fincher and Sorkin is perplexing on its it actually is from the industrial surface — Sorkin is most concerned about the depth of his content rock band. Reznor is no stranger to where Fincher prefers a focus on structure and tone. Sorkin’s writing depraved, lonely music. He characters are snappy and shrewd where Fincher’s are idiosyncratic has an uncanny ability to affirm one and futile. And yet the marriage of their work manages not only to while dragging them further into retain the best qualities of both, but also adds synergy to them. his dark orbit. And that quality is Fincher is notorious for being a rigid perfectionist, so Sorkin’s precisely how he gives the score its esoteric, game-theoretic dialogue plays out with striking clarity. lasting edge. Sometimes, we are all “But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you the kid behind the computer, fingers clacking furiously away into because you are a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of the void. “We don’t know what it is yet.” my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole,” “The Social Network” imagines the beginnings of Facebook as Rooney Mara’s (“A Ghost Story”) Erica Albright hisses at the end of ANISH TAMHANEY
a youthful, enterprising endeavor. “The Facebook is cool,” Justin Timberlake’s (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) Sean Parker says. “You don’t want to ruin it with ads because ads aren’t cool.” And for all the things that the real life Facebook has become since the movie’s release, “cool” and “ad-free” are certainly not accurate descriptors. In Sorkin’s optimistic imagination, the company was created by people who didn’t understand what it was. If anything, reality has affirmed this narrative; only since the Brexit vote and the Cambridge Analytica scandal has the world woken up to the actual extent of political and social power the site has. Actual events affect how we rewatch the film, but interaction goes both ways. Watching Jesse Eisenberg’s (“The Hummingbird Project”) real-life counterpart and his blabbering testimony on Capitol Hill is fascinating. He carries all the highstrung, geeky energy, but without the ease or the nonchalance of the character. He in every way has become the worst version of a lonesome coder who got dumped in a bar; more accurately, lonesome coder with his tendrils in control of global communication. It doesn’t matter that Facebook wasn’t started over a breakup at a Harvard bar. Whether we like it or not, Jesse Eisenberg’s performance has irreversibly shaped our perception of one of the biggest figures in tech today. *** What better way for this decade to end then for Sorkin himself to pen a New York Times opinion lambasting Mark Zuckerberg? “The Social Network” is a movie that has dramatically changed since its release. Its interaction with culture is a conversation, not a statement. How its impact will shift in the future is impossible to tell, so we need to keep watching it. But the actual experience of watching it isn’t boring, or a chore. It’s a delightful example of talented craftspeople working at the peak of their SONY MOTION PICTURES / YOUTUBE respective potentials. Our need for communication will never end. And, unfortunately, the deluge of creepy hacker tech figures might not either. “The Social Network” is a half-open window into the kind of loneliness that drives our desire to stay connected with each other.
As both a wildly entertaining tragedy of deteriorating frienships and a diagnosis on the impending future of technological communication, “The Social Network” perfectly straddles the line betwen watchability and cultural dynamism in a way that no other film from the decade does.
B-SIDE: MUSIC NOTEBOOK
Bikinis, Bud Lights and the brazen rise of bro-country KATIE BEEKMAN Daily Arts Writer
Bro-country, a word that sends shivers down the spines of genre traditionalists, brings smiles to the faces of millions of loyal listeners and sounds like money to industry insiders. Coined in 2013 by Jody Rosen in New York Magazine, he pins down the subgenre as being “music by and of the tatted, gymtoned, partyhearty American white dude.” Whether you like it or not, this character (and his infatuation with trucks, beer and girls) defines the past decade of mainstream country music. Popular but polarizing, it’s worth acknowledging the best, or at least the most memorable, bro-country hits of the 2010s — if not for sentimentality’s sake, than to help us figure out where mainstream country music is headed in 2020. “Dirt Road Anthem” was recorded twice before it became the highestselling record by a solo male country artist, so it’s significant that its success came with Jason Aldean. It was a glimpse into the future. In 2011, a rapinfluenced country song had never broken into the mainstream before, that is until the mash-up was endorsed by Aldean, an already established artist. The popularity of “Dirt Road Anthem” offered just an inkling of the potential that its kind of sound and shallow themes might hold when given the opportunity to reach a bigger audience. Soon enough, everyone was trying to rap about
The popularity of “Dirt Road Anthem” offered just an inkling of the potential that its kind of sound and shallow themes might hold when given the opportunty to reach a bigger audience. Soon enough, everyone was trying to rap about “cornbread and biscuits.”
“cornbread and biscuits.” “Baby you a song / You make me wanna roll my windows down / and cruise.” In the summer of 2013, with an added verse from Nelly, “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line was inescapable. And let’s be honest, the hook is probably in your head right now. But what is it even about? Literally, it’s about getting a girl to ride in your truck with you. But really, as the first country song to ever go diamond, it’s about country songs not needing to be about anything. That’s key. If the genre’s best-selling song was a heartfelt, acoustic story-song, then that’s what country radio would have been playing the past few years. But it wasn’t. Instead, we have hundreds of “long, tanned legs” copycats. Later that year, Zac Brown infamously called this song “the worst song (he’s) ever heard” and for good reason: “That’s My Kinda Night” by Luke Bryan can sound painfully cringe-y. “Little Conway a little T-Pain / Might just make it rain,” Bryan croons, which feels more like a threat than a welcome suggestion. If that wasn’t bad enough, an auto-tuned voice echoes the “make it rain” verse unironically. But as hard as it is to admit, I like it. I understand the song’s appeal. It’s insanely catchy, and, for a young woman from the suburbs, it’s fun to play pretend, to embody the swagger of a cocky, hypermasculine bro, if only for three minutes. “It’s gettin’ kinda cold in these painted on cut off jeans” Maddie & Tae sigh on their refreshing first single, giving country listeners a much-needed reality check. Even though “Girl In a Country Song,” released in 2014, is antibro-country, it absolutely is worth acknowledging as it proves that bro-country’s domination was met with some pushback from fellow artists. The song takes the perspective of the onedimensional props used in all of the songs mentioned above, the girl, and finds out that being the bro’s muse isn’t as fun as they make it sound. It’s chock full of references to the songs it got played alongside on the radio, but twists their lyrics into funny one-liners to prove a point. “Can I put on some real clothes now?” they wonder. Although the song hit #1 and got the duo plenty of interviews, bro-country continued answering no. After bashing Bryan’s hip hop-infused country, Zac Brown decided to
give the style a try himself on his 2016 album Jekyll + Hyde. “Beautiful Drug” is one of its standouts, exemplary of the way country can blend with EDM relatively seamlessly. It’s a glossy, highly produced, extended metaphor with a beat drop as irresistible as Brown finds his love interest. Because of Brown’s initial resistance to this kind of genre-bending, the song’s existence also demonstrates the overwhelming wave of experimentation country started going through in the latter half of the decade, something that sprouted from bro-country. If Zac Brown got on board, rest assured nearly everyone else in mainstream country music did too. Released in 2017, “Body Like a Back Road” is “Dirt Road Anthem” 2.0 which makes the genre’s dramatic evolution all the more evident. Unlike Aldean, Sam Hunt is open about his rapping influences. Instead of real drums, Hunt opts to rhyme against a snap track. And the narrative itself is different. The singer no longer meets the girl on the dirt road — in Hunt’s version, her agency has been cut down to the point that she is the dirt road. Hunt’s style had already struck up a conversation about the boundaries of country music, what’s borrowing and what’s appropriating, but ultimately the success of the song pushes all of those questions aside. “Body Like a Back Road” and Hunt himself suggest that anything can be country, so long as that’s what the artist calls themself. Throughout the past 10 years, country radio has been playing women less and less, bringing in sounds and artists from different genres more and more, and finding new ways to compare women to inanimate objects. But it wasn’t all bad. As Kacey Musgraves gets recognized for her instrumentally rich and witty style and traditional-leaning and Luke Combs starts to dominate the charts, it’s clear that the genre is preparing to start a new US AIR FORCE chapter. The 2010s raised questions fundamental to the essence of what country music is. For better or for worse, the next decade holds the answers.