2022-02-23

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Ann Arbor, Michigan

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‘We don’t trust the administration’: U-M alumni denounce ‘U’ handling of sexual assault

Survivors criticize University for inadequate response to misconduct allegations ANNA FIFELSKI & MARTHA LEWAND Daily Staff Reporters

First Regents meeting of year discusses presidential search, felony disclosure policy

JOSÉ BRENES/Daily

Public commenters advocate for student representation on the Board, more focus on carbon neutrality efforts ANNA FIFELSKI & MARTHA LEWAND Daily Staff Reporters

The University of Michigan Board of Regents met at the Postma Family Clubhouse Thursday for their first meeting of the year. They discussed plans for a presidential search committee, new dorm proposals on North Campus and heard from the Central Student Government about the current felony disclosure policy.

Coleman began the meeting by emphasizing her commitment to the University community as well as her focus on academic excellence.

“Our collective commitment to learning and discovery holds true for yesterday, and it will guide us for tomorrow,” Coleman said. “It is what compels us as a university to take great risks, so that we may always pursue new knowledge for the good of society.”

Coleman’s current contract with

the University has her serving for six months or until a new president is appointed.

Regents Denise Ilitch (D) and Sarah Hubbard (R) gave statements on the Presidential Search Committee, which is comprised of students, faculty and staff from all three campuses and Michigan Medicine. The duo announced the committee in an email to the campus community “Our board is very excited about our presidential search and we have worked very hard to build a Presidential Search Committee that is widely representative of our very diverse community,” Ilitch said. “We’ve already had our initial meeting, and we look forward to insights from this incredible group as we proceed with our search. We are eager to hear directly from students, faculty and staff across campuses about their perspectives and expectations as we work to identify the next leader of our university.”

Hubbard said the University is hosting a virtual listening session on Feb. 18 for Ann Arbor campus faculty and staff. Other sessions gauged towards Michigan Medicine, Ann Arbor students and the Dearborn campus community are scheduled for Feb. 21-23.

The regents also discussed plans for constructing a geothermal plant to power the new Leinweber Computer Science and Information Building. This project would be the first large campus building to rely on a source other than natural gas for climate control.

Rebecca Cunningham, vice president of research, then briefed the regents on the state of research at the University. Cunningham said the University has remained the leader among public universities for the eleventh year in a row in terms of research volume, especially in the social sciences. She also said University research projects resulted in 23 startups, 502 inventions and

287 license and option agreements in the past years.

Nithya Arun, Central Student Government President, gave the Student Government Report to discuss the University’s felony disclosure policy as well as student representation on the Board of Regents. The current felony disclosure policy (SPG 601.38) requires employees of the University disclose all felony charges and convictions that occur while affiliated with the University; CSG passed a resolution on Tuesday asking the Regents to rescind this policy.

“It is known that Black and Indigenous communities are disproportionately criminalized and surveilled,” Arun said. “Because of structural factors in the justice system, BIPOC communities are disproportionately affected by SPG 601.38.”

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Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.

The University of Michigan Board of Regents met Thursday, their first time meeting after firing former University President Mark Schlissel for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.

Schlissel’s firing came after the former president touted revisions to the supervisor relationship policy in response to sexual misconduct at the University.

University alum Isabelle Brourman, a survivor of sexual assault, criticized the University’s re-appointment of Interim President Mary Sue Coleman.

“Firing Schlissel is not enough,” Brourman said during public comments. “You fired one president for sexual misconduct and then hired another who was historically indifferent to it. Despite her comments today, Mary Sue Coleman has demonstrated that she is part of the problem.”

Brourman said Coleman and the University were aware of former Provost Martin Philbert’s previous sexual misconduct allegations when he was made dean of the School of Public Health.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Brourman said she filed a lawsuit against the University after her FOIA request — seeking information about investigations into accusations of sexual

misconduct against Conforth done in 2008 and 2016 — was never acknowledged. “(Brourman and other survivors) were curious about what (the University) knew about each (case of abuse) through the investigation because we never heard from them, and we still haven’t heard from the University,” Brourman said. “That’s the part that shocks me the most is that they could know that there was somebody out there that he abused when they looked into his University email and his computer who they decided not to reach out to.”

In addition to the lawsuit, Brourman said she is actively working to get representation from survivors of sexual assault on the Presidential Search Committee.

“We are hopeful that the University will take seriously what I asked for, which is to assign U-M survivors — unfortunately, there’s a ton that they could choose from — to help steer the Presidential Selection Committee,” Brourman said.

Brourman added that if the University extended the invitation to join the committee, she would accept.

“A huge part of why we’re doing what we’re doing is because we don’t trust the administration to protect (students),” Brourman said. “And God forbid, unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly clear that if, God forbid, something were to happen to a student and they got raped, instead of being protected they’ll be perceived as a threat, to the school and its reputation, and that has to change.”

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Washtenaw County UMich to expand community members campus composting host forum on nonprograms police response team More bins will appear on school Coalition for Re-Envisioning Our Safety leads public conversation ISABELLA KASSA Daily Staff Reporter

Over 200 Washtenaw County community members met over Zoom Wednesday night to discuss the implementation of an unarmed safety response team for the county. Led by members of the Coalition for Re-Envisioning Our Safety (CROS) — as well as several other sponsored organizations — the forum discussed the need for non-police responses to community crises as well as a path to implementation within the county.

Donnell Wyche, pastor of the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, spoke first about CROS and its dedication to community-led work. In late January 2022, CROS released a statement on their idea of what an unarmed response team in Ann Arbor could look like. Wyche said the organization will prioritize transformative

justice and building care-based safety within the community when considering methods of implementation.

“CROS is a group of folks who’ve come together to ensure that this process and program that is being created is community-led, it’s evidence based and that it is progressive,” Wyche said.

Wyche continued to explain how the proposed unarmed safety response team will encourage people to move away from the typical model of a 911 call to police.

“When you think of the majority of the calls that come into a dispatch center, over 83% of those calls do not require someone who’s been authorized with a weapon to respond,” Wyche said. “Only 17% of the calls might fit someone’s definition of crime. It might be petty larceny or maybe property crime, but only 4% of those are what someone might Read more at MichiganDaily.com

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grounds to promote waste reduction initiative

CAROLINE WANG Daily Staff Reporter

The University of Michigan’s Office of Campus Sustainability (OCS) announced the expansion of on-campus composting programs in support of their waste reduction initiative.

OCS introduced composting through their Zero Waste Initiative in 2017, focusing on education, accessibility and implementation throughout the campus community.

Composting is the process of recycling organic matter by allowing it to decompose into fertilizer for the soil. Any food waste and materials that are Biodegradable Products Institute certified compostable are considered safe to compost, and BPI certification is designed to prevent greenwashing.

Benefits of composting include: reducing emissions from landfills, improving soil health and reducing food waste. The University aims to reduce food waste 40% by 2025;currently, food waste has been reduced by 32% since Fall 2021. All of the University’s compostable waste gets sent to the City of Ann Arbor’s compost site

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There are currently over 1,000 compost bins in over 150 buildings on campus, but most of the bins are located in staff-focused areas, according to Anya Dale, manager of Waste Reduction and Engagement at OCS. “(Compost bins in stafffocused areas) enables us to capture a lot of the compostable wastes with very minimal concern of contamination,” Dale said. “It’s really important that we minimize that contamination because the facility we take our compost to does not have a sorting mechanism for getting rid of contamination.”

Contaminants are materials that are not compostable and can damage the plants and soil during the compost process.

Plastic is one of the most prevalent contaminants; once mixed with the rest of the compost, animals might mistake plastic particles for food. Additionally, with heavy rainfall irrigation, the microplastic pieces could flow into water sources and contaminate the water.

Dale

said

a

major

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President Biden speaks about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and how it effects the Great Lakes near Lake Erie at The Shipyards in Lorain, Ohio Thursday afternoon.

TESS CROWLEY/Daily

Joe Biden talks infrastructure, Great Lakes during visit to Ohio

New $1 billion fund announced for protecting wildlife, ecosystems in midwest waterways IRENA LI

Daily Staff Reporter

President Joe Biden visited Lorain, Ohio — a small industrial steel town 140 miles southeast of Ann Arbor — on Thursday to discuss the $1 trillion infrastructure bill he signed into law last November and announce $1 billion in funding for the protection of the Great Lakes.

Joined by a cohort of lawmakers and cabinet members, Biden spoke to a crowd of about 60 guests in The Shipyards, a warehouse-turned-restaurant standing along the shores of the

INDEX

Black River and Lake Erie.

The president’s trip to the Cleveland suburb is one of several recent speeches from Democratic politicians in support of the infrastructure package. Both U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-MI, and Biden’s visits served to discuss infrastructure and Great Lakes conservation efforts.

The crowd cheered after Biden announced the $1 billion in funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a program dedicated to protecting the wildlife and ecosystems of the Great Lakes basin.

“It’s going to allow the most

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significant restoration of the Great Lakes in the history of the Great Lakes,” Biden said. “We’re going to accelerate cleanup of sites across six states in the Great Lakes Basin… And we know these sites were dangerously polluted for decades. We’re committed to (cleaning) them up.”

Biden emphasized the need to invest in American infrastructure, citing the collapse of a Pittsburgh bridge last month and widespread lead contamination of water in the United States.

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Students express frustration with dance minor not offered in LSA

Petition with over 800 signatures calls for recognition, increased awareness ASHNA MEHRA Daily Staff Reporter From the age of five, LSA senior Ninnie Chiang knew she had a love for dance — a realization that came from her first kindergarten class performance, where she soared across the stage.

After taking a break from dance, Chiang said she decided to re-immerse herself in the art upon arriving at the University of Michigan to take back part of her identity.

Chiang said she planned to include dance into her collegiate education but there was one problem: a dance minor was not offered through the College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

Despite being recognized as a minor in other schools, including the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, LSA has yet to establish a dance minor.

Even if LSA students complete all of the required classes for a dance minor, they will not receive a minor upon graduation.

In November 2021, Chiang and her peers, LSA seniors Kyla Hyatt and Yuyao Sun, decided to take action.

They sent multiple emails to dance

advisors, department chairs and the head of the LSA curriculum asking for answers.

Chiang said she is disappointed by the lack of action from the LSA department. She said that although she was previously notified about the absence of the minor in LSA by her advisor, she still chose to move ahead with the hope she would be able to eventually complete the dance minor as an LSA student.

“What seemed at first like an issue from the past 3-5 years now seems like a decade-long issue,” Chiang said. “It’s been passed for years from individual to individual.”

In November 2021, Chiang, Hyatt and Sun created a petition to increase awareness and urge LSA to consider recognizing the dance minor. As of Feb. 15, the petition has received over 800 signatures.

“I feel like there is a path for the minor to get approved, but for some reason it’s so convoluted and difficult,” Hyatt said. “I think it’s because the minor was denied before, but not for super clear reasons.”

Associate Dean Tim McKay reached out to the Daily about a possible explanation for this discrepancy.

ADMINISTRATION

Curious about U-M’s carbon neutrality plan? Here are the latest updates.

Find answers to your biggest questions on climate change action at UMich ARJUN THAKKAR Daily Staff Reporter

Various University of Michigan stakeholders for the past few years, including student as well as staff and faculty organizations, have pushed for the University to take an active role in combating climate change by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.

The University has responded to these requests by presenting a path for the institution to become carbon neutral and limit emissions so they are equivalent to the amount of emissions sequestered from the atmosphere. The University has committed to eliminating its scope 1 emissions across all three campuses by 2040, achieving netzero scope 2 emissions by 2025, and establishing goals by 2025 for eliminating scope 3 emissions.

Scope 1 emissions are greenhouse gasses directly released by the University, including emissions from the campus power plant, heating and cooling for buildings and bus transportation. Scope 2 emissions are generated by the electricity purchased from other utilities to help power the campus. Scope 3 emissions are indirect sources of emissions at the University and include commuting to campus (using cars and The Ride buses),

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food and University-affiliated travel.

This commitment to carbon neutrality followed months of research and deliberation from the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality, created in February 2019 and consists of various faculty members, students and advisors to deliver a report with a plan for the University to obtain net-zero carbon emissions.

The final report,released in March 2021, outlined specific recommendations on how the University could achieve net-zero emissions.

Community members argue the University’s progress on achieving carbon neutrality has been too slow to address the ongoing climate crisis, with student organizations, such as Climate Action movement pressuring the University for a more aggressive timeline and to reduce emissions by 2030.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body under the United Nations that evaluates climate science, states humans need to reduce emissions to 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050 in order to avert the damaging effects of climate change, including natural disasters.

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“The dance minor was proposed to the LSA curriculum committee about five years ago. At that time, several concerns were raised by the committee, including about the fact that the minor requires 22 credits (most minors require 15-18),” McKay wrote. “Those concerns are now being addressed by SMTD, and we are hopeful that a credential for the dance minor will be available to LSA students in the near future.”

LSA sophomore Isabel Reid – who also signed the petition – said she considered switching to the School of Kinesiology to complete the dance minor, but faced many challenges along the way.

“I’m pre-med and the education that I really want in my undergrad aligns more with what LSA offers,” Reid said. “I knew it would be too big of a sacrifice to have to start over with prereqs as well, and I wasn’t willing to give that up just for the minor, even though it does mean a lot to me.”

Reid also has an academic scholarship through LSA that would not transfer over to any other school, further preventing her from switching and being able to complete her intended dance minor.

The dance minor at the University consists of 22 credits over four areas: technique, composition, dance history and electives. According to the SMTD course website, applicants for the dance minor who have not completed a U-M Dance Department technique course at the 101 level or above should send a video “that demonstrates dance proficiency and a one-page dance resume.” While awaiting acceptance, students are able to enroll in Dance 101, 102, 103, or 104 as an entry-level course in the program.

Hyatt said she currently has a job teaching classes at an off-campus dance studio and plans to take a year off after graduation to teach full time.

When it comes to finding future jobs in the dance industry, Hyatt said she worries that the lack of a recognized minor will limit her opportunities.

“If I were to want to get another job similar to mine elsewhere, I don’t necessarily have the credentials,” Hyatt said. “So I guess I’d just have to tell a potential employer that I’ve met the requirements for a dance minor and hope they’ll take my word for it.”

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RESEARCH

Pediatric surgeons at C.S. Mott perform remedial surgery on premature chimp

Michigan Medicine, Detroit Zoo partner on non-invasive procedure JINGQI ZHU Daily Staff Reporter When Dr. Marcus Jarboe, director of Pediatric Minimally Invasive Surgery at the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, was approached by the Detroit Zoo to perform a therapeutic surgery on a newborn chimpanzee, he jumped at the opportunity to heal a non-traditional patient.

The premature chimp, named Zane, had developed an inguinal hernia — a painful bulge of tissue that develops in the groin region — five weeks after he was born, in January 2020. For unclear reasons, Zane’s mother didn’t show any interest in her newborn, so the caretaker team began taking extra care of Zane in his early weeks. After Dr. Ann Duncan, director of Animal Health at the Detroit Zoo, and the team discovered Zane’s inguinal hernia, they reached out to Mott for help.

“Chimpanzee anatomy and human anatomy are very similar and the equipment needed for neonatal patients is specialized,” Duncan wrote in an email to The Michigan Daily. “For these reasons, we contacted a human pediatric surgeon with expertise in non-invasive laparoscopic repair techniques.”

Contrary to the open hernia repair, the laparoscopic method allows the surgeon to visualize the hernia defect without making a large incision over the operating site. A camera called

a laparoscope is inserted through the incision, and the surgeon uses the image relayed on a monitor to guide doctors as they perform the procedure.

For his first non-human surgery, Jarboe said he decided to use the laparoscopic method because of his expertise in minimally invasive surgery. He also said the scope helps to better visualize the anatomy.

“I do most of my (surgeries) laparoscopic and I think the hernia is easier to do laparoscopic,” Jarboe said. “I could figure out the anatomy easier with the scope.”

Jarboe also said pediatric surgeons have much expertise in performing surgery on human patients that are of similar size to Zane, so many of the procedures can be similarly performed on primate animals.

“Zane was somewhere around three kilograms,” Jarboe said. “It’s the same size we usually operate on.

In addition to two pediatric anesthesiologists assisting with the surgery, Jarboe said he invited senior pediatric surgeon Dr. Ronald Hirschl and two pediatric anesthesiologists to perform the surgery with him.

He said inviting the pediatric anesthesiologists was important because of their expertise in inserting the endotracheal tube so the patient can breathe during

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Arts

Wednesday, February 23, 2022 — 3

The Apocalypse B-Side EMILIA FERRANTE Senior Arts Editor

WE HAVE ALWAYS been obsessed with the looming apocalypse — the final, cataclysmic catastrophe that will end the world as we know it.

It’s a question that has preoccupied humanity seemingly forever, from biblical Revelations to zombie f licks. But increasingly, the apocalypse doesn’t feel so far away. We’ve all gotten accustomed to our current “unprecedented times,” but everything seems a little too… precedented.

The unfolding apocalypse: climate change, death and art

How do we deal with the end of the world when it feels like it’s happening right in front of us? How do we reckon with the cultural phenomenon of the apocalypse when we’re living through it? Sometimes it feels like we’re walking towards our certain doom on a road with billboards still trying to convince us everything is fine. This B-Side walks that road and examines how art is dealing with the concept of the apocalypse, both real and imagined.

CECILIA DURAN Daily Arts Writer

— Emilia Ferrante, Senior Arts Editor

Design by Abby Schreck

Phoebe Bridgers knows the end, but how do we deal with the ending?

SERENA IRANI

Daily Arts Contributor

APOCALYPSES ARE POWERFUL entities. They represent full-scale calamitous events with the potential to wipe out everything we know to be familiar and true. For artists, they’re an opportunity to experiment with our imaginative endurance as human beings, an attempt to put to words the entropy that manifests at the end of the world. In reality, apocalyptic occurrences seem unfathomable, entirely void of rhyme or reason and almost always end up hitting us when we least expect it.

Improbable as they may be, we’re endlessly trying (and failing) to answer the endall-be-all questions we know frighteningly little about (When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? anyone?).

Although the endings apparent in my own life may not be on par with those of alien invasions or natural disasters, the scale is irrelevant in the dissection of the feeling itself.

However brief or insignificant in the grand scheme of things, endings represent a paralyzing inability to accept the end of one chapter of your life and transition to the start of another.

With “I Know The End,” Phoebe Bridgers closes her sophomore album, Punisher, with not only a bang but also a whimper. She plunges straight into the depths of the murky waters of inevitability, life after death and how we as human beings cope with the ending of things big and small. Bridgers watches the final scenes of intimate relationships in her life play out and encapsulates her ironic refusal to revel in the downtime, to make the most of staying at home doing nothing after months of longing for just that. (Yes, her pre-quarantine predictions were eerily spot-on and you can do with that what you will.)

As a cluster of details makes up the minor endings in Bridgers’s own life, we catch glimpses of the outside crumbling in parallel ruin. Just as a breakup is finalized, she knowingly foreshadows a catastrophic event on the horizon. It’s not an if, but a matter of “when the sirens sound.” We gradually get a sense of the larger forces at play here as images of a desert-

ed town reside in the background of her own awareness that “not even the burnouts are out here anymore.”

Ever an agent of the apocalypse at heart, Bridgers acknowledges the usual sus-

things had begun to permanently set in. I was reeling from the loss of a loved one after months of separation from friends and relatives, and I was constantly anxious about starting a so-called new chapter in

Design by Abby Schreck

pects, questioning whether an unnamed object hovering in the sky is a “government drone or an alien spaceship.” Her evasive response of “either way, we’re not alone” is foreboding and has an ominous rather than comforting connotation.

It’s not so much about how the world ends, but what we are left with after. The specifics have no real consequences here as she’s far more concerned with the ending itself — the acceptance of the cataclysmic, earthshattering event — in order to address the perhaps even scarier question: what next?

Like every other standing high school senior of the class of 2020, I spent much of my time post-graduation (or in my case, post-makeshift ceremony in the bus drive-through of my high school) in a stasis of sorts.

I kept waiting for my mind to catch up to my body, to dramatically come to terms with the fact that life as I knew it was forever gone; that my future would resemble very little of the long-awaited post-high school plans I had dreamed of. The first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic were weird, but in my head, it was still nothing more than a temporary break, a pause from the regularly scheduled programming of my reality that would soon get fixed by the forces that be. I kept busy with school, talked with friends on the phone for hours and patiently watched my prom dress gather dust hanging from the closet door.

By the time summer hit,

my life when the last one had seemingly never ended. I was exuding nervous energy, endlessly frustrated and bogged down by a growing restlessness and longing for a portion of my youth that I felt was unjustifiably snatched from me right as I reached the precipice. There was none of that closure every Bildungsroman I had grown up reading and watching had so earnestly promised. No graduation ceremony, no prom, no final school musical. No happy ending. I knew they were inconsequential things in the long run, but they could only grow in stature as I built them up in my head instead of living them out in reality.

Naturally, I spent far too much of my time mourning what a petty waste my 17th year around the sun was. These unresolved thoughts and feelings raced around my mind unabated by not only the remnants of the senior year I did have but the imminent prospects of my freshman year of college. The coming-of-age stories that I usually sought such comfort in only served to further fuel my depressive spiraling and bitter resentment that this isn’t how things were supposed to be.

Listening to “I Know The End” for the first time was like something clicked into place.

It communicated this feeling I couldn’t quite seem to put into words, of grappling with the ending of a thing you saw coming all along, but something that still hits you with a sudden shock all the same. I

got lost in Bridgers’s vividlyimagined chaos, soaked in the sadness and tried to process it all. It’s difficult not to get fully submerged in the song itself; Bridgers’s immersive detail in her writing only makes the mutual catharsis of experiencing her musically-actualized apocalypse all the more visceral for the listener.

For once, someone wasn’t sugarcoating it. My own inner melodrama could make it feel as though the world was collapsing in on itself and the negative energy I was bottling up inside of me was desperate for expulsion. I didn’t need someone to tell me it was all going to be okay because everyone in the world had just unanimously decided that it was, in fact, not going to be okay in the slightest. I was 17 years old and had nothing figured out, but I wasn’t supposed to. The problem was that no one else had it figured out, either — not even the people that I thought always did.

Although Bridgers’s apocalyptic ending is certainly not a happy one, it felt more akin to an embodied dreamscape than a nightmare, a cinematic experience I projected upon heavily within the walls of my childhood bedroom. The first half of the song f loats along with Wizard of Oz references and wallows in the circumstances of endings itself — the end of a tour in one verse, a break-up in another. But her eyes keep glancing to the horizon as she iterates, “I gotta go now / I know, I know, I know.”

In the midst of it all weighing down on me, that same restless energy buzzed about, that urge to risk everything just for a chance to peek over the edge of the cliff and catch a glimpse of what was waiting beyond.

It was this nagging desire to pack it all up and make a change, any change at all. What resonated with me most was the fact that in the midst of all of Bridgers’s resolutions, she seemingly had nothing figured out. And that was where I was at, unable to go back to the way things were before, but with no real way to move forward.

She so precisely captures the sensation of feeling as though you have nothing left to do but stand directly in the eye of the storm and scream it out.

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THEY SAY THAT a slow death is worse than a sudden one, that in those last seconds when your life flashes before your eyes, you are at peace. A meteorite, a car crash, a dream becoming the last place you’re in. They tell you to picture it as if you’re a frog placed inside a pot with water gradually getting hotter — the bubbles growing exponentially bigger, until you’re so immersed in the heat that you no longer feel a thing. Numbed by the stretch of time, blinded by the vagueness with which you swam in the water, you realize, it’s too late.

The gamut of doomsday predictions has always resulted in failure. I recall calling my parents “one last time” on Dec. 12, 2020, from my overcrowded boarding school dorm in Dublin, Ireland. Between sobs was a hardly intelligible “I read about it on the internet,” while they tried to pacify a baby in the body of a preadolescent. The Last Judgment, Halley’s Comet, the evangelists, your crazy neighbor, a book you read, a movie you recently watched starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Irony within truth. A distant future, peering around the corner.

But what if, instead of envisioning the apocalypse as something sudden, a blink of an eye, a last gasp, I told you the apocalypse was here already. Go ahead, turn the other cheek — it’s habitual by now. Picture this: You’re no longer a frog, but yourself, in your college dorm. You notice the empty box of Cheez-Its that has been sitting between the blue recycling and the black garbage

just have to open your eyes. Perhaps you need something to help you do so. I intended to make my take on the apocalypse a simple story about how climate change is depicted through art and how it has become a means to unravel historical turning points. Unfortunately, climate change is not a turning point, but a series of missed exits, reckless lane switching and closed-eye speeding on a wrong way street. Our current apocalypse is, thus, not one single event, but a myriad of ludicrous and thoughtless tribulations. Road rage at its finest, except the ones getting mad are the good guys, and the ones who don’t mind are the bad guys.

In our fight with the environment, silence becomes too costly an expense; the price of words is weighed down by an hourglass that is running out. In the age of information, science, truth, technology and innovation we choose to turn inarticulate, primate, taciturn and ignorant. Because no one wants to accept that if this apocalypse wipes out the human race, the Earth will continue on creating new ecosystems — ones in which there is no place for us. They will speak of us as we speak of the dinosaurs, and they will recall the 21st century with as much brevity as we word “Ice Age.” In the first lockdown back in 2020, while every single citizen of Barcelona was confined to the four walls of their home, while life was put on hold and it felt like the world stopped spinning, COVID-19 meant nothing to the millions of species we share a planet with. A video of three wild boars meandering in city streets, dolphins spotted on the coasts, virgin sights of the LA mountain

Design by Jennie Vang

bin for days now. In the heat of a snowless November, you realize you neglected the stimuli that told you that danger was coming. The bliss of winters becoming milder and springs becoming warmer. The summer: infernal, perpetual, wilting.

Why wait for a sudden death when you can avoid death altogether, by impeding the world from looking like this, or this or this? Science fiction, alas! Perhaps the following seem more conceivable: Evidence of Hades’ wrath in a wildfire in Madera County, Calif. Remnants of what used to be a seaside neighborhood in Mexico Beach, Fla. ‘Highway River’ AKA a morning commute to Detroit with the wrong means of transportation — boats weren’t on offer that Friday.

Here’s the punch line: You

skyline… the Earth went through rehab while we fought to find new drugs to cure ourselves.

Even then, I found myself coming back to the works of Alexis Rockman, a New York-based artist who has been depicting pre- and post-human scenarios where common sites such as Central Park or the Brooklyn waterfront take on different meanings with the demise of modern civilization. In Manifest Destiny, a 24-foot long omen, Rockman pictures the East River, 200 feet taller, engulfing the Brooklyn Bridge as jellyfish and eels inhabit the places men used to — a decaying scene in which mankind is now a fable to the evolving species that remain unfazed.

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The apocalyptic setting of ‘The Last of Us’ provided strange comfort during the pandemic MITCHEL GREEN Daily Arts Writer

FOR MANY OF us, the pandemic has been a very isolating time. Particularly in the early stages of 2020, being shut off from people and places we care about was incredibly difficult to process. While many returned to lighter, more comforting art to help them process and get through some tough times, I personally preferred to consume darker, heavier art. I didn’t want art that distracted me; I wanted something that could help me deal with what I was feeling.

I turned to a lot of apocalypticbased art. The Steven Soderbergh pandemic thriller “Contagion” was something that weirdly helped me cope with my fears surrounding the virus. Phoebe

Bridgers’s gloomy album Punisher fit my feeling that everything around me was crumbling. But the art that was most helpful to me processing my feelings during the early stages of the pandemic was the video game series, “The Last of Us.” “The Last of Us” and its sequel “The Last of Us: Part II” take place in a post-apocalyptic future in which a fungal-based virus called Cordyceps has ravaged the world’s population, turning some into mushroom-controlled, infected people that the few survivors avoid while they try to pick up the pieces. The pandemic aspect of the game was an obvious (albeit twisted) draw for me going in, but what really had a significant emotional impact on me was the way it handled themes of isolation and grief.

Large chunks of the first game

are spent with the player in control of just two characters, Joel and Ellie, trekking through desolate cities across the United States in an attempt to find people who can use Ellie’s immunity to make a cure. Occasionally they run into other humans, but for the most part, it’s only the two leads and the infected who roam the areas. The settings in the game are often dangerously quiet, adding a sense of fear of what lies ahead, but also conjuring a sense of loneliness that you may never see another human again. Backed

by Gustavo Santaolalla’s longing acoustic guitar score, the game drives home a helpless isolation from society that becomes powerful both in the context of the game and the outside context I brought to it.

The game captures an evergrowing frustration for the char-

acters and the player. Every clue that seems like it might lead to the people Joel and Ellie are looking for — a resistance group called the Fireflies — inevitably comes to a dead end. In reality, this resonated deeply with me: All I was hearing at the time was just to wait a little bit longer — wait until some milestone was hit — and we would go back to normal.

I had felt so isolated for so long, and I got my hopes up every time it seemed like we were approaching normal again. But we never got there. The isolation and loneliness only got worse. Every day seemed more and more hopeless.

Ultimately, Joel and Ellie’s journey to find the Fireflies ends in bittersweet fashion. They do not end up finding a cure, thanks to a major decision by Joel, but they do find a small community where they no longer feel

so isolated. This mirrors how the world around us has gone in the past couple of years. We are back to socializing with people, and our communities have come back together, but it still doesn’t really feel normal. We’re still living with the virus and many of the precautions put in place, and although we aren’t as isolated anymore, it’s still hard to say we’re past it.

The second game in the series, while still having elements of isolation like the first game, deals far more with the theme of grief.

This progression nicely paralleled the way I processed the pandemic. After dealing with isolation for so long, there was a devastating amount of loss still to process. Much of that loss felt unnecessary, and had people in positions to do something acted quicker or differently, perhaps

the outcome would have been better. Similarly, “The Last of Us: Part II” sees Ellie having to process the unnecessary loss brought on by Joel’s decision to not use her to create a cure for the in-game virus. It never felt like it needed to be this way, but for many of us, like Ellie, it was never our decision to make — there was nothing we could do about it.

“The Last of Us” series will always be a very important work of art to me. Not only are the games’ narratives incredibly engaging and emotional, but the mid-pandemic context in which I first played them meant they resonated much deeper with me. It provided me with a nice outlet for my feelings of isolation and grief during the pandemic. Despite its brutal dark tone and its apocalyptic setting, I was still able to find comfort in “The Last of Us.”

Arts

4 — Wednesday, February 23, 2022

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Poetry to get you through the 2020s (and your 20s) maid’s Tale,” a searing criticism of Western rape culture and restrictions on reproductive freedom. She turns that same keen eye to her poetry — though in the several decades that have passed, it has been molded, not dulled, by age’s wisdom. Now 82, Atwood speaks to today’s crises in her most recent poetry collection, “Dearly,” with both her characteristic wit and anger and a sort of gentle, pleading hope. Her poetry encapsulates what this era is and could become: the ongoing fight for women’s rights, the looming climate catastrophe, the grief of losing a loved one and our current political situation. But despite its heavy topics, her poetry does not produce a helpless feeling; instead, it makes you want to fight even more.

“What the Living Do” by Marie Howe “What the Living Do” tells the fragmented story of youth, how our childhoods shape us into who we are and how we come to learn what living is all about. Written for her brother, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1989, “What the Living Do” is imbued with a sense of wonder for life — all of its pain and joy and in-betweens. It does

BRENNA GOSS Daily Arts Writer

POETRY HAS THE ability to give us strength in our darkest times and reflect our joy in our happiest moments. For evidence, just look at the outpouring of gratitude for Amanda Gorman — President Biden’s inaugural poet — and the virality of her poem “The Hill We Climb.”

The line “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it,” seemed to encompass both the despair and the hope so many Americans were feeling on that day, just two weeks after armed rioters stormed the capitol. That is the power of poetry. So if you feel like you’re living through an apocalypse — the seemingly never-ending COVID-19 pandemic, political turmoil, deep divides in American society, threat of war, climate change, police brutality, a collective mental health crisis or whatever other calamity you can think of — here’s some poetry to help carry you through.

“Dearly” by Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood is perhaps best known for her 1985 novel “The Hand-

not attempt to make everything rosy; it knows how difficult this all is, how tiring it can be to keep going day after day with the small frustrations and regrets piling up. But it also shines light onto the underside, the part that we often let collect dust as we alternate between slogging away and sleeping: the heartwrenching beauty of this short, short time we have together.

Howe’s poetry speaks best for itself: “We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. / We want / whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then / more of it. / But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the / window glass, / say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so / deep / for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m / speechless: / I am living. I remember you.”

“Unearth [The Flowers]” by Thea Matthews “Unearth [The Flowers]” is a book for today’s moment of collective outrage and action. Matthews, a Black Indigenous Mexican poet, does not shy away from the grief and anger born from colonization, militarism and patriarchy. This is not an easy read — the violence she describes

left a sickening feeling in my stomach. But the poems are, at their roots, vignettes of survival and resilience. How does one heal when the injuring is ongoing? How does one reclaim their body, their life?

With each poem named after a flower,

how we will always plant our roots and reach towards the sun: “My roots now / strengthened my bones in formation / I emerge slowly uprising in the night. I rise / in the glimmer of untamable waters / I live.”

Design by Reid Graham

Matthews shows how people can bloom even through the darkest moments,

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Life lessons from Rick Grimes and his zombie apocalypse CONNOR JORDAN

Daily Arts Contributor

Content warning: Character death, violence, spoilers for “The Walking Dead” THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON AMC television series “The Walking Dead” (Robert Kirkman) was once one of the most highly rated television series on air. “The Walking Dead” follows zombie apocalypse survivors Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln, “Penguin Bloom”), Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan, “Invincible”), Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun, “Minari”) and an ensemble of a few dozen other characters as they clash with the braineating monsters and other survivors alike.

Despite its acclaim, the show has somewhat faded from the public eye in recent

years. The adventures of protagonist Rick Grimes and company inevitably become dull as similar plot threads are repeated and a large portion of its original cast is killed off. Still, “The Walking Dead” remains a guilty pleasure of mine, regardless of this decline in quality. Watching the world end for Rick Grimes, though often a complicated viewing relationship, has taught me how to prevent my own from ending.

It all started one blistering summer afternoon some four or five years ago. In search of an escape and a quick thrill, my mother and I embarked on our first episode of the acclaimed series, not knowing what lay ahead of us. One episode was enough to have us wrapped around Grimes’s finger. A weekly routine became a nightly binge which became an insatia-

ble obsession.

We turned into Walkers ourselves, desperate to feast on any Walking Dead content we could get our hands on. Thanks to my mother’s Netflix subscription and the DVD section of my hometown’s public library, this hunger engulfed our summer with an intensity akin to infatuation.

Now, years later, I am both proud and embarrassed to say that I have watched 10 seasons of “The Walking Dead,” six seasons of the spinoff-prequel series, “Fear the Walking Dead” and (unfortunately) one season of “The Walking Dead: World Beyond.”

As time went on, the magic of the first five or six seasons wore off, and watching “The Walking Dead” became increasingly daunting. I was continually force-fed unnecessary character deaths and con-

trived storylines. There have been marginal improvements in recent seasons, but too many aspects of the show are twisted unrecognizably from their origins; all but two original cast members have been killed off or left the show. “The Walking Dead” became the television embodiment of the Ship of Theseus. I was no longer watching the same show I fell in love with.

As “The Walking Dead” has experienced somewhat of an apocalypse of its own, the COVID-19 pandemic raged on and created a world that was hauntingly similar to the desolate landscape depicted in the show. At its best, “The Walking Dead” underlined the importance of found family and connection through adversity. Like Rick Grimes and his group of survivors, the only way I could weather this apocalypse was with the aid of fam-

ily.

My mother and I watched every single episode of the nearly 200-episode series together; we cried together, we screamed in terror together, we expressed our disappointment together. When a gutpunching cliffhanger left us in awe, we would revel in it. When a string of bad episodes left a sour taste we could always turn to each other to complain. Sharing the strenuous viewing experience made it more than bearable, even when “The Walking Dead” was at its worst. Watching the show with my family during the pandemic was one of the only things that kept me sane; the escapism of a fictional apocalypse helped me cope with the reality of the global pandemic.

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Our current apocalypse can’t be escaped in fiction

SUDOKU

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

Release Date: Wednesday, February 16, 23, 2022

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

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ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

02/23/22 02/16/22

Judy Hughes

By George Jasper ©2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

02/23/22 02/16/22

WHISPER WHISPER “Has everything worked out yet?”

“Froyo is totally out for 2021 AF!!”

Design by Jennie Vang

ERIN EVANS

Daily Arts Writer

THE APOCALYPSE OF the past two years was marked in my life, not just by the COVID-19 pandemic, but by the subjects of the books I read.

I began reading more consistently during this time and found myself deep in a genre of existential stories that, whether or not I realized it at the time, added still more apocalyptic material to my darkening view of the world. After Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the injustice of war was stamped into my brain on top of the rising COVID-19 cases.

After Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours,” it was sickness and sadness and the fact that the human condition had begun to appear fractured. These and other novels left me unsettled by the passage of time for longer than I’d care to admit. I loved books like these, anxious and pessimistic as they made me. They altered my thinking.

I felt changed by the authors’ use of language, which was powerful and mesmerizing. They were beautifully written, and they meant something.

There was no question for me that they were worth my time.

Yet as the pandemic dragged on in the real world, and the insurmountable worldly problems and existentialism piled up in the fiction I consumed, I began to long for an escape. I loved these books, but I needed a break from them. I wanted to be happy while reading, not because I liked the writing or because of Vonnegut’s dry, satirical humor, but because the stories themselves were happy. I wanted a book that was cozy and exciting.

I wanted fluff. I wanted romance. I wanted characters to root for who got what they wanted in clear-cut ways that I didn’t need to struggle to wrap my mind around.

So, I set out to find a cute, fluffy romance novel. It couldn’t be too hard,

I thought. Not a big romance reader myself, I turned to the BookTubers I watched, and they almost unanimously recommended Talia Hibbert’s “Get a Life, Chloe Brown.” I checked it out from the library with perhaps unattainably high hopes.

I liked “Chloe Brown” well enough, but it wasn’t everything I had dreamed it would be. I tried to be invested in the story, to care whether the characters ended up together, but the reality was that I wasn’t. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the story didn’t matter. I doubted it would deeply affect me in any way. I didn’t want this to be true.

I certainly didn’t want to be someone who couldn’t enjoy romance novels because they weren’t heavy and dense and “serious.” I desperately wanted to care about Chloe and her love interest, Red. I tried to fend off my ambivalence to the story, but in the end, it was impossible. I looked for other romance novels, but none appealed to me much more. I followed this failure with a string of thrillers — a genre I once loved — but the ones I chose, highly recommended as they were, felt generic; they felt like nothing special and I stopped reading most after a few chapters. I didn’t want to read another heavy book yet. I still wanted something fun, but for one reason or another, I didn’t enjoy the books I thought would fit this description.

While deciding to write this for The Michigan Daily, I realized that I needed to think of a book that had saved me. A book that had felt both meaningful and worthwhile and been truly energizing to read — fun in a non-depressing way. I knew that I must have read such a book during this time, and finding it was the logical conclusion to this piece. Racking my brain, thinking of every piece of fiction I read in the last two years, I could not find anything that fit the bill.

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Do it all with Amazon Prime Student.

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6 — Wednesday, February 23, 2022

STATEMENT

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The anonymous art of the University’s public pianos Design by Grace Aretakis // Page Design by Sarah Chung OSCAR NOLLETTE-PATULSKI Statement Columnist

I sit on the gray, pleather couches in the East Quad Residence Hall lobby, passing time between a class and a virtual meeting. The long glass windows behind me tell me it’s gray outside; I wouldn’t be surprised if it started raining.

A fellow college student strays from the lobby’s traffic patterns and pivots toward the space’s musical focal point: the glimmering Yamaha grand piano. They set their backpack down to the side, adjust the simple black bench and rest their hands on the reflective keys. A few chords are played as a warm up, and the music soon turns into a Hans Zimmer melody from “Interstellar.”

After some repetitions, the tune changes to an early 2010s pop hit I can’t remember the name of, modulating again into something lush and classical-like, the sounds of a modern Mozart.

I pretend to type on my keyboard while the pianist plays on theirs, and perhaps 15 to 20 minutes later, the song ends and the musician leaves.

There is no bow, no applause, no fanfare, for this is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a typical performance on the East Quad public piano.

There are versions of this scene scattered throughout the University of Michigan’s campus. You can try the dark, polished upright piano tucked down a hall in the Michigan Union, or the multiple sitting within the various spaces of Pierpont Commons. For dinner and a show, visit the dimly lit seating area in the rear of South Quad’s dining hall; the worn down wood grain seat of the instrument and mood lighting gives the appearance of a popular underground music venue while you eat meal-plan pizza. You are in the

audience by default, so why not lean in and enjoy? *** A year after my family moved to Michigan, my mom commandeered her childhood upright piano from my grandfather’s living room, placing it in our own where it now sits. My brother and I took lessons on it while in elementary school, and though they halted when I turned twelve, my fondness for the instrument never did. I played almost every day, especially when I didn’t have school.

During the summer evenings, my arpeggios would float through the open windows, harmonizing with the symphony of cicadas outside.

In the months leading up to my first fall at the University of Michigan, I frequently thought about how I would play the piano once I moved out of my parent’s house. I daydreamed, perhaps too optimistically, of dazzling the East Quad lobby and touring my talents around the residence halls. My high school hobby would blossom into something publicly popular, quickly cementing my status as a university icon.

Upon my arrival in Ann Arbor, though, other hopeful musicians had similar ideas and more advanced skills. And upon hearing them play, I was overcome with jealous dread, deciding the public keys were not for me.

In the past month or so, however, realizing my access to these instruments is fleeting, I’ve forced myself to step up to the bench and play music in public. The moment I decided to do this I became incredibly nervous. My limbs forgot how to do their job and my eyes darted around the room, trying to uncover reasons I shouldn’t perform.

I walked up to the keyboard but then quickly turned around, worried to

offend, eager to eliminate anxiety.

How does everyone else make it look so easy? What are the comforts in being so publicly visible? *** To investigate such feelings, I interviewed some campus public pianists, all of whom were within a variety of stages and majors in their college careers. What makes these musicians so compelling is the fleeting nature of their performances. They start and end without notice, except for the overheard chords of a spontaneous setlist. Their programming is a mashup of your favorite pop, classical and throwback playlists, but unlike your Spotify music player, the name of the artist is nowhere to be found.

Despite their lack of disguise, the pianists camouflage with the rest of the student body moments after playing their final chord. In an era where musical artists are aligned with their visual brand as much as their melodies, the campus piano player approaches the stage with the clothing of normality.

Some of these anonymous sensations have other musical outlets, like a cappella groups or bands, and some had collaborators.

LSA sophomore Will Chehab, who also records rap under The Young XP, started early in making the pianos a part of his campus experience, playing in Stockwell Residence Hall and on the grand in the East Quad lobby during his freshman year.

“I had a friend who also played piano, he was really good, we liked to mess around for an hour or two,” Chehab said.

LSA senior Thomas Martin told me about “a little piano gang” that formed during his first year on campus, when a passerby

recognized the “Fourth Chopin Sonata.”

“She sits down and starts playing the same thing … I mean, as a lot of friendships in college occurred, it’s not like we saw each other every day. But, we’re still friends,” Martin said.

Behind the allure of musical recognition is the opportunity for genuine and lasting friendship.

Though others may see the piano player as just that, knowing them as people helps break down the barrier between audience and performer.

Some moments of connection are much more fleeting, but are just as gratifying because of their unexpectedness.

Engineering graduate student Dan Maguire said, “I definitely have people come up to me a lot and say thank you for playing … Someone once left a note for me.”

When asked about the note, Maguire smiled and picked it up from its spot on his desk, reading: “Beautiful playing, thank you for the music. Hope you have a wonderful day.” The message concluded with a hand-drawn smiley face, providing something comfortingly genuine on a folded piece of notebook paper.

All of the piano players I interviewed indicated they are repeat performers on campus, with Martin going as far to imply it was his self-appointed job.

“The University doesn’t pay me” he conceded, but described the routine musical acts as a kind of “addiction.”

Chehab had a similar sentiment, saying the sight of the piano poses enough of an incentive to play: “I look at it and (think) I kinda want to play this, and I go in and play. It’s usually pretty spontaneous.”

There is a sort of rugged individualism a person must have to initiate their own performance, to create something grand out of ambivalent silence. Dexter Kaufman, LSA sophomore and member of the Southeast Michigan band Luna Pier, told me the experience is quite different from being on stage with his group. “At the piano you’re by yourself, you can play at any tempo you want, all the keys are in front of you,” Kaufman said.

However liberating the freedom of no-strings-attached performance is, the inherent self-promotion of spontaneous song must be carefully balanced with the needs of an everchanging campus audience. When a quiet study space unintentionally doubles as a de-facto performance hall, chaos can ensue. Maguire told me of a time when another musician’s act was stopped at the request of an irritated study group.

“It was kind of really sad, I felt so bad for the guy … I imagine a lot of other people were really enjoying it,” Maguire said.

Indeed, the flip side of anonymous praise and the serotonin it brings is the harsh bite of faceless critique.

The campus piano player, though relatively free from the repercussions of

digital communities.

While some users like Feldberg invest time into moderating and cultivating digital spaces, these communities are generally characterized by low barriers to entry. Online content creation generally follows a power-law distribution, with a few users contributing the majority of the content. Guo observed that, on the U-M subreddit, “it’s the same names that keep coming up,” and he contrasted these active-participants with “most people who occasionally post maybe asking for classes or asking for professors.”

Still, with an account, some motivation and enough posts, anyone can become a recognizable power-user, while the majority of us sit back and watch the feed unfold.

Knowledge & Norms Every semester when backpacking begins, I find myself instantly turning to the U-M subreddit.

I had a four-year plan color coded and organized in a spreadsheet before I even began college. During my freshman year, you could’ve asked me what I’d be taking as a senior, and I’d answer in earnest.

But I quickly learned that even if you know exactly what you’ll be registering for, the subreddit has something that you’ll never find on the LSA Course Guide — insider information about nearly every class. If the professor is boring, if the homework is too long or if discussion attendance is mandatory, someone has probably posted about it.

When I asked Feldberg about the value of informal spaces like the Discord, he quickly mentioned classes. He said that communities like the U-M Discord raise

awareness for things that “the University isn’t going to tell people, Like, no, do not take intro classes.

Terrible idea. Do it at a community college. The University isn’t gonna tell people to do that, whereas current students or former students or alumni, they would all have that experience.”

But not all majors and departments are well represented in the subreddit. Guo critiqued the page for being “EECS-centric,” noting that most posts are made by and for computer science majors.

“The post I made asking about linguistics classes, I think I got like, maybe two comments. The other majors don’t really have the same sort of presence on Reddit,” Guo said.

While there’s no hard data on the page’s demographics, moderators have instituted a policy that posts asking about courses must include the department name, largely as a response to the constant stream of users asking about “281, 370, 445,” referring to common courses in the EECS Department.

I am not an EECS major. But I’m interested in posts about recruiting for tech internships and doing research, which are common on the page. I’m a statistics minor, and as the department is decently well represented in the group, I can usually find useful information.

I can benefit from the subreddit because my interests are close enough to the stereotypical engineer major the page caters to. The subreddit provides a rich knowledge base for a certain type of student, but has less utility for others.

Going Offline These digital communities are crucial in disseminating information

identity, must take time to consider the effect of their sounds on the room to dodge unwanted scrutiny. Maguire tries to cater to the hypothetical piano skeptic, saying “I’m careful to play agreeable music … If it’s really crowded that day I’ll be like ‘nah,’ I’ll pass today, I don’t want to annoy people too much.”

This consciousness extends to the other performers as well. Martin, who, like other interviewees, plays for hours at a time, sees it as a matter of continuing the musical tradition: “I’ll have to balance my addiction to play with everyone else who goes here, (so they can) get what I got (from the pianos).”

The lack of artist recognition associated with this particular type of performance allows the impromptu stage to be claimed by anybody and for anybody, for as long as they want. As Kaufman stated simply: “(It’s) just a public piano, anyone can use it.”

Following Kaufman’s sentiment, it seems the pianos can occupy two paradoxical spaces in the public consciousness: they are meant to be played and heard, and their performers are aware of the effect their music has.

But, they also bend some of the most basic rules of social

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

I saw it online: The importance of digital communities at U-M

Design by Grace Aretakis // Page Design by Sarah Chung

HALEY JOHNSON

Statement Correspondent

It’s a common refrain on campus: “I saw on the U-M subreddit that”, “There’s a rumor going around in my class group chats”, “Did you see the Facebook post about”.

Running parallel to official sources on campus — University press releases, emails and The Michigan Daily — there is an informal, crowd-sourced ecosystem of digital circles: the U-M subreddit, posts on Yik Yak, Discord servers and countless others.

These spaces are difficult to characterize. Their collaborative nature and emphasis on community norms make them distinct from other social media. They aren’t quite meme pages, but they aren’t overly serious. They’re conducted mostly by students, but professors are known to lurk in the background.

There’s a social element, but most users are strangers to one another. Still, users with a range of academic backgrounds, interests and motivations coexist in these spaces, tied together by their common identity as members of the University of Michigan community.

Since my freshman year, I’ve been an atypical producer and consumer in Michigan’s information ecosystem. I spent three years working on The Daily’s audience engagement team, which is responsible for managing the newspaper’s social media presence, posting breaking news and publishing newsletters. Simply put, my job was to get news to students.

Getting our stories circulating in group chats and online communities was crucial. During my tenure, I learned that if a story isn’t a meme

or the topic of a discussion thread on platforms like Reddit, it’s not really circulating on campus.

Having been both an information producer and consumer, I’ve seen how information can take on a life of its own in digital spaces. The U-M subreddit, various studentrun Discord servers and a collection of Facebook groups fill in the gap between information that has been endorsed and vetted by the University and external publications like MLive and The Daily.

Always Online Information junior Ari Feldberg is always on Discord. “In my room on my desk, I have two monitors. I have a bigger main monitor, then I have a second monitor with pretty much just Discord open,” he said.

Discord was released in 2015 as a messaging platform targeted towards video game players, but has since grown to include features like video- and voice-calling. It’s split off into servers, which are smaller communities with their own members, moderators and rules. University-specific servers have popped up on campuses across the nation as a way for students to connect with one another.

Thanks to his persistent use of the platform, Feldberg became the owner of the U-M server in 2019, giving him access to essentially everything on the server. Felberg can change the group’s settings, add moderators and remove members at his discretion. When he joined, the group belonged to an entirely different team of moderators and was more or less inactive: “The previous owners just gave it over to someone else because they’re like, ‘Okay, you guys are active and you’re gonna fix the server.’”

Since then, the U-M Discord has grown to over 5,000 members and has channels for everything from politics to off-campus housing to sports. In practice, Feldberg is the server’s lead moderator, taking on most of the responsibility of monitoring acidity on the Discord and ensuring that users follow the group’s rules. Moderators are the border patrollers of the digital world; the gatekeepers who decide what kind of information and discussion gets to be on the platform.

Feldberg said he takes a “relatively hands-off approach” and despite constantly being on Discord, he spends very little time actively moderating the group. He also shared he typically doesn’t intervene in heated discussions so long as parties are “arguing in good faith.”

Engineering sophomore Casper Guo knew about the U-M subreddit before he was even active on the platform. Subreddits are individual communities devoted to a specific topic within Reddit. The platform is made up of millions of subreddits with distinctive cultures and norms.

“I literally made my Reddit account because I wanted to see the [U-M] Reddit,” he shared. Guo couldn’t recall exactly how he had found out about the subreddit. The group has been around since 2010 and has 34,000 plus members — just larger than the population of 32,282 undergraduate students on the Ann Arbor campus.

Like Guo, no one told me about the subreddit, or the Discord or any other student-run communities.

It’s a testament to the ubiquity — and sometimes, the invisibility — of these spaces. It’s up to students to stumble across the University’s

across campus, but that’s not their only purpose. They are, first and foremost, a space for members of the Michigan community — a space which became especially important to students over the course of the pandemic.

Cliff Lampe, a professor in the School of Information whose research specializes on social media and social computing, speaks on the value of fostering social connections during this stage in our lives.

“Part of the college experience, in fact, one of the best parts of the college experience, is building social capital,” Lampe said. Social capital is a sociological term that refers to the trust, reciprocity and shared values that allow our interpersonal relationships to function. Social capital manifests as friendships, professional connections or access to opportunities. In a way, social capital is analogous to that certain something that we all feel is missing from online learning.

Lampe went further to say that the connections we make in college “provide value often throughout (our) life; (we) make lifelong friends.

How do you do that over Zoom, right? How do you build meaningful friendships via technology?”

The students I spoke to had mixed experiences forming social connections in digital spaces. When Feldberg first began using the U-M Discord, in-person meet ups were more common. Now, he says these virtual interactions have moved to smaller groups specific to students’ graduating classes.

“There’s like a class of 2025 server, there’s a class of 2026 or ‘20. So it’s

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

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STATEMENT

m I a t ginat s o L io e

Design by Grace Aretakis Page Design by Sarah Chung

Th

EMILY BLUMBERG

Statement Correspondent

When you are young, anything is possible. Princesses fly on magic carpets, fairies lurk in the depths of every forest and animals seem to always seem to be able to speak fluently. There is no greater liberation than being a child, mind open to the possibility of anything and everything. Pure, (literally) unadulterated imagination.

Freedom.

Any day my Hogwarts letter would come, or I’d find the fifth Golden Ticket, surely to be whisked away to the wonderland I always envisioned for myself. A vivid imagination, in awe of every tree and cloud and Polly Pocket doll in all their other-worldly wonders.

I don’t know when I lost that imagination, but I mourn it every time I sit down to write. At some point, the creative person I considered myself to be changed, presumably from a child to an adult. The girl who once spent recess writing a short story about a koala ballerina from space now cannot produce a 100 word poem for class without restlessly

searching her brain for something exciting.

But how did this happen? Not just to me, but to many, both “creative” types and not? How do we lose our childlike magic, and where does it go? Does it fade into the sky, leaving us bare?

Losing our imagination begins with the psychological changes that underscore the shift from childhood to adulthood. In our younger days, the mind is effortlessly transformative.

University Professor Frederick Amrine gives the mundane example of a saucepan, which children can interpret as virtually anything they desire.

“The young child is just so wonderful,” he explained. “Take a saucepan. Well, you know, the saucepan isn’t just a saucepan, it’s a boat, it’s a hat. It’s fungible; the young child weaves a sort of magical aura around this saucepan, and it can become almost anything.”

Gradually, Amrine explained, the child sees its caretaker use a saucepan over and over and over again in the exact same way. Place it on the stove, let the flame blaze and serve up your creation. Eventually, the child is

n

gradually induced into ditching the saucepan’s metamorphic potential and simply seeing the object for its practical function.

Through a combination of psychological processes, social learning and cultural expectations, we slowly grow accustomed to what exactly it means to be a child; we learn where the line of “growing up” is drawn.

Through the process of social learning, we are conditioned into the confinements of our decided age group. As we move out of childhood (roughly ages 0-12) and into adolescence (roughly ages 13-19), we learn what is deemed socially acceptable for our particular age range and are encouraged to act accordingly. And at one point or another, the majority of us are told to put down the Legos and crayons in search of more “mature” pursuits; rather, those that fit our perceived expectations for adulthood.

And growing into adolescence typically means developing an acutely controlling selfconsciousness. We start to notice what makes us feel different from others, whether it be our bodies,

hobbies or our perceived social statuses. Our insecurities take center stage, leaving our imaginations to wait in the lobby, sell snacks during intermission and commiserate.

Rather than continue to create worlds of our own, we become preoccupied with the one in front of us: namely, the social spheres under which we operate. The “imaginary audience,” defined as the adolescent belief that others are constantly focusing on them, pushes us to conform to the world around us to prevent embarrassment or shame.

Hence why, according to Psychology Professor Daniel Keating, abandoning the liberal individuality of childhood is often inherent to the nature of adolescent insecurity. “(Adolescence) is a psychosocial thing. It’s what you’re thinking about yourself, and what others think of you,” Keating said in an interview with the Daily. “The adolescent peer experience, with all of its dominance hierarchies and struggles with popularity, sharpens what one would imagine one’s ideal self to be and what the world is going to accept.”

It’s a tale as old as time: a wideeyed child who loves to play make believe subconsciously transforms into a teen who would rather stay quiet in an unfamiliar circle of peers.

Take Ohio State University freshman Talia Moses’s experience, for example: “[When I was little], I had notebooks on notebooks of plays and stories that I wrote. I was super into theater, which really allowed me to express myself,” she said.

But coming into middle school, discomfort around her peers led her to abandon what had once been her primary creative outlet.

“I think that as I got older, I thought I would get judged for being a theater kid or something like that,” Talia described. “And because of that I didn’t want to be associated with that or have people know what I was doing so I just let it go.”

LSA sophomore Lilah Shandel shared a similar sentiment.

An avid reader and writer as a child, Lilah actively hid her

Wednesday, February 23, 2022 — 7

imaginative side once she entered high school in an effort to better ‘fit’ into her social environment.

“Honestly, when I was in middle school, my friends made fun of me a lot. Because I liked (books and that) kind of stuff. And in high school I saw a way to reinvent myself a little bit,” she said. “So I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I won’t be that girl who reads under her desk all the time when the teacher is teaching.’ I’m just gonna keep my head down and do what everyone else is doing. And maybe I’ll have friends that way.”

The adolescent experiences of Talia, Lilah and others like them are positioned in a society that sees imagination as something to grow out of. Beyond the more concrete neuroscience behind “growing up,” societal notions of what exactly being a child means impact our connection with the imaginations we were once closely in touch with. Through our experiences with others, we begin to internalize these expectations and allow our imaginations to fall to the backburner of our ever-busy minds. *** Working as a camp counselor for a group of 10-year-olds this past summer, I had the opportunity to watch “growing up” in action. For some, the age of 10 was just another year of experimental play and creativity. The “mature” 10-yearolds might have crushes on the older boys and test out every curse word. Among lifeguards, counselors and head staff, the latter campers were the center of attention in conversation, showered with praise for their “adultlike” personalities.

The former went unnoticed.

My campers were not alone in being encouraged to participate in the activity of “growing up:” becoming familiar with the “real world” and its consequences and complexities.

Wanting to be an astronaut is a cute ambition when you’re in elementary school. Yet suddenly, 10 years later, you are being encouraged to use your scientific skills to go through medical school instead. It’s practical; it makes

logical sense for establishing a stable income and daily life. Or, that’s what we’re told. *** Like Lilah and Talia, I, too, ditched my notebooks filled with bizarre short stories to engage with the ups and downs of middle school social life. Almost a decade later, exiting late adolescence and moving into young adulthood, I find myself yearning for the simplicity of my childhood, cursing my insecure middle school self for minimizing the magic with which I once saw the world. But slowly, I have discovered that imagination is not gone forever.

Instead, it is lost — waiting to be found again.

And life’s only a matter of how we go about finding it.

Lilah, having gotten back in touch with her love for fantasy in college, explains that a supportive environment has provided her with the space to do so.

“I was so lucky last year to meet the people that I met,” she said. “And people who really pushed me to do what I wanted to do and not what other people like, or what I thought other people wanted me to do.”

As a naturally exploratory life stage, young adulthood (roughly ages 18-25), provides us with the opportunity to find the communities that best serve our most authentic selves. Additionally, it gives us the space to engage with the ideas that intrigue and excite us, especially those we may have thrown to the wayside during a more uniformed adolescence. To Amrine, regaining our imagination is an active process, one to be taken on with love and patience.

“The world is imaginative and (a) young child sort of imbibes that. But then the adult actually has to develop imagination from the inside out,” Amrine explained. “So they have to actually expand once faculties again and make them more mobile.”

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Southern Macaroni and Cheese By Millie Peartree, Kiera Wright-Ruiz

Normalize cheesy first dates.

University of Michigan students now have access to New York Times Cooking — which means your normal food routine just became anything but.

Activate your free Cooking subscription.

Michigan in Color

8 — Wednesday, February 23, 2022

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Here we go again: examining the NFL’s anti-Black discriminatory hiring processes MARIA PATTON MiC Columnist

Well, here we are again. I can’t say I’m surprised; I don’t even think I’m disappointed.

Deep down, I knew it was only a matter of time before more of the National Football League’s (NFL) corruption would come to light to prove, yet again, that no matter how many helmets they print “end racism” on, the NFL is, without a doubt, racist. I was hopeful that the next piece

Flores has sued the NFL claiming the organization was racially discriminatory in its head coach hiring process. He alleges that the owner of the Dolphins, University of Michigan’s own Stephen M. Ross, of the Ross School of Business, offered Flores money to purposely lose games in the 2019 season. Having more losses than wins would better the Dolphins’ chances of acquiring a higher draft pick, allowing them to select the best upcoming player for the future of their franchise. However, Flores was

Younji Jin/TMD

I would write about the NFL would be to praise some of my current favorite quarterbacks that have completely changed the game. Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson, I’m talking to you. Unfortunately, another instance of systemic racism in the NFL has been brought to light with a recent lawsuit by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores.

focused on having a successful season by winning, not by manipulating the future NFL draft.

Every time Flores and his team would win games, the Dolphins’ general manager would express anger towards him, claiming that he was hurting the team.

With his commitment to the current success of his team, Flores recorded back-to-back winning seasons with the Dolphins for the first time since 2003. Despite

the immense success he brought this organization, on Jan. 10, the Dolphins fired him, on grounds of being considered difficult to work with.

Then, as he began seeking a new job as a head coach, Flores attended interviews with the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos. Flores had a Zoom interview with the Giants and was given a date for an in-person interview in the near future.

However, before this interview, he was informed through a text by one of his old colleagues that someone else had received the position. The NFL has a rule called the Rooney Rule, which states that its teams are required to hold an in-person interview with at least one minority or female candidate for a general manager or head coach position. This means they were still required to hold the interview, only for him to find out that someone else was offered the position a day later, implying that the decision had already been finalized before Flores’s interview. Flores states he had a similar experience in interviews with the hiring managers of the Denver Broncos, further alleging that the interviewees arrived an hour late and were hungover.

In addition to his successful seasons with the Dolphins, Flores has had a triumphant coaching career with other NFL teams. As an assistant coach, defensive coordinator and safeties coach for the New England Patriots, he has won four Super Bowl titles. Many of the players he has coached rave about how

supportive and compassionate he was to them. His past colleagues have even stated that he is dedicated “to doing things the right way. He never cut corners…

He’s always been a guy that’s been level, never too high, never too low. That’s what made him a great player, and that’s what’s making him a great coach.”

Flores has an incredible résumé and numerous accolades to his name; having recently been fired from the Dolphins being denied these two head coaching positions is questionable considering the large impact he has had on the organization in his time there and the potential he brings for its future.

The NFL has a long history of racial discrimination against Black coaches. The fact that the Rooney Rule exists just to check a box to say that a marginalized individual was taken into consideration shows its corruption.

Flores having been fired because he was labeled difficult to work with, a common way of devaluing Black people in professional settings, shows the NFL’s discriminatory ways. I hope he is given the justice he deserves.

The NFL is long overdue in enacting actual systemic change and owning up to its apparent discrimination. But instead of focusing solely on all the ways this institution is corrupt, I want to now call attention to some of the amazing and talented Black coaches in NFL history and present day.

Hue Jackson is a former coach of the Cleveland Browns who had an impressive coaching career.

I love my clothes… but it’s complicated JUANPABLOANGELMARCOS MiC Columnist

I love clothes. My night-time routine involves plugging music into my ear and muting out all my thoughts because at the end of a long and stressful day of classes, I get to unwind and focus on creating my next day’s outfit. At the end of a long day, what I want to focus on most are the clothes in my closet. I spend a few intimate moments curating what I want to wear and how I want to wear it. I want to look good for me, myself and I. Today, my fashion inspiration comes from the rappers I listen to, the skateboarders I keep up with, the N.B.A players I imitate and Mexican L.A. street style. Artists like Kanye West, Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean, skaters like Louie Lopez and Sean Pablo and athletes like Kevin Durant put together outfits that make them shine bright.

Each has a unique and signature style, inspiring me to curate my own. There’s a tension, however, between being truly unique and conforming to the trends of society.

Over the years, I’m sure you’ve come across the “Aesthetic Starter Pack” meme. It’s a collection of clothing pieces that are associated with a particular type of person. It’s interesting to see how people categorize themselves, others and their personalities based on a particular set of clothing. When I go out to skate, I put on my beanie, button up shirt and loose flowing pair of pants to pull off a classic skater boy look. It’s fun and easy, but I want to push myself to not fall for the trends too heavily. Though

thrifting, I’m able to experiment with my clothes and avoid current trends by acquiring timeless pieces. Thrifting allows me to enter my own fashion world and find my own style in a financially stable and sustainable way.

I’m creating my own collection of clothes that speak to me. I find confidence in who I am by what I wear, and finding my own style fuels an ongoing journey of authenticity. When I look good and feel good about myself, I can feel better on my skateboard or on the basketball court.

When I am thrifting, my eyes are constantly adjusting, moving from left to right as my fingers comb the clothing racks

graphic. These clothes come from dusty basements and can be generation-long hand-medowns. And, if someone doesn’t love or want their piece of clothing, I’m able to take it in and care for it.

One particular piece of clothing that I care deeply for came from the city of Detroit. When I lived in Detroit this past summer, I explored the city and visited all the thrift stores and vintage shops to find my next catch. I learned about the city’s history and gained a greater appreciation for its culture. Detroit loves its sports teams, with the Detroit Pistons playing such an important role in the city’s culture.

Design by Maya Sheth

in search of my next purchase.

It takes time, but I search for pieces that call to me. It could be a smaller fitting shirt that complements my skinny frame or an oversized dress shirt that drapes over my arms. I’m always looking for polos of all different shapes and sizes or pants that are baggy enough to cuff and fit nicely over my sneakers. Thrifting appeals to me because you can become the owner of a piece that is one of a kind. Thrift stores are not like the stores at malls, where there are hundreds of shirts in all sizes with the same

The Pistons are three-time world champions. From the Bad Boy Pistons winning two championships in the late 80s to beating the Shaq and Kobe duo in 2004, Detroiters love the Pistons and living in Detroit made me become a bigger fan of the team. On weekends when I wasn’t working at my internship, I would bike down to Tolan Park and play basketball on a court designed with Pistons decals. I would join pick up games with the people from the city and play for hours. I was playing basketball in Detroit while listening

to some of my favorite Detroit artists like Baby Tron and Flint rappers like Rio Da Yung Og. My love for the city, and the Pistons, made me want to thrift and find vintage Pistons pieces, so I embarked on a search.

A few blocks from Tolan Park is Eastern Market. This farmers market is filled with food vendors on Saturdays, but on Sundays, the sheds become a space for vendors to sell their art, clothes, jewelry and more.

One vendor, Brandon’s Vintage Basement, had my attention the moment I laid my eyes on the clothes racks stuffed with vintage Detroit sports teams shirts.

Vintage tees can be expensive — ranging from $50-$200 — but I was always aware of my budget. I kept drifting back and forth from this stand throughout the day, finding myself staring at the shirts on the rack and debating if I should purchase a Detroit Pistons shirt. I eventually had to ask myself, ‘when will I ever be living in Detroit, on my own, spending the summer in the city?’ My summer in Detroit would be coming to an end, and I needed something to remember it by. I finally purchased a black shirt with the classic Pistons logo from the 90s, even though it was more pricey than usual, because I knew that I would love and wear that shirt until it wore down to its final thread. And far later that summer, I also found a championship hat from the ‘04 Pistons title run. When I bought this hat, I knew that I was paying for a quality hat that, to me, had a deeply sacred and historical meaning.

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As a testament to this, Jackson won the 2015 NFL Assistant Coach of the Year award and has played an integral role in the success of franchises he has been a part of. Former colleagues praise him for his industrious mentality and overall commitment to player development. However, Jackson claims to have had the same experience as Flores in his time with the Browns. The Browns offered him money to lose games and were successful in their goal of acquiring high draft picks; but Jackson was fired from his position in the 2019 season. He now serves as the head coach of Grambling State’s football team.

The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Head Coach, Mike Tomlin, has given this organization consistent success in his 15 seasons with the Steelers. Tomlin made history in the NFL this most recent season by setting the record for the most consecutive non-losing seasons at the beginning of a coaching career. He has seven American Football Conference (AFC) North Division titles, two AFC titles, has had nine playoff appearances and is the youngest coach to win a Super Bowl. He is one of the longest-tenured active head coaches in the NFL. Tomlin is praised by his players and fellow NFL coaches for how well he controls and commands his team. Mike Tomlin still remains the head coach of the Steelers.

As a Lions fan, I have a soft spot for Jim Caldwell. Though there has not been much to celebrate in Lions history, Caldwell gave Detroit hope for a brighter future during his time here as

a head coach. At the beginning of his career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he trained its quarterback, Brad Johnson, and in turn, Johnson broke team records for passing yards, completions and attempts, helping the team to finish with a winning season and a National Football Conference Wild Card spot. He served as part of the coaching staff for seven years with the Indianapolis Colts, and head coach for another three years. In nine of these seasons, the Colts set records by appearing in nine consecutive playoff appearances in which they won six AFC South titles and made it to two Super Bowls, winning one. Later, serving as an offensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens, Caldwell led the team to a Super Bowl win. Finally, in his time with the Detroit Lions, the defense ranked second in the NFL in total defense in 2014, making it one of its best defensive teams in Lions history.

He was also the Lions’ first noninterim coach to leave the team with a winning record since the 1967-72 coach, Joe Schmidt, with two playoff seasons. He was fired from the Lions in 2017 on grounds of not being successful enough against higher-ranked teams for the then general manager, Bob Quinn. Jim Caldwell was the Lions’ most successful coach in almost 30 years. Two coaches have since gone on to take his place, but they have failed to even reach Caldwell in his success.

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Focaccia recipe from a Chinese daughter LOLA YANG

MiC Columnist

1. What you need: flour, yeast, water, salt and olive oil. Focaccia is a no-brainer for beginner bakers. It’s the perfect bread for college students who commute back and forth between classes and club meetings. The yeast respiration allows the dough to rise in the fridge overnight, without excessive kneading or complications.

2. My mother says only food sticks in my memory. Her secret noodle recipe which became a go-to whenever we were too lazy to cook. The individual drops of rice swimming in the porridge for my sick days as a child, with a perfect consistency achieved from being boiled on low heat for hours. The vegetarian bao, bursting with bok choy, shiitake mushrooms and tofu, that she and I always picked up on Friday afternoons in Shanghai. She hates that I forget to bring my homework to school, but never the packed lunch. She hates that I forget she’s a light sleeper when I lurch into the kitchen at 2 a.m., shoving Kirkland Mixed Nuts down my throat until my heartbeat slows.

3. Measure yeast and mix it with roomtemperature water. Using warm water nurtures the yeast and helps it grow.

4. My mother’s birthplace is named after its proximity to water. The area of the country is , which is “South of the River” in Chinese. The women of were known to be honey-voiced, moonskinned with hips that homed oceans and swayed liked fishtails. We know this because male poets wrote about them for dynasties. My mother was raised by her grandparents on sticky rice rolls that wrapped youtiao, marinated egg, zhacai, yellow croaker noodles and shengjianbao.

Later, she moved to Beijing for schooling, where her parents worked as aerospace engineers.

5. Pour the yeast water into the salt-

and-flour mixture. Mix gently until a mass forms in your bowl. Pour the olive oil and begin kneading.

6. is the abbreviation of my father’s home province, named after the state of from the Spring and Autumn period.

But the only seasons I remember of his city are the summers and winters, when my family visits for the holiday. My father comes from the land of black vinegar, knife-sliced noodles, millet porridge and coal mines. My mother told me that he never tasted fish before the age of 12. The eldest son in a peasant family of six, my father was his family’s pride for attending a top college in the capital. After graduation, he drifted toward the seaside and settled there, where he gradually grew accustomed to the breakfast xiaolongbao and plum rain.

7. Olive oil should alleviate the stickiness of the dough. Once all the flour is properly incorporated into the mixture, you are more than halfway there. Cover the bowl and leave it in the fridge for at least 12 hours.

8. Even after my parents got married, my grandparents never approved of my father. They say he eats like someone who starved to death in their past life.

He slurps up noodles like a hurricane demolishing a village and gulps down his rice with the force of a ghost general who can make things disappear into thin air.

They trace his crude manners to his peasant lineage, saying no matter how smart a monkey is, it can only paddle in the ocean. My grandparents always called me a fat Shanxi girl, because I bear no resemblance to the women of . Whenever I ask for more rice, they take my bowl to refill it. But the bowl that appears before me is only half-full, with a familiar warning that crawls up behind my ear: “Don’t eat too much, or else you will be like your father.”

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Evil eye: cultural emblem or fashion fad?

YASMINE ELKHARSSA MiC Columnist

Bala hasad, Yasmine, say Smallah so you don’t give ayn” This is a phrase that has been regurgitated to me throughout my life. When complimenting family and friends, I have always been careful to not cast the “evil eye” onto someone. Whether I have been conscious of it or not, the evil eye has played a significant role in how I talk to and coexist with others.

The evil eye: a sacred phenomenon and the superstition of all superstitions. In my religion and culture, the evil eye is a widely held belief. It is a malicious gaze cast by an envious person, preventing one from good health and fortune by sending negativity their way. In order to be protected from

hasad, or evil, various cultures have promoted wearing or displaying the symbol as a form of defense. Over the course of my life, my home was littered with evil eye wall decor and I was constantly gifted evil eye jewelry by my loved ones. I was taught to bless others after giving compliments so as not to cast evil or bad fortune upon them. If my evil eye decor or jewelry were to break, I’d quickly become suspicious; legend has it that if your evil eye emblem breaks, it has successfully protected you from someone’s ayn or harmful “eye”. I would wonder, “has it really served its purpose?” After, I’d promptly replace my pendant, whether that be a necklace, anklet, bracelet, ring or keychain. Believing in this protection from evil almost became second nature to me, treating the evil eye as not only a superstition, but a way of thinking that translated into my everyday life. This

easily discernible symbol, composed of a royal blue outer circle, white midsection pupil and small black iris, is more than just a colorful work of art. However, over time, the evil eye has lost its historical significance, becoming more of a fashion fad than religious and cultural hieroglyph.

The evil eye stems far beyond popular culture. Dating as early as 5,000 years ago, the first-ever recorded evil eye was marked on clay tablets by the Mesopotamians.

Intersecting both culture and religion, wariness of evil is found in the scriptures of various religions — Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism (among others) — while also dating back to ancient Greek and Roman cultures. From the beginning of civilization, humans have feared a harmful gaze, doing whatever was in their power to protect themselves and their families from evil.

As a practicing Muslim, the evil eye has always been something I am wary of.

I’ve been taught to be careful of the language used when complimenting someone, almost always blessing them afterward with Islamic reaffirmations such as Mashallah and Smallah, in order to prevent their good fortune from being jinxed.

Throughout my life, I have gifted friends and family with variations of evil eye pendants as protection from evil. As I write this, I am wearing an evil eye necklace and gold bracelet with multiple evil eye pendants interlinked together. To some, this symbol ignorantly serves as a cute jewelry piece — an uninformed infatuation with cultural symbols without actually bearing the weight of carrying that culture. For those who practice the culture it originated from, the evil eye serves as a protective measure from harm they may not be aware

of. In Islamic culture, the Hand of Fatima and the evil eye symbol are equal signs of protection that have reappeared hand in hand throughout my life. I often see new parents pin an evil eye charm to their newborn child’s clothes, while others hang the Hand of Fatima or evil eye symbol in their new homes or business establishments.

Some may even choose to dangle the symbol from the rearview mirror of their car.

Protection from hasad or “destructive envy” is a recurring theme in Islamic culture. Both religiously and culturally, the evil eye holds tremendous weight for those who believe in it, serving as much more than a trendy wardrobe fad, later to be found in a pile of other short-lived “fashion must-haves” in the back of someone’s

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022 — 9

Happy or distracted?

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From The Daily: Congressional stock trading needs reform THE MICHIGAN DAILY EDITORIAL BOARD

B

ipartisan support for stock-trading bans on members of Congress has risen in the last year, largely due to the several violations of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States. Insider trading is illegal, and the STOCK Act prohibits members of Congress from utilizing “nonpublic information derived from” their position to trade stocks.

Former Sen. Kelly Loeff ler, R-Ga., as well as Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., were accused of insider trading in early 2020. Even before this, an investigation

by The Wall Street Journal yielded hundreds of instances in which “(federal judges) or their family members owned shares of companies that were plaintiffs or defendants in the litigation” over which they presided.

Public backlash stemming from this show of government corruption has given rise to widespread agreement within Congress to restrict legislators’ trading, particularly with individual stocks. Just last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s, D-Calif., f lippant dismissal of any restrictions was met with both public and professional backlash before she reluctantly agreed to further action to stronger regulations.

As we approach congressional elections this November, the incentive for many elected officials to address the issue of stock trading restrictions is becoming apparent. A ban on members of Banning lawmakers from trading stocks has the support of around threequarters of the electorate, making it an easy political victory to support it. Naturally, legislators must now address how these restrictions will be put into place, what they will restrict and whom they will impact.

A proposition embraced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., calls for assets to be set aside into blind trusts to be managed by a family mem-

ber or friend. Unfortunately, blind trusts have not historically done a great job of preventing conf licts of interest, with possible loopholes for active trading inf luenced by congressional business. Perhaps the most prominent example of the dangers of blind trusts came with President Trump, who repeatedly came under fire for the unlikelihood of wholly unbiased decision making when he generally knew what the assets in his blind trust were composed of.

A more tenable framework might be found in the Federal Reserve regulations released following recent trading scandals that led to the resignation of multiple Fed governors.

By banning the trading of individual stocks, bonds and cryptocurrencies, the updated standards limit governors to index funds and diversified equities. By restricting investments to highly diversified positions, even members of Congress who take an active role in the management of their investments will be mostly unable to act in ways that bolster their portfolio.

By extending this ban to the spouses and direct dependents of members of Congress, most direct conf licts of interest will be covered under new legislation. While by no means comprehensive, such regulations would be a tremendous step towards accountability and restoration of trust in Congress.

With this framework in mind, another major consideration in any new legislation is enforcement, which remains poorly addressed by existing regulations.Although public backlash can incite change on multiple levels in the behavior of individual members of Congress, much more must be done at the legal level in terms of “punishment” for insider stock-trading offenses.

The goal of the 2012 STOCK Act was to increase transparency between the public and members of Congress, requiring officials to file disclosures concerning their trading activities. Under this law, members of Congress are banned from gaining any “nonpublic” information when it comes to stock

trading, as they are public citizens in their roles as elected officials. Still, politicians continue to ignore these rulings, rather unashamedly using private information to trade and keeping their trade maneuvers out of the public eye. Change is needed in terms of transparency and efficacy.

Multiple plans of action have been introduced in the Senate surrounding punishment for insider trading offenses, ranging from economic punishment (such as paying a fine similar to or more than your salary in Congress), to criminal punishment (like jail time). In the middle is a proposition introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. Brown’s bill, the “Ban Conf licted Trading at the Fed Act”, would fine offending members of Congress at least 10% of the value of the stock.

This measure, among others concerning enforcement of said law, seems like an acceptable middle ground when it comes to punitive action against insider stock trading.

It puts a heavier burden on those wealthy politicians who do not rely solely on the benefits of the stock exchange and does not significantly harm those middle-class representatives who rely on smaller, less frequent investments. In the end, no politician is seriously fiscally damaged, but they are taught a lesson: their insider trading is recognized, and a fine establishes that this is not acceptable to the general U.S. population.

The issue of insider stock trading by members of Congress is a bipartisan one, both in terms of offenders and opposition. These investments are the antithesis of the role of “public servant” these officials serve. Offending politicians are profiting off of their position of political power. In banning representatives and their immediate dependents from such investments, and taxing direct offenders, there may be better financial transparency and trust amongst the people and their government. Public service is what we have elected them to do, not a private smoke-filled-room business.

There need to be consequences.

of gay people you found during your freshman year on accident or brought from high school (like I did), then you must resort to Bumble, Tinder, Her or maybe even that one girl your roommate thinks is bisexual.

And once you have found someone, what do you do?

There are not many helpful queer dating how-tos for college-aged students right now. There are online articles about where to find other queer people, and there is Yik Yak, where an anonymous asker may meet an anonymous answer. Dating is already hard enough for us teenagers and 20-somethings. Queer dating is even harder, and meeting your very own queer network is a whole different bag of worms.

Living in Kerrytown, the unofficial-official Ann Arbor gay-borhood, I have a lot of access to queer people.

While I have never visited the Spectrum Center on campus, nor any organized queer club, I still live in a bubble of Gay. I often forget that there are people on campus who do not have at least five other gay friends, and I wonder, are these the people on Yik Yak? The Spectrum Center and more general queer-student clubs are not popular with the people around me. One of my friends, a bisexual man, tried the club oSTEM (Out in Science, Technolog y, Engineering, and Mathematics), and left after freshman year. Being on Zoom for an hour once a week was not a meaningful way to meet new people for him, nor did the year before make him any new queer friends.

The people on Yik Yak looking for hookups and relationship advice aren’t going to these places either.

They are going on Yik Yak and @collegefessing on

CLAUDIA FLYNN

C

Opinion Columnist

ollege will be the time of your life.” A sentiment that every teenager has heard multiple times in their life. For high schoolers, it serves as a justification for a less than satisfactory high school experience. For new college students, it provides hope that the next four years will be unforgettable. And for the students reaching the end of their college years, it can be two things: a truth, or a “what could have been.”

After completing my first semester of college, I stopped to consider this expectation. In so many ways, college has exceeded my expectations. I didn’t have a big, close-knit friend group in high school, nor did I spend my weekend nights at parties or on unforgettable adventures.

Instead, my closest friends and I navigated high school in a different way; we played sports, focused on school, hung out at each other’s homes and on weekends spent time outdoors, whether we were hiking, surfing, skateboarding or something else (this remains one of the main perks of the Bay Area). My first relationship was a long, peaceful, healthy one with one of my best friends. Looking back, this lifestyle contained all the aspects of true happiness, yet at the time, I felt unfulfilled. Where was the chaos of the American teenage life I had been so conditioned to want?

College took a sharp 180.

Within one month, everything about my life had completely changed. Every second I wasn’t studying or sleeping, I was being social. Romantically, I had guy and girl drama in every corner, and for the first time I felt like someone that people could truly be attracted to. My instagram slowly filled up with pictures of me and my new friends at football games, parties and other events.

I could finally do what I wanted without my parents checking my

location, being home by curfew or constantly having to prioritize my safety. It truly was the American teenage dream, so I should have been the happiest I’ve ever been, right?

What wasn’t shown on my social media stories or texts home to my friends, however, was the other side. The endless hours spent crying at random places around campus, the anxiety of wondering if my friends liked me, the never ending pressure of college classes, the relationship drama that consumed my thoughts, the feeling of being too far away from my family and my home, the hate for the way I looked and the complete overwhelmingness of being in a new state, in a new school, with new friends and absolutely no sense of familiarity.

When we search for happiness in college, we are truly looking for distraction. Stress is released when we become too intoxicated to remember our problems and continue the facade we put on for the week. We wear clothes we hope will make others like us, because we yearn for validation from them instead of giving it to ourselves. When homework becomes too much, we go on a “5 minute” TikTok break that suddenly morphs into hours, then we are consumed by the guilt that follows. When the world feels like it’s ending, we search for our friends to help us push that feeling off for a bit, until it returns later. So much of the idealized large state school experience is derived from students finding ways to distract themselves from the anxiety that comes with entering such an overwhelming new environment.

The issue then, is the feeling of being alone. When everyone around us curates this image of having so much fun, and our parents or aunts and uncles keep reminding us how revolutionary their college experience was, we feel like failures when it’s not perfect. Yet, we are often portraying the same image in an effort to fit into the puzzle,

all it takes is one conversation with any student to realize that this portrayal is not true to life.

So why don’t we have these conversations?

As a society, we are working towards a goal of destigmatizing mental health, however, one important topic often gets left out of the mental health conversation: struggling without a diagnosis.

One of the things that has consistently held me back from truly reaching out to my friends and asking for help when I need it is the fact that I suffer from no mental disorders. A feeling of guilt arises when I feel hopeless, because I feel that whatever I’m feeling must not be as bad as those who have diagnosed mental illnesses. So I do what many of my peers do: push away what I’m feeling for as long as possible.

When that feeling returns, however, it feels bigger and more dangerous. And so the need for a distraction becomes more imminent.

So let’s learn to talk about it.

Let’s learn to ask our friends how they are and reach out in moments of crisis. And let’s erase this idea of college being the most perfect time of your life.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to find happiness, because there is so much happiness to be found in college. I’ve met friends so far in my first semester that I hope will be the friends my kids call “auntie” and “uncle” in 30 years. I’ve made memories I can imagine reminiscing over at the dinner table years in the future.

In just one semester, I’ve learned so much about my academic interests, and I’m excited to learn more. But these things don’t come from intoxication, or letting everyone on my social media know I’m having a great time. They come from the moments when I’m not thinking about what others think, or if I’m doing enough academically and extracurricularly. The first step to truly being happy is living life, instead of distracting ourselves from it.

Ethics 101 with Schlissel

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Yik Yak isn’t the place to find queer love on campus

GISELLE MILLS Opinion Columnist

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s someone who occasionally scrounges Yik Yak for funny content, there is an unending source of “lookingfor-someone” posts. The app is anonymous and annoying to scroll through, but it’s easy to recognize patterns. You find things like: “Are there any other gay girls on campus?

Asking for a friend,” or, “how do u meet wlw in aa, please help,” constantly — especially on weekends. It seems the queer women on campus need rest, too.

According to “The Statement 2021 Sex Survey,” more than 30% of University of Michigan students surveyed did not identify as heterosexual.

That’s a lot of queer people, but how do you meet them?

It’s really not easy. Unless you already have an entire network

Instagram.

These places hold an anonymity that the Spectrum Center does not. I’d like to believe that other clubs have more successful social opportunities for queer people when they invite anyone to come. For example, I recently went to the United Asian American Organizations’ (UA AO) “Femme + Queer Skate” in early November. It still did not feel like a place to meet people, but it was fun to go to with another queer friend. There were lots of femme queer people, and, while some were a part of UA AO, a lot were also just interested in a non-judgemental skating atmosphere.

One of the organizers told me that there were more people signed up than she thought there would be. I asked her if there would be another meeting like this, and she said there could be.

And that was it.

I don’t know anyone in a

queer-student club. It often seems to me that co-ops are more queer-friendly spaces to meet people than any organized club on campus.

I wonder if those people on Yik Yak simply do not live in Kerrytown, or their dorm hall during their freshman year was not at least half gay.

Necto’s “Gay Night” for anyone 18+ seems to be more popular with those that are confident and outward in their identities as queer people. Attending Necto’s “Gay Night” myself, it did not feel like a place to meet friends, especially not friends who prefer a Friday night in.

I know that not every space on campus is queer-friendly, despite what I may hope is true. Not every professor asks for your pronouns in your introduction, though you can’t help but appreciate the ones that do. Especially in nonliberal arts majors, there are very few students that you

may be able to recognize as gay in cultural cues or fashion, which is why it’s important to have places like the Spectrum Center and create clubs like oSTEM. Unfortunately, I don’t think that every lonely queer person is going to these places.

Anonymous sites like Yik Yak are more accessible and less scary for these people, especially during a time of such serious health concerns with meeting in person.

For those people on Yik Yak who are looking for a simple “like” so that they don’t feel so alone and are being encouraged by other “Yakers” commenting the same questions in solidarity: keep looking. There are places here for you, and there are places to find people like you. Whether it’s a Co-op, an art class or someone with a rainbow pin in the library, you can find people. Just maybe outside of Yik Yak.

Opinion

10 — Wednesday, February 23, 2022

War and peace: an administration that has chosen neither NIKHIL SHARMA Opinion Columnist

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s the fate of Ukraine teeters on the brink, President Biden has been tasked with a grave decision that has tremendous international consequences: cave into Russia’s demands or threaten to fight to defend Ukraine. The first option would preclude Russia from any attack, destroying their diplomatic reputation if they advanced their troops. The second, though it heightens the risk of a confrontation between the United States and Russia, two nucleararmed nations, would likely scare President Vladimir Putin away from invading in the near future.

This would ultimately show that the United States means business when it comes to defending freedom.

Unfortunately, Biden has chosen a third, murkier option that neither ends the conflict nor stands up to Russia. By continuing to support diplomatic channels with Russia while explicitly stating that his administration would never agree to Putin’s demands or send troops into Ukraine, Biden has made the United States look geopolitically weak, a nation uncommitted to its allies and unable to foster productive diplomatic discussions. Though it still remains unclear when Russia will choose to attack, Biden’s choices have permanently diminished the United States’s negotiating power and might prove catastrophic when Putin inevitably forwards his expansionist agenda.

Though Putin has been angling for a mainland invasion of Ukraine since his 2014 takeover of Crimea, the current conflict was instigated when he demanded that Ukraine be prohibited from ever joining NATO.

While a drastic demand, the request is understandable and could even serve to reduce future provocations. Having NATO on Russia’s doorstep would be tantamount to having Russian troops permanently stationed across the Ambassador Bridge. Realistically, it would serve neither the interest of the U.S. nor Russia to have Ukraine join NATO, as it would dramatically increase the tension of an otherwise relatively stable relationship.

Beyond international security implications, Ukraine is unlikely to even be a strong fit for the NATO alliance. With a sizable sect of the population supporting the Russian separatist movement, Ukrainians would likely be wary of taking actions against Russia. The ongoing conflict in the Donbas region, which has been decimated by trench warfare between over 75,000 separatists and government forces since 2014, is evidence of just how unstable Ukraine’s national security was even before the recent spike in tensions.

Attaching NATO backing to a region with tremendous turmoil could lead to the unnecessary involvement of Western troops in civil warfare and bloody internal conflicts.

While meeting Putin’s demands of curbing NATO’s eastward expansion would temporarily weaken our standing, in the long-run, it could serve to ease international tensions and increase our goodwill amongst European nations currently reluctant to sever their economic ties with Russia or risk sending in troops to an unstable region.

The other path that Biden could have taken was to hang the threat of war or harsh sanctions over Putin to deter him from engaging. Though Biden has threatened sanctions if Putin were to attack, the prospect of future sanctions might do little to dissuade a Russian administration

that has erred on the side of recklessness with regards to longterm threats. If Biden had instead preemptively imposed sanctions on the Russians, he could have forced Putin back to the negotiating table on American terms and coaxed Russia into pulling its troops back from the border.

Another misstep came in Biden’s declaration that the U.S. would not engage militarily in Ukraine. Though the nation would clearly never send in American troops, the past century of U.S. foreign policy has shown our willingness to support proxy wars, with the U.S. training and backing forces throughout the Middle East and Africa. With three decades of built-up tension between the U.S. and Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin would be wise not to risk any military action. By giving up this option, Biden has made clear that while the U.S. opposes Russia’s actions, it would never go to war with them, tacitly approving Putin’s decision to move forward with little U.S. military opposition.

Unfortunately, Biden is likely too late to fully avert a Ukrainian crisis.

Whether Russia attacks now or waits until a later date, Putin is clearly set on expanding Russian influence in the region. While diplomacy is a viable negotiating tactic with other nations, as an ex-KGB officer, Putin seems far more likely to respect threats of force. With China rising as a global power, the U.S. can’t afford to stay distracted by Russia, so going forward, Biden would be wise to negotiate from a position of power to ensure that Russia doesn’t pose a future threat. If he is serious about reestablishing America’s commitment to its allies, it’s time for Biden to stop reacting to Putin and start proactively asserting American interests.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Expectations vs reality: prioritizing ourselves over profession SAM WOITESHEK Opinion Columnist

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ecently, I pursued a very exciting opportunity, one that afforded me the chance to work in an industry I’ve loved since I can remember: sports. Of all the extracurricular opportunities I’ve involved myself in this year — professional fraternities, sports business groups, writing for this awesome paper, etc. — this felt different. This was the chance of a lifetime, one that could define my college career.

One thing you should know about me is that when I go after something, I go all-in. I’m sure many of you do as well. It’s one of the traits which defines the student population here: when we want something, we go after it with a vengeance. So, that’s exactly what I did. Networking calls, emails, talking to people who held the position formerly — everything you’re supposed to do, by the book, to position yourself in the best way possible.

Yet, as I stubbornly pursued this opportunity, I found myself growing more doubtful. This doesn’t feel right, I told myself. What the heck is wrong here? As I asked more and more questions, I received answers which didn’t necessarily excite me. I kept scrambling for the right inquiry, one that would unlock my lost enthusiasm (my original motivation for the position). Unfortunately, it never came. I realized, throughout the process, that more is not always better. I chose to affiliate myself with a couple of select student organizations already; I liked the people I met, the objectives of the organizations and believed in their respective potentials.

Quite honestly, I thought I had struck gold when, in reality, this should be

the standard across the board.

No one should have to feel like they are settling. This exact sentiment made my emotions all the more troublesome. On the surface, this athletic opportunity should be my dream. However, I turned it down because it wasn’t the right fit for me.

Now, a few days after, I still feel in shock. I question whether it will turn out to be the right decision. Right now, in my gut, I think it is.

Frictional unemployment, as defined by Professor Ed Cho, is “workers taking the time to search for jobs that match their skills or tastes.” Granted, at first, this seems like an overwhelming, intimidating concept. No one should want to turn down employment if they need it, right? True, although I propose that frictional unemployment may actually be a positive idea.

Quite simply, we should pursue opportunities that are not only engaging, but those that achieve this quality without forcing us to compromise our well-being. Our desire to be involved is one thing; seeking commitments which are enriching, re-energizing and leave us fulfilled after putting in work is another. Scott Dust, professor of management at Miami University, notes that “person-organization fit is a strong predictor of whether or not someone will be committed to an organization in the long-term.”

Additionally, individuals who experience “higher levels of this type of fit typically enjoy being at work and connecting with colleagues.”

In my short two years here, I have been told to take informal, informative interviews seriously as “you are interviewing them for as much as they are interviewing you.” For the longest time, I never understood this advice or how to determine whether a position is a healthy fit. To do so, I started to

break down what a responsibility entails into comprehensible questions.

How does this obligation agree with my personality and morals?

Will it allow me to balance my other competing interests? Does this opportunity provide adequate benefit for the time I will put in?

These may seem like basic inquiries at first glance, but I discovered that answering them truthfully requires intricate, complex rationalization. I don’t always like my answers, but at the very least I know they are sincere.

Therefore, I believe there is power in introspection and, more importantly, self-honesty. While the demands of our ‘dream job’ may at first seem too glorious to pass up, it is important to understand who we are as evolving individuals; we need not jump at our first offer, our second, but rather the one which speaks best to our personality and lifestyle.

The sooner we learn to prioritize our well-being over what we believe to be ‘professionally outstanding,’ the better off we will be in the long run. Granted, when Fortune 500 companies are offering six figures upon graduation, I understand this might be easier said than done. In my anecdote, it is not like I would be unhappy working within sports. In fact, I’d be over-the-moon ecstatic.

In this role, however, I just would not be as excited as I could be, and that, personally, is a red flag. If I can’t be fair to myself, how can I be fair to the organization?

Thus, I encourage you to keep digging, keep soul-searching for the ‘perfect’ opportunity. Refuse to compromise the first few years of your professional career for a better one later on. Ideally, you should not have to accept mortgaging your future. Trust yourself now, in the moment, and know that everything is going to be alright.

February 15th

The downside of Big Dairy’s big influence SOPHIA LEHRBAUM

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Opinion Columnist

ooking back on my childhood, it’s exceedingly apparent that Big Dairy propaganda was omnipresent in my daily life. My parents always reminded me that drinking milk makes for stronger bones. Both chocolate and regular milk in cute cartons with cartoon cows filled my school lunches, “Got Milk?” campaigns filled the newspapers I’d flip through while waiting in line at Safeway and my school cafeteria decorated its walls with colorful USDA dietary guideline posters that encouraged students to consume at least 3 cups of dairy every day.

According to these guidelines, our government maintains that regular consumption of dairy is “associated with positive health outcomes” and is an excellent source of protein and nutrients. While this widely accepted “truth” appears to hold merit, there’s a concerning amount of information being withheld from this argument.

So, let’s break it down.

Within this half-truthful argument, the government conveniently forgets to mention that the dairy industry is incontestably one of the most abusive and exploitative toward animals in the United States. The image that Big Dairy has fed the American public

of a quaint farmer milking a cow while sitting on a pail is intentional disinformation, to say the least.

When female cows are just two years old and newly able to give birth, they are forcibly inseminated by machines. They carry their calves for nine months, living in pens with concrete floors and hundreds of other dairy cows and sleeping in piles of manure. Hours after delivery, the calf is robbed from the mother; if it’s male, it’s sent to a beef farm to be raised for meat products, and if it’s female, it’s sent to another dairy farm to be raised for dairy products.

The mother would typically produce just enough milk for her calf, but with the help of hormones pumped into her body, she unnaturally produces a surplus for market consumption.

She is connected to a machine with suction tubes on her udders and milked for weeks until her body stops producing. When she can give birth again, she is similarly artificially inseminated, and the process continues until she cannot breed anymore. Now, useless to the dairy farmers, she is killed and sold for beef products.

Because 99% of U.S. livestock are raised in disease-ridden feedlots, factory farms or concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) as previously mentioned, cattle must be injected with high amounts of antibiotics to fight rampant infection

within these heavily confined, germ ridden spaces. Consequently, numerous studies have found antibiotic “residue” from dairy cattle in a majority of our dairy products.

The human impact of this practice cannot be understated. Antibiotics in our day-to-day dairy products can lead to antibiotic resistance in the general public, resulting in more costly and prolonged treatment of infections, allergic reactions (especially if the antibiotic contains penicillin), carcinogenic impacts, mutagenic effects on female fertility and destruction of microflora in the intestines — which help to fight infection. Inarguably, the inorganic practices within Big Dairy that translate into its products are incredibly costly to human health.

After being presented with this information, the alarming lack of transparency within our pro-dairy government health organizations becomes staunchly evident.

And even still, the American public is urged to consume dairy by government health organizations, even though all of dairy’s speculative positive impacts can be debunked by opposing studies. For example, though government health organizations like the USDA claim that dairy makes your bones more resilient, a study conducted by New Zealand scientists found that there was no association between

calcium intake from dairy products and a reduction in bone fractures.

Moreover, the perceived nutritional benefits of consuming dairy, like fulfilling our daily recommendations for phosphorus, calcium and protein intake can be satisfied through increasing our intake of certain green vegetables. According to a 2020 nutrition review published by scholars at Oxford Academic, “focusing on more nutrient-dense, plant-based foods would allow greater latitude in food choices to meet mineral requirements by allowing a greater number of choices from a variety of plant foods while reducing kilocalories consumed (from dairy products).”

This brings us to the ultimate question of why our government pushes pro-dairy rhetoric to the American public despite its obvious lack of merit. As it turns out, this entire system was constructed during the first World War, when the U.S. government began sending milk products overseas to nourish impoverished European soldiers.

This created a booming market for newly specialized dairy farmers who invested heavily in raising dairy cattle. When the war ended, dairy farmers ended up with a plenitude of milk products and little demand, leading the U.S. government to sponsor milk campaigns that encouraged consumers to buy dairy

products. This, lined up with the creation of the National School Lunch Program, which required public schools to serve milk as a part of complete meals for students.

After Reagan cut U.S. spending, which included buying excess dairy products, Big Dairy discovered its ability to exert market influence through lobbying efforts in Congress, which incentivized congresspeople to continue including dairy in national health organization guidelines. These lobbied members of Congress also assist Big Dairy by involving dairy corporations in partnerships with restaurant chains, like Domino’s and Starbucks, where they can help to create dairy-heavy menu items for consumer use.

The dairy industry — made up of companies such as Land O’Lakes and Dairy Farmers of America — spent a total of $6.7 million on lobbying in 2021 alone. Essentially, in order to serve the personal interests of some of our government officials, pockets get fuller with Big Dairy money for the sake of their personal interest and they sacrifice the health of their nation.

There are numerous concrete actions that people can take to combat the corruption of our government’s department of agriculture. While veganism and vegetarianism can be far-fetched goals, a simple reduction of dairy

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use on a day-to-day basis can help to sizably decrease the dairy industry’s impact on our country’s people, animals and environment. Dairy alternatives, such as oat milk and soy milk, are just as delicious and far less saturated with unhealthy fats and excessive calories than traditional dairy. Oat milk pairs harmoniously with cereal, coffee and even baked goods — I personally recommend Chobani Vanilla Oat Milk for a dulcet, thick milk alternative, and Planet Oat Original Oat Milk for a light, mellow milk alternative.

Shopping local for dairy products is another great alternative to buying from Big Dairy corporations because it supports small businesses, bypasses the excessive processing of dairy products and allows the consumer to know where their dairy is coming from.

On a political level, it is crucial to support policies that take a stand against special interest lobbying in Congress and that fight to expand lobbying disclosure so that our constituency can be informed about what representatives are selling themselves to corporations.

It is time that the American public stop COWering at the investment into healthier dairy alternatives, for the sake of our public health, environment and trust within our democratic system.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Sports

Michigan loses to Wisconsin with grim second half performance, ugly scrum JOSH TAUBMAN

Daily Sports Editor

An ugly performance for the Michigan men’s basketball team turned uglier after the final buzzer sounded Sunday afternoon.

After Michigan (14-11 overall, 8-7 Big Ten) fell to No. 15 Wisconsin (21-5, 12-4), 77-63, the postgame handshake line morphed into a physical altercation. Several Wolverines engaged in the scuffle and Michigan coach Juwan Howard threw a punch at a Wisconsin assistant coach.

After the game Howard seemed prepared to suffer the consequences of his actions, although he did not utter an apology: “I respect whatever the Big Ten decision that they make,” Howard said. “It’s up to them and I will respect whatever decision they end up making.”

Frustrations boiled over for Howard, perturbed that Wisconsin coach Greg Gard took a timeout with 15 seconds left in a game that was a foregone conclusion.

But the punches also came after a lamentable second half performance for the Wolverines, who

ANNA FUDER/Daily Michigan blew a winnable game against the Badgers in the second half, and then frustration soon boiled over.

saw a tied game at halftime turn into a blowout loss.

The first half played out as a tug-of-war, with neither team able to drag itself towards a win. Playing at a snail’s pace, both teams grinded through possessions, not finding many open buckets or chances to run in transition. The teams combined for just one three pointer, further adding to the ugly offensive pace.

Instead, the main battle transpired in the paint. The Wolverines leaned on sophomore center Hunter Dickinson, who scored 15 of their 31 first half points. The Badgers refused to commit to double teams and Dickinson took advantage, constantly flipping hook shots toward the rim. But, Wisconsin challenged Michigan’s interior defense with similar success, equalling the Wolverines’ 31 points with 22 coming inside the paint.

Neither team could find any separation at the halfway point.

Michigan appeared to break the seal on its rim to start the second half, as it raced out to 7-0 run and went up 38-33. Instead, the quick offensive spurt proved to be a mirage. Empty offensive possessions piled up — including a plethora of missed threes — and an instant lead in the second half turned into a growing deficit.

“I think a lot of our shots were good shots,” Dickinson said.

“They just happened not to go in. But when you stop shooting, that shows a lack of confidence in yourself. And that’s the worst thing that can happen in basketball is when you don’t have confidence in yourself.”

Suddenly trailing with less than twelve minutes to go, the offense looked to break out from its slog and prevent the game from completely unraveling. But there was no solace on that end of the floor. Offensive fouls, blocked shots and 3-point attempts clanging off the rim ultimately spelled doom for the Wolverines. A 38-33 lead had turned into an astonishing 56-41 deficit.

“We just had some mental lapses on defense,” graduate transfer guard DeVante’ Jones said.

“I think that was a big thing for us. And (Badgers’ guard) Johnny Davis hit some tough shots and they just kind of fed off that.”

The Wolverines had no answer for Davis, who amassed 23 points on 11-for-16 shooting. The offense completely disappeared, especially Dickinson, who scored just six points in the final 20 minutes after his scorching start. Michigan as a team shot an atrocious 4-for-25 from beyond the arc and was never able to cut into the lead once it fell behind — trailing by double digits for a majority of the second half.

An abysmal second half showing caused a game within reach for the Wolverines to completely slip away. The forgettable result, though, didn’t kill Michigan’s postseason hopes.

But the actions that followed postgame will long be remembered. The fight creates a number of problems — and almost certainly some suspensions — that will make what’s been a difficult season for the Wolverines that much harder to navigate as the finish line nears.

Michigan to suspend Juwan Howard for rest of regular season NICHOLAS STOLL AND JARED GREENSPAN

Managing Sports Editors

Michigan has suspended coach Juwan Howard for the remainder of the regular season, Yahoo Sports first reported Monday evening.

Howard will miss the Wolverines’ five remaining regular season games as the team attempts to secure an NCAA Tournament bid and play its way off the bubble. In his absence, associate head coach Phil Martelli will serve as Michigan’s acting head coach, while director of basketball operations Chris Hunter will temporary fulfill the third assistant coaching position.

The suspension follows Sunday’s incident in which Howard took a swipe at a Wisconsin assistant coach in the postgame handshake line, inciting a full-out brawl between the two sides.

Howard will also be fined $40,000.

“After taking time to reflect on all that happened, I realize how unacceptable both my actions and words were, and how they affected so many,” Howard said in a statement released Monday evening. “I am truly sorry. I am offering my sincerest apology to my players and

their families, my staff, my family and the Michigan fans around the world. I would like to personally apologize to Wisconsin’s Assistant Coach Joe Krabbenhoft and his family, too.

“Lastly, I speak a lot about being a Michigan man and representing the University of Michigan with class and pride, I did not do that, nor did I set the right example in the right way for my student-athletes. I will learn from my mistake and this mistake will never happen again. No excuses!”

After Sunday’s transgression, Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel released the following statement: “I am aware of and watched the end of our men’s basketball game.

There is no excuse for any of our staff or student-athletes to get into a physical altercation with others regardless of instigating factors. I reached out and apologized to Chris McIntosh and President Coleman has reached out to UQ Chancellor Blank to apologize for the totally unacceptable behavior.

We will review the situation more thoroughly and work with the Big Ten Conference as they determine their disciplinary actions and will determine if any further disciplinary actions are needed.”

In his press conference after

the game, Howard did not issue an apology, instead doubling down on his sentiment.

“I addressed it with (Gard) that I will remember that because of that timeout,” Howard said. “For someone to touch me, I think that was very uncalled for him to touch me, as we were verbalizing and communicating with one another.

So that’s what ended up happening.

And that’s what escalated it.”

While Big Ten rules state that disciplinary fines will “not exceed $10,000” and suspensions for “no more than two contests,” Michigan worked alongside the Big Ten to amplify the punishment, extending the length of the suspension.

In addition to Howard, two Wolverines will be suspended one game each: Freshman forward Moussa Diabate and sophomore forward Terrance Williams II, who both appeared to throw punches during Sunday’s brawl. The suspensions are effective immediately, meaning Diabate and Williams will miss Wednesday’s contest against Rutgers.

On the Wisconsin side of things, guard Jahcobi Neath will receive a one-game suspension, while coach Greg Gard will be fined $10k. Meanwhile, assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft, who was also involved in the altercation, will not

receive any sort of punishment.

“Big Ten Conference coaches and student-athletes are expected to display the highest level of sportsmanship conduct,” Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren released in a statement. “I am grateful for the partnership with Michigan Athletics Director, Warde Manuel and Wisconsin Athletics Director, Chris McIntosh. Our expectation is that the incident yesterday will provide our coaches and student-athletes with the opportunity to reflect, learn and move forward in a manner that demonstrates decorum and leadership on and off of the court.”

DOMINICK SOKOTOFF/Daily Juwan Howard will miss Michiga’s five remaining regular season contensts while serving a suspension.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022 — 11

Michigan’s guards step up in second half against Maryland

JULIA SCHACHINGER/Daily Michigan’s guards complimented forward Naz Hillmon in Michigan’s win over Maryland.

ABBIE TELGENHOF

Daily Sports Writer

The No. 9 Michigan women’s basketball team had been here before in Ann Arbor.

Fighting once again for control of the Big Ten in their matchup with Maryland, the Wolverines found themselves in a familiar place. Less than a month ago, Michigan faced off with Indiana under the same circumstances.

The biggest difference between the two? Senior wing Leigha Brown’s absence.

Against the Hoosiers, Brown was tied for second-leading scorer. Without her, the Wolverines have struggled to make up for her 14.8 points per game average, falling in consecutive outings to Michigan State and Northwestern.

But in Michigan’s 71-59 victory over the Terrapins on Sunday, the Wolverines finally found the secondary scoring they had lacked in their previous two contests. Specifically, the team’s guards made up for Brown’s lost production.

“We’re really tough to guard when everyone’s being aggressive,” junior guard Maddie Nolan said. “(There were) shots in the second half where they started double teaming Naz so we were able to find Laila (Phelia) and me and Danielle (Rauch).”

Much like in the matchup against Indiana, Hillmon mostly carried Michigan’s offense early on. Without any offensive presence outside the post, the Terrapins were able to sag off their defenders and condense into the paint against Hillmon throughout the first half. Heading into halftime Michigan knew they’d have to recalibrate.

Struggling to score for nearly three minutes into the second half, the Wolverines needed a spark. Phelia — a freshman guard — was the first to light up, finding her way into the lane for a driving layup. On the next play, Phelia drained a 3-pointer at the tail end

of the shot clock.

“When we’re having an insideoutside attack, we’re at our best,” Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico said. “And there’s always so much pressure on Naz, a doubleteam, a triple-team … so we were just really encouraging them at halftime to shoot the ball and to be aggressive from that guard spot as well.”

Nolan kept the streak alive throughout the fourth quarter, scoring eight of her eleven points in the final frame. Going 3-for-5 from the 3-point line and grabbing five rebounds, Nolan made herself indispensable down the stretch.

With the win-by-committee style the Wolverines found for the first time since Brown’s absence, Rauch — a senior guard — also found her stride late in the game.

The second leading scorer against both the Spartans and the Wildcats, Rauch has filed nicely into the missing gaps left behind by Brown.

Sophomore guard Elise Stuck also brought depth off the bench notching four points and one assist in just three minutes.

Attacking the Terrapins’ limited bench which had only eight dressed players, the Wolverines tired them out with multiple different looks and offensive sets.

“They were able to kind of send more waves in against us,” Maryland coach Brenda Frese said.

“And they had more depth.”

The losses to Michigan State and Northwestern highlighted many problems, but one was glaringly obvious: Simply relying on Hillmon is no longer enough for the Wolverines. Other teams key in on the paint and focus their entire defense on stopping her.

When Michigan’s guards are producing offensively, it disrupts opposing teams’ game plan.

With control of the Big Ten on the line, Michigan needed its role players to step up. And after multiple missteps in their last two losses, against Maryland, they finally did.

Hot and cold hitting hampers Michigan, leading to 1-2 start ZAIN RODGER

Daily Sports Writer

Junior outfielder Clark Elliott stared down Texas Tech pitcher Andrew Morris with an 0-1 count.

His eyes locked onto the second pitch of the season and didn’t leave the ball until it reached the right field stands. The solo home run gave the Michigan baseball team an early 1-0 lead against the Red Raiders and led off an explosive but inconsistent offensive performance on the weekend from the Wolverines.

Michigan (1-2) won just one of three games in the College Baseball showdown in Arlington, Texas, beating Kansas State (0-3), 10-2, and falling to No. 14 Texas Tech (1-2), 7-6, and Oklahoma (2-1), 6-1 in its opening weekend of the season.

The Wolverines cruised from the start against the Red Raiders, continuing a rally through the second inning. Grad transfers Joe Stewart and Alex Fedje-Johnson

found themselves in scoring position after a walk and hit by pitch.

After an RBI single by senior infielder Riley Bertram, Elliott found himself in the spotlight again with two runners on base.

He capitalized, barrelling his second hit of the night into right field to score both runners. Elliott was the Wolverines’ clear best hitter on the weekend raking in two home runs, four RBIs and a .462 batting average.

“He’s one of the harder workers we’ve had and a guy that got a lot of confidence this summer competing against the best out in the Cape Cod League and carried that confidence into this season so far,” Michigan coach Eric Bakich said. “ … He’s just very steady and just does a really good job staying centered mentally and with his routine putting together a lot of consistency in his preparation.”

The bats cooled off after the fiery start until two outs in the fifth inning. The Wolverines rattled off three straight singles, with senior

infielder Jack Van Remortel hitting Stewart to his second run of the night.

No runs were scored from the seventh inning on and the game fell on the shoulders of senior reliever Willie Weiss in the bottom of the ninth. He allowed the first three batters to reach base and sophomore outfielder Dalton Porter hit a sac fly to tie the game at six.

Texas Tech outfielder Owen Washburn stepped up to the plate for the biggest at bat of his career thus far. In his first ever college game, Washburn laced a walk-off single to right field, scoring senior infielder Cole Stilwell for the Red Raiders’ 7-6 win.

“I wouldn’t look back at that game and say ‘man, Texas Tech beat us,’ ” Bakich said. “I would look back at that game and say we lost that game. We had the lead.

They did stop us from continuing to score, but we gave that one away with just the extra 90s and the freebies. You can’t do that.”

Saturday’s game against Kan-

sas State started off cold for both teams. The bullpens clamped down until the sixth inning when the Wildcats switched pitchers to sophomore Griffin Hassal who struggled to find the plate.

Junior catcher Jimmy Obertop advanced from first to third after two consecutive wild pitches.

Michigan continued to pile on after a lucky error at first with two outs. Van Remortal batted in FedjeJohnson with a double and would later score off another Kansas State error to make it a 3-1 game.

The Wildcats tried to slow the Wolverines down with another pitching change at the top of the seventh, but it only made things worse. Michigan went off for a season-high seven runs in an inning capped off by Elliott’s second home run of the weekend to ice the game at 10-2.

The Wolverines again started cold against Oklahoma but had ample chances starting in the fourth inning. Junior infielder Ted Burton reached first via an error and was

hit home by a double from Obertop.

The fifth inning looked like a return to the cold bats with two consecutive outs to start, but Bertram and Elliott rattled off two singles to put men at first and third, giving Burton a chance to capitalize.

The Sooners made a pitching change and struck him out to halt Michigan’s momentum. The Wolverines didn’t put a runner in scoring position for the rest of the game. Oklahoma cleaned up in the eighth to secure a 6-1 victory over Michigan.

“The difference was that Kansas State made the mistakes against us that we made against Oklahoma tonight in terms of walks, errors, and extra 90s,” Bakich said. “When you give things away to good teams, they make you pay for it.”

Michigan is not unfamiliar with rough starts to the season. It schedules many of the best nonconference opponents for opening weekend to highlight its own weaknesses early.

“It’s good for us to get knocked

down a little bit and face a little adversity early this year,” Bakich said. “That’s why we scheduled the teams that we scheduled. … We expect that there’s going to be some getting knocked down where we’re going to have a response. We’ll certainly use that to our advantage and it helped us in the past, certainly helped us in 2019.”

JULIA SCHACHINGER/Daily Clark Elliot’s solo home run against Texas Tech set the tone for the weekend.

SPORTSWEDNESDAY

GUT PUNCH Juwan Howard’s actions put Michigan in a terrible position JACK KINGSLEY Daily Sports Editor

H

eading into Sunday’s game at No. 15 Wisconsin, the questions surrounding the Michigan men’s basketball team were solely on the court.

Would the Wolverines be able to pick up a second consecutive Quadrant 1 road win and put themselves safely on the right side of the NCAA Tournament bubble? Or would they once again follow up an important win with a dud?

But as Michigan left the Kohl Center floor after a blowout loss, all of those points became moot. All that mattered was the altercation between Michigan coach Juwan Howard and Wisconsin coach Greg Gard in the handshake line, an ugly incident that resulted in Howard throwing a punch at Badgers’ assistant Joe Krabbenhoft and a full-team brawl.

Any way you look at it, Howard’s actions were inexcusable. His failure to apologize postgame or even acknowledge any wrongdoing only made matters worse. Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel admitted that much in a statement after the game.

According to both coaches, the incident stemmed from a sequence that occurred with just 15 seconds remaining in the game.

While Wisconsin had a lineup of all reserves on the court, Howard left a few of his starters in the game and instructed them to play a full-court press. In danger of a backcourt violation, Gard called a timeout to reset the 10-second clock and draw up a play to break the press.

“I didn’t like the timeout being

called,” Howard said afterwards.

“I’ll be totally honest with you, I thought it was not necessary at that moment, especially being a large lead, and then for the time out to be called with three seconds or four seconds to go. I thought that … wasn’t fair to our guys.”

Howard said extending the game wasn’t fair to his players, but he should have considered how unfair of a position his response has now put them in. By throwing a punch, Howard will almost certainly be suspended for the foreseeable future, missing a string of crucial games for his team’s NCAA Tournament push. All five of the Wolverines’ remaining games are against potential tournament teams, and they likely need to win three to feel good about their chances entering the Big Ten Tournament.

Now, they might be without their head coach for all of them. And the ramifications of Howard’s actions might make things worse.

After Howard escalated the situation, multiple players on both sides got involved. Freshman forward Moussa Diabate and sophomore forward Terrance Williams II also appeared to throw punches, which could result in additional suspensions.

Needless to say, losing Diabate — who dropped a career-high 28 points just two games ago — and Williams, a key cog in an undermanned rotation, will hamper Michigan’s ability to rattle off much-needed victories.

When asked after the game why players stepped in, sophomore center Hunter Dickinson and graduate guard DeVante’ Jones

both preached a “we’re a family” mantra. Howard even used that to essentially excuse his players’ actions, saying: “But you know what? I respect our young men for saying what they’re saying as far as we are a family and truly, but did not want it to be in a situation where it escalated like that.”

If Howard truly believes that this team is a family, and if he truly didn’t want to escalate anything, he should have had the wherewithal to temper his emotions to avoid what would transpire.

Players play with a lot of adrenaline, and after a tough loss, they tend to run hot. It’s already happened to Diabate this season when he got into a skirmish after a loss to Rutgers.

But Sunday, Howard put all of his players in a situation to potentially face discipline. And even the ones that are allowed to play on Wednesday against the Scarlet Knights will be forced to do so shorthanded and without their coach. Howard put his entire team — a team that has finally begun to rack up big wins and seemed poised to secure an NCAA Tournament bid after months of frustration — in an unfair spot, both directly after the game and as the season comes to a close.

For Michigan, Sunday should have been a mere blip on the radar, a chance to address shortcomings after a loss and regroup for a crucial stretch run.

Instead, Sunday’s ramifications will last as long as Michigan’s season does.

And Howard’s actions may have shortened it.

Julia Schachinger/Daily | Design by Lys Goldman