Ann Arbor, Michigan Wednesday, November 5,
Michigan residents lose SNAP benefits Nov. 1 amid government shutdown
Federal judges ordered the Trump administration to use emergency reserve funds for SNAP payments
Update 11/2: On Oct. 30., the State of Michigan announced it will provide $4.5 million to the Food Bank Council of Michigan to assist residents impacted by the government shutdown.
On Oct. 31., two federal judges ruled President Donald Trump’s administration must use contingency funds to continue the dispersal of SNAP benefits.
According to Michigan Attorney
General Dana Nessel, even if the Trump administration releases the contingency funds to states immediately, Michigan residents set to receive SNAP benefits may still see delays. It is not yet clear if the Trump administration intends to appeal this ruling.
Update 11/3: On Nov. 3, the Trump administration announced in response to the federal judges that it will send out partial SNAP payments this month. The emergency fund it will use has $4.65 billion — enough to cover half of recipients’ usual benefits. It is still unclear when recipients will receive their aid.
The United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service announced Oct. 27 that no Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits will be distributed from Nov. 1 until further notice due to insufficient funds. Nearly 13% of Michigan households receive assistance from SNAP, a federal program that provides monthly food benefits to low-income households. USDA’s website states that due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, there may be limited availability of government funding to pay for these benefits.
About 41.7 million Americans, including 1.4 million Michiganders, receive SNAP benefits, typically through an electronic debit card
which can be used at grocery stores nationwide. In a press release, Elizabeth Hertel, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services director, said losing SNAP funding will have drastic impacts on many families, and that the state will do what it can to minimize harm.
“SNAP is more than a food assistance program; it’s a lifeline for many Michigan families,” Hertel said. “It helps families put nutritious food on the table, supports local farmers and grocers, and strengthens our communities and economy. We are strongly disappointed by the USDA’s decision to delay this assistance, and in Michigan we will do what we can to help blunt this impact.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced in a press release Tuesday that she has joined a coalition of 22 other attorneys general and three governors in filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts against the USDA and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins for the suspension. The press release claims
the suspension violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
“While states are responsible for administering SNAP in their state, the federal government is obligated to fund and set the monthly amount of SNAP benefits,” the press release read.
“Suspending SNAP benefits in this manner is both contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.
Where Congress has clearly spoken to provide that SNAP benefits should continue even during a government shutdown, USDA does not have the authority to say otherwise.”
On Oct. 24, the USDA released a memo stating that it won’t use its emergency funding to distribute partial SNAP payments for next month if the government shutdown continues after Oct. 31. The USDA explains that the contingency fund is not available to support regular benefits for fiscal year 2026, as it is not considered an unforeseen event, which the contingency fund
is meant for.
“Due to Congressional Democrats’ refusal to pass a clean continuing resolution (CR), approximately 42 million individuals will not receive their SNAP benefits come November 1,” the memo reads. “Instead, the contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies, such as the Disaster SNAP program, which provides food purchasing benefits for individuals in disaster areas, including natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, that can come on quickly and without notice.”
Nessel wrote in her press release that she believes the government shutdown should be considered an emergency to avoid a pause in benefits.
“Emergency funding exists for exactly this kind of crisis,” Nessel said. “If the reality of 42 million Americans going hungry, including 1.4 million Michiganders, isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is. It is cruel, inhumane, and illegal to hold back emergency reserves while families struggle to put food on the table.”
UMich Law professor files U.S. Supreme Court petition
Laura Beny requested the Supreme Court hear her discrimination case against the University
CHRISTINA ZHANG Daily News Editor
Laura Beny, University of Michigan Law School professor, filed a petition on Monday asking the Supreme Court to hear her racial and gender discrimination case against the University. Beny alleges University officials — including Mark West, former dean of the Law School — subjected her to improper and discriminatory disciplinary action.
Beny’s original lawsuit was filed in 2022 and dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 2024. Beny appealed the dismissal, but the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s decision this July.
Beny was hired in 2003 and became the second African American female tenure-track professor in the Law School’s history. In 2018, she received a disciplinary notice for disruptive conduct and in 2019 received another notice for verbal abuse.
The Sixth Circuit opinion states West issued Beny her third notice of disciplinary action on March 31, 2022, the sanctions from which are the subject of her lawsuit.
“The University provided a legitimate reason for the disciplinary actions set out in the third notice: ‘[Beny’s] ‘abandonment’ of the classroom, retaliation against students who raised concerns about her course, and her troubling communications with other faculty and staff members’,” the opinion reads.
However, according to the District Court opinion, Beny was approved for medical leave on April 15, 2022, under the Family and Medical Leave Act for the period between Feb. 15, the date Beny informed her class that she could no longer teach, and May 15, 2022.
Beny argues in her lawsuit the University disciplined her when they should have known she did not truly abandon her class due to her approved medical leave, which she alleges would make the decision to discipline her pretext for a discriminatory motive.
The Sixth Circuit opinion asserts the University and West are protected under the honest belief rule — which holds that as long as an employer had an honest belief in their provided reason for disciplinary action, an employee cannot establish pretext, even if the reason is later proven false.
“There is no evidence in the record to suggest that West and others doubted that Beny ‘abandoned’ her class when she was issued the disciplinary notice,” the opinion reads.
“That is, nothing in the record suggests that any relevant decisionmakers knew about Beny’s leave application or that it was FMLA related.”
Beny is represented by a team of four attorneys led by Amos Jones, principal and founder of Amos Jones Law Firm. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Jones alleged decisionmakers at the Law School were aware of Beny’s medical leave claim.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Ann Arbor community protests United Electrical Contractors amid racial discrimination lawsuit
About 30 protesters gathered Thursday morning outside of the Five Corners construction site on Packard Street to call for housing developer Core Spaces to terminate their contract with United Electrical Contractors. Protesters carried signs that read “United Electric Liable for Racism” and called for “Justice for the United Six,” the initial group of six former UEC employees who filed a federal lawsuit against UEC for racist behavior by company management and employees.
UEC is assisting in the construction of Five Corners, a new student housing development, and admitted legal liability in a federal racial discrimination case in June. They were held liable for racial discrimination against nine employees who said they were harassed and called racial slurs while working. As part of the settlement, UEC will pay each former employee, on average, $47,960 plus attorney fees. Richard Mack, an employee and union rights attorney at Miller Cohen, organized and led the rally. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Mack said the protest aimed to bring attention to the working conditions faced by UEC employees.
“It was shameful, some of the things,” Mack said. “A Black man who had the N-word written on his hard hat and was forced to wear that hat for a week because they wouldn’t give him a new one and Hispanic Latino employees faced all of the most vile slurs you can think of from workers. And not only would the employees complain about all of these things, which happened weekly
for many of them, but when they complained to supervision, supervisors laughed.”
Mack led the group in a march around the Five Corners project area, guiding them in a series of call-and-response chants to voice their frustration with the situation. The crowd stopped in various locations around the site to listen to different speakers,
including U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich. Dingell said the citizens of Ann Arbor cannot back down from fighting for racial justice.
“Every person on this Earth was created equal and every person should have the right to compete for a job based on their ability no matter their sex or the color of their skin,” Dingell said.
“We cannot let them wear us down. Our future is at stake and we the workers are the backbone of America.”
City Councilmember Cynthia Harrison, D-Ward 1, who also spoke out at the protest, said she believes racist and sexist comments to employees are unacceptable and should not be tolerated in Ann Arbor.
“We are here today to fight against racism,” Harrison said.
“We are here today to fight against sexism. This is my hometown. I was born and raised here, and I will not tolerate it. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Mack told The Daily he believes the Ann Arbor community, who he believes do not agree with racist and sexist behavior in the workplace, should ask Ann Arbor authorities not to allow Core Spaces to work with UEC.
“You need to go to your city council, you need to go to your city leaders, you need to go to the University itself, who was going to be sending students to live in that edifice that is built by a racist, sexist contractor,” Mack said.
“We cannot allow it to happen, so we need to let everyone in Ann Arbor know to come out and stand up against this. Because if we don’t stop it, it’s going to grow.” Andre’ Watson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People of Ann Arbor, who also spoke at the protest, said the fight is not over until there is justice for those who have been discriminated against in the workforce.
“We appreciate all the support out today, and just understand that this is just the beginning,” Watson said. “We will fight this to the end.”
Alum Sydney Hasings-Wilkins/DAILY
ALYSSA TISCH Daily Staff Reporter
Ann Arbor’s aging rentals leave students fighting mold
“For some reason, there’s always water leaking from the showerhead, out of the shower — basically, where the mushroom is living.”
SALMA ABDELALE Daily Staff Reporter
When LSA senior Daisy Galgon spotted a small beige lump sprouting from her bathroom wall, she assumed it was a bug.
“Then I looked closer and thought, ‘there’s actually no way’ — it was a mushroom,” Galgon said. Her housemates named it Stanley. But the mushroom soon became a reminder of a recurring problem many student renters face — mold.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Galgon, along with two of her roommates, Art and Design senior Emery Swirbalus and LSA senior Zach Levine, said that while they love the experience of sharing a house, they’ve encountered several maintenance issues since moving in.
“When we got here, there was a ton of mold everywhere,” Swirbalus said. “There was literally mold in our dishwasher.”
In their bathroom, Galgon said, persistent moisture has led to an unusual sight — mold that grew its own mushroom.
“The wall behind is covered in mold and peeling and breaking, so it’s not a terrible surprise where (the mushroom) comes from,” Galgon said.
Levine said he worries the issue likely goes beyond surface-level mold and stems from the issue of water damaged walls.
“For some reason, there’s always water leaking from the showerhead, out of the shower — basically, where the mushroom is living,” Levine said. “There must be water in the wall that’s causing the mold.”
In an email to The Daily, Jennifer Head, an assistant professor and researcher at the School of Public Health, wrote that mold exposure can have significant health impacts.
“It can trigger asthma episodes and exacerbate respiratory symptoms, including coughing, sneezing, and eye irritation,” Head said.
“Spores are microscopic, so an individual may not know if they are inhaling spores. Mold growing behind drywall or in corners of homes may not be readily visible to residents.”
For some students, those health risks have been experienced firsthand. In an interview with The Daily, LSA sophomore Alex Ponzio said he first encountered mold in his University residence hall and again later in an off-campus rental. He noted that while the issue in his Bursley Residence Hall room was handled promptly by University Housing, his experience in off-campus housing in Ann
Arbor was more complicated.
“We walked in and you could just feel the air was thick,” Ponzio said. “It smelled really musty. There was stuff leaking down the walls, like the tiles were covered in it. I actually noticed that I’m allergic to mold, so I was pretty nasal for the first few weeks.”
Tian Xia, a research investigator in the University’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said mold often grows under conditions similar to those found in older student housing.
“Mold grows in damp, warm and dark environments with poor ventilation,” Xia said. “It can grow in hidden spaces like behind furniture or under the carpet, and spores can become airborne from these areas and pose health risks.”
Property managers, meanwhile, emphasize that prevention and fast response are critical. In an email to The Daily, Katie Vohwinkle, vice president of property management at Oxford Companies, a prominent Ann Arbor leasing company, wrote that they prioritize timely inspection and verification whenever tenants report potential mold issues.
“When a tenant reports a potential mold concern, we treat it with the same urgency as any maintenance issue,” Vohwinkle wrote, “A qualified maintenance technician is
dispatched to inspect and document the reported area.”
Vohwinkle emphasized that Oxford’s lease agreements outline clear expectations for tenants regarding mold prevention.
“Our lease agreement includes comprehensive mold prevention requirements, outlining tenant responsibilities such as removing visible moisture accumulation, using exhaust fans, and maintaining reasonable climate and moisture levels,” Vohwinkle wrote. “Tenants are contractually required to report water leaks, persistent mold growth, or HVAC malfunctions immediately in writing.”
While Oxford outlined a detailed remediation process, students said experiences with other leasing companies in Ann Arbor can vary widely. Ponzio said he feels that, in some cases, property companies rely on high demand to avoid more expensive repairs or replacements.
“A lot of property companies in Ann Arbor try to cut as many corners as they can because they know they can charge whatever to students,” Ponzio said. “If the property company’s not going to respond to you and take care of the issue, you’re kind of stuck. You either pay $1,900 for a newer place or deal with the conditions you have.”
New Ann Arbor Economic Development Director Joe
Giant talks affordability, development goals
“To be able to live in a city that I had for a long time really admired and grown to love was a dream come true.”
GRACE SCHUUR Daily Staff Reporter
The Michigan Daily sat down with Joe Giant, Ann Arbor’s new director of economic development to discuss housing affordability, the city’s development priorities and economic relationship with the University of Michigan. Giant began the position March 17 after previously working as the community development administrator for the Redevelopment Department of Fort Wayne, Ind. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Michigan Daily: What drew you to Ann Arbor?
Joe Giant: When you’re studying city planning, you’re learning about all these cities that are doing it right with progressive, best practices, and Ann Arbor is always on those lists: number one quality of life, best place to raise family, most educated. So we just drove up. It was the middle of March, the longest, most disappointing month. But there were so many people out: people running, walking, eating outside, drinking coffee outside, just being active, being so vibrant. And it just had this energy that I had just never experienced anywhere that I had been, especially in making the most of an otherwise disappointing season. So it just felt serendipitous. I felt like I had to apply for it. I’m really excited and happy about the stuff that I get to do on a dayto-day basis, but to be able to live in a city that I had for a long time really admired and grown to love was a dream come true.
TMD: What does the role of Ann Arbor’s economic development director entail, and what does a typical week look like for you?
JG: Over the last few years, we’ve experienced some city challenges: It’s an expensive place to live. We are kind of struggling to provide some basic city services, like maintaining our parks and getting our roads paved and everything.
So city staff created this office and charged me with trying to facilitate housing development,
helping to build our tax base and place-making. So, making sure that the development that we have helps to continue forward our wonderful, exciting, vibrant quality of life.
A lot of it is being the first point of contact for a lot of developers that are coming to town, the first point of contact for businesses that are thinking about opening up here. When projects start to become a little bit more real, it might be negotiating with them to figure out if the city is going to be involved in the project, whether it’s infrastructure or it’s tax increment financing, trying to put together deals, working with other city agencies — like utilities and like transportation — to make sure that our infrastructure is keeping up with the growth that we want to see.
TMD: What are your top priorities for Ann Arbor’s economic development?
JG: It’s not “Joe Giant’s plan for Ann Arbor,” it’s the residents’ and community’s plan for their community. The city is commendable in a lot of ways, but one of them is definitely that the people that live here really, really care about it, and they care actively about it. Right now the city is undergoing an amendment to our Comprehensive Plan, where we’re looking at areas that we want to grow. And so what I would do is look at the policies that are in that plan and say, “How do we take those just from a sentence that’s pretty open-ended to actual activity on the ground?” It’s making that connection between what our policies and goals are to how that affects the built environment, how that affects the economy.
If you look at our Comprehensive Plan draft, it is very focused on making sure that there is housing for people that want to be here. Right now, there are wonderful communities here. There’s places to live, but it’s challenging when the people that make a city a city can’t afford to live there; teachers and police officers, firefighters and nurses have to commute in. So, that shows up in the plan a lot.
That’s something that definitely is important to people that work at Larcom City Hall, making sure
that we have housing options for not just for professors, doctors and lawyers, but also the people that on a day-to-day basis make this a wonderful place to live.
TMD: Are there any early wins or projects from your first six months you’d like to highlight?
JG: We have a couple of cityowned properties. One of them is called the Kline’s Lot. It’s right behind Main Street on Ashley Street, a real high-profile site. I’d say it’s probably one of the best development sites in Michigan, if not the Midwest. And then another site around the corner across from our YMCA. We talked to City Council, tried to get their priorities, tried to figure out what our policy said about how those lots can be developed and we selected developers for those sites. And we’re negotiating with those now, which doesn’t sound like a huge win, but knowing that we have at least some preliminary buy-in from a couple world-class developers for these sites, I’m gonna take the W … The vision that these two companies put forward for these respective sites is really exciting and ambitious, and I am thrilled to see where it goes.
TMD: What development projects are you currently prioritizing?
JG: In our Comprehensive Plan draft that I mentioned, we identified some areas of the city where we think we could thicken it up, grow a little bit, add some higher density housing. One of those is South State Street just north of I-94, there’s this tall building, 17 acres of surface parking, an old parking structure, and there’s a gas station. We have proposals to redevelop 17 acres into 1,000 units of housing, including 200 affordable units, 100,000 square feet of commercial units, streets, blocks, open space — essentially just about six blocks of a downtown feel. I think it’s something like a $600 million development. It would be one of the largest projects in Ann Arbor’s history, probably the largest publicprivate partnership where the city is taking an active role in the development of it. It’s called Arbor South. It’s on the agenda for the Nov. 6 City Council
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meeting, and we’re really excited to present it to the community.
TMD: What emerging trends in Ann Arbor’s economy present the biggest opportunities — or concerns — for the city?
JG: Our downtown is a regional destination. It’s an amazing place. Since the COVID19 pandemic, I think that we’ve heard that a lot of businesses have seen a change in what their day-to-day experience is like: not as many people around during the day, more people around nights and weekends. So if we’re going to have a smaller daytime workforce population, we’re going to have second, third floors of businesses that are not really great spots for offices anymore. What are we going to do with those? We’re thinking about how to maybe repurpose those for housing or some other uses that might work great in downtown but are a little bit different than we previously contemplated. Another part of that is trying to increase our downtown-resident population. One way to support Main Street businesses is to have more people there, just on a dayto-day basis.
TMD: How do you approach economic development in a city that’s both a traditional municipality and a college town? Do you collaborate directly with the University on projects?
JG: It’s an interesting push and pull: Ann Arbor would not be the wonderful place that it is without the University, and I would argue that the University would not be the wonderful place that it is without Ann Arbor. I think one of the coolest things about this community is the way that the University just bleeds into the city. We have regular meetings with University leadership where we’re learning about what they’re doing, we’re telling them about what we’re doing. We collaborate on big infrastructure projects. For instance, the University of Michigan is building these beautiful residence halls north of the Big House, and when you add that many units there’s an impact on the infrastructure, and they’re helping us fund huge sewer expansion.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
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UMich Dance Marathon hosts ‘Spook-A-Thon’ on the Diag
Raises awareness for C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital through Halloween-themed event
About 400 University of Michigan students and community members filled the Diag Sunday afternoon for “Spook-A-Thon,” a Halloweenthemed event hosted by Dance Marathon. The student-run non-profit organization raises awareness and fundraises for pediatric therapies and programs at the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and outpatient clinics through volunteering, hosting events and fundraising.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA senior Amrita Bhattacharjya, DMUM communications director, said community events like “Spook-AThon” are designed to help U-M students foster relationships with families and patients at the children’s hospital.
“Because our organization is so big, and since we’re students, the members of our work can’t necessarily get to know the families that well,” Bhattacharjya said. “This gives us a chance for all of our members to make friends with the kids (and) the families.”
Bhattacharjya told The Daily DMUM values keeping events such as this one free and instead uses social media for marketing and fundraising.
“All of our family events are completely free because we want to make it as accessible as possible to not just the families, but the greater Ann Arbor community, as well as all of the students,” Bhattacharjya said. “So, this event does not involve any fundraising, but we post a lot on our social media to raise awareness about what we’re doing.”
Kinesiology junior Alex Kersten, DMUM public relations
chair, told The Daily she enjoys the festivity of seeing everyone dressed in costumes.
“My favorite part of the event is definitely seeing all the families come out and seeing all the kids dressed up in their costumes, as well as all the members of Dance Marathon dressed in the costumes,” Kersten said. “Because it really livens the mood for the families and the kids, and it’s a fun experience for them, just to play, (to) do more Halloween-themed things.”
There were numerous U-M student organizations tabled with booths offering activities as part of the event, including Alpha Epsilon Delta, a preprofessional health care society.
In an interview with The Daily, Public Health junior Natalie Hood, DMUM chair at AED, said the event served as a good way for AED’s members to directly
Students Supporting Israel and Let’s Do Something host march in solidarity with
Jewish students
The gathering came after an unidentified person attempted to kick down the door of the Jewish Resource Center
About 100 University of Michigan students and community members marched from the Diag to the Jewish Resource Center Wednesday evening in support of the Jewish community on campus.
Organized by the University’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel and advocacy group
Let’s Do Something, the march was organized after a person attempted to kick down the door of the center Sunday morning.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Rabbi Yitz Pierce, program director at JRC, described the attack on the center.
“Early Sunday morning, someone came by our building,” Pierce said. “It’s all on camera. They tried to kick in the front door. And when they failed, they left running and were screaming, ‘F the Jews. F Israel. The Jews control us. F the Jews,’ over and over again. And it was pretty disturbing, to be honest.”
During the event, speakers spoke about their experiences with antisemitism, but also the support they received from the Jewish community at the University following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel which killed more than 1,200 people and resulted in about 250 more being taken hostage. The resulting Israeli military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 67,000 people.
Moshe Shear, chief marketing officer of Let’s Do Something, described how the attack on Israel impacted the Jewish community on campus.
“When I look out here on the lawn and see within 36 hours, so many proud Jews, I really see the essence of the Jewish people and
why we’ve been around since the dawn of time and why our people are never going to go away,” Shear said. “Even with so much hate, things that happened, like October 7…and how we reacted to that moment, or an antisemitic hate crime on the Jewish Resource Center two years later in Michigan, how Jews react to that and take so much hate and turn it into a place of love and a place of building, and build something positive out of it. And it’s so, so beautiful to see.”
LSA senior Dan Viderman, president of SSI and a speaker at the event, thanked attendees for being present at the march.
“SSI was approached with this idea 36 hours ago, and I want to thank each and every one of you guys sincerely for coming out of here,” Viderman said. “These clubs are only as strong as the people that make them up. And we have so much hatred, so much darkness.”
Pierce told The Daily the march was meant to come out of love and support despite the attack against the center.
“The march is happening as a show of love and unity,” Pierce said. “Because when there’s sort of an attack — even a verbal attack — on this community, the way we try to protest and go against it is by coming together as a unit and just showing that we’re strong and proud and not afraid to be Jews.” Pierce said while the march was to show support for the University’s Jewish community, everyone was welcome to participate.
“I think when people see that there’s strength in any community, they feel more included,” Pierce said. “Anyone can join in and walk with us. We try to be very open, not intimidating, and it’s peaceful. Everyone looks at this group
interact with the families they fundraise for with DMUM.
“It’s a nice kickstart because it shows all the members in AED who they’re supporting by fundraising throughout the year,” Hood said. “We get to interact with the community directly, helping through all the fundraising activities.”
Business graduate student Joe Longo, an infielder on the Michigan baseball team, was invited to the event to play games with the children who attended. In an interview with The Daily, he said it was great to see them enjoying the event.
“I’m a member of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee — a couple of our members said it would be a great opportunity for us to get out here and spread some Halloween cheer,” Longo said. “Seeing the kids, seeing their smiles — it’s been amazing so far. They’re going through so
much, and it’s just great to see them out here for fun.”
Kimberly Bannoy, a parent of a child who attended the event, told The Daily in an interview that she enjoyed the enthusiastic atmosphere of the event and was happy to see her son having a good time.
“Halloween is over, but we do love to support anything (U-M),” Bannoy said.
“Obviously, (my son’s) having a blast. The enthusiasm from everybody, involvement with the kids, … we’re having so much fun.”
Ashley Simon, another parent of a child who attended the event, has attended previous “Spook-A-Thon” events with her daughter. In an interview with The Daily, Simon said she especially values how the younger kids can form friendships with the college students.
“Fostering that relationship between the two helps a lot,” Simon said. “What they’re doing has helped so much, like (my daughter) was nonverbal a few years ago, and the small group activities have helped get her verbal and foster some friendships.”
The event, however, is not only supposed to help children. Bhattacharjya told The Daily participating in the event can be fulfilling for all attendees.
“I hope that whoever comes to this event realizes that no matter how much time or how big or small your contribution is…you are making a difference in these kids’ lives,” Bhattacharjya said.
“And if everyone just puts a little bit of effort in, we can really create something beautiful and make a difference in the families’ lives every single day. And, hopefully, make the world a better place.”
William Clements Library presents a ‘Haunted Histories’ murder mystery experience
The library transformed into a 19th century haunted mansion with actors in historically accurate costumes
JOSEPHINE VELO Daily News Contributor
About 130 students and community members gathered Wednesday evening at the William Clements Library for “Haunted Histories,” an interactive 1800s-themed murder mystery event enacted by staff and volunteers. There were historically accurate Halloween costumes accompanied by activities inspired by the time period, such as the card game old maid, paper-doll making and fortunetelling.
The event also centered around a chilling performance by Music, Theatre & Dance senior Sarah Hartmus, who recited part of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” for each hour of the event.
In an interview with The Daily, Hartmus said she originally got involved with the William Clements Library through a class and did a voiceover for one of their previous exhibits.
“I love history,” Hartmus said.
something kind of in the theme of the 1883 Vanderbilt Ball.” Oonk told The Daily the William Clements Library is open to students from all academic disciplines, especially since their history is steeped in interdisciplinary curiosity.
and they see people are having a peaceful display of unity.”
In an interview with The Daily, Business senior Izzie Haymann, vice president of strategic planning for SSI, attended the event and said she joined the march to stand against the antisemitic act that occurred next door at the Sigma Delta Tau sorority house where she lives.
“I actually lived at the (Sigma Delta Tau) house next door, and it can be very scary when you have to be worried about events like this,” Haymann said. “So I wanted to march today to show that students at the (University) shouldn’t have to be worried about antisemitism and violent acts occurring due to being Jewish.”
Viderman told The Daily the march served as a reminder of the need to support the Jewish community — which only makes up 0.2% of the world population — in the face of rising antisemitic incidents.
“It’s important now, at a time like this, when Jews make up only 0.2% of the world’s population, to come together to show unity,” Viderman said. “So it’s important for us all to come here.”
Viderman also said all communities can find strength in coming together against hate.
“The Jewish community is not the only community that has to deal with hate crimes, but I do hope that other communities can take inspiration from how we deal with hate crimes,” Viderman said. “The response to hatred is not to spread more hatred against other minority groups or any groups in general. The response should be us all coming together. Let’s all be doing unity events, supporting the great country that is the United States of America, coming together under these pretenses on our amazing campus and coming together in unity.”
The library transformed its interior into a haunted mansion, with cobwebs and fake spiders lining the Avenir Foundation Room stairwell. Participants were given clues and interacted with actors to slowly decipher the murder of the fictional Dr. A. C. Cruing.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Kinesiology sophomore Yahil Ceballos said he enjoyed how dedicated the actors were to their roles.
“My favorite part of the event so far is how engaged the actors are at the moment,” Ceballos said. “I’ve had some impromptu discussions with them where I’ve been able to get some clues I don’t think other people have gotten.”
“Anytime I get the chance to do something that’s a period piece or something like this where it’s helping facilitate teaching about history or anything like that, I’m always very into it.”
LSA junior Samantha Huck, William Clements Library outreach assistant, organized the event alongside Angela Oonk, the library’s director of development. In an interview with The Daily, Huck said the library has hosted three haunted history events, and two have included a murder mystery.
“We had wanted to do something kind of in the theme of Edgar Allan Poe, something traditionally kind of spooky, Halloween-esque,” Huck said.
“That’s how ‘The Black Cat’ specifically came about. The theme was dreamt up by our director Angela Oonk, and she decided that we should do
“Sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, you must only host history classes’,” Oonk said. “Mr. Clements himself, he was a U-M alum, and he had an engineering degree but loved history and collected rare books, and I think that speaks a little bit to the (University of) Michigan tradition of being people who are interested and curious. Our biggest hurdle though is because the building is a little imposing, finding ways to make sure people know that they can come inside.”
The Avenir Foundation Room is currently hosting its “For All Ages” exhibit, which showcases historical American games. In an interview with The Daily, Oonk said the inclusion of historical games can help connect the past to the present.
“I’m always thinking about fun ways to get people into the Clements and show people things about history,” Oonk said.
“Everybody’s grown up playing games, so this particular exhibit that we have lends itself very well to people seeing themselves playing those historical games.”
CAMPUS LIFE
KAYLA LUGO Daily Staff Reporter
CAMPUS LIFE
ALYSSA TISCH Daily Staff Reporter
Zayd Ahmad/DAILY
University of Michigan students prepare for a march to the Jewish Resource Center on the Diag Wednesday evening.
Randall Xiao/DAILY
Clements Library interns and volunteers Samantha Huck, Ella Brooks-Kamper and Cody Musial greet an attendee at the “Haunted Histories” event hosted by the William Clements Library Wednesday night.
A number of magnificent auteurs broke out in the scene at the start of the 21st century. Blockbuster king Christopher Nolan has been dizzying and dazzling audiences since his debut, “Memento,” in 2000. Horror-turned-social-commentary powerhouse Bong Joon Ho finally got people paying attention with “Parasite,” but he has been documenting the foibles of capitalism since “Snowpiercer.” And then, there’s the science fiction enthusiast Denis Villeneuve (“Dune”), whose subversive films have elevated the idea of what a modern blockbuster movie could be. The greatest of them all, though, may just be a guy who’s obsessed with symmetry.
Wes Anderson’s style has become one of the most easily recognizable (and parodied) in modern cinema. He uses symmetric, centered shots, vibrant color palettes and that iconic yellow text, to create films that feel like they take place inside a dollhouse or diorama.
With the release of his most recent film, “The Phoenecian Scheme,” over the summer, the Film Beat has decided it’s time to decide once and for all which of Anderson films reign supreme.
However, despite our fair and democratic system of voting, some writers were shocked, even horrified, to see where their favorite Anderson piece ended up, resulting in both supportive blurbs and violent refutations of our ranking.
So, for better or worse, here’s The Michigan Daily’s spectacular, phenomenal and totally-not-subjective Wes Anderson ranking that the world has been waiting for:
The Michigan Daily ranks Wes Anderson films
Honorable Mention: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More” (2024)
How does a legendary director evade all the talk about whether he’s too indulgent, too full of himself or too obsessed with his own style? By making a series of shorts in which the artifice, which once decorated his frames, define the formal language of the films, of course!
In the aptly titled “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More” — a feature-length compilation of four short films directed by Anderson — the
auteur has decided to push his style to near avant-garde experimentation. Gone is dynamic scene blocking or elaborate dialogues that flow into one another; a person standing up straight and reciting directly to the camera drives the narrative. Gone is the slightly robotic affectation of Anderson characters — a cold delivery will do instead.
Indeed, these short films find Anderson once again adapting Roald Dahl stories, but with a disregard for conventional film wisdom. The short films feature characters narrating each line of dialogue with book-like, third-person attributions (“he said,” “she said,” etc.). Cheap-looking, set-like foreground and background elements highlight the artifice of film form — which Anderson seems intent on exploring.
Be it boredom, curiosity or a jab at all the critics, the resulting compilation is wonderfully endearing. Anderson, in acknowledging and playing into the awkwardness of his stilted writing and scene construction as of late, ends up ironically making a digestible film that feels unforced and unencumbered. However, “Asteroid City,” for all its thematic import about emotional distance, is still emotionally distant — a conundrum which this series manages to side-step by not having any emotional depth at all. Relying heavily on visuals and Dahl’s original texts, “Henry Sugar and Three More” is a surprising highlight in Anderson’s late career.
— Ben Luu, Senior Arts Editor
“The French Dispatch” (2021) I hate to say it, but “The French Dispatch” represents the worst of Anderson’s style. In the film, the cracks in his iconic style become deep and unavoidable. His work appears as a cumbersome parody of itself, harming the overarching story rather than supporting it. His style has lost a sense of genuineness, instead feeling campy and akin to the recent social media trend of people “Wes Anderson-ifying” their lives. It’s overly complicated, full of rapid cuts and contains intensely obnoxious symmetry, building an elaborate, whimsical aesthetic that distracts from the actual story. It’s a beautiful and vibrantly colored mess.
The film is further burdened by an unnecessarily large ensemble cast that collapses under its own weight. Anderson weaves so many threads together that they get tangled. It seems that he tried to write a story to ensure he’d be able to fit all of his collaborators (and some newcomers) into one film. The narrative suffers as a result of this overly complex structure. Characters are underdeveloped and emotionally removed, storylines are half-baked and the pacing never seems to even out.
It’s no coincidence that this was one of the Film Beat’s few
ror, “The French Dispatch” is the perfect reflection of all of Anderson’s flaws as a filmmaker.
— Isabelle Peraut , Film Beat Editor
“Asteroid City” (2023)
Late-style Anderson (that is, everything since “The French Dispatch”) has its fair share of detractors. Anderson’s success and army of cinephile fans has transformed his style into a recognizable trademark and source of endless parody. Rather than departing from his style, the filmmaker leaned into it even further, stretching his visual language to its formal and emotional limits. No film of his epitomizes this phenomenon more than “Asteroid City.” The film is a play within a documentary within a movie; its actors are actors playing characters turned actors once again. Critics have decried the film with a menagerie of insults: it’s a self-parody, cold, distant or simply insists upon itself.
However, I write this blurb as an impassioned defense of “Asteroid City,” as my well-intentioned yet misguided Film Beat brethren exile it to this undeserved subaltern position. Yes, it is true that “Asteroid City” reflects the most stylized mise-en-scène of any of his films. The artificial set of the diegetic play makes the film’s
son’s style overshadows any semblance of emotional core — is missing the point. The emotional distance between audience and character is more of an intentional feature than a bug; by centering the story around artists making a work of art they don’t understand, “Asteroid City” is Anderson questioning his own commitment to craft. This self-analysis of artistry and meaning makes it one of Anderson’s most personal. What does the play mean? What’s up with that alien? Does any of this matter? Anderson doesn’t pretend to know the answer to any of these questions, but he keeps on asking. “Asteroid City” may have its haters, but I find it to be one of Anderson’s most self-aware and emotionally resonant films to date.
— Will Cooper, Daily Arts Writer
“The Phoenician Scheme” (2025)
There are plenty of reasons why “The Phoenician Scheme” ranked this low. For starters, it’s Anderson’s most recent release, so it’s possible that many of my fellow Film Beat writers have not gotten around to seeing it. It’s also possible that people don’t rock with late-stage Anderson and his overt stylization. Or maybe people are tired of his aesthetic. Whatever the reason may be, I simply do not care — “The Phoenician Scheme” is great, and deserves to be in the upper echelon of his films. Despite being in the later part of his career, “The Phoenician Scheme” is very much a return to form for Anderson. He departs from ensemble works to revisit a formula that has worked for him time and time again: narratives centered around family. As with many of his films, especially his recent work, Anderson has been criticized for prioritizing “style over substance,” but this simply isn’t the case here. Sure, his aesthetics have been dialed up a notch, but the emotional core — the father-daughter relationship — is what defines the film. Beneath the schemes, assassination attempts and espionage, the film is really about a father’s struggle to balance his work life and personal life. It seems to serve as a reflection for Anderson on managing the roles of both a working director and a parent, resulting in one of the most beautiful narratives in his filmography. As I noted in my review of the film, “The Phoenician Scheme” is Anderson at his most personal, and
Maheen Rashid/DAILY
ABIGAIL WEINBERG Daily Arts Writer
Football. In a small, rural high school smack dab in the middle of Ohio, football may have very well been the first word I heard when I entered high school. What stood out to me about this sport was not its fast-paced action, and definitely not its entertainment value, but its incredible ability to take over the lives of everyone around me — from obsessive players to crazed, small-town fans. Moving to college, this obsession seems to have followed me, as every weekend I watch thousands of attendees make their way to Michigan Stadium. I’m haunted by the one sport I can’t understand.
When I saw the latest horror film in theaters was not just
‘Him’ makes football horrifying
a sports horror, but a football horror, I was neither phased nor interested. What did intrigue me, however, was the immensely divisive discourse it was causing online. It seemed that all these reactions came as a result of the big name attached to this film: Jordan Peele.
Ever since 2017’s immensely successful “Get Out,” Peele has brought the psychological horror film genre to a new level of dark and twisted. In past projects like “Get Out” and “Us,” his work has gone beyond the classic psychological trope of madness, delving into societal issues such as systemic racism and class ideologies. These works drew praise from fans and critics, and led to Peele becoming the first Black person to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for “Get
Out.” However, Peele’s success streak seemed to end with his last film “Nope,” which was seen by critics as too ambitious, with little connection between plot points — from horse ranch activities to UFO sightings. So, when Peele’s name appeared in the title card next to the psychological football horror “Him,” not as a director but as a producer, it was unclear what this new project would look like. But given my disinterest in football, as well as Peele’s lack of creative direction on the film, my expectations were low. That was, until “Him” proved me wrong.
Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers, “I Know What You Did Last Summer”) is a quarterback tackling a quick rise to fame and the opportunity to join the professional football league, the USFF. But there’s a catch:
To earn his spot in this league and on his dream team, The Saviors, he must make it through a week of training with his predecessor, quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans, “Scary Movie”). As the week begins, the plot becomes more absurd and Cam’s problems worsen. At Isaiah’s house, Cam is locked in a sauna, injected with unknown medicine and haunted by a rolling football (of course).
Isaiah’s wife, Elsie (Julia Fox, “Uncut Gems”), seems like a beacon of normality at first, but soon proves to be just as corrupt as the rest. All the while, Cam and Isaiah’s relationship grows increasingly tense, as Isaiah teaches Cam what he will have to give up to become the greatest. The concept of being the Greatest of All Time, or the “GOAT,” is a prevalent motif
throughout this film, alongside extremely similar descriptions of success such as becoming “Him” (or, in other words, becoming the best). Both “GOAT” and “Him” are terms whose origins are tied to Black athleticism. The former originated with Muhammad Ali, and has since been used to describe athletes like Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Simone Biles. “Him,” often used in the phrase “I’m him,” was popularized by Odell Beckham Jr. in 2019. Given that professional American football is a majority Black sport filled with some of the highest-achieving athletes in the world, it’s no surprise that “GOAT” and “Him” soon found their place on the field. But for everything the words celebrate, it also casts a veil over the debilitating pressure haunting Black athleticism. Players work
toward unattainable standards of perfection, conditioned to believe that all their work is meaningless if they cannot be The Greatest of All Time. Throughout Isaiah and Cam’s training, these terms consistently arise. Cam’s greatest motivation is his family — particularly his deceased father, who introduced him to the sport at a young age — as well as the idea of being the greatest. Isaiah sees Cam’s love for his family as a weakness, emphasizing that if Cam truly wants to be the GOAT, he will need to stop caring about everyone and everything. These all-or-nothing conversations between the two raise the stakes and eventually reveal more and more of the league’s cult-like influence.
ISABELLA CASAGRANDA Daily Arts Writer
Searching for chic nails in Ann Arbor? Look no further than Ally Cool Cat, a nail artist who has amassed more than 216,000 followers on Instagram for her incredibly intricate nail sets. Ally, University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design alum, creates and mails out press-on nail sets entirely on her own, and has created scenes that depict everything from Lorde songs to floral fantasies. She’s not alone, either. In recent years, online nail art has exploded; now, business is booming. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Ally Cool Cat described how she was driven to start her business through her own dissatisfaction with the limited designs offered in most salons.
“I saw an image on Pinterest,
this really simple design: a nude color base with black stars painted on top. … The thought of presenting one of the nail techs at the salon with that image, I just felt like I could not do that” Ally said. “At salons, it’s pretty basic, just a flat color and maybe a French tip. So I just went online on Amazon and bought an at-home nail kit for gel. And I just did it myself!”
The support of her friends, who would let her practice on them, fueled her hobby, which eventually grew into a self-made business. According to Harper’s Bazaar’s Arabelle Sicardi, the nail art explosion has been a long time coming. Acrylic sets first appeared on the market in the 1950s, and eventually became an important form of cultural expression within Black and Asian communities, who have been pushing the boundaries of nail art since the medium’s creation. Nails are now crucial aspects of runway
looks around the world and even on display in museums – Sicardi highlights Bernadette Thompson, who became the first nail artist to have a museum exhibit of her nail designs at the MoMa. But Sicardi credits the most recent uptick in nail art to the COVID-19 pandemic, when, in the absence of salons, press-ons became essential for those who wanted expertly crafted acrylics. The press-on nail side of
‘Haunted Hotel’: Frights and delights
ANA TORRESARPI
Daily Arts Writer
Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide. Spoilers for “Haunted Hotel” season one. The beginning of “Haunted Hotel” plays like the ending of every horror movie you’ve ever watched: A young girl sprints down an eerie hallway, screaming as a ghostly figure chases close behind. She hastily turns a corner and trips, turning to look at her pursuer before he sinks a knife into her back. Only this time, the girl doesn’t scream, but laughs as the knife goes straight through her without leaving a mark. It turns out her “killer” is really a harmless ghost, and she just loves messing with him. This little girl is Esther (Natalie Palamides, “The Real Housewives of Shakespeare”), a mischievous kid who just moved into her new, extremely haunted home and is enjoying the undead company. Her unorthodox introduction serves as the perfect embodiment of Netflix’s new animated comedy, “Haunted Hotel.” The show revels in using typical horror tropes to propel its comedy, blending morbidity and absurdity together. With a plot coming straight out of “The Shining,” the series spends more time poking fun at its horror elements than intentionally scaring its audience. Although the name gives it away, “Haunted Hotel” is about a family living in an enormous, rundown hotel in the middle of the woods.
The show centers Katherine (Eliza Coupe, “Happy Endings”), a single mother who recently inherited the Undervale Hotel from her
deceased brother, Nathan (Will Forte, “The Last Man on Earth”). The catch? The hotel runs rampant with demons, monsters and ghosts — including Nathan himself. Katherine is left to raise her kids, Ben (Skyler Gisondo, “The Righteous Gemstones”) and Esther, deal with her dead brother’s ghost and somehow turn a profit from her new hotel business all on her own. Nathan, lacking any corporeal vessel on this mortal plane, can only watch and give terrible advice from the sidelines. Meanwhile, Ben and Esther navigate the paranormal and do what any other kids in their situation might do — practice black magic and date ghosts. On top of all that, living with the family is Abaddon (Jimmi Simpson, “Dark Matter”), a demon trapped in the body of a little boy that has been tormenting the entire town for centuries.
Every character has their own charm that breathes life into the series. Esther’s love for black magic and her general air of mischief is endearing and entertaining, while Katherine’s immediate exasperation at the supernatural is a fun foil. Nathan’s carefree energy and identity as a ghost also brings a unique dynamic to the table. But, hands down, the best character (and arguably the best element of the entire show) is Abaddon. Dressed in the clothes of a 10-yearold pilgrim, he is capable of great atrocities while simultaneously not knowing what a computer is or how to tie his own shoes. This cast of endearing characters really set the tone for what “Haunted Hotel” brings to the table.
Every episode features a new scare, ranging from a soul-eating angler fish to “Gremlins”-esque
“rollyfluffs” to the actual end of the world. With only a short, 10-episode debut, the show takes great lengths to introduce as many novel ideas as possible, allowing it to exhibit its narrative potential while keeping audiences interested. With so many out-of-the-box ideas, it’s hard to imagine getting bored.
That being said, there are moments where this strategy hinders the show’s overarching integrity. With only 10 episodes at its disposal, all of which try to jump into new ideas and scares, the show tends to abandon its original premise in favor of showcasing its creative potential. Although the show introduces Katherine’s struggle to book guests and manage the various supernatural beings in the hotel as the focal point of the series, it’s hardly recognized in any episode after the pilot. There isn’t a single episode that hinges on Katherine’s ability to ward off or hide ghosts from any prospective guests, which just feels like a missed opportunity to lay a foundation for the show’s episodic formula.
While “Haunted Hotel” never wavers in its quality of humor, there are times when the show struggles to maintain a consistent tone. Most of the time, the series takes a lighthearted approach to its characters and storytelling, which complements the comedy and makes the more horrordriven scenes pop. However, the later episodes show a desire to be more mature and nuanced. While it’s definitely an interesting avenue to pursue, introducing darker themes after building a consistently playful tone in the first half felt very disjointed.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Wajahath/DAILY
the industry, and the internet, has continued to surge in popularity since then.
Ally Cool Cat used that creative independence to her advantage. She initially viewed her nail art business as a side hustle, a way to make money during her time in college. But soon, she found personal value in the medium.
“I was in art school (at the Stamps School of Art & Design) and I was
really focused on printmaking, which is a pretty physical medium and labor,” Ally said. “And then that was gone. So I really threw myself into nail art. Rather than trying to make a profit off of the set, it became, ‘I want to make something that I really love and use this as a form of creative expression.’”
Entrepreneurship comes with its challenges, the biggest of which is the time commitment, which Ally also discussed.
“It’s a pretty long work day, usually six to 12 hours,” she said.
“It is so time-consuming. If I’m being completely honest, I spend almost every day at home working on (nails). I’m lucky enough to be able to do this as my full-time job, but it is all I do. I see friends when I can here and there, but my mind is always on this and I’m always doing this. And it does get a bit overwhelming. When orders pile up, it gets so stressful.”
But she doesn’t let that get her
down. The core of Ally Cool Cat’s business is a positive attitude.
“When you do what you’re passionate about, you enter that zen state where it really goes, and you’re in this mode of relaxation” Ally said. “It doesn’t feel like a lot, but it is a long time.”
Ally Cool Cat has to make sure her social media stays up to speed, too. At the beginning, when she had to exclusively make commissioned designs instead of following her own artistic endeavors, finding inspiration was a challenge.
“Sometimes it makes me feel a bit anxious that I can’t keep up with it — the trends and stuff on social media,” Ally said. “I really try to remember it’s not about the likes and the followers, even though I love them. I just try to remind myself that as long as I’m still doing what I love to do, it’ll be okay. It’ll work (itself) out.”
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Plant ___ of hope 8. "___ we all" (everyone agrees) 9.
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Dearborn isn’t oppressive
ARIANNA MEHMOOD Opinion Columnist
Church bells ring without question, but when mosques share their call to prayer, the country paints it as controversial. In America, one sound is considered a tradition while the other is disruptive. Viral TikTok videos and media stories surrounding the broadcasting of the Azaan — the Islamic call to prayer — in Dearborn have highlighted the rise in Islamophobia and misrepresentation of Muslim communities. Critics claim that the loud noise from the announcement is pressuring the community to craft their daily routines around the Islamic tradition, contrasting with traditional American ideals of freedom of religion and cultural coexistence.
Online videos have gained significant attention, instigating deep tensions within the community. Multiple non-Muslim residents have shared clips of the Azaan echoing around 5:30 a.m.
during the Fajr prayer, noting it as a disturbance rather than a moment of faith. The comments under these posts often spiral into outrage — many users claiming that Dearborn is being taken over or implying that Islamic practices are incompatible with American culture. This even connects the issue to the so-called liberal propaganda in America. As a result, Muslim residents are being villainized for exercising their faith, without forcing it on anyone.
Some argue that the Azaan exceeds the city’s decibel limit. This is true in a few isolated instances and may momentarily disrupt the morning routines of residents. Dearborn has a limit of 55 decibels at night and 60 decibels during the day. After the recent uproar, city officials have conducted tests that show that many of these mosques are actually operating under permissible noise levels, suggesting that for most residents, the nuisance is minor or nonexistent. While a few have surpassed the limit, it is ultimately up to the city to find a balance that
allows the Azaan to continue as a protected religious practice while addressing the lawful concerns regarding sound.
Debates over the Azaan have led to larger discussions about religious freedom in Dearborn.
One social media user shared a video of Dearborn’s largest mosque surrounded by several churches, arguing the setup proves the city’s imbalance and lack of recognition for Christian beliefs. Her framing, however, misses the point entirely. The coexistence of churches and mosques side by side is a visual representation of what America strives for: freedom of religion and a diverse nation. The user points out how the mosque caters to more than 3,000 worshippers, but that simply mirrors Dearborn’s population demographic, where a significant number of residents are Muslim. The mosque’s large architecture isn’t to assert dominance, but rather to accommodate the community’s needs.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
University of Michigan students are no strangers to high rent prices. Ann Arbor is one of the most expensive college towns in the nation, with the average rent hovering at about $2,060. For many students, housing consumes the majority, if not all, of their budget. Students tend to attribute these rising prices to a number of things — general inflation, lack of Universityowned housing, a rising student population and greedy landlords to name a few. All of these are true to some extent. But there is another force quietly reshaping Ann Arbor’s rental market — private equity. Private equity is not only buying up student housing and increasing rent, but also decreasing the quality of the housing itself. What makes this trend even more troubling is the University’s own financial entanglement with private equity. The University has already committed portions of its multibillion-dollar endowment to private equity firms, which are not on their face a bad thing, but something that demands far greater scrutiny. Private equity’s expanding role in Ann Arbor’s student housing market raises the risk that the University may be directly profiting from practices that make life harder for its own students. And with 39.4% of university endowment money invested into private equity and venture capital companies, the greater U-M community deserves to know whether the University is indirectly funding these predatory companies. The
University of Michigan must be transparent about where its endowment’s private equity investments go to ensure it isn’t profiting from practices that harm its own students and that raise broader social equity concerns.
Simply put, private equity is a way for firms to invest in private companies that are not on the stock market. Firms raise capital from institutions and accredited investors, pool that money into a limited liability fund separate from the firm and use it to buy companies to resell them for profit. To maximize returns, these funds typically strip assets, cut jobs and extract fees for their own management services while saddling these companies with debt. For example, a common practice of private equity companies is to sell off a newly acquired business’s land, which is often the biggest asset of a company. Then, that same land is leased back to the company, where they are subject to uncontrollable rental prices. Many of the acquired companies eventually collapse under these pressures, but because of the legal structure of private equity, the firms themselves avoid accountability. Private equity targets a broad range of industries from retail to healthcare and in 2024, played a role in 56% of corporate bankruptcies in the United States despite accounting for only 6.5% of the national economy. Now, there’s a growing private equity footprint in student housing. On campus, private equity firms own Willowtree, The Courtyards, Campus Edge Ann Arbor, Varsity, Saga, The Yard, Six11, Sterling Arbor BLU and Landmark, totaling 1,804
Trump’s
EMMA MARGARON Opinion Columnist
Normally, a celebration is appropriate when a class assignment isn’t available, but when my professor told us that our class couldn’t access Arctic ice and sea levels data because of the government shut down, no celebration was in order. Instead, the class felt confusion and a sinking recognition that political agendas are affecting our academic resources. Since Oct. 1, the current government shutdown has resulted in widespread restrictions on government websites. These restrictions are part of a concerning trend of the Trump administration: the disappearance of public data. The rise of inaccessibility to public data is a major threat to maintaining societal health, government transparency and environmental justice.
When attempting to access various government websites, a message appears stating that the government shutdown because of Democrats. The blame on one party is an unethical, deliberate misdirection by the Trump administration. The actual reason for the 2025 government shutdown was a disagreement between Democrat and Republican representatives on a bill related to funding government services. Some environmental websites that show this message and now aren’t fully accessible include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — all crucial inlets to research and information.
The shutdown amplifies the fact that government data is disappearing, but this is not a new occurrence for the Trump administration.
In the first 100 days of office, Trump’s changes to 70% of government environmental websites include modifying content, focus or links with a specific decrease in information pertaining to climate and environmental justice. Since February 2025, more than 8,000 pages from various government websites, ranging from scientific research to justice issues, are absent from public sites. In their Library Research Guides, the University of Michigan writes:
“It has become increasingly common for government data sets that were previously publicly available to be removed. Some of these datasets may be altered and made available again, while others may remain offline indefinitely.”
This disappearance of data isn’t a stunt specific to this year. Immediately after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the administration began removing all climate-related data from the official White House website. This kind of denial of public access to government information and data is a pattern of the Trump administration.
Government-funded data and research is vital to public health and protection. Scientists, communities and government employees use this data daily to track and respond to environmental threats involving air, water, forest and other natural systems.
Caren Grown, senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings,
emphasizes the importance of data in our age.
“I think reliable statistics collected, financed by governments, but open, accessible, transparent, are a public good,” she claims. “Effective policymaking relies on accurate and timely data, as I said, that are open and accessible not just to government agencies, but to international organizations like UNICEF, for instance, or parts of the UN system, to academics, like I mentioned, to journalists, to civil society organizations. Reliable and timely statistics are a tool of accountability.”
As Grown dictates, data is essential to instigating policy changes. When it comes to the environment, scientific policy makers combat climate change by monitoring data on environmental barriers such as resource quantities, pollution, droughts, deforestation patterns and temperature fluctuations. Sustainability methods develop from this data analysis so it is critical for progress in protecting the environment. More than 100 climate studies came to a halt this year due to the Trump administration. Restricting publicly funded research is a step backward for democratic society because it is a political move that supports Trump’s agenda. The country’s biggest authoritarian doesn’t want new environmental policies to exist from this data, so he continues to restrict and delete. When there is a government shutdown, the Trump administration gains another opportunity to quietly stall environmental progress by taking down data related to the environment.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
units. In order to rapidly double or triple their investments, they often raise rent, fees and evict residents. This has led to rent hikes of 26% over three years, which far outpace regional increases of 13%. As a result, students are suffering, in part because of investments in private equity. The higher the rent students pay, the more money private equity firms and their investors make, which could include the U-M endowment, given the lack of transparency and accountability from the university.
The University risks harming its reputation if it doubles down on strategies increasingly seen as at odds with academic and social responsibility through broad-level private equity
investment. The current University endowment policy is to generate the most money possible in concurrence with the University’s goals in teaching, research and service. Housing insecurity undermines academic success, mental health and equity on campus. The University of Michigan should not be actively investing in the forces creating it. Investing in companies actively hurting students, or other populations for that matter, does not support the University’s mission and therefore should not be welcome in the endowment.
However, if the university is not moved by its moral responsibility to divest from private equity, it should be moved by the financial one.
Private equity investments often lock funds away in long-term structures with limited access. As President Donald Trump’s administration continues attacks on higher education and calls to tax endowment funding, universities are quietly selling off their private equity stakes, anticipating the need for more liquid assets. The University of Michigan should follow suit as costs increase. Additionally, these investment returns are only really good on paper and hard to estimate until the PE firm actually exits its position, which is normally 5 to 8 years after the initial investment. As these investment activities slow down, exiting them will become harder and offer smaller returns. The University of Michigan
should commit to endowment transparency by publishing information about its private equity partners and the industries they invest in. A clear outline would send a signal that the institution takes its social responsibilities seriously. At the end of the day, students should not have to wonder whether the institution they attend is making a killing from their rising rent. If the University continues to profit from private equity’s dominance in student housing, it risks further eroding trust and deepening inequality. For a public institution that prides itself on affordability and access, continuing down the private equity path without greater scrutiny is both financially risky and ethically unsound.
ELIZA PHARES Opinion Columnist
Lara Ringey/DAILY
Why Ann Arbor’s Vision Zero falls short of protecting U-M students. And how to fix it.
MADELEINE BURKE Opinion Columnist
Whether attempting to get to a library, a dining hall or an academic building, crossing busy streets is a common occurrence for students at the University of Michigan. In fact, U-M students are the most prominent pedestrians and cyclists in the city. While students rely on the safety of these streets, the number of pedestrian and cyclist crashes in Ann Arbor is at a high. According to Ann Arbor Police Department reports, there have been two fatalities and 11 serious injuries caused by these crashes in 2025 so far — the highest number since 2014. To top it off, Washtenaw County is the most collision-prone county in the state of Michigan, with Ann Arbor being one of its major cities. In an attempt to address these safety concerns, the Ann Arbor City Council formally adopted Vision Zero in June 2021, intending to eliminate pedestrian crashes by 2025. While this policy has ambitious goals — such as reducing speed limits, creating safety infrastructure for cyclists and filling sidewalk gaps — Vision Zero is ultimately insufficient due to a lack of motivation among elected officials to enforce it and weak public advocacy. To properly address Ann Arbor’s crash problem, Vision Zero’s road safety initiatives need to become the top priority for City Council members and their constituents. Some of Vision Zero’s main objectives are to create pedestrian zones, add bike lanes and construct curb extensions. These additions are necessary to promote road safety for pedestrians by giving them safer places to walk, bike and cross the street. However, these additions would take away space from metered parking spots that generate revenue for the city. There’s profit in parking — there
isn’t in protecting pedestrians. Evidently, that fact has kept local politicians from enforcing Vision Zero effectively.
Just as local politicians are uninterested in implementing this policy, the public has seemingly lost interest in supporting it. According to a 2022 City Council memo focused on public demands for spending, very few residents advocated for funding to be allocated toward Vision Zero. This lack of public motivation is a significant issue. If the public doesn’t push for change, then the number of Ann Arbor crashes will continue to worsen in the coming years.
While Vision Zero currently isn’t reducing the number of crashes, some may claim that this analysis is premature and disregards possible long-term benefits. In fact, Vision Zero’s executive summary claims that the policy initiative is a “long-term plan” for the future of the city. However, efforts such as Vision Zero have been in development in Ann Arbor since 2013 with the creation of a Pedestrian Safety and Access Task Force. The city has spent more than a decade attempting to solve this problem without any tangible benefits. Thus, we can consider how Vision Zero could be beneficial in the future, but the potential long-term benefits do not justify ignoring the current problem of eroding pedestrian safety.
Others may claim that it would be unfair to expect perfection from the program because pedestrian crashes will always exist as long as pedestrians and drivers do. However, AAPD reports highlight that serious pedestrian injuries and casualties are highest since 2014, with two months still left in the year. These numbers signify a problem that must be substantively addressed instead of being brushed off as inevitable.
To properly respond to this growing issue, City Council members have to reconsider the
Istarted kindergarten at a Michigan public school in 2009 and graduated in 2022, but like most Michiganders my age, my more disciplined education lasted from the fifth to 10th grade. Beginning with the shot heard round the world and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall, each of those six years built upon the last in a step-by-step process that culminated in the world’s most recent events. Despite the decade between current fifth graders and me, their curriculum remains very similar to the one I remember remains pretty identical — chronological, simplistic and not conducive to retention.
Michigan’s K-12 Social Studies Standards shed light on how educators prepare students for and instruct history curriculum.
From kindergarten to second grade, students build a conception of self, family and community, and
goals of Vision Zero. Currently, the only data projection for road safety within the policy is to eliminate all fatalities and serious injuries resulting from crashes by the end of this year. This is an extremely broad and unattainable goal. City Council members must work to create clearer short-term objectives that can be used as checkpoints on the way to zero casualties.
However, only reforming the targets of Vision Zero isn’t enough to fully incentivize Ann Arbor politicians. Institutional changes must be made as well. For example, forming a Vision Zero task force with officials from the entire office of the mayor, police and transportation could be pivotal in motivating politicians. Over time, members of this task force will gain specialized knowledge on the problem at hand and will be able to advocate for its goals even if other politicians push back.
Of course, the politicians aren’t solely to blame; public engagement around Vision Zero must also be strengthened. Fortunately, the inclusion of a community representative on this Vision Zero task force could enhance engagement of citizens by giving them direct input on the policy. When residents have a stronger voice in the process of enforcing Vision Zero, they will become more motivated to push for its proper implementation when politicians fail to follow through.
Ultimately, this task force would create greater coordination between Ann Arbor politicians and stronger representation for the people, which would be significantly more effective than the existing general policy plan in ensuring the goals of Vision Zero are fulfilled.
Students at the University deserve a fair chance to safely get around campus, whether they’re walking, riding a bike or driving a car. However, the inadequacies of Vision Zero are putting the lives of students at risk. There must be a greater effort taken by both Ann Arbor politicians and residents to bring the goals of Vision Zero to fruition. Until local politicians are motivated to implement the policy and residents begin advocating for greater road safety rights, students will continue to be at risk every time they cross the road for class.
I, along with 112,407 others, gathered together at the University of Michigan Stadium on Sept. 27 to listen to Zach Bryan perform not only the first concert at the Big House, but also the largest ticketed event in U.S. history. While I’m not a fan of Zach Bryan, the massive scale of the event impressed me, along with how successfully his team and the University of Michigan pulled the event off. Over the course of its nearly 2.5 hour duration, the concert paid homage to the University with fighter jet flyovers and a rendition of Mr. Brightside, showing us that the Big House could be much more than just a football stadium.
However, in the wake of the concert’s success, it’s apparent that the University is underutilizing its access to a large and excitable community, as well as missing out on a chance to secure an enormous investment.
The University uses the Big House almost exclusively for football, despite it being the third-largest stadium in the world, seating more than 107,000 people. While Michigan winters put the outdoor stadium out of use practically six months out of the year (though the football team does play in the snow), the stadium is still only used for football games six weekends out of the year. This presents a compelling opportunity to use the stadium for events outside of football. Activities like concerts, other sporting events, conferences or pretty much any large scale event are all possibilities. In doing so, the University could increase its return on the stadium’s infrastructure upkeep and make much more revenue from an otherwise idle stadium. Outside
Michigan kids need a thematic
third and fourth graders develop historical inquiry skills. From fifth grade to high school, students cover early U.S. history, world history and geography sequentially across time. Eighth graders who learn U.S. history will pick up from where they left off in fifth grade, and high schoolers who study world history will begin with the Middle Ages instead of reviewing seventh grade’s ancient history. This chronological approach isn’t unique to Michigan, but is rather a framework used nationwide. What underlies Michigan’s social studies standards, however, is the concept of “responsible citizenship,” stemming from disciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, democratic values and civic participation. This can’t be achieved by a recitation of dates, figures and events as they occurred over the course of time. If Michigan wants today’s kids and teens to grow into responsible citizens, schools must require a thematic approach that allows students to grasp the historical influences
behind present-day issues and form personal perspectives of the world around them.
A thematic framework leaves the broader timeline behind in favor of discussing various trends of U.S. or world history unit by unit. A unit focused on civil rights, for example, can cover the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the feminist and gay rights movements and even the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
Focusing on themes, rather than a timeline, best allows students to explore aspects of history that have and will continue to shape their world.
Approaching history instruction thematically also allows teachers to reach further across history instead of being limited to a smaller frame of time. History continues to be made every day, and, naturally, we’re left with more and more events to cover in a set amount of time. Current classrooms now
of (some) football practices, football games, the Big House 5k, it’s not being used all that much. Given that it costs about $226 million — not including maintenance or the recent renovations — the University should be looking to use its asset more broadly.
The University’s peer institutions are already doing this. In 2024, The Ohio State University hosted the Buckeye Country Super Fest, a twoday festival in OSU’s football stadium that drew more than 127,000 fans. That year, they were also the highest-earning college athletic department, raking in $280 million. While there’s no direct line showing where the revenue of the OSU’s country festival goes, it can be assumed that as the school makes more money, it puts some of it into its athletic program, which is a big revenue maker. At Pennsylvania State University, Beaver Stadium has hosted major acts like Luke Combs and Blake Shelton, turning what once was strictly a football stadium into a venue that hosts year-round entertainment.
The University of Colorado Boulder recently hosted John Summit at its football stadium, drawing in over 50,000 fans.
These universities have not only shown that it is feasible to host concerts, but that it’s beneficial financially for universities to do so. The University, with its massive football stadium, personal support and fan base of 50,000 students in walking proximity to the stadium, is perfectly positioned to follow suit in hosting these concerts.
Hosting events will bring in millions of dollars of revenue to the University and Ann Arbor, which will support local businesses. Many long-term Ann Arbor staples have shut their doors, citing increasing overhead costs and decreasing revenue. Commercial business
history education
have to incorporate the Vietnam War, Reaganomics, the early internet, the Great Recession and the War on Terror — all topics classrooms didn’t have to contend with 50 years ago — making history curriculum outdated.
Given the sheer amount of events to cover, instructors have to make cuts. Recent events — which have the most direct impact on students’ lives — are often sacrificed in those final few weeks of the year. We’ll only have more to cover as time goes on.
Following thematic history instruction would also mean that the earliest parts of U.S. and global history would be covered starting in late middle school and continuing throughout high school. Older students would be able to discuss and remember topics of history with greater complexity.
As it is right now, precolonial and early U.S. history is left for fifth grade, while industrialization up to the new global age is left for eighth and ninth grades. This means students are more likely
to remember how an alreadyestablished U.S. evolved into a global superpower. A thematic framework, though, would mean students of all ages can learn at a deeper level how the Americas looked before colonization and the American Revolution.
Beyond the ability to more easily reach across the timeline, a thematic history means students wouldn’t see the course of history as a list of events predating them. A thematic unit on U.S. immigration, for instance, could first discuss indigenous people. The next lessons would discuss the first wave of immigration from Western Europe, then the mid-18th-century immigration of Irish, German and Chinese populations. Later lessons would cover the third wave of Northern, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and then the fourth wave of immigration with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
The unit’s conclusion could include a tie-in with current events and their historical influences,
vacancy rates have increased to 14.6%, representing a larger trend in small businesses shutting down. As a result, large companies like Dunkin’ and Raising Cane’s are moving in, creating more competition and eroding the local culture that has defined Ann Arbor. There are concerns about how this will disrupt and affect the lives of Ann Arbor locals. Football Saturdays already bring in massive crowds, causing traffic congestion, parking shortages and an overcrowded downtown area. The Zach Bryan concert drew in a similar number of people, including many who did not understand how to navigate the chaotic culture a Big House event brings, which raised concerns among locals about how more concerts will make it harder to go about their lives during such events. However, this first concert was still encouraging. The head of Ann Arbor Public Safety stated the event ran smoothly and safely with only a few minimal issues. With improved transportation management and planning, Ann Arbor and the University can refine the process to make future events even more successful. This could include more messaging about event logistics like cell phone signal, parking and traffic beforehand or bus systems employed on game days that take people to and from parking lots outside of the greater stadium area. Ultimately, the Zach Bryan concert should serve as an example of what is possible for the Big House. By expanding its use beyond football, the University can use idle infrastructure, drive economic growth and support Ann Arbor local businesses. The Big House has already proven it can handle being the biggest stage in the country. Now it’s time to embrace that year-round potential.
allowing students to more clearly recognize how the definition of an American has shifted, how certain groups have been included or excluded over time and how these various cultural groups have shaped the country’s national identity.
All of this isn’t to say that incorporating some amount of chronology when teaching history has no benefits. The chronological approach is what almost all of us are comfortable with, and it can often be the simplest option. Adhering strictly to a timeline can help students first understand the concept of a past, present and future as a foundation to later comprehend cause and effect. Under a thematic history framework, instructors are justified in worrying about a framework that jumps back and forth across time between units, especially when there’s no textbook organized for a fully thematic pedagogy.
Hannah Willingham/DAILY
ELIZA PHARES Opinion Columnist
Matthew Prock/DAILY
AUDRA WOEHLE Opinion Columnist
Catfished by an elective course
Influenced, not empowered
As I smile, lines subtly form around my mouth and frame my face. When I lift my eyebrows, soft waves of wrinkles greet my forehead. Alone in front of the mirror, these small imperfections never seemed like flaws to me — until I opened my phone.
I start scrolling through my Instagram feed of flawless faces, perfectly constructed bodies and carefully curated lifestyles, and immediately, feelings of self-consciousness flood my mind. Each image tells me the same thing: Natural is simply not enough. I must change myself to like how I look.
Amplified by social media’s constant obsession with appearance, the culture around plastic surgery strengthens the same message: “Want to look like the people on your screen? Just alter yourself to meet the standard.” The insecurities born from my discovery page aren’t exclusive to me. An estimated 40% of female college students express interest in or consider undergoing cosmetic procedures in the near future.
While cosmetic plastic surgery appears empowering, it commodifies women’s bodies to fit patriarchal beauty standards. Reducing plastic surgery simply to a matter of personal choice and newfound autonomy ignores how the media reinforces the need to look a certain way to conform to beauty trends.
The plastic surgery industry claims that women can eliminate insecurities by undergoing reconstructive procedures — procedures that are consistently being promoted by social media. However, we must take into
The
There is a reason why democracies almost always die to thunderous applause, and it’s because dictators offer something democracy never has: speed. They have a single voice, a steady hand, and offer an end to the endless arguments that make every law, every budget, every reform feel like progress dies in committee. Impatience may seem like a fool’s excuse for surrender, but when it’s the price for putting food on the table, it’s cheap.
In the United States, that impatience has its own face.
President Donald Trump sells himself as the man who cuts through the noise, the one who does what “the politicians” never could. He moves fast, breaks norms and leaves his opponents arguing over rules he’s already rewritten. To his supporters, that looks like results.
To his critics, it looks like erosion. But the real problem isn’t only Trump — it’s the pace of politics today. Today, more than ever, the
account how our media and language use reinforces toxic ideals and therefore decline the notion that plastic surgery is freeing and a form of selfexpression.
The constant evolution of beauty trends, whether that might mean the prioritization of a certain body type over another, forces women to chase unattainable goals, leading them to undergo procedures and choose to base their selfworth on how they look.
As social media trends phase in and out, they influence women’s decisions to get cosmetic surgery by constantly putting down bodies that don’t fit into what’s trending. This becomes harmful toward self-image and security for a number of women because these trends are temporary and the idolized appearance is often replaced within months.
For instance, the Brazilian butt lift quickly rose in fame over the past decade because social media promoted thicker and curvier bodies as the ideal that women should fit into.
BBL procedures, which are extremely invasive, drastically change women’s bodies and are often accompanied by various complications and health risks.
Although BBLs can foster body confidence, it’s only a matter of time before a new body is trending in the media. Women feel like they need to reconstruct their bodies in order to be accepted, even if that puts their safety at risk.
If women continue to keep changing their bodies based on what they see on social media, they will never truly be happy with how they look, especially after undergoing highly dramatic body transformations.
We can see that change happening right now with the recent emergence of the “skinny BBL.” As social media pushes skinny influencers towards the
forefront of the algorithm, the standard has started shifting from thicker bodies to skinny bodies. This change comes with new procedures to further encourage women to change their appearance.
Women no longer chase procedures that promote volume, but instead want to slim down into the new ideal.
Some women with fuller bodies, either naturally or enhanced cosmetically, now find themselves outside of this re-emerging ideal “aesthetic.”
This causes women to not only go through constant surgeries and reverse procedures, but also continues the cycle of insecurity and toxic body image.
The shift from regular BBL procedures to the “skinny BBL” emphasizes how rapidly social media switches from beauty ideals. It only took a few years for one body type, initially celebrated, to be left behind and deemed not desired.
From one extreme to the other, women’s bodies aren’t used for self-expression, but instead are just mirroring what trend social media is promoting at the time.
As social media and the plastic surgery industry work together to promote women’s bodies as commodities, the focus shifts from a woman’s intelligence, individuality and merit, strictly to her appearance. Plastic surgery promotes the idea that natural is not enough; rather, women have to constantly change how they look in order to feel valued, successful and confident.
Through each trend and procedure, women’s bodies are being framed as marketregulated items that are always available to be reshaped and resold since the industry finds new ways to tweak and prune what it deems acceptable.
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The politics of aesthetics: How American fashion shifted right
Historically, American fashion has reflected the political climate of the country. Most notably, these trends appear throughout various decades and defining events. During the 1920s, for example, female fashion tendencies were commonly characterized by the popularity of the “flapper.”
Flapper fashion embraced shorter hemlines, low or nonexistent waistlines and sleeveless tops. Undergarments were designed to be more flexible, resulting in straighter silhouettes that permitted easier movement, particularly useful for dancing. Popular amid the movement for women’s suffrage and liberation, flapper girl culture deviated from patriarchal expectations, encouraging women to embrace their sexual autonomy, economic independence and political power. Over time, the flapper girl became a cultural icon, inherently indicative of the 1920s rebellion against gender norms and expectations.
Other examples include during World War II, when the rationing of materials and the influx of women in the workforce led to the popularization of shorter skirt hemlines and pants, and the 1960s, when the women’s movement brought forth the mini skirt.
Just as previous eras of fashion mirrored social and political changes, today’s trends signal a similar relationship between ideologies and aesthetics.
The most notable of these trends includes the “old money
aesthetic,” which, according to Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford, is defined as a style that references mid-20th century East Coast elites. The aesthetic draws on the style associated with generational wealth, often including highquality and expensive pieces devoid of flashy logos or branding.
The imagery predominantly features white individuals and has been criticized for being racially exclusionary. Using these elements of fashion to frame extreme wealth and status as natural and desirable, the aesthetic idealizes the socioeconomic hierarchy, reflecting values that can be seen among conservative ideologies.
18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, whose political theory laid the groundwork for classical conservatism, asserts the importance of preserving social order through the preservation of inherited structures, including hierarchies of class and power. Though distinct from contemporary conservative movements, Burke’s philosophy nonetheless bolsters elite privilege, promoting the belief that those born into wealth are most suited to regulate society’s moral and political order, thereby justifying sustained power dynamics.
Modern American conservatism also continues to prioritize uber-rich individuals through enacted policies such as tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation that favors large corporations. Similarly, President Donald Trump’s attempts to increase “fairness” in the college application
process have noticeably ignored legacy admissions, a system that overwhelmingly benefits wealthy white families and preserves generational privilege. Thus, the old money aesthetic functions as a cultural expression of rising conservatism, glamorizing inherited privilege while concealing its foundations in racial and economic inequality. Other rampant fashion trends also reflect conservative values, though in different ways. “Coquette” and “cottagecore” aesthetics typically consist of pastel colors — the most prominent being pink — and floral patterns, commonly depicted on long, flowy dresses with modest necklines. While it is frequently portrayed as a reclamation of hyperfemininity, it has disconcerting ties to domesticity, a projection of traditional gender roles advocated for by conservative figures.
A more tangible example of modern fashion’s conservative influence can be observed in a specific clothing brand, Pretty Little Thing — particularly in reference to their recent rebrand. Once known for their colorful and revealing clubwear, the brand underwent a noticeable shift in early 2025. The rebrand resulted in more neutral-colored pieces designed predominantly with modest silhouettes. Moreover, while the brand once featured a diverse array of models, the campaign now largely centers thin, white women, akin to the racial exclusivity noticeable in the old money aesthetic.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
seduction of speed: Why authoritarianism looks irresistible
American people feel like their government doesn’t listen to them or produce any results when told it does, and they’re right. A Princeton University study found that public opinion has a statistically nonsignificant impact on public policy and the laws Congress passes. This trend isn’t new; history is full of leaders who rose on the same promise.Autocracy has often looked like a shortcut to order. Rome’s first emperors brought peace after chaos; Adolf Hitler’s early regime temporarily revived Germany’s economy amid the Great Depression; Chinese President Xi Jinping lifted hundreds of millions from poverty. Each autocracy began with a crisis and ends, for a short time, with stability. The pattern is always the same: Chaos breeds fear, fear breeds obedience and obedience buys time until the illusion of control collapses. Authoritarian systems trade accountability for action, consent for control, and they work best right before they stop working at all.
The single hand that steadies the nation eventually becomes the one that strangles it. Rome’s empire
rotted as emperors fought over succession and embraced hedonism; Germany’s promise devoured itself in genocide and ruin; China’s success has come with the price of silence. The pattern isn’t about morality — it’s about structure. A system built on one person’s will can’t survive the next person’s weakness. When one person’s will is the law, then the law naturally becomes subservient to that person’s will. When accountability dies, so does correction.
That’s what makes “benevolent dictatorship” such a seductive contradiction. It promises the strength of tyranny without the cruelty and the efficiency of control without the corruption. But every dictator starts out believing he’s the exception — the one who won’t abuse the power he’s seized. History keeps proving otherwise. Joseph Stalin’s reign, which began with the revolutionary promise of a workers’ paradise, devolved into the Great Purge and the Holodomor, demonstrating that absolute power invariably leads to absolute terror.
The United States isn’t necessarily turning into a
dictatorship — but it’s growing fond of what dictators promise. Every poll shows the same exhaustion: Respondents believe the government doesn’t work. Congress feels paralyzed, the courts feel partisan and the presidency has become the country’s only engine for change. When nothing moves,
power flows to whoever can still act — and we’ve built a democracy that rewards that impatience. We cheer executive orders because they bypass the gridlock we created. We celebrate presidents who “get things done” even when it means bending the rules meant to stop them. Constitutional amendments — the proper tool for institutional change — have all but vanished. Instead, we try to reshape the system through the courts or through partisan control of the bureaucracy. It’s faster, but it’s corrosive.
AVERY ALLEN Opinion Columnist
Selena Zou/DAILY
FIONA MCCALLY Opinion Analyst
SETH GABRIELSON Opinion Columnist
EMILY QUINTEROS Opinion Cartoonist
Cornelia Ovren/DAILY
Michigan in Color is The Michigan Daily’s section by and for People of Color.
In this space, we invite our contributors to be vulnerable and authentic about our experiences and the important issues in our world today.
Our work represents our identities in a way that is both unapologetic and creative. We are a community that reclaims our stories on our own terms.
A taste of home
MEDESSE FAGNON
MiC Columnist
I knew the taste and smell of home before I knew its language, its sights, its culture and its people. My most poignant memories of my childhood in Benin involve food. I remember frequently eating fruits like mangoes and papaya; snacks like kuli-kuli, atchomon and coco râpée; beverages like bissap and desserts like dèguè.
My favorite time of day was always dinner time. As a child, it was when I would impatiently stand by the dinner table as my mother set out a spread for what we were to feast on for the night. The daily offering would always involve a starch (whether that be rice, pounded yam, plantain, cassava, etc.), a stew, a protein and, obviously, some kind of pepper or spice.
The structure of the meal was always formulaic, but I never tired of the endless options available — I could eat. Every night, I would ecstatically finish off my plate, before echoing the same refrain as I did after every meal, “Maman, nuɖ uɖ u ɔ vivi tawun”.
“Mom, the food is very delicious.”
The Samantha Woll Dialogues
Which is why, after immigrating to the United States, I assumed that my routine would be disrupted, and the foods that filled my plate every day would no longer be a part of my cultural diet. So, my relief was evident when my family found our first African market. It carried small quantities of the ingredients we needed for staple dishes and supported the meals of not just our family, but countless other West Africans in the area.
Thanks to them, we slowly began cooking meals from Benin once again. Although our selection was limited, we made do with what we could and remained grateful for the taste of home and community that the markets afforded us.
Later on, my parents found Saraga, an international grocery store in Indianapolis.
The large building boasted imports from every single continent, and it quickly became our go-to place where we managed to find the things our mom and pop stores didn’t offer.
A hub for immigrants of all backgrounds, it quickly became one of my favorite places to go. Whenever my mom wanted to go shopping for ingredients, I’d tag along
with her, ready to snoop around, beg for snacks and make suggestions as to what foods we should prepare for the week.
Thanks to the efforts of local African market vendors and stores like Saraga that understood how important food and culture are, I was able to feel deeply connected to my Beninese heritage even when I was an ocean away. It allowed my connection to my family and culture to not be a passive endeavor, but one where I could tell aunts and uncles back home that I also ate “w ɔ” and “nǔ súnnú” for dinner, and converse with them without feeling disconnected from where I came from.
What I hadn’t realized in those years was that my access to cultural food and cooking was closely linked to the bustling immigrant communities in my city. It was our presence that contributed to the demand for stores that carried our ingredients and created a culture in which we, as people, bonded over food. So, I never expected that I would lose these textures, flavors and aromas I spent the last 18 years of my life around when I moved to Ann Arbor CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Should Religion Play a Role in the Law?
stark contrast to the westernized individualism that makes up daily life in America.
Every morning in Lebanon, like clockwork, someone visits and has coffee with my Tata. As she smokes her morning cigarette and sips qahwa from a small, chipped mug, she listens to her companion recount their recent updates and happenings. They could be her next-door neighbor. They could be from across the street. They could even be my aunts and uncles, her kids, coming over for breakfast. To her, it is all the same.
In the “day3a” you don’t need an invitation. A gate left open or the smell of freshly boiled coffee is enough of a reason to stop by someone’s house for a quick chat. One of the words you hear called out in the South of Lebanon
Even the simple act of smiling at someone you pass by on the street can earn you a dirty look here in Ann Arbor. We’ve grown so accustomed to keeping to ourselves that any breach of our invisible contract is seen societally as weird and invasive. We’re rewarded individually for accomplishments at work or school, and any fallback to help is looked down upon as weak and less-than. As a Lebanese American who was born and raised in America, but with Lebanese values, I find this juxtaposition difficult to navigate on a day-to-day basis.
On the one hand, I long to be as involved in my cousins’ lives as they are in each other’s. On the other hand, I find that the environment of singularity I am surrounded by has rubbed off on me, and I want my private life to be just that. There’s a constant war occurring between my two identities. Do I insert myself into the personal business of
of the Samantha Woll Dialogues, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute will host an exchange between Terrence McDonald, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, and Benjamin Berger, author of Law’s Religion, on how legal systems engage with religious beliefs and practices in pluralistic societies and how recent supreme court decisions and executive actions affect the relationship between church and state.
my family and subject myself to the same scrutiny in order to maintain the sense of community found in the “day3a”? Or, do I keep my struggles to myself and expect everyone else to do the same?
There are so many existing articles about living in a diaspora (I’ve already written one myself) that I don’t think I need to reiterate how it feels to be separated from my culture and language, isolated from my cousins or not Lebanese enough. One of the weirdest parts of living away from my relatives, though, and something I don’t see spoken about often, is that my family still finds a way to find out what’s going on in my life. Through the tidbits they receive from my parents or whatever they decipher from the unflattering pictures of me that are passed around group chats, my relatives are more involved than I would’ve thought could be possible, given the distance between us.
Info@laurenstudios com
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AMANY SAYED MiC Columnist
Alisha Razi/MiC
What’s in a diagnosis?
I grew up simultaneously as every Chinese American parent’s wet dream and worst nightmare. I held the coveted “gifted kid” title — advanced for my age in every school subject, well behaved and somehow successful in everything I put my mind to. At the same time, I fell asleep in extracurricular classes, refused to practice piano or finish my Kumon workbooks and was genuinely uninterested in doing more than the bare minimum.
My parents tried every method in the book to beat out the problem child in me. I spent hours in the basement going over math problems until I could solve them in my sleep. Yet, much to their dismay, I would come home with a 95% on my exam every time, having lost a few points over some stupid mistake. Every night after dinner, they sat next to me, watching eagle-eyed, to make sure I didn’t leave the table until work was done. But as soon as they looked away, I was filling my worksheets with doodles in the margins. “Why are you still like this?” they would yell. “Why can’t you just listen to us?” With eyes full of tears, all I could do was apologize and make empty promises of doing better the next time. As I grew older, I became better at hiding those parts of me, and earning my parents’ approval. I double and triplechecked my answers on every assignment to ensure they were perfect. I still fidgeted and squirmed — but only when the teacher wasn’t watching. I knew just how much I had to study to get an A, the perfect amount of effort I had to put into something so that I wouldn’t get in trouble. I was always dancing on the line between failure and success, and I always made sure to end up on the right side.
I suppose it was inevitable that this gifted kid facade didn’t last forever. By the time I hit senior year of high school, I was burnt out, depressed and pretty much spent. By the time second semester rolled around, I had completely given up.
My parents put me in therapy after a particularly rough episode (an immigrant family taking mental health seriously? That’s when you know it was bad). It took all but one session for my therapist to say, “I think you have ADHD.” Two weeks later, I got a diagnosis. And my world changed.
ADHD was an epiphany. All those struggles that had plagued me for years could be explained by one simple condition. Maybe I wasn’t lazy, or a lump of wasted potential I could never seem to cash in on. There were hundreds of people online who had the same experiences as me. It was fascinating.
But perhaps even more fascinating were all the symptoms I began to see in my dad. Going on tangents, constantly fidgeting and spacing out when he lost interest. Mood swings when a small thing didn’t go according to plan. Even the anecdotes he
told me — apparently, the only way he could do work during college was to wait until 2 a.m. and do it all in one sitting. When the psychiatrist was telling my parents the reasons for my diagnosis, all my dad could say was, “But I do all these things too.”
In the weeks following my diagnosis, I devoured any information I could find on symptoms and common coping habits. I became obsessed with ascribing everything I did to a psychological phenomenon. A five-minute TikTok fix turning into hours of doomscrolling?
Time blindness. Spending four hours researching a niche topic?
Hyperfixation. Interrupting someone mid-conversation because they said something that made me think of something else? Tangential thinking and impulsivity. I had spent years trying to change all these traits I thought were undesirable, and now, not only did I have a name for them, but I had the tools to fix them. It was as if a new world had opened up to me. Things I hadn’t even realized I did subconsciously became more items I could add to my self improvement checklist. Maybe I could finally be normal!
When I asked my dad what he thought about ADHD, he just shrugged. “Yeah, I probably have it, too.” And while I tried to poke and pry him for more, that was the end of that conversation. I was flabbergasted. This groundbreaking label, the one that explained everything for me, meant nothing to him. Eventually, this gave way to anger. A later diagnosis already meant years of conditioning and trauma, and even with the diagnosis, did it even matter when it wasn’t real to the people closest to me?
Anytime I used ADHD to justify something, I was lectured to not use it as an excuse. “You just need to try harder,” my parents would advise. Executive function didn’t exist — why wouldn’t I just be able to start a task? When I finally convinced my parents to allow me to get medication, they would continuously ask: “Has the Adderall cured you yet?” To my parents, ADHD was just another one of those unnecessary “Western” things. Soon, a diagnosis that had once been so freeing began to feel like a curse. I knew so much about my condition, but when it came to actually healing it, I was hopelessly lost. Every new hobby that I thought would finally be the one to stick eventually found its way to the trash when the hyperfixation passed. I tried to listen intently during conversations. Don’t derail the interaction with an irrelevant personal anecdote this time, Amy. Yet somehow we always seemed to stray miles away from the original topic. I must have set that stupid pomodoro timer thousands of times, yet I still couldn’t lock in to save my life.
Being able to see the same traits in my dad just made it worse. Shouldn’t he, of all people, be able to understand how
DIVYA THUMMA MiC Columnist
Echoes of Gold
The world begins in whispers of gold against my skin. The crescents sway, catching light like tiny suns, each bell a fragile pulse, each movement a heartbeat. Before words, before breath, my jhumkis speak. They tell stories of home, of courage, of generations stitched into gold. They are more than earrings; they are the rhythm I move to, the melody that steadies me when the world wavers.
“They are yours now,” she said. In her voice lay the weight of generations. I felt fragile, almost unworthy, but as I fastened them to my ears, the metal whispered a soft reassurance: You belong to a lineage of strength, of beauty, of resilience.
I wore them on my first day working at the children’s hospital. My palms were clammy, my chest tight and my voice trembled as I knelt beside a little girl, trying to coax a smile. Every nervous step I took was accompanied by faint tinkles in my ear, a delicate punctuation to my uncertainty.
he wasn’t there anymore. The message arrived in fragments: first a silence that stretched too long, then the trembling phone in my hand, then the whispered confirmations no one wanted to say aloud.
debilitating ADHD could be?
Couldn’t he see all of the ways that ADHD affected his own life?
While I tortured myself night and day trying to mitigate my symptoms, how could he be so okay with just existing?
I tried to bring up the topic of diagnosis multiple times.
Sometimes I’d do it subtly: “Heyyy Dad, I noticed you were on Xiaohongshu for hours …” Other times, I would just say it outright. The result was still the same every time, and we ultimately got nowhere.
I’ve read dozens of articles on how to parent a kid with ADHD, mostly out of curiosity. While they prescribe many different things, one thing was evident: the way my parents approached it was not great. Articles pushed for understanding, support and embracing ADHD. My experience couldn’t have been further from that. However, with time, I’ve begun to see a different story.
While my dad doesn’t talk much about his childhood, I can draw my own inferences from what he does tell me. Growing up in China in a generation that understood the complexities of mental health even less than we do now could not have been easy. Neurological disorders were seen as taboo, as something innately wrong, to be hidden away. Learning to adapt and succeed despite having a brain that worked differently was about survival. What must it have been like for him to raise a child with the same problems as him?
To look at me and see a reflection of his younger self?
Maybe my father did understand and dealt with it the only way he could. He found success through a strict upbringing that insisted on perfection, and that projection onto me was a way of keeping me safe from failure. I can only imagine the invisible scars he carries with him. My approach to mental health has always been very linear, and I think part of my desperation for my dad to get diagnosed was so that he could also begin to heal. However, I’ve come to realize that his approach isn’t for me to decide, and these scars weren’t for me to treat.
These days, I look at my dad and see a man who might have discovered his own version of healing. He has a stable job, a robust community within the church and dozens of interests to spend his time on. My parents have learned ADHD patterns and symptoms without any research, simply through observation and years of shared living. My mom will follow my dad in conversation, not skipping a beat at the topic changes and random tangents. My dad plays a lot of Pokémon Go. He impulse buys little gadgets online (discovering Temu might have been the worst thing to happen to him).
Whenever I’m home, we do jigsaw puzzles for hours side by side, without pausing to use the bathroom or even speaking a word. CONTINUED AT
They rest on my ears daily. To anyone else, they may simply be a pair of earrings, a delicate ornament meant to catch the eye. To me, they are anchors, companions, witnesses. They’ve held me steady in moments of joy, of fear, of grief. They have been the quiet witnesses to a life lived in fragments of light and shadow, to the heartbeat of a girl learning to navigate a world of grey.
The first pair I remember was given to me by my grandmother. She fastened them to my ears before I could even walk. They were heavier than expected, photos capturing my unfamiliarity and curiosity at the new addition to my wardrobe. Later in life, while she lay bedridden from the disease that consumed her, she pressed her own pair into my small hands, sunlight falling through the curtains in strips across the living room floor. They were heavier than I expected, golden metal warm to the touch, shaped like small bells promising a melody only if they moved.
And then, a giggle, the first real one of the day, and it felt as though the bells themselves laughed with her, transforming fear into courage. In that small moment, I understood that courage is often found in small spaces, in tiny details, in jewelry swinging gently with the rhythm of a pulse.
During late nights cramming for exams, writing essays, panicking over the little things, I would twirl my jhumkis between my fingers as I worked, the metal cold and warm all at once, catching the light in ways I couldn’t anticipate. They reminded me of home: of festivals filled with music and heart, of sari-clad aunties laughing with the diyas, of my mother adjusting her own earrings before leaving the house. In those loops of gold, I carried the warmth of kitchens, families and rituals that survived centuries.
Even grief could not undo their presence. Marc, my friend, always carried the weight of perfection, hiding a smile that never quite reached his eyes. One morning,
The world shifted in a single heartbeat. I heard soft crying in corners I didn’t notice before, the muted whispers in hallways, the small, shattered sobs that seemed to echo from the walls themselves. Each laugh I heard after felt hollow, each smile felt borrowed and in its absence, the weight of everything pressed against my chest. Nights became restless; I felt my own heart hammering with a frantic rhythm I could not control. Anxiety, sharp and insistent, gripped me in ways I had never known.
And still, my jhumkis hung at my ears. Their gentle sway, the faint, comforting tinkle, became a lifeline I could touch, matching the chaos in my mind. Twisting them between my fingers, I felt the warmth of generations who carried grief before me, who walked through darkness. They did not erase the sorrow or quiet the sharp ache of absence, but they offered me a tether, a pulse, a reminder that even when the world around me trembled, some constants remained. They anchored me, bell by bell, swing by swing, through nights of tears and days of quiet panic. In their subtle song, I found a fragile yet stubborn strength: the courage to keep walking forward, carrying the weight of memory without letting it crush me.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
BY VIVIAN PARK — MiC Columnist
In my last year of high school, our English teacher told us that poetry rings true in spite of its vagueness.
It’s the sporadic phrases that lodge themselves in the crevices of our brains I think of her words often: Language is only a medium. It felt something like a breakthrough then.
On days like this, my love, I go back to that day last summer that changed everything.
The sun setting on the beach we stumbled across, so by chance as if it were meant for us to find. Our stunned silence at its beauty, your first sunset on a lake.
I joked that Lake Michigan had its moments too.
The stillness between us that followed was comfortable as always, despite the tension of the unspoken words.
In the lull of conversation between us, you finally said them, like a confession, as if something so obvious could be a confession.
In other words, it’s nice out. It’s always nice out here.
I used to always tell you that I want to go to California where it’s summer forever and be the first to burn together when the sun finally explodes.
It seems fitting for the end of the world to start here.
Can’t you just imagine it?
Those license plates with the red cursive heating up until they glow ember.
I was here when I was little,
Before I spoke any English.
Maybe you were here too—what a pleasant thought.
My mother used to take me to the park after long, silent school days, playgrounds that reek of nostalgia now.
I wonder if I was lonely then, before I had the words to say it.
I don’t think so
Her presence was enough.
In my last year of high school, our English teacher told us that poetry rings true in spite of its vagueness.
But anxiety from the same sentiment blossoms in the pit of my stomach now.
We are trapped in cells and we claw at the cage with words.
But trying to articulate love, grief or faith will only ever be in vain.
Trying to pick the right words
In the right order
At the right time close but never close enough
Confessions of shame and damnation packed up into neat boxes of noun, verb, adjective
But all my curses seem like blessings with you
Because I thought the pit in my stomach was loneliness but I’m beginning to think it was desire
Tell me something
The truth, maybe, if you can.
But maybe it doesn’t matter.
A moment of clarity in the bar bathroom with the French and Spanish women whom I understand completely despite the language barrier.
(They were talking about the persistent urge to urinate after drinking,
Three different tongues and yet more understanding than what can be found in some love letters)
Perhaps the meaning of life comes to you in the dirty bathroom of a bar in a foreign country you’ve never been to before.
When the sun finally explodes, maybe it’ll feel like it did in that bathroom, on that beach.
I don’t think anyone will need words then
AMY XIU MiC Columnist
Emmeline Meldrum/DAILY
Natasha Eliya/DAILY
high noon
In a world increasingly centered on training athletes from the youngest of ages, one constantly inundated with stories of early risers and after-practice stayers, it seems strange for a projected first-round draft pick to not have always been committed to the grind.
But for graduate forward Yaxel Lendeborg, that training-obsessed life just wasn’t him at first.
“All my friends when I moved to New Jersey played basketball,” Lendeborg told The Michigan Daily. “So it was just a given to continue to play when I got into the system. It was all just fun. At first, I didn’t take anything serious. I played the same way that I did outside (when I was) playing stupid with my friends.”
In spite of her son’s halfheartedness, Lendeborg’s mom,
Mom knows best: Yaxel Lendeborg’s motivation to get to the top of college basketball
Yissel Raposo, remembers a different outlook:
“I always bought NBA clothes for Yaxel,” Raposo told The Daily. “And when he was little I asked Yaxel, ‘What are you gonna do when you grow up?’ and he always said, ‘NBA.’ ” Even with Lendeborg’s hesitance to give basketball his all, his mom never doubted him. She saw his innate potential and understood that he had the ability to make his childhood dream come true. All he needed was a little push. ***
Lendeborg isn’t the first in his family to play basketball — not by a long shot.
Growing up playing basketball and volleyball, Raposo took her own talents in both sports to the American University of Puerto Rico. She eventually continued playing both sports for her home country, the Dominican Republic.
Lendeborg’s father was also a prominent player in the Dominican scene throughout the ‘90s and the early 2000s. He played for both the national team as well as professionally within the Dominican Republic’s National Basketball League.
All of this culminated into Lendeborg being instilled with a love of sports from birth. Between watching his mom play courtside and growing up in a house that mandated sports as an extracurricular, Lendeborg was all but born with a ball in his hand.
Trying everything from hockey to gymnastics, Lendeborg thought that baseball would’ve been the sport that stuck. As he grew up, though, persuasion from his mom and his friends pushed basketball into a prominent position in his life.
But again, even with his mom trying to convince him to follow in her footsteps, Lendeborg didn’t commit. It wasn’t for a lack
Zach Goldstein: Depth and fit will make or break Michigan’s season, not its top-end talent
Not every team has the luxury of saying it has a preseason Naismith College Player of the Year Award contender, but the No. 7 Michigan men’s basketball team has one of the best players in the country in graduate forward Yaxel Lendeborg.
At 6-foot-9, Lendeborg provides versatility on both sides of the ball for the Wolverines, as a highlevel scorer and playmaker with an ability to switch onto smaller defenders. His talents propelled him to back-to-back seasons averaging a double-double at UAB and an AP Preseason All-America Team selection this year. He was even in talks to be a first-round NBA Draft pick in 2025.
Michigan coach Dusty May knows of his accolades and his potential. In fact, May coached against him at Florida Atlantic two seasons ago. Lendeborg terrorized the glass en route to a 17-point, 21-rebound performance in a UAB win over the Owls. And so far this preseason, May has been singing the praises of Lendeborg.
Sure, Lendeborg will lead Wolverines on the court like he had
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
for the Blazers in years past. But for all the merit Lendeborg brings, his stardom alone won’t be what defines Michigan’s season. Instead, the supporting cast will tell the Wolverines’ story.
Last season, Michigan featured a frontcourt duo of forward Danny Wolf and center Vlad Goldin. Despite the pair’s strong play — which led the Wolverines to a Big Ten Tournament Title and a Sweet Sixteen appearance — depth issues were a consistent problem. Without a deep cast of role-playing guards with the ability to score and facilitate consistently, Michigan fell short in numerous key moments.
This season, though, those holes are not as pressing. The Wolverines have enough to field out a full rotation of complementary pieces if they can work together.
On paper, Michigan has the requisite depth to make an even deeper run — perhaps even winning the national championship. It returned important pieces like senior guard Roddy Gayle Jr., graduate guard Nimari Burnett and graduate forward Will Tschetter. The Wolverines also made splashes in the transfer portal, swapping Tre Donaldson out for junior guard Elliot Cadeau and adding big men in sophomore forward Morez Johnson Jr. and junior center Aday Mara.
The underclassmen have already shown promise as well. Guard Trey McKenney was a blue-chip, five-star recruit out of high school. Guard Winters Grady knocked down a pair of 3-pointers against Cincinnati and was a positive in his minutes. Sophomore guard L.J. Cason showed flashes as a microwave scorer and figures to be the primary ball handler for May’s bench unit.
“I don’t think anyone on last year’s team or this year’s team would disagree that we have more natural ability, more proven success on this year’s team,” May said Sept. 30 at Michigan Media Day.
Depth of talent alone won’t be enough for Michigan to build on last year’s successes — the supporting cast around Lendeborg will have to gel together. Despite having potential scheme fits a championship contender needs, it’s yet to be seen if this group will truly mesh. Through two exhibition games, the turnover problem that persisted last season has returned, giving away the ball a combined 42 times already. This issue burned them against the Bearcats and led to 22 points off turnovers for St. John’s.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
of love for the game — playing with friends remained a weekly pastime — but he never integrated it fully into his life as much as his mom wanted.
“When he was younger, she always tried talking to him, telling him, ‘You need to take basketball
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
more seriously,’” Raposo’s daughter translated into English.
“And he wouldn’t take it seriously and he would just play basketball with his friends, not to actually succeed.”
In middle school, Lendeborg finally gave it a shot, trying out
all three years. However, he never made a team — attributing it to the fact that he just wasn’t good enough. At 15-years-old, Lendeborg had still never played a competitive minute of basketball.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Nate Schreck: New frontcourt cements Michigan on national stage
NATE SCHRECK
Without question, Michigan is led by its guards.
The Wolverines women’s basketball team’s backcourt spouts an Olympian, last season’s co-Freshman of the Year and a program-embodying star tasked with the primary ballhandling duties. Sophomore guards Syla Swords, Olivia Olson and Mila Holloway will be at the top of their opponents’ scouting reports all season.
But they’re not what will enable Michigan to take the next step.
The Wolverines know what they have in their star guards. What sets this year’s No. 13 Michigan women’s basketball team apart from last year’s is its holistic roster construction. And for a team whose goals are to compete for a title in one of the nation’s toughest conferences, the pieces are set in place — Wolverines coach Kim Barnes Arico just has to push the right buttons.
“We stuck with five guards for the course of last season,” Barnes Arico said Oct. 27 at Michigan Media Day. “A great thing about this team … is that
we have the ability to change lineups. We can go big, we can go small, we can go medium.”
Michigan’s unorthodox roster and lineup construction held it back in crucial games last season. In a nonconference loss against Oklahoma, the Wolverines were forced to put 6-foot-1 Swords on 6-foot-4 AllAmerican Raegan Beers. Beers drowned Swords and pounded Michigan inside all game, leaving the Wolverines with few answers.
Conference play posed a similar challenge: UCLA and preseason Big Ten Player of the Year Lauren Betts overwhelmed Michigan inside, USC 6-foot2 star guard JuJu Watkins dominated in the key and Michigan State’s All-Big Ten Second Team forward Grace VanSlooten all powered their respective teams to crucial conference victories over Michigan.
None of these games defined the Wolverines’ otherwiseproductive season, but they were emblematic of Michigan’s ineffectiveness against truly elite teams, specifically down low. These ranked matchups aren’t going away in this season’s conference slate, and neither is the size that the Wolverines will have to face off against.
The silent hand that ‘steers the ship’: For Mila Holloway the focus has always been the game
Suited up in her basketball uniform, 16-year-old Mila Holloway and her mother, Robin Raimey, were sitting in a restaurant waiting for their food when they were approached by Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico. While both parties were in town for the Boo Williams Nike Invitational in Virginia, neither was on the other’s radar. But in that restaurant, curiosity got the best of Barnes Arico.
The conversation was casual — a few words on Holloway’s high school career and collegiate recruiting. Barnes Arico mentioned the Wolverines’ tendency to not recruit down near Holloway’s home in North Carolina, as too many players were hesitant to brave the cold, distant north.
“I said, ‘Oh, well we go north,’ ” Raimey told The Michigan Daily. “ ‘You know, she’s supposed to play for Team Canada.’ And she was kind of like, ‘Whoa.’ It just kind of happened by chance.”
The chance exchange lingered. While Barnes Arico hadn’t circled Holloway on her scouting report, following their conversation, she kept an eye on her — both in Virginia and beyond. In doing so, all of the qualities that have come to define Holloway became clear. There is the unselfishness — the way she lifts her teammates, always finding the extra pass. Then, there’s her poise and ability to stay calm and confident in her skill, even in high-pressure situations. And, to boot, she has the skill to make her vision come alive on the court.
“I like to see other people who succeed, and especially if I can assist them with that,” Holloway told The Daily. “It just puts a smile on my face. My teammates always joke with me on how I never get too high or too low. I’m always kind of just calm. They say I’m poised.”
What has changed, however, is the presence of the Wolverines’ frontcourt. And that newfound development will allow their guards to excel in their natural positions. Michigan’s two biggest splashes in the transfer portal, junior forward Ashley Sofilkanich and sophomore guard Kendall Dudley, are both physical presences who specialized in rebounding and defense at their previous schools. At Bucknell, Sofilkanich averaged 8.4 rebounds last game and was named the Patriot League Player of the Year. In just over 12 minutes a game last year, Dudley averaged 2.3 rebounds a game for UCLA — production that would be big if it extrapolated to a game’s full minutes.
“All the things that are important to us, which are defense, which are rebounding and which are making the right play are things that are at the top of Kendall’s list,” Barnes Arico said.
The Wolverines are also returning senior forward Alyssa Crockett, who missed most of last season due to injury, and sophomore forward Te’Yala Delfosse, a lanky defender that Barnes Arico is very high on going into the season.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
does for our program as much as the people in the program and the coaches in the program understand. … We are not Michigan Women’s Basketball without Mila Holloway.”
Like Barnes Arico, many may not have heard the name Mila Holloway prior to last season. But Holloway has never felt the need to be recognized. She leaves it all on the court, letting the poise of her game speak for itself.
***
While she currently holds the role of starting point guard for the Wolverines, elementary-school Holloway lived by a very simple fact: she did not want to play basketball. At least not for a team.
if she got hurt. Every time, she’d bounce back with a spirit and resolve that towered even if she physically didn’t.
Mila Holloway drinks a Capri Sun with her brother.
Courtesy of Robin Raimey. When not playing the sport alongside her brothers, Mila was watching them, shuffling around their games and practices, slowly fostering a deep personal tie to the sport. It just wasn’t one she wanted to take onto the court.
But Barnes Arico had a vision beyond what Holloway showed on the court. She saw what others — including Holloway herself — couldn’t. She saw a Power Four prospect, a high-caliber starting point guard and a team leader ready for molding under the maize and blue.
“Mila Holloway is what drives our train, what steers our ship,” Barnes Arico said Oct. 28 at Michigan Media Day. “… I don’t think sometimes she understands what she brings and what she
Instead, she much preferred playing basketball in her driveway alongside her older brothers Leito and Aden Holloway. Undeterred by them having both years and inches on her, Mila was, even then, the ultimate competitor. It didn’t matter if they “destroyed” her or
“I was always going to their games, and I would always be in the stands watching, cheering them on,” Mila said. “And I always hated the thought of me playing organized sports. I just liked playing with them in the driveway.” Despite her hesitance, she couldn’t help but be drawn in as she entered middle school. She wanted to further foster her connection to the sport.
LYRA SHARMA Daily Sports Writer
Madalyn Braun/DAILY
XAVIER CHOUSSAT Daily Sports Writer
Soyeon Kim/DAILY
MICHIGAN 21 PURDUE
O N T R AC K STAYING
It wasn’t supposed to take much for the No. 21 Michigan football team to get past Purdue. The Boilermakers’ last six opponents — ranging from ranked teams to bottom-of-the-barrel Big Ten teams — managed to do as much.
Wolverines’ underwhelming showing on offense mattered not on sophomore running back Jordan Marshall’s career night.
Despite a meager passing attack and two red-zone turnovers, Marshall’s three touchdowns lifted Michigan (7-2 overall, 5-1 Big Ten) to a 21-16 win over Purdue (2-7, 0-6).
“Overall, we got the win, sloppy win,” Marshall said.
“We’re a way better team than that, and we’re just going to get back to work. I played well, and break, not a sustained effort. Their two touchdown drives combined lasted less than a minute.
that is statistically one of the conference’s worst.
On a two-play drive Marshall went 79 yards all by himself for the first score. He took advantage of a poor angle taken by the Boilermakers’ safety for a 54-yard touchdown run that followed a 25-yard screen pass.
An ill-advised kickoff return set the Wolverines up at the 14-yard line to start the second half. Going three-andout, Michigan picked up just 6 of the necessary 86 yards. On the third down, freshman quarterback Bryce Underwood missed freshman wide receiver
Wolverines up at the 12-yard line in two plays. But Underwood fumbled on a keeper as the ball rolled out of bounds in the end zone — his second red-zone turnover after an earlier interception — and gifted the Boilermakers the ball back in a 14-10 game.
Purdue has an active losing streak for a reason, though. the drive with his third touchdown.
“Outstanding,” Michigan coach Sherrone Moore said. “Twentyfive carries, 185 yards, three touchdowns, averaging 7.4 a carry, and he’s (had) 124 (carries) and he’s only had one tackle for loss.” Up by two scores thanks to Marshall, Michigan was firmly in the conductor’s seat as the clock dwindled. Even with Purdue finding the end zone once more, Marshall had already done enough to make up for the Wolverines’ many mishaps — and put away a team unlikely to win Big Ten game this
JONATHAN WUCHTER Managing Sports Editor
SECRETS
EDITION
Illustrations by Abigail Schad Design by Maisie Derlega
Maybe I’m lying, maybe I’m not
LOLA POST Statement Correspondent
Moving so many times has taught me how to blend in fast. I started noticing which versions of myself fit best in each place — the quieter one, the more outgoing one, the one who spoke a little differently to sound like everyone else. It wasn’t something I thought about much at the time — it took a lot of reflection to realize what parts of myself turned into secrets each time I moved to a new state. Looking back, I’m not sure where the line blurred between adapting and performing. Was I changing because I wanted to or because I thought I had to? It’s strange to finally realize that learning how to belong sometimes means forgetting what belonging actually means.
Pennsylvania
I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. It’s the fifthmost populated city in the state, it’s extremely influential during elections and it’s situated right on the coast of Lake Erie. If you walk downtown, you will see homeless families bathing in fountains. If you approach the neighborhoods on the lakefront, you will see milliondollar homes. It just about has it all.
I lived there for about five years before my first major move, so I don’t remember everything, but the fragments are sharp. My family grew concord grapes and raspberries in our backyard and there were rose bushes lining the neighbor’s house that pricked me when I tried to smell them. We had an above-ground pool that would turn green before we ever got around to cleaning it. I went to the nature center with my grandma and learned about bees and water snakes. I went to the zoo with my brother and would sit on a bronze statue of a dog and jump on musical tiles. Every Sunday morning, I ate a raspberry frosted donut in a booster seat as we drove along the beach. I discovered my ragweed allergy and convinced my parents that anteaters were sneaking onto our porch every night.
Erie was my first lesson in contrast: beauty and neglect, abundance and struggle, all sharing the same few square miles. Maybe that’s why I notice small details now, or why I’m drawn to contradictions. Erie was the beginning of my curiosity, as it taught me how to
right fit, but the second kindergarten I attended was definitely my favorite. I was in a class of five people — one of only three girls — and we’d take field trips to classmates’ houses to see their horses. In first grade, I went to public school, where I became friends with
Lutheran school, which was ironically where I learned my first curse words. I never would have done a single one of these things in Erie.
But Sturgis was also where I first learned to blend in. I developed a bit of a Midwest accent — which I’ve never noticed, but my friends have pointed out the strangeness in how I say the words “diagonal” and “fire.” I respected the men who would hunt lions to keep me safe. I tried to mirror the confidence of the kids who had grown up there, and held in my emotions when I was made fun of for being smaller than the average girl. No 7-year-old would be able to make sense of this code-switching, but that’s exactly what it was — small adjustments that let me
conservative, and just about every freshly licensed 14-year-old owned a motorcycle. I lived in one of the few established neighborhoods, surrounded by ponds, national parks and Indigenous history. I absolutely loved it.
I was in South Dakota from halfway through kindergarten until halfway through third grade. I attended four different schools during that time, moving through two public schools and two private schools trying to find the
keep anonymity. I learned to shoot a pink camouflage gun and dreamed of owning a matching pink motorcycle. My mom worked to open a community garden that’s even bigger and better now than it was then. I learned the importance of rattlesnake safety when my across-the-street neighbor got bitten while heroically protecting his brother. I learned to stay inside after dark to avoid having an encounter with a mountain lion. I went to church every Sunday in order to be able to attend the
The stereotypes of South Dakota — rural, rugged, reserved — weren’t entirely wrong, and I felt the pressure to fit them. It was the first place where I realized that belonging sometimes required some performance. I truly believe that the girl living in South Dakota was a strong reflection of me at my core, but I’ll never know how much of her was a version built to match her surroundings. I will likely never touch a gun nor congratulate hunting again, but when I was 7, those values were genuinely my own.
New York
Halfway through third grade, I moved from South Dakota to Horseheads, New York. The population was even smaller than Sturgis, at a whopping 6,500 residents. We owned multiple acres of land and used them to build a garden and fire pit upon. We had a tree house that scared me and my brother because a family of pigeons lived in the window. The families down our street still owned large animals, but this time it was alpacas. Within the first week, I learned how to spell the word beautiful and became obsessed with winning every spelling bee.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
ALEX COULOURIS Statement Columnist
“Okay, but you have to see the choreo with the song so you … get it,” I say, tugging on the ends of my sleeves. Backs turned to the dying fire, a group of us circle my friend’s phone, where blue and pink balls orbit each other as his TikTok search loads. I feel a strange solidarity with him, our anxiousness as we know what everyone’s about to experience.
As new members of our professional fraternity, we were just told to memorize “Gnarly” by the girl group KATSEYE to perform for current members over our fall break retreat. I already know most of the simple, repetitive lyrics just from seeing the clips online, despite not actually enjoying the experience of listening to the song.
“Gnarly” is highly ironic. In the lyrics, slang usage is gratuitous and somewhat awkward. Sung in a bored, valley girl monotone, the song even claims, “Oh my god, this song is so lit, congratulations.” The beat is loud and clanky, featuring staples of the hyperpop genre like heavily distorted vocals and synth and random sound effects like a knife being unsheathed, which should make the song unpalatable for a general audience. Yet the music video has more than 100 million views, and #gnarly on TikTok has more than 270,000 posts.
Most of this appeal, as I’m trying to preface while this TikTok loads, is the performance. Although the group is based in Los Angeles, KATSEYE’s label, Geffen Records, manages K-pop groups that also have talented singers and dancers who feature choreography alongside their title tracks. Even while singing tacky lines like, “Hottie, hottie, like a bag of Takis,” the members perform “Gnarly” with so much conviction and confidence that they almost seem angry, hard to simply dismiss.
Everything’s gnarly!
directly benefits from. Geffen Records is an industry giant that once hosted Snoop Dogg, John Lennon and Elton John. The members were selected in the Netflix competition show and documentary series “Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE,” which created a fan base for the girls even before they began performing and releasing music.
I can’t parse the laughs I hear beside me as we watch one of the
constant qualification of our interest in anything. The current use of the word “performative” now brings to mind a slew of aestheticized items: wired headphones, Labubus, authors like bell hooks and Joan Didion, music artists like Clairo and Laufey. I’ve never ordered a matcha latte with a friend without joking about our own performativity, or lying to them that I only kind of like it.
In our search to be ahead of the
It seems more appropriate to tell my club members that I only know the words to “Gnarly” because of seeing clips of their performance online, and not because the song is actually starting to grow on me, so I’m not taking the great risk of enjoying something “bad” or “cringe.”
The performance and choreography, where at one point a member gets her butt smacked playfully while the group circles her and acts shocked, makes it “camp.”
sing this song to embarrass ourselves?
When the video ends, no one says anything or gives any impressions for a while.
“That was … something.”
It’s hard to parse the authenticity of the song. The lyrics mention parties “in the Hollywood Hills” and ask if the audience is “jealous of (their) mansion?” and generally seem to critique the boasting opulence of Los Angeles culture that the group
I keep my mouth shut, because even though the song is highly ironic, I can’t figure out a way to talk about it with anyone without saying I like it, ironically.
I’m finding myself more exhausted with how much current pop culture relies on irony, performance and
the layers of irony and proclaimed self-awareness. The competitors of performative male competitions are only performing as performative males — an ironic alter ego if you will — because their awareness exempts them from the scrutiny or judgment we give to a true performative male. This use of irony and layers of over-exaggerated awareness to escape judgment is hostile to simple authenticity and keeps our true feelings a secret.
Describing the highly artificial, stylized and over-exaggerated, Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” argues that camp is an integral part of Queer culture.
“Camp sees everything in quotation marks,” Sontag wrote. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-
Naturally, people who have had to hide their gender identity or sexual orientation are especially aware of the kind of performances we all put on in daily life. This manifests in drag, a performance art that relies on irony and abstraction to create a persona separate from the self in order to express it.
On season seven of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” drag queen Gottmik walked the runway topless with inflatable arms reaching around her chest with scalpels to give her top surgery, while carrying a bloody plastic bag of fake removed breasts in a tiny latex mini skirt. Out of drag, Kade Gottlieb is a trans man, and chose to bedazzle his own top surgery scars for the look, to highlight how gender-affirming care was life-saving for him.
“You’re supposed to feel or see yourself in the art,” Gottlieb said in an interview. “I’m doing the art that I’ve always wanted to do.”
Even looking at drag without such an overt message, which could include something as tacky as Katya’s Hello Kitty Eleganza, the campiness of drag heightens every concept to such a strong degree that assigning value judgments isn’t easy or linear.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
A nightmare on State Street
GABE EFROS Statement Columnist
One part of the story of Passover that has stuck with me throughout my entire life is that of the Four Sons. This specific story revolves around four children who ask four questions about the nature of Passover, ranging from questions about the laws of Passover to others about the holiday in a broader context. My three siblings and I would quarrel over who was which son, with all of us claiming to be the revered “wise” son, as we all wanted to be wise. However, there is one son in this story who doesn’t ask a question about Passover, not because he does not know what to ask, but because he does not know how to ask. I understood then, as I understand now, that you do not want to be that son.
***
When I was 18, I didn’t want to attend the University of Michigan. Two of my three older siblings graduated from the University, and so did both of my parents. Partly because I thrive off competition and partly because I have a natural tendency to zag when everyone else zigs, I not only wanted to be different from them, but I also wanted to be better than them. I had better grades, better test scores and better extracurricular activities than all of my siblings. I should have been better than all of my siblings. But of course, in the most tangible way anything could be to an 18-year-old, I was not. Like my parents and siblings before me, I was going to be a student at the University. When I arrived on campus a little more than two years ago, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend my time as a student: work as hard as possible at all times to make up for my own perceived deficiency. Whether it be class, extracurricular activities or anything even remotely careeroriented, I needed to succeed. The overall benchmark that I set for myself was being admitted into the Ford School of Public Policy. While it was the place to be for fellow aspiring law students at the University, it was also my personal benchmark that I was chasing more than anything. I told myself that, after sophomore year, when the Public Policy School released
its admissions decisions, I would set a new goal for myself.
I’m not going to detail what the past two years looked like until now. Not because I don’t want to or because I don’t think it is important, but because there is nothing to detail. I did exactly what I said I was going to do. I showed up to nearly every class. I joined clubs that had complicated and unnecessary applications. I secured leadership positions, got letters of recommendation and attended lots of office hours. I never deviated from the goal I had set and, as a result, I have nothing interesting to say about those two years. And now, I have been a Public Policy student for about two and a half months.
The week before I started my junior year of college almost two months ago, I sat in Weill Hall during my orientation for the Public Policy School, officially a Public Policy major. I was excited, but mostly because I had met my benchmark and was eager to pick another. At that point, though, I was excited because I didn’t know what it meant to be a Public Policy student. However, I was about to find out.
Sitting with 100 other people — my peers whom I would be taking classes with for the next two years — I learned what it meant to truly be a public policy major. Over the course of the two-day orientation, the word that stuck out to me the most was “network.” It had been repeated almost ad nauseam. In order to be successful as a public policy major, we had to build our network. That word — “network” — to me, is pretty much a phrase that activates me into a sleeper agent, but instead of initiating plots to overthrow governments, I become a cynical asshole.
But when I heard that word during that orientation, I wasn’t imbued with cynicism like I normally had been throughout the many networking opportunities I had been a part of in college. Instead, I was suffocated. My pursuit of academic validation was not fulfilling personally or intellectually. I had always been a spectator to the person I thought I wanted to be, and seeing peers as my network instead of real people before hearing about the educational aspect of the Public Policy School, broke the illusion that I put myself under.
It made me deeply, emotionally uncomfortable. There had to be more than just another benchmark. In that way, the Public Policy School didn’t lie to me. I lied to myself. However, I’m sure that was obvious. To say the least, my mindset was childish. But it took an ensuing identity crisis after realizing how childish I had been to understand the secret of the Public Policy School: superposition.
I have heard all throughout college about the “Michigan Difference” and have been told firsthand by employers that career opportunities may come to me just because I am a U-M student. I heard as soon as I sat down during orientation that I was sitting with my future network. I heard how wonderful it was that I got to meet my classmates (network) after doing an icebreaker (networking) bingo activity to end the day. It was as pervasive in the Annenberg Auditorium as it was everywhere else on campus. I know what networking is, of course. I have a LinkedIn, obviously. I want a career, duh. But I always thought that my education and my career existed in symbiosis, feeding off of one another, equally propelling me forward. While the academic aspects of Public Policy School were discussed, the networking cloud hung over us. Whenever I talked to someone I had just met at orientation, the idea that they were part of my network had already been implanted in my head. We heard from professors, but we also heard from career counselors and specialists and advisors. There is an exclusive Ford writing center that can help you with assignments, but also cover letters and resume building. These not-so-subliminal messages combined with a looming, disastrous job market for me and the rest of my classmates after graduation make it hard not to be constantly thinking about my career, both when I was sitting in my orientation and as I type this right now.
In that sense, the Public Policy School is
both a job training program and an education program, each existing in superposition with the other. At any point, it could be one or the other. In a lecture hall, you are a student; outside, you are a job seeker. Since a college degree now doesn’t guarantee you a career anymore, securing your future has joined, or maybe even surpassed, learning as an undergraduate priority.
Even clubs, pre-professional fraternities and sororities and exclusive majors like business and public policy exist within the context of education — you will learn something, maybe even a lot, in each group — but they exist to provide you a specific group of people and experience to constantly leverage for yourself, whether it be now or decades down the line. Whether I like it or not, my network now includes 100 other Public Policy majors, many also intent on law school,
U-M students. U-M students are already weeded out of the thousands of college applicants. And then, of course, there are tens of thousands of students nationwide who are also applying to law school. These continued qualifiers — college student, U-M student and Public Policy student — work to make the pool of applicants more exclusive so you, or in this case me, have whatever slight boost you can get to your job prospects.
The Public Policy School’s unique problem lies in its second superposition: existing in the 21st century as a policy school while treading the murky waters of the political reality of President Donald Trump’s administration.
None of this is surprising, nor is it exclusive to the Public Policy School. In fact, it is a feature of higher education institutions everywhere. More and more jobs require a college degree, yet there are fewer openings. There is less focus on education out of necessity for students and the school itself. If there is no additional benefit, career-wise, to universities, then why go? While an important question, we often act not as if we don’t know the answer, but as if we don’t know how to ask it of ourselves.
In a literal sense, there is no secret to what the Public Policy School is. It is education on rigorous, evidencebased policy analysis focused on achieving the most public good. I believe that to be true. I want that to be true. That’s why I applied, after all. There’s no nefariousness traditionally thought of politically liberal U-M bias or secret Public
Belief in the Public Policy School requires a belief in the American political project, that we are a nation founded on certain principles that are stronger than any one political figure. We need to believe that policy is decided on its merits through honest debate. We need to believe in experts and trusted public officials. We need to believe that change is slow, and that it is good that it’s slow. We need to believe our country’s own myths about itself.
There is nothing more representative of Public Policy School’s problem than Policy Talks. These talks are hosted by the Public Policy School, and feature an array of “policy experts,” including former elected officials and public servants. Policy talks discuss and debate approaches to modern public policy problems, in an effort to broaden the public knowledge on whatever topic the respective talk is on.
A recent policy talk focused on centerright perspectives in the modernday political context. Such beliefs traditionally held purchase, power and popularity in the American government and operated in accordance with Public Policy School values of technocratic policymaking, hence their presence at a policy talk. Now, the conservative movement has been subsumed by President Donald Trump, focusing on staffing his administration with Nazi sympathizers. There is no centerright anymore, because they lost the debate not due to their merit but their meekness.
A larger problem with these beliefs is that Trump is president again and doing basically whatever he wants. He is not evaluating policy on its merits, making the choices in the way that I am advised to make, given certain situations, when I sit in class during the week. He is flailing around haphazardly, and a minimum of 40% of Americans approve of it reflexively.
I don’t agree with Trump, and I’m sure most of my professors and classmates don’t agree with Trump, but that doesn’t mean Trump isn’t deciding policy based on television commercials and late-night talk shows!
So what is the point? Why am I supposed to lionize our institutions and the attitudes that uphold those institutions when the main man in power completely ignores them to institute rapid changes whenever and however he wants? Why should I care about the Constitution when the president doesn’t? When we believe so hard in our processes, and those processes fail and produce the conditions necessary for Trump to get re-elected, we become that same
unquestioning son. We forget to question those processes. We forget how to ask ourselves questions about our system in general. For decades, we have believed so much in our systems, so much so that when systems are no longer worth believing in, we have nothing left but our belief.
I don’t know the answers to the questions I pose, but I do know this: Try as we might, no one is going to forget that Trump was president for eight years and dominated politics for more. He has erased the freedom that America has historically stood for. It will not come back. There is a new reality that I, and the Public Policy School, must contend with.
***
Ironically, I have been thinking about political philosopher Francis Fukuyama a lot recently. He most famously posited that history is over. He believed that Western, liberal, democratic institutions had grown so good at dealing with problems of their respective day through processoriented solutions that they would come to dominate the globe. In the context of now, I think it is self-evident that he was wrong.
Fukuyama did not consider the story of Passover. He did not understand the final, most secret, superposition. Nor did I. I also exist in superposition. I am a student, yet a future careerist at the same time. I don’t know how to reckon with that. Coming into college, I had a goal that allowed me to ignore such an existence. Now, not only do I not have a singular goal, I cannot hope to come up with one that balances my two states of being.
Furthermore, America exists, at the same time, as the wise son who knows exactly what to ask and the son who does not know how to ask anything. Maybe America is every son, including the two I haven’t mentioned. In some decades, like the 1980s when Fukuyama held positions within former President Ronald Reagan’s administrations, the wise son was leading America, knowing which questions to ask and how to deal with problems. In other decades, the wicked son or the simple son was at the helm. Right now, we exist as the son who is completely helpless as to what questions to demand of our political system. He does not know. We do not know. Perhaps it is time we start to think about that.
We should be paying more attention to water in Detroit
KATIE LYNCH Statement Correspondent
For a state that’s surrounded by 21% of the world’s freshwater, it’s ironic that Michigan seems to have so many water problems. There are the obvious ones, the natural consequences of living adjacent to this abundant resource that so many notorious players seek to take advantage of — the environmental devastation posed by the Line 5 pipeline running underneath the Straits of Mackinac and the commodification of water by companies like Nestle circumventing the Great Lakes Compact, for example. But then there are the other problems — the obscured shortcuts and mistakes that are more indicative of the tenuous relationship between politicians and their constituents, between those with power and those without it. Infamously, we’ve seen this with the Flint Water Crisis over the past decade, where a switch in city water supply initially exposed more than 100,000 people to contaminated water and led to criminal charges being pressed against negligent state officials (but these were eventually dropped). Recently, though, tensions pertaining to water infrastructure and access are bubbling to the surface a little bit closer to home.
In Detroit, water justice is a pressing issue, but a neglected one. Residents across the city are experiencing perpetual flooding cycles that are directly connected to city water infrastructure, and tens of thousands are regularly unable to afford water services to their homes at all. It’s a complicated web, one in which the term “water crisis” doesn’t fully do justice to the variety of calamities unfolding. Despite this, a consistent through line remains: The city’s response and non-local media coverage have been lacking, keeping the crisis shrouded in an air of secrecy and away from sustainable avenues for change that truly address its root causes.
***
Over the past decade, access to safe and affordable water has increasingly become a luxury in Detroit. In 2014, one year after the City of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the Detroit Water
and Sewage Department shut off water services for more than 20,000 Detroit residents with unpaid water bills in an effort to pay off their own debts. Between 2014 and 2020, more than 141,000 Detroit residences had their water shut off at some point — a little more than 20% of the city’s current population. Shut-offs were paused for more than three years during the pandemic — a combination of a moratorium issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the City of Detroit’s extension — but in August 2023, the shut-off campaign resumed. The impact has been enormous, predominantly for low-income residents, leaving tens of thousands of households suddenly on the hook for $700 to $10,000 in water debt they cannot pay off, and with no access to running water in the meantime — a human rights violation, according to the United Nations.
In an email with The Michigan Daily, Monica Lewis-Patrick, We the People of Detroit CEO and president, contextualized the rationale driving these mass shutoff campaigns.
“Shutoffs have been used by water systems as a tool to manage debt rather than to support residents’ needs,” Lewis-Patrick wrote. “These decisions have been driven by financial pressures tied to bond obligations, state oversight and austerity politics, which prioritize revenue collection over basic human needs. It’s deeply unjust that Detroiters, largely Black and lowincome residents, are targeted to absorb the system’s financial strain while external customers are not paying their fair share.”
In addition to the increased financial pressures and practical consequences associated with one’s water being turned off, Lewis-Patrick emphasized the negative physical and emotional health impacts created by water shutoffs.
“A study by researchers at the Henry Ford Global Health Initiative found that residents living on blocks where water shutoffs occurred were 1.55 times more likely to be diagnosed with a waterassociated illness,” Lewis-Patrick wrote.
All of this is coming at a time when water is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the average household.
Across the United States, water bills are rising about 7% every year, and Detroit is not exempt from this pattern. The Great Lakes Water Authority placed a 10-year 4% cap on water rate increases, but this expired in June 2025, prompting a 7.73% proposed hike in Metro Detroit water rates for 2026. In relation to its suburbs, the city of Detroit is disproportionately feeling the impacts of this due to the 1999 Rate Settlement Agreement dubbed the “83/17 split,” which burdens Detroit residents with paying 83% of regional stormwater treatment infrastructure costs while its suburbs (with a 2021 median household income more than twice that of Detroit’s) only pay a collective 17%. With 34% of Detroit residents living below the poverty line, these inflated water bills are proving increasingly difficult to pay. In 2022, DWSD implemented the water affordability Lifeline Plan in an attempt to address these issues, but the funding has since mostly dried up, raising questions about the program’s efficacy moving forward.
“The underlying problem isn’t just the loss of one program,” Lewis-Patrick wrote. “It’s the absence of a long-term, water affordability plan that ensures every household can maintain access regardless of income.”
The water issues plaguing Detroit aren’t limited to increasing rates and water shutoffs, too; there are also significant problems with the city’s water infrastructure that are directly impacting Detroit residents and going unaddressed. On July 19, 2024, a water main broke in northwest Detroit, near the corner of Biltmore and Gilchrist streets, flooding the basements of nearby residents like Diana Hill, Sabrina Moore and Tina Wixon, and causing thousands of dollars in damages.
“I’m still struggling to pay off the debt for all of the damages, and I still need stuff fixed,” Wixon said in an interview with The Daily.
All three described severe damage after water seeped into their homes for more than 12 hours. The flood and its aftermath ruined appliances, destroyed family keepsakes and left black mold covering the floor.
“I had to replace my heating system because it was inoperable,” Moore said. “That furnace cost $9,000.”
Beyond the damage to their physical possessions, these women and their families have been experiencing different health issues since the floods began, citing asthma and other respiratory issues that have been exacerbated by the black mold in their homes. Part of the reason for concern is the water itself, Moore adds, describing how she has to run the water coming from her bathroom sink before using it because of how it smells.
“I’m starting to question that the water system is even safe for us to be consuming,” Moore said. “I believe our water is contaminated. Our water needs to be checked by an independent source.”
In response, the city and the DWSD have been unhelpful.
“The (DWSD) still refuses to give us any compensation. They refused to even help us,” Hill said. “I had to call the Red Cross, I called (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and each one of them told me it wasn’t a disaster so they couldn’t help me. So I had to lose my emergency money.”
These three women were introduced to me by Beulah Walker, vice chief director of Hydrate Detroit, a Detroitbased water relief organization. And as the five of us met over Zoom to talk about the flooding, Walker described how July 19, 2024 is only one instance in a bigger pattern of Band-Aid solutions and neglect.
“This flooding has been going on for 10 years, ever since the bankruptcy,” Walker said. Hill nodded, elaborating to say that it’s happening all across the city, but “not every area is getting the same treatment.”
According to Hill, the claims the women filed were denied on the basis of the Michigan Governmental Liability for Negligence Act of 1964. Section 17 of this act makes the government not liable for damages resulting from the overflow of a sewage disposal system. But that’s not what happened on Gilchrist Street, Hill argues — it’s fresh water that they’ve seen filling up their basements.
“The interpretation of the rules — what (Hill) is reading — we might see it one way, but they have already interpreted it a whole different way,” Moore said. “We need to understand what is the verbiage really saying. We’re tired of people just lying to us.”
Frustration with the lack of institutional powers listening to what’s going on is a common theme across each of these three women’s experiences.
“We live here in this beautiful city of Detroit, raise our families, we are homeowners, we pay taxes. We should never have to deal with flooding in our homes due to a lack of services that are supposed to keep our city water system safe,” Moore said. “To me, it shows there’s a lack of respect for people — for human rights.”
At the end of our conversation, Hill, who is now in her 70s, tells me that
clearer in refuting the stereotypes Walker references. There is an abundance of grassroots movements taking shape in Detroit right now, from the informal neighborhood collective of Gilchrist Street to formal institutions taking a statewide approach like the People’s Water Board Coalition. The fight is far from over.
“We’re not giving up,” Moore said.
Like any good Michigander, I could talk at length about what’s happening in Flint or the evils posed to the Great Lakes by Nestle, but can I let you in on a secret? Even though I grew up in Royal Oak, a suburb about three miles north of Detroit, I had no idea of the extent to which Detroiters were facing similar water issues. The state of various water crises in Detroit was introduced to me for the first time only a few weeks ago when We the People of Detroit came
embedded in the communities around me. Now, though, the shock factor has worn off, and I’m angry. Tens of thousands of Detroit residents are regularly experiencing the effects of water injustice, whether it’s with uncompensated flooding damages as the result of poorly maintained DWSD infrastructure or water services being shut off to their home. This should not be a secret. Why aren’t more people talking about this?
What’s happening with water in Detroit is the type of crisis that should be making national headlines, but it’s not. Whether water should be commodified or considered a human right is a major topic of conversation across the U.S. and the world, but Detroit, with its majority-Black population, largely seems to be excluded from these dialogues. The city’s complicated web of water issues
“It’s striking how many people still don’t know about the water crisis in Detroit, despite its inextricable connection to Flint and the broader fight for water justice,” LewisPatrick wrote. “Too often, crises that predominantly impact Black and Brown people are underreported or framed as management failures instead of systemic injustices rooted in policy and disinvestment.”
In Flint — another city with a majority-Black population and a severe water crisis — national media coverage has slipped significantly despite lingering contaminated water and distrust towards the city’s institutions persisting even 10 years after the water supply was initially switched. Flint’s water crisis was quickly catapulted from a local story to an international one in early 2016 when a state of emergency was
AYA FAYAD Statement Deputy Editor
The secret is distraction
I will tell you outright so that you do not have to read this article to the end.
There is a death happening in America, but not the kind that you think. This one is secret. It’s hiding in plain sight, yet no one is seeing it. No one knows to even look.
I watched a video of a little boy on Instagram the other day gathering what remnants of flour he could find on the ground before him — mixed with dirt, of course — and I realized then that I may be a little empty. There was a gap between the pain being played out on the screen before me and the emotional response that should have accompanied the viewing experience. There should have been something of a pain, of empathy. But there wasn’t, and so I just scrolled past. Next video, next feeling, next diversion.
The average person watches one hour and 16 minutes worth of short-form videos a day. An adult in the U.S. will spend 58.4 hours on TikTok monthly. Short-form content is the preference now. It retains us and our attention spans. It is entertaining. It is sticky, so users keep coming back to it. Attention is precious, and there is not enough of it to go around anymore. The constant distractions we are bombarded with from digital technology have shifted the way that our brains process information and the capturing of attention for profit has effectively set off the “dopamine loop,” encouraging the constant checking of social media that has made it harder to concentrate on a single task for an extended time.
feel something is distract myself. I can just look away. Next video, next feeling, next diversion. And so that is exactly what I do. Because it hurts. It hurts to care. It hurts to see everything.
The distraction economy is everywhere. When it hurts to look,
person spends five to six hours a day on their screens. All the while, this war for attention — this desensitization, if you will — trains the human brain to prefer quick clicks and entertainment because of the immediate reward they offer, discouraging reflection and complexity in
even if briefly, I close my eyes. There is something more important to attend to, something that lightly tugs at the pits of my stomach, something that I do not have to think too hard about. That something is wanting: my hunger. But in truth, I do not understand this hunger either. I think that it is one for material, for wealth, for the individual. And so I fill it by clicking, tapping, another second spent, another dollar gone. It is cyclical, this hunger, because the truth is that it will never be satisfied. Its whole existence is just to keep going and going and going. And I think that I may or may not know this. I know that to look directly is to confront a truth too burdensome, too painful to exist with knowing. I know that when I look away and opt for the superficial for fulfillment, I will never be satisfied.
We expend our attention and stretch it thin in the places where we do not have to think too hard, and then, there is just less of it to go around for much else. The little boy can keep searching, and all I have to do to not
Our care is exchanged for fast gratification. Our empathy is bought out for a boost of dopamine. When we are trained to look for feeling in buying and consuming quickly and thoughtlessly, distracting ourselves from anything else, this care ceases to be applied in the places where it matters. It is estimated that about 77% of consumers watch TV while using their smartphones, while the average
when the content and products are constant and right at our fingertips, they become addictive because of the unending hits of dopamine associated with them. And because of the nature of social media and the accessibility of endless scrolling, we are trained to seek the quickest hits of dopamine where we can get them.
When the parts of the world that I do not want to look at flash across my screen
We look away because it hurts. Because it is easier that way. We think that to be fulfilled is to cover up our own pain and discontent with products and stimulation, and that to look away from the rest of the pain in the world is to alleviate our own. But the distraction economy works to lure you in and trap you, not to heal you. The hunger will never be filled by it. When I look at the world around me and I see it burning, I think about how we could have ever allowed it to get to this point. How could the suffering have gone unchecked, unrepaired, for so long? How could I have had a part in its perpetuation? And then I think about how it is easier to pretend that it is not there, how it hurts less that way, and I understand. The secret is this: Our care and empathy have been bought out, whether by constant stimulation or by consumerism, and we have just let them. Apathy is the status quo. Individualism is the prevailing sentiment. Who cares if the people on our screens die, if the boy will never collect enough flour, if I don’t even have to look? Why should I be pained by the killing of all that is human? The soul, the mind, the heart, the guts and the gore? Why should it matter? What is human, anyway? If the world is burning, all I have to do is look away, and then I will not be burned with it.
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