2019-03-20

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Ann Arbor, Michigan

the

statement

michigandaily.com

Catch, exploit, release QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

The Daily speaks with Farrow and Auletta

KELSEY PEASE/Daily

Ronan Farrow speaks with fellow journalist and author Ken Auletta regarding the breaking news stories that helped spur the #MeToo movement at Rackham Auditorium Tuesday evening.

Reporter recounts experience uncovering Weinstein’s abuse

Ronan Farrow examines power imbalances, challenges in confronting misconduct AMARA SHAIKH & LEAH GRAHAM Daily News Editors

Investigative journalist Ronan Farrow spoke with reporter Ken Auletta Tuesday night at Rackham Auditorium about the impact of the #MeToo movement

and his role in exposing famed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of predatory behavior and sexual assault. The lecture, entitled “The Weinstein Effect: Breaking the Stories That Spurred a Movement” focused on Farrow’s experience reporting on Weinstein’s

misconduct and the challenges he faced in getting the story to print.

Wallace House at the University of Michigan hosted the lecture, which drew more than 600 students, faculty and Ann Arbor community members.

Farrow, a contributing writer to

The New Yorker, also uncovered allegations of sexual misconduct against the former head of CBS Les Moonves, former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

See FARROW, Page 3A

Journalists discuss #MeToo movement, cultural reckoning after Weinstein Before “The Weinstein Effect: Breaking the Stories that Spurred a Movement” event hosted by the Wallace House, The Michigan Daily sat down with journalists Ronan Farrow and Ken Auletta to discuss their roles in reporting on Harvey Weinstein and where they see the next cultural reckoning coming from.

The Michigan Daily: When you first started investigating Harvey Weinstein, did you ever envision the magnitude of the cultural reckoning that would eventually follow?

Ronan Farrow: I never have a completely satisfactory answer to this because obviously, I had no crystal ball. But for a number of the reporters working on

this story, the threats and intimidation — and this was of course also directed at the sources — ratchet it up to the point where you did have to think about it all those existential terms that were asking about.

And I wish I could say it was all heroic instinct but part of it was a pragmatic judgment call that I was … I was gambling and it was worth getting fired and going through all of this because there was a chance that it would be a huge story.

Now, what does a huge story look like, maybe not this, maybe not people in industry after industry doing this incredibly brave thing?

See Q&A, Page 3A

Faculty panel considers impacts CSG looks Whitmer at adding of prison construction and crime speaks at

STUDENT GOVERNMENT

well-being tuition fee

Representatives evaluate DPSS response to false reports of active shooter BARBARA COLLINS Daily Staff Reporter

The University of Michigan Central Student Government met Tuesday evening to discuss a new resolution regarding the implementation of a well-being fee. The Student Assembly also continued debate over a resolution to advocate for the revision of the cross-examination model of the sexual misconduct policy, and Lt. Bryan Baker, Division of Public Safety and Security liaison to the Division of Student Life, spoke to the Assembly about unfounded reports of an active shooter on campus Saturday afternoon.

During a vigil on the Diag Saturday afternoon honoring the more than 50 killed and 50 injured in Friday’s mosque attacks in New Zealand, reports of an active shooter in Mason Hall surfaced.

After investigating the situation for about three hours, police cleared the area and determined there was no active threat to the community.

Baker gave a presentation to the Assembly about active attacker preparedness and the University’s emergency alert system.

See CSG, Page 3A

GOT A NEWS TIP? Call 734-418-4115 or e-mail news@michigandaily.com and let us know.

GOVERNMENT

Institute for Humanities hosts discussion of criminal justice and the built environment TAL LIPKIN

Daily Staff Reporter

On Tuesday, the Universit y of Michiga n Instit ute for the Huma nities, along with the Residential College a nd va rious other Universit y depa rtments, hosted a pa nel discussing the relationship bet ween crime a nd the environment.

The pa nel, titled “Huma nities & Environments Facult y Pa nel: ‘Criminal Justice a nd the Built Environment ’,” hosted three Universit y professors

of va rious disciplines to explore their perspectives on the environment a round us a nd how physical a nd social struct ures contribute to the criminal justice system.

The event bega n with opening rema rks from each pa nelist about their respective def initions of the “built environment ” a nd the role it plays in policing a nd the current criminal justice system.

David Thacher, associate professor of public policy a nd urba n pla nning, explained the role of sha red spaces in

propagating inef fective tools of policing, such as stop a nd frisk laws, specif ically in minorit y communities.

“One consequence of urba nization is that people bump up against each other a lot more tha n they did in less urba n environments,” Thacher said. “ We create sha red environments. We also have to create rules that reg ulate how we’re going to sha re them. Then we have to create tools to enforce those rules.”

He also addressed the relationship bet ween urba n development a nd

the increased policing of personal vices since the ea rly 19th cent ur y.

“In the Western mining towns where the f irst drug laws took shape … upwa rds of t wo-thirds of the population was born outside the United States,” Thacher said. “They were exposed to the inf luence of people with dra matically dif ferent habits a nd vices. A nd perhaps more importa nt, their kids were exposed to these dif ferent lifest yles.”

See PANEL, Page 3A

MICHAEL BAGAZINSKI/ DAILY

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize winning author, speaks about the role of society in discussions about prison reform and the development of humane environments of punishment at the South Thayer Building Tuesday.

Follow The Daily on Instagram, @michigandaily

For more stories and coverage, visit

michigandaily.com

INDEX

Vol. CXXVII, No. 90 ©2019 The Michigan Daily

WCC about labor needs

Governor addresses state’s job market demands at Workforce Pipeline Summit ZAYNA SYED

Daily Staff Reporter

On Monday, the Ann Arbor/ Ypsilanti Regional Chamber hosted the 2019 Workforce Pipeline Summit to discuss the future of the workforce in Michigan.

The summit had a few hundred attendees, and was a day-long event with lectures on educational inequity and hiring practices. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Raffaele Mautone, CIO and vice president of Duo Security, presented keynote speeches. The event took place at Washtenaw Community College in the Morris Lawrence Building.

According to Richard Chang, CEO of the Ann Arbor company NewFoundry, a local software developer, and a main organizer of the event, the summit was created in order to address workforce issues that members of the chamber encounter.

“Workforce issues are one of the top issues/challenges our members face and it is our duty as an organization to help create a solution,” Chang wrote in an email to The Daily. “The pipeline summit was step one in a series to create solutions.”

See WHITMER, Page 3A

NEWS.........................2 OPINION.....................4 ARTS......................6

SUDOKU.....................2 CLASSIFIEDS...............5 SPORTS....................7

News

2A — Wednesday, March 20, 2019

MONDAY: Looking at the Numbers

TUESDAY:

By Design

WEDNESDAY: This Week in History

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: REGENTS GETS GRIM MINORITY NEWS March 19, 1981 Concerned members of the University are preparing to battle the persisting problem of declining black enrollment as the University Regents take a look at the minority enrollment report today.

The report shows that black enrollment been falling since 1976 with a record decline

fall of 5.6 percent - the lowest figure since the report was first compiled in 1972.

Administrators speculate the declining enrollment is caused by several factors, many of which, they say, the University can do little to remedy.

Many black campus leaders, however, University must place a higher priority on recruiting

and retaining minority students. And they worry that educationally disadvantaged students will be hard hit by the current budget cutting fervor.

Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Admissions Office Lance Erikson said that his office would like to bring more prospective minority students

to see the campus, but that the budget will not allow for it.

And assistant admissions Director Dave Robinson said that while the University’s many programs are “somewhat successful,” the University is fighting more than the problem of contacting prospective students.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

THURSDAY: Twitter Talk

FRIDAY: Behind the Story

Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1327 www.michigandaily.com

MAYA GOLDMAN

TOMMY DYE

Editor in Chief 734-418-4115 ext. 1251 mayagold@michigandaily.com

Business Manager 734-418-4115 ext. 1241 tomedye@michigandaily.com

NEWS TIPS

news@michigandaily.com

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR tothedaily@michigandaily.com

EDITORIAL PAGE

TH E PIN BALL M ACHIN E : UX CRUCIBLE

opinion@michigandaily.com

PHOTOGRAPHY SECTION

ARTS SECTION

photo@michigandaily.com

arts@michigandaily.com

NEWSROOM

SPORTS SECTION

734-418-4115 opt. 3

sports@michigandaily.com

CORRECTIONS

ADVERTISING

corrections@michigandaily.com

dailydisplay@gmail.com

Editorial Staff FINNTAN STORER Managing Editor

frstorer@michigandaily.com

GRACE KAY and ELIZABETH LAWRENCE

Managing News Editors news@michigandaily.com Senior News Editors: Sayali Amin, Rachel Cunningham, Remy Farkas, Leah Graham, Amara Shaikh Assistant News Editors: Barbara Collins, Alex Harring, Danielle Pasekoff, Atticus Raasch, Ben Rosenfeld, Samantha Small, Emma Stein, Zayna Syed, Callie Teitelbaum, Liat Weinstein

JOEL DANILEWITZ and MAGDALENA MIHAYLOVA

Editorial Page Editors tothedaily@michigandaily.com Senior Opinion Editors: Emily Huhman, Alexander Satola, Elias Khoury, Nicholas Tomaino, Erin White

MAX MARCOVITCH and ETHAN SEARS

ASHA LEWISI/Daily Adam Kempa speaks about the pinball machine as a UX crucible during Ignite the UX Michigan at The Circ Bar Tuesday. Ignite UX is an evening of five minute talks about things such as UX user experience, design and research topics.

ON THE DAILY: NEIL PATRICK HARRIS NAMES GANDY DANCER AMONG FAVORITES ZAYNA SYED

Daily Staff Reporter

Actor Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, David Burtka, a Michigan native and professional chef, named Ann Arbor’s Gandy Dancer as one of their favorite restaurants. The actors recently listed their top ten favorite restaurants for OpenTable’s new feature, Tastemaker lists, which allows users to explore the favorite

restaurants of frequent diners, including many celebrities.

Gandy Dancer currently has a 92 percent recommendation rate on OpenTable and almost 4,000 reviews.

The fine dining restaurant, which opened in 1970, is known for its seafood and steaks. It is located in downtown Ann Arbor, at the intersection between Broadway and Depot Street.

The term “gandy dancer” is slang that refers to early railroad workers

in the United States. The restaurant sits inside a renovated 19th century railway station. According to reviews on OpenTable, trains run by the restaurant.

“Known in railroading days as ‘the finest station between Buffalo and Chicago,’ the majestic Michigan Central Railroad Depot deserves that commendation more than ever as the Gandy Dancer now,” OpenTable’s description of Gandy Dancer reads.

Harris and Burtka also listed Roast in downtown Detroit as a favorite restaurant, along with a number of other eateries scattered across the country.

Burtka is a University of Michigan alum and left his full-time acting career to study at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Los Angeles in 2009.

He currently runs a Los Angeles catering company called Gourmet M.D. Harris starred in the popular sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”

Wang-McKillop look to find ways to increase accessiblity on campus LSA Student Government candidates plan to implement iClicker rentals first year on campus. running mate, he said he wanted to people,” Wang said. “I was a vice Wang said he enjoys helping find someone who was passionate chair for a few committees for a other students understand what about student government and year and a half, and the best way As students gear up for the the University has to offer. He experienced in dealing with a I learned and contributed was listening to other people and seeing University of Michigan’s Student credited his inspiration for running variety of situations.

“I think one of the reasons why what they had to say, because as a Government elections on March to Pharmacy student Ibtihal 27 and 28, The Daily sat down Makki, who encouraged Wang to I asked Mary to run with me is first-year student, you come in here with LSA presidential and vice run for president last year. because I saw her passion for how with very little knowledge of how presidential candidates to talk “(Makki) reached out to me last well she connected with other the University runs.”

The campaign’s platform is platforms, vision and plans. In year hoping I was going to run for students that she was bringing into this installment, we profile the president, but I told her I was a our organization,” Wang said. “I broken down into three main Wang-McKillop ticket. This is the sophomore,” Wang said. “I was a really liked the way she handled points: accessibility on campus, first in a series profiling each set of little too young (and) I still wanted herself, handled the situations that academics and student life.

On the accessibility point, candidates for the executive team. to get more experience, but this came up, addressed the issues that LSA junior Brian Wang, the LSA year when I was considering to run, our new representatives faced, and McKillop said the candidates presidential candidate, and LSA I definitely reflected back on that just overall was a great presence hope to implement iClicker and sophomore Mary McKillop, the text … I took it as a compliment. It and resource for these other calculator rentals for students LSA vice presidential candidate, was one of the largest reasons why students and kids who want to get because some students can’t afford Sudoku Syndication http://www.sudokusyndication.com/sudoku/generator/print/ both got involved with LSA I decided to run.” involved and came in with, you to buy those materials.

McKillop said the idea of fixed Student Government during their When Wang was looking for a know, open minds and just really want to try and understand what tuition rates is also an important part of accessibility. Fixed we’re about.”

McKillop said she enjoys tuition is when a student pays the asking students what they same tuition from year to year would like to see happen and she without any increases. Wang strives to improve her leadership said implementing this idea will EASY style by asking others what she make it easier for students to attend the University. McKillop could do better.

“I guess my inspiration to added that the principle has run for vice president started been implemented at George when I became the chair of Washington University and the the appointments committee new tuition would be proposed because originally I was only to be the average between the (vice) chair of the Internal under division and upper Review Committee,” McKillop division tuition. According to said. “When Brian asked me the U.S. Census Bureau, average to run with him to be vice household income increased by president, I knew that I could 1.8 percent from 2016 to 2017. In step up and do it because of 2018, the University announced what I had been doing as the a 2.9 to 3.9 percent increase in chair of the appointments tuition for the following year.

“When people come here, they committee and also I was just really excited to be able to be a don’t know how much they’ll be part of bringing LSA to the next paying in three years,” McKillop level of representing students’ said. “The average income in the United States doesn’t change interests.”

Wang said he would that much from year to year, but describe his leadership style as tuition does … and so it’s very much an issue of accessibility constructive and democratic.

“I think most of my because people who are of a EASIER. puzzle by sudokusyndication.com © sudokusolver.com. For personal use only. experience that I’ve gained for lower socioeconomic status are the last three years has really the most affected by an increase come from listening to other in tuition.”

MICHAL RUPRECHT Daily Staff Reporter

SUDOKU

2 7

6 9

5 1

5

2

4

5

7

1 6

1 6 2

2

6

8

1

7

4

5

2

9 3

9

6 4 2

5

3

Generate and solve Sudoku, Super Sudoku and Godoku puzzles at sudokusyndication.com!

Managing Sports Editors sportseditors@michigandaily.com Senior Sports Editors: Mark Calcagno, Jake Shames, Matthew Kennedy, Anna Marcus, Paige Voeffray, Avi Sholkoff Assistant Sports Editors: Aria Gerson, Tien Le, Rian Ratnavale, Bennett Bramson, Theo Mackie, Akul Vijayvargiya

JACK BRANDON and ARYA NAIDU

Managing Arts Editors arts@michigandaily.com Senior Arts Editors: Clara Scott, Emma Chang, Rob Mansuetti, Sam Della Fera, Trina Pal Arts Beat Editors: Verity Sturm, Sayan Ghosh, Mike Watkins, Ally Owens, Stephen Satarino, Izzy Hasslund, Margaret Sheridan

ROSEANNE CHAO and JACK SILBERMAN Managing Design Editors Senior Design Editor: Willa Hua

design@michigandaily.com

ALEXIS RANKIN and ALEC COHEN Managing Photo Editors

photo@michigandaily.com

Senior Photo Editors: Alexandria Pompei, Natalie Stephens, Alice Liu, Annie Klusendorf Assistant Photo Editors: Katelyn Mulcahy, Miles Macklin, Emma Richter, Hannah Siegel, Allison Engkvist

ANDREA PÉREZ BALDERRAMA

Statement Editor statement@michigandaily.com Deputy Editors: Matthew Harmon, Shannon Ors

MADELINE TURNER and MIRIAM FRANCISCO Managing Copy Editors

copydesk@michigandaily.com

Senior Copy Editors: Dominick Sokotoff, Olivia Sedlacek, Reece Meyhoefer

CASEY TIN and HASSAAN ALI WATTOO

Managing Online Editors webteam@michigandaily.com Senior Web Developers: Jonathon Liu, Abha Panda, Ryan Siu, David Talbot, Samantha Cohen

NOAH TAPPEN

Managing Video Editor video@michigandaily.com Senior Video Editors: Jillian Drzinski, Aarthi Janakiraman

CARLY RYAN and NA’KIA CHANNEY Michigan in Color Editors

michiganincolor@michigandaily.com

Senior Michigan in Color Editors: Maya Mokh, Samuel So, Ana Maria SanchezCastillo, Efe Osagie, Danyel Tharakan Assistant Michigan in Color Editors: Grace Cho, Harnoor Singh, Nada Eldawy, Lorna Brown

CATHERINE NOUHAN and JOHN FABIAN Managing Podcast Editors

CARRINGTON TUBMAN and MADALASA CHAUDHARI Managing Social Media Editors

Business Staff ADRIANNA KUSMIERCZYK CAMERON COANE

Creative Director

ZELJKO KOSPIC

Sales Manager

Special Projects Manager

ROBERT WAGMAN

ANITA MICHAUD

Marketing Consulting Manager

Brand Manager

The Michigan Daily (ISSN 0745-967) is published Monday through Friday during the fall and winter terms by students at the University OF Michigan. One copy is available free of charge to all readers. Additional copies may be picked up at the Daily’s office for $2. Subscriptions for September-April are $250 and year long subscriptions are $275.

University affiliates are subject to a reduced subscription rate. On-campus subscriptions for fall term are $35. Subscriptions must be prepaid.

In their academics point, the candidates would like to increase transparency in departmental grading in large classes.

McKillop said the coursework in classes like Economics 101 can be vastly different depending on the professor, which can impact students’ grades.

In addition, they would like to add more details from course evaluations to Academic Reporting Tools so students can get a better understanding of the class.

“Once you are mid-class or at the end of your class, you get reminders repeatedly about filling out course evaluations, but most of the information is only for the benefit of professors and students don’t get to see it,” McKillop said.

“Some of it was released with the implementation of ART 2.0, which you can find on the Course Guide with grade distributions and things, but we would like to see more of them because there are 27 possible questions to be

asked on the course evaluation (and) we’d like to see more of the questions released so students will be able to better gauge which courses fit with their needs.”

In their student life section, Wang and McKillop said they would like to expand the recreational sports waiver program for students of lower socioeconomic status. They would also like to expand and improve CAPS functions.

Wang said there is a shortage of CAPS counselors and office locations.

“The solution we included in our platform was at least working with CAPS to provide a more informational email and sessions to increase other students’ knowledge and awareness that CAPS is a resource that they can use,” Wang said.

Read more online at

michigandaily.com

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

FARROW From Page 1A Farrow won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Weinstein, an award he shared with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times.

Farrow said while he had seen a shift in society and the way people responded to reports of sexual misconduct when he first wrote about Weinstein in October 2017, there were still power imbalances obstructing accountability.

“I think we have a long way to go,” Farrow said. “I don’t think we’ve achieved accountability, I don’t think we have in the media fully come to grips with the extent to which we were failing to the hold the powerful accountable and contributed to a cover-up culture.

I don’t think we’ve extended the tentative steps towards accountability to all of the segments of society that desperately need it.

It is still very much a set of stories that has been dominated by affluent people, white people, people with a public profile. All of that needs to change.”

Daily reporters Sammy Sussman, Music, Theatre & Dance sophomore, and Nisa Khan, Information senior, introduced Farrow, discussing how his work influenced their own.

Sussman documented 40 years of misconduct allegations against Music, Theatre & Dance professor Stephen Shipps. Khan and LSA junior Maya Goldman, The Daily’s editor in chief, followed a University student through the difficult process of reporting a sexual assault to the administration.

Farrow began the conversation by crediting the women willing to go on the record for the success of the story and the cultural reckoning that followed.

“It’s important to point out what the sources in those stories were

CSG From Page 1A He began his presentation by reading from Saturday’s official University statement on the situation, as well as an excerpt from DPSS Executive Director Eddie Washington’s official statement on March 17.

“The news of a shooter on campus was a terrifying and traumatic experience for members of our community — both for people near Mason Hall when the reports were coming in as well as anyone who received the alert from afar,” Washington wrote in the statement. “After a thorough search of Angell and Mason Halls, officers were able to confirm the reports were related to balloons popping in the area, which sounded like shots being fired. Even though this was a false alarm, we are grateful for members of our community who made the call to police to report it.”

Baker shared DPSS’ and Counseling and Psychological Services’ contact information and explained how students, parents and community members can register their cell phone numbers through Wolverine Access to receive emergency alerts. Alerts are offered through a text message,

WHITMER From Page 1A Chang believes the main takeaway of the summit is to support local communities through hiring practices.

“If I can only choose one, I’d go with: look local, build local, hire local,” Chang wrote.

“Invest in our community for long term economic viability and sustainability.”

Whitmer spoke about the state budget and prioritizing infrastructure issues such as the roads, education and clean water. Whitmer also addressed her proposal for an increase of the gas tax and remedial measures in the plan that seek to compensate the working poor and senior citizens.

“No one wants to raise the gas tax,” Whitmer said. “I don’t enjoy putting the solution on the table, but it is about time that we have serious conversation about where we are headed as a state and what it’s going to take to fix these problems. Fifteen cent gas tax increase this fall, going up another 15 cents six months later, and 15 cents after that, actually puts us in a position to

News

living through was exponentially more difficult than anything I dealt with as a reporter,” Farrow said. “I wasn’t reliving the intense personal trauma. I didn’t have to grapple with the extra dimension of not only might my career fall apart, but also I’m going to be staring down this very specific kind of stigma that sexual violence carries.”

Auletta first tried to report on allegations against Weinstein in 2002 but struggled to get sources to go on the record. He was working on a profile of Weinstein for The New Yorker, and when he confronted him with allegations of rape, Auletta said Weinstein was enraged.

“I failed to get names,” Auletta said. “When I confronted Harvey Weinstein at the time, Harvey said they were consensual affairs. We had to decide at The New Yorker, are we the National Inquirer, are we going publish anonymous versus him publicly saying it didn’t happen?

And we didn’t publish it.”

According to Auletta, Weinstein’s behavior was an open secret in the industry and for many years, rumors about him circulated. Auletta congratulated Farrow on being able to publish allegations against him.

Farrow said previous survivors of sexual assault who had come forward with allegations against powerful men like Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes made his reporting possible and thanked the women who spoke to him for his article.

“Although I couldn’t tell those sources as they were doing this incredibly brave thing that they would be heard, that there would be a version of the universe that we would all live in a year later where people would care about their stories and the stories would matter and there would be accountability because of them,” Farrow said.

“But I could say for the first time in recent history, hey, there are some slivers of precedent here that are

promising.”

LSA sophomore Sophie Underwood said Farrow’s lecture interested her because she eventually wants to go into the film and TV industry.

“Media plays a big role in society and in uncovering these sorts of events that would have just remained hidden because of the major power that certain people have in the industry and how they abuse that power, and I think that journalism is one of those ways to check that abuse of power,” Underwood said.

During a Q&A session, American Culture lecturer Emily Lawsin asked Farrow about the University’s track record on handling sexual assault cases, citing a 2015 survey which found prevalent instances of misconduct among students.

Farrow said college campuses were among the many segments of society that needed to confront the manner in which they responded to claims of sexual violence.

“There are a lot of spaces that need serious reforms to create a safe space for people who should never have to be survivors of sexual violence again but too often are,” Farrow said. “In terms of the specific intricacies of Title IX offices on this campus and others, those systems are broken. I have not reported on the University of Michigan specifically, but across the country, they are broken. The striking thing is that both accusers and accused often walk away from Title IX processes on campus feeling that the process was unjust, that there wasn’t a fair hearing of facts.”

One of the audience members criticized Farrow for encouraging “McCarthyesque” tactics and undermining due process. Farrow began to address the comment, but the audience member left immediately after voicing his complaint.

“You should see my Twitter mentions,” Farrow said. “That’s tame.”

Farrow also touched on the politicization of sexual misconduct claims, a criticism heavily associated with allegations made against Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate in the fall. Professor Christine Blasey Ford said Kavanaugh tried to rape her when they were teenagers and Deborah Ramirez, who attended Yale University with Kavanaugh, accused him of sexual misconduct.

Farrow and his colleague at The New Yorker broke news of Ramirez’s allegations in September.

Whether or not someone thought the allegations were true depended largely on political affiliation, with a majority of Democrats believing Ford and a majority of Republicans believing Kavanaugh. Farrow said he approached allegations of sexual assault based on the merits of the claims, not who was making them.

“Everything gets thrust into this cauldron of partisan mistrust, and what’s saddening about that is it’s fundamentally antithetical to what we do as investigative reporters,” Farrow said. “If the evidence is there, I’ll do a body of reporting about anyone of any persuasion …

There is such a shrinking space for that kind of approach and for any kind of understanding that anyone might genuinely have that approach.

There’s this assumption that you just must be on our side or the other side and this crushing disappointment when it proves out that you’re not on anyone’s side.”

Farrow said he hoped the assumption of politically motivated journalism would abate.

“I hate partisanship, and I hope fact-based reporting is the antidote for it,” Farrow said.

phone call or both, and the person registering their number chooses the way they wish to be notified.

“I read a few statements and I heard things, students saying, ‘I didn’t get any type of alert,’” Baker said. “That’s telling me those students, if they haven’t registered for emergency alerts, need to make sure that they are. We do know that there were some communication issues in terms of how the alerts were sent out due to cell phone towers and their capacities over the weekend.”

Emergency alerts are also available through the Michigan app and the new version of the DPSS app, Baker said. He encouraged Assembly members to sign up for both text message and phone call notifications through Wolverine Access in addition to downloading both apps.

Baker continued his presentation by addressing the University’s protocol in the event of an emergency. He emphasized the need to use the “run, hide, fight” protocol implemented by DPSS in regards to situations involving an active attacker.

“It’s not necessarily hide and then run and then fight,” Baker said. “It is run or hide or fight. Again, you have to make that determination of what that

means … If there’s a threat that’s immediately present to you, it’s up to you to determine what your response is going to be.”

Baker said investigation of Saturday’s events remains ongoing and the University and DPSS are looking into the delay in alerts to the campus community.

“The University and DPSS, we’ve already transitioned our gears into active action and figuring out what exactly happened, what happened with communication, what happened with responses,” Baker said.

“We’re working on really getting the best of that.”

After Baker’s presentation, members voiced concerns regarding how Saturday’s situation was handled. LSA fifth year Cece Huddleston asked Baker about the delay of alerts from DPSS. Although Huddleston was not near Mason Hall at the time, she said she was very disappointed in the way the situation was notified to students across campus.

“I wouldn’t be a good LSA rep if I didn’t let you know that pretty much everybody in my community was very disappointed,” Huddleston said. “We heard in our group chat between 4:00 and 4:15 about an active shooter being on campus, but I just looked up the first tweet from DPSS was at 5:04 ... Being so close to campus and not

knowing what’s going on is very scary.”

Huddleston also questioned whether the balloon popping that caused reports of an active shooter were a malicious act. She said as a member of a marginalized community, she along with others in the community thought the balloon popping occurring during a vigil for the New Zealand victims seemed almost too convenient.

Baker said he is not directly involved in the investigation.

He answered Huddleston by explaining that he has not heard of any malicious intent.

“From what I understand, the investigation is still ongoing,” Baker said. “From what I’ve been told, there was no malicious intent.

I know that might differ from the perception of the community, but that’s all I can share right now.”

In addition to Baker’s presentation, CSG President Daniel Greene, Public Policy senior, along with LSA senior Rafik Issa and LSA senior Edward Samir Haraka, presented a new resolution encouraging the implementation of a well-being fee. If passed, the resolution would add a $19.33 well-being fee to student tuition to expand mental health services and attempt to improve overall well-being on campus.

find interns, we’re going to transform individuals that are in the industry or not in this industry, but want to be in tech, want to be in IT, want to be in cybersecurity, and let’s enable them. But if you don’t have the right infrastructure or mindset within your organization, even in the next layer within your management team, it won’t work. And I found that out fairly quickly.”

Ida Abdalkhani, the founder and president of Ability to Engage, a marketing and consumer research company, said one of the reasons she attended the summit was to learn how to best engage the community and hire locally.

Abdalkhani said this has been difficult to do.

“I wanted to learn more, myself being an entrepreneur, and needing to find hires — it’s been incredibly difficult to find people in Ann Arbor, the majority of people that I work with are actually outside of Michigan, and so it’s a topic that I’m interested in to learn about,” Abdalkhani said. “How can I, as someone who’s looking for people in the state and in Ann Arbor, think differently

about how to approach the topic?”

LSA senior Zach Tingley attended the summit with the University’s Poverty Solutions organization. Tingley said the summit made him aware of how managers’ hiring practices affect the makeup of the workforce.

“I never really think about managerial practices and things of that nature,” Tingley said. “I thought it was really interesting listening to these new hiring practices that he was talking about. I really appreciated being very conscious of the way that company’s hiring practices affect the workforce and affect access to the workforce, and I think I learned a lot from that actually.”

Tingley said he appreciated the speakers’ focus on skills that cannot necessarily be found on a resume.

“I really appreciate the approach they’re taking with recognizing people’s disadvantages and recognize their abilities in their purest forms that aren’t necessarily on their resume, but really growing with people,” Tingley said.

solve all of the problems that I just went over.”

Mautone spoke about his personal journey from graduating from college at Eastern Michigan University, to working as a waiter in Austin, Texas, to getting hired and trained by Dell. According to Mautone, Dell recruited young people who worked in the service industry that developed good communication and problem-solving skills and fit well into the company’s culture.

Mautone said his experience taught him local companies should reconsider what they look for when hiring employees.

He cautioned this mindset must also apply to management.

“I want you to take a chance and change jobs,” Mautone said. “That is what we did at Duo, that is why Rich asked me to be here. We started looking through a different lens, and with that, we were able to find local talent. So you might be saying to yourself, Raffaele, I believe in that. But does your management team? Because see that’s where I started looking next. I was saying to everyone, we’re going to

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 — 3A

Q&A From Page 1A TMD: Ken, you have talked about your experience with trying to break the Weinstein story back in 2002 and 2015. What about the circumstances in 2017 were different from 2002 and 2015 that allowed the story to be released?

Ken Auletta: But I think you know there’s a tendency to say, well because of Cosby, because of Roger Ailes, because of O’Reilly and others have the culture change and therefore continue to meddle with ... I think that minimizes the work that this guy did and the reporters with The New York Times did to make women feel comfortable enough to come out and be brave … My hat’s off to the job this guy did.

TMD: What encouraged you to stick with the story between 2002 and 2015?

KA: I thought this guy (Harvey Weinstein) was a beast. I thought he would do it again, and he did.

TMD: Ronan, do you think there are any areas where the #MeToo movement has failed?

There have been criticisms saying working class women and women of color have not been as highlighted. Is the #MeToo movement just a reshuffling of existing power dynamics?

RF: You know, I wish I could take credit for any movement.

This activism and even the term “me too” was around a long time before these stories. Tarana Burke had been using that term and doing grassroots community organizing around this for years and years.

So it’s important to hat tip to those people who are really better equipped to answer the kind of question that you’re asking about the movement dimension of it. I’m watching from the sidelines as a reporter. I have a much narrower job which is just digging for the facts. I think that by and large, the reporting around that movement has been really strong from some of the major publications. We’re seeing almost a renaissance of this kind of tackling of sacred cows and untouchable subjects through investigative journalism. So I’m really happy about that facet of it.

TMD: Ken, often, there is competition between journalists to “break a story” first, but in the situation with Weinstein, your cooperation with Ronan helped expose years of abuse and misconduct. When should journalists consider themselves brothers in arms, and when should they see themselves as competitors? Can that competition be counterproductive?

KA: Well, I think competition spurs us to be aggressive, to do a better job, but I think one of the things — Ronan and I were talking about this earlier — one of the things that I actually marvel at is the generosity between The New York Times reporters … but they came out a week before, they were both working on it and he (Ronan) came out, and they were different stories and yet they both coagulated ...

Yet, they praised each other. It wasn’t about sharp elbows, it was about, ‘Good job, good job.’ That’s really extraordinary, that kind of feeling of joy for his success.

RF: Well, it was a perfect storm where The Times broke these incredibly important stories about sexual harassment and then it really did add a very different dimension five days later that there were assault and rape allegations. I think if it flipped either way, the individual stories wouldn’t have had the same impact. Also, the point of breaking these stories requires a tank-like mentality for any news organization and I think it put both The New Yorker and The Times in a much stronger position. They were both going into battle on this quote facing down with threats and lawsuits and so forth.

TMD: For both of you, where is the line between activism and journalism? Because sometimes it can be tricky to find the line.

KA: Our job is to be an umpire and not a participant and to call fouls and to expose what we think, and if we’re activists, it’s hard for us to be credible.

RF: I talked about this a lot. You know, my job is not to be an activist. I’m incredibly inspired by good activism that can be prompted by exposing the right facts. But I really, I think somewhere deep in my bones — and I don’t say this as a, you know, a self-advertisement — I don’t necessarily think it’s a good trait, but I just, I get very dispassionate when I’m looking at the facts.

Actually I had a situation in a reporting job recently where someone who had really viciously, a PR person, who had smeared a lot of women, sexual assault accusers and worked for people that I had, you know, personal negative history with and was it looked like maybe going to be a source who would back up the account of my stories. And I would have given that person a hero’s treatment in a heartbeat that never even occurred to me, and my editor actually said to me, “You’re okay with putting this person in the story, given the horrendous things they’ve done?” … I don’t claim to be perfect or a robot. I definitely have opinions. But when it comes to that particular process an art form, the emotion does drain out.

TMD: Journalists at all levels have exposed sexual misconduct on the behalf of people who hold a substantial degree of power, in executive offices, on university campuses and even inside newsrooms. It’s something we’ve been working to do here at The Michigan Daily and the University of Michigan. What’s your advice to young journalists who may be overwhelmed by the magnitude of reporting on situations like this?

RF: There’s a couple of things. One is, I’ve now had this incredible luxury of being able to talk to student reporters all around the world, speaking at schools like this one, who are so passionate about what they do and who, in many cases, on many campuses, are doing important groundbreaking reporting.

That’s one thread of what’s gonna carry us through these incredibly trying times. Local journalism is important and very much under threat, you know, there’s a lot of questions about the sustainability of the business model. Large scale media organizations, you see a mix of incredible, important work that really defends our democracy and holds the powerful accountable, and also media organizations in the tank for powerful people and doing exactly the wrong thing, and covering up wrongdoing.

So we’re going to need that next generation to navigate all of that.

And so my advice to student journalists is to keep going. I hope that, you know if anything I do ever plays a little part in igniting people’s passion for this, I am so happy because I can tell you, when I was in the thick of tough stories, it was people like Ken, who were the example that kept me going and particularly when you stared down a lot of those forces of suppression that I just mentioned, you need all the encouragement you can get.

If I can replicate that and be for others what a lot of reporters I respect were for me in my most trying times, I hope I can be. And I get a lot of emails from student reporters, so feel free to reach out if you’re dealing with a tough story and I probably will have absolutely nothing helpful to say but I’m happy to try.

KA: If you’re a student newspaper and you follow this guy, you just look at his work, and his work will inspire you. You say, I gotta do something, or hey I wrote about this professor at the University. And that’s exactly what happened here after this guy broke stories in The New Yorker and The Times broke their story.

You’re not going to put that genie back in the box. And I think young people learn that our job in part is to challenge power. To be an adversary.

TMD: Given the widespread impact of #MeToo, moving forward, where do you see the next cultural reckoning coming from?

KA: I mean you know you could just go anywhere … clearly, in Washington we talk about the conf licts of interest.

I don’t think we’ve cracked the surface of sexual harassment and sexual beastly behavior.

I mean, we can list ... look, now the latest one last week about admission to colleges.

And here we are we’re talking about people paying off but there, there are much deeper problems. When I was on the board of my daughter’s private school, they said we have 39 openings for kindergarten and 28 of them for legacy. So, we have 11 openings, that’s all you have? When you talk about two classes and unequal treatment, boy oh boy, that’s just right there.

Opinion

4A — Wednesday, March 20, 2019

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

CAROLINE LLANES | COLUMN

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

MAYA GOLDMAN Editor in Chief

MAGDALENA MIHAYLOVA AND JOEL DANILEWITZ

FINNTAN STORER Managing Editor

Editorial Page Editors

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Emma Chang Joel Danilewitz Samantha Goldstein Elena Hubbell Emily Huhman Tara Jayaram

Jeremy Kaplan Sarah Khan Lucas Maiman Magdalena Mihaylova Ellery Rosenzweig Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury Alex Satola Ali Safawi Ashley Zhang Sam Weinberger Erin White

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of The Daily’s Editorial Board.

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

FROM THE DAILY

Venezuela deserves democracy

O

n Feb. 18, President Donald Trump issued a statement to Venezuela’s military: abandon its support for current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — or else. The president warned at a speech at Florida International University that if the military continues to support Maduro, they will “lose everything.” While this ultimatum is vague by nature, it brings up concerns about how far the U.S. is willing to go to in order to oust Maduro as president and let Juan Guaidó, Maduro’s U.S.backed challenger, assume power until a new election can be held. Guaidó claims the recent election that re-elected Maduro was fraudulent, and has since proclaimed himself the interim president until fair elections can be held — a point the legislature supports and Maduro dismisses.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela continues. Citizens still face food shortages and power outages. This has drawn the attention of the international community, with aid from across the world flowing to the borders.

The U.S., along with the a large part of the international community, backs Guaidó as the current Venezuelan president, which has added another political dimension to the crisis. This tension has also been exacerbated by the long and turbulent past between the U.S. and Venezuela, with Maduro even refusing to accept U.S. aid as a result. Ultimately, however, the most pressing aspect of the crisis is the miserable shortage of basic goods and freedoms the Venezuelan people have endured. At this point, inaction is tantamount to complicity; the U.S. has a responsibility to address the crisis. By collaborating with regional and international actors, the U.S. can help establish a truly free and fair presidential re-election as soon as possible and thereby minimize the possibility of further Venezuelan suffering.

The most important and pressing fact is that the people of Venezuela are currently fighting for survival. Citizens lack basic access to food and medical services and are facing a national blackout. The U.S. ought to continue to do what it can as an economic and political power to provide aid to the Venezuelans. We at The Daily feel it is important that this aid be distributed for the sole purpose of humanitarian assistance and not as a tool in disrupting Maduro or furthering domestic political agendas. Recently, Trump

has erroneously blamed the current dismal conditions of Venezuela on socialism, rather than resource dependency and economic mismanagement.

This only worsens the politicization of the problem.

Furthermore, Venezuelans are being denied aid due their country’s turbulent political history with the U.S., so any sense that American aid is simply cover for political interference could lead to continued denial of aid for Venezuelans. Approaching the immediate problem at hand will take cooperation on both sides to ensure the quickest and most efficient resolution possible.

The most important and pressing fact is that the people of Venezuela are currently fighting for survival This also means that Maduro will need to step up and put his own politics aside in order to help the people of his country. Maduro often invokes the idea of “patria,” or fatherland, to justify his rule. If this is truly the case, he ought to do whatever it takes to provide Venezuela’s citizens with the most basic needs of food, medicine and basic living standards. As we have stressed with regard to the U.S. government, the Venezuelan government — including both Maduro and the opposition — should put aside political agendas in order to ensure the livelihoods of its citizens.

Beyond the immediate

humanitarian issue, however, it is increasingly evident that the root of Venezuela’s problems is intertwined with a violent political history.

The international community must tread carefully in the fashion by which it provides aid and/or intervenes in Venezuela. We encourage the United States to reflect on its complicated relationship and past involvement in Latin America, and caution against military or imperialistic intervention. To go in and determine the presidency by force would be an excessive overreach of the United States’ position, and would likely fuel Maduro and his supporters’ view of the U.S. as a nefarious agent bent on political control.

Instead, we suggest further collaboration between the U.S. and the international community, specifically with Latin American coalitions that have a larger stake in finding a resolution, so that free democracy and peace can eventually be reached through fair and uninhibited elections.

The future in Venezuela is undoubtedly ambiguous, and we cannot predict the fates of Maduro or his opposition. What is absolutely clear, however, is the immediate suffering of everyday Venezuelans who lack basic resources and necessities; they have weathered enough human rights abuses to justify reasonably-restrained involvement and aid in their country. To the extent that their suffering has been cruelly exacerbated by political unrest, it can also be remedied by political solutions. We hope that the U.S. can take a benevolent role in this project and help establish true democracy in Venezuela that caters to the needs of Venezuelans first.

SUBMIT TO SURVIVORS SPEAK The Opinion section has created a space in The Michigan Daily for first-person accounts of sexual assault and its corresponding personal, academic and legal implications. Submission information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/survivorsspeak2019.

SUBMIT TO OPINION ABOUT THE EVENTS ON SATURDAY If you felt impacted by the circumstances surrounding the false reports of a shooting on Saturday, we encourage you to submit an Op-Ed to The Michigan Daily. You can send any writing to Joel Danilewitz (joeldan@umich.edu) and Magdalena Mihaylova (mmihaylo@umich.edu).

American ghost stories

I

love ghosts. I love ghost tours, paranormal investigation shows, rumors and stories of hauntings, attributing something falling off my shelf to a ghostly presence; I love it all. To be perfectly clear, I’m not talking about horror. I have enormous respect for the horror genre and its cultural significance, but I do not derive the same thrill and enjoyment from consuming horror media that die-hard fans do.

But ghosts? I absolutely adore ghosts. I’m endlessly fascinated by them, and it seems I’m not the only one: 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and 18 percent of Americans say they’ve seen a ghost.

What I think draws me to ghost stories so much is the storytelling aspect of it all.

The occult combines with the historical combines with gossip and rumors to create a lore — a hyper-specific geographic mythology in which the dead still walk with us. For relatively young country, the United States is positively littered with ghosts.

In nearly every city and town across America, you can hear stories about local hauntings and lore, from Puritans hung for witchcraft in New England to aspiring starlets found chopped into pieces in Los Angeles.

Specters seem to linger in both the grandeur of old mansions and in the dust and destitution of abandoned mines; in the echoing halls of plantation houses and in the fields. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, we can piece together a history from ghost stories alone, a history that reveals both what we love and fear the most.

There is, perhaps, no time in American history more filled with phantoms than the years immediately following the Civil War. The death toll was massive, with Union and Confederate forces suffering somewhere

between 650,000 to 850,000 deaths combined. That’s about 2 to 2.7 percent of the population, more deaths of U.S. soldiers than any in other conflict and nearly half of the total number of U.S. soldiers lost in all wars combined.

How does a nation grieve this massive loss? How do the millions of loved ones left behind reconcile the deaths of parents, spouses and children?

Whether the ghosts were the product of an overactive imagination, intense grief and a desire to communicate with a loved one just one more time, or the actual spirits of the dead roaming the Earth, it seemed that no one could escape ghosts in America in the 20 or so years following the Civil War. Ghosts supposedly even followed Sarah Winchester all the way to San Jose, where she built her large and bizarre estate. Her husband, William, was the owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, the manufacturer of the gun rumored to have claimed the most lives over the course of the war. When he died of tuberculosis and their infant child passed too, Sarah took her inheritance and moved west, where she began construction of her massive, labyrinthine home.

The story goes that Sarah had consulted a psychic, who told her that death was following her as a result of all the lives her husband’s guns had taken. Once she started building her home, she could not stop. She had to keep building — even adding partial floors and hallways that didn’t go anywhere — in order to appease the spirits that haunted her.

Sarah is just one story, but it seems that many postbellum ghost stories involve women. Countless sisters, daughters and widows of the hundreds of thousands dead during the war seem to have stories of their loved ones reaching out to them from beyond the grave.

Sometimes, however, these women were desperate enough to reach out to the dead themselves.

Originating in 1848, but rapidly gaining popularity through the ante and postbellum eras, the Spiritualist movement in America signaled to a new form of spirituality. It was a movement that rejected the mores of organized Christianity and the idea of a go-between God, instead claiming that its followers could communicate directly with the dead. In Spiritualism, there was no heaven and hell and no God — just a judgement-free afterlife that all could access.

Spiritualists held seances and ceremonies in which they reached out to the dead, who responded with knocks and walls and tables and levitating objects, along with other seemingly unexplainable phenomena.

One prominent Spiritualist and self-styled “spirit photographer,” William Mumler, even claimed that he could capture the spirit of a deceased loved one on photograph. His clientele was diverse, including Mary Todd Lincoln among others.

Many prominent Spiritualists, however, were women. The original practitioners from upstate New York were the Fox sisters: 15-yearold Margaret and 12-year-old Kate.

Spiritualism differed from other organized religions in that, well, it wasn’t really very organized. Were there a clergy, however, the majority of its ordained members would be women. These women were also involved with other causes, such as abolition in the antebellum, civil rights in the postbellum and the movement for women’s suffrage, among other things. As time passed and these movements, already controversial, fell further into disfavor, more and more Spiritualists were brought on trial for fraud.

Strides were made in the field of parapsychology, and by 1920, the movement all but ceased to exist.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com Caroline Llanes can be reached at cmllanes@umich.edu.

KRYSTAL HUR | COLUMN

T

When dropping out is a privilege

he elaborate, “Gossip Girl”-worthy college scam recently revealed by the FBI has incensed people across the United States, with college students and their parents in particular expressing the most outrage. The scam was possible because of William “Rick” Singer, who helped parents fake their children’s test scores, recruitment in college athletic teams, and even their races and ethnicities to be accepted into prestigious universities such as the University of Southern California and various Ivy League schools. He collected over $25 million for his efforts, and his clientele included notable celebrities Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.

Loughlin’s daughter Olivia Giannulli, better known as Olivia Jade, was accepted to USC after her parents paid $500,000 for their two daughters to be admitted as crew recruits, complete with staged photos of the girls on rowing machines. As a social media influencer with 1.9 million subscribers on YouTube, 1.4 million followers on Instagram and various partnerships with brands such as TRESemmé and Sephora — which have since ended — Giannulli has received perhaps the most backlash on social media. Her entire brand was built around an “I’m rich but still down to earth” image, which was completely shattered by her involvement in the scam. Giannulli has also said in a video that was uploaded before she began her freshman year, “I don’t really care about school.” She later apologized for her statements in a follow-up video. Her words have been the subject of many news reports in the wake of the admissions controversy, and many people are angered that someone who apparently does not even care about her education was able to use her privilege to attend a school over rejected students who work hard and do care about their education.

Many students who grew up watching “Full House” bemoan Loughlin’s involvement in the scheme (“I’m so sad, I love ‘Aunt Becky,’” my friend told me when she heard the news), and Giannulli’s subscribers openly mocked the star through comments on her social media before she disabled them.

Since the scandal first came to light, TMZ reported that Giannulli and her sister have dropped out of

college because “the family feels certain, if the girls went back to USC, they would be ‘viciously bullied.’”

As a college student, it of course upsets me that students such as Giannulli bought their way into prestigious schools when there are so many students who apply to these schools with true credentials and get rejected, or receive admission but cannot attend due to expensive tuition. Yet, I am almost more irritated that Giannulli and her sister gave up their spots at USC so easily due to a fear of being “viciously bullied,” if TMZ’s source is correct.

Their ability to drop out of college so easily showcases their privilege more than their ability to scam their way into it in the first place.

It has never been a secret that rich white folks use their money to earn their children places at top colleges, whether it be by making donations to the school or leveraging personal and business connections. Singer’s clients have simply been performing the same tradition, just in a much more illegal way. While this doesn’t excuse their actions by any means, it makes them less shocking.

So many students, particularly students of color, face both outright and covert bullying in schools that invalidate their right to be there even when they do not scam their way in. Such bullying dates back to the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, in which school segregation was outlawed. The Little Rock Nine, a group of nine Black students who enrolled at a previously all-white school in Arkansas to test the court decision, had to be escorted in by federal troops. Even today, many people attribute the admission of students of color in colleges to affirmative action rather than their academic achievements. We have all heard the argument that the only reason students got into a university is because they are Black or another underrepresented race. These students who have their intelligence constantly undermined are exactly the kinds of students defended by critics of parents involved in the scam: Students who work honestly and tirelessly for the chance to earn admission to a school, knowing that if they don’t get accepted, there’s nothing they can do, and that if they do get accepted, they need to work even harder than they did before.

These students don’t have the luxury of quitting school because

of a fear of bullying that they will almost inevitably face as people of color at an institution of higher education. Students whose parents can afford to pay bribes to send them to college don’t have to worry about earning enough money postgraduation to make a living. Perhaps these students don’t necessarily receive the kind of blatant backlash that Giannulli has received.

However, these students have the burden of knowing that they can’t make mistakes, because any that they do make will perpetuate racial stereotypes that already undermine their presence at their school. They do not have the privilege of buying their way into school, and they do not have the privilege of making mistakes. They do not have the privilege of dropping out after funneling so much of their hardearned resources into obtaining an education.

I do believe that the Giannullis made the right choice in dropping out. Yet, I wish that the reason they did it was because they felt remorse about the situation, rather than because they were afraid of being bullied. From the harsh backlash they have received, it’s understandable that they feel scared and mortified. But their willingness to give up their spots at USC without even fighting for them, despite their willingness to be a part of an incredibly illegal scheme to be admitted in the first place, further undermines the efforts of students who endure hardships for the chance to receive an education.

To all parents out there: If your children don’t get admitted to the college of their dreams, enroll them in another school where they earned admission, and encourage them to submit a transfer application for the following year or semester. If you have enough money to bribe college admissions to admit your child, instead use that money to hire tutors for your children so that they can maintain a high GPA so as not to risk commemorating their college years with a criminal record. Bribery may seem like a perfectly acceptable course of action in “Gossip Girl.” In this case, however, do not let life imitate art.

Krystal Hur can be reached at kryshur@umich.edu.

Arts

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 — 5A

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

ALBUM REVIEW

Lessons from my mother ELI RALLO

Daily Arts Writer

My mother taught me to read. She taught me to read long before pre-school and long before someone else could teach me first. She wanted to be the one to bless me with the gift of stories, so we spent all of my childhood reading together. My now overgrown personal library started from a chest of books in the basement of my childhood home, and a small white bookshelf set against the wall in my childhood bedroom. When I was young and small, reaching into the chest meant reaching into another world, where pages could ignite the wildest parts of my mind with dreams of far off places. Maybe she knew that I’d be so inclined to telling stories — to knowing them, to holding and nurturing them, years and books and pages later, when I’ve become all tangled up in everybody else’s wordy limbs in attempts to untangle my own.

She took me to the library to get my first library card, a tradition I’ve matched as I move to new cities and experience new places, and would sit on a plush cushion chair as I browsed for a few hours, indulging my curiosity for books. She gave me stories and with that, perhaps as collateral or perhaps because she truly intended to, she gave me imagination. She let me write stories and read them out loud at the dinner table, where I was the strong, female protagonist, so that when I was met with hundreds of stories with strong male characters, and a singular troupe-y female ingenue, they felt foreign and forced. Maybe she doesn’t realize this, but perhaps I am so inclined to make believe because she gave me the tools to fall in love with art.

My mother taught me to run. She instilled in me a fierce competitiveness even when I was the weakest athlete on the team, a willingness to believe that anyone no matter how unathletic, could be a runner.

All it takes is supportive sneakers and the road, and you could fall in love on your way down the dusty trail and never return to where you began. Running is not without defeat, but the best days are always accompanied with the knowledge that for me, the road always listens. I was ten years old when I started running at Meadowridge Park with my mother, and I’ve probably run a total of 10,000 miles. It is a love affair — Meadowridge Park, Hoka sneakers and I, that will never grow stale. At first it

felt as though she was making me run, and I dreaded every middle school cross country practice and the runs her and I would take on the weekends.

But she was right in teaching me to run. My mother did not make me a runner, but she gave me the tools to begin. Running and I are an unlikely pair, as I like to think I am unabashedly artistic and unathletic, and runners are meditative and strong. But my body craves the movement — running is my moving meditation, the way I settle an unsteady heart, the way I clear my cluttered mind.

I’ve run five half marathons and one full marathon, with her unwavering support, because she gave me love for the pain and the goodness in the familiar motions.

My mother taught me gratitude. For no one thing in particular, but for my life.

She taught me to count my blessings and know that I have many of them — even when I struggle to recognize it. She puts momentous downfalls and eye level tragedies to rest when she reminds me that things can always be worse.

She taught me this when she curbed my anxiety surrounding flying on airplanes, when she didn’t sugarcoat the difficult moments in life to teach me about reality and truth, no matter how ugly those can be.

She taught me to be thankful for my body, regardless of how frustrating it’s peculiarities and complications, because at the end of the day it is a healthy body. It is a strong body. It is a beautiful body. One that has given me so many gifts — one capable of so many miracles and with so many flaws that are mine to love.

My mother taught me strength, which is a life lesson you cannot learn from a book or a classroom, or even a simple conversation. Sometimes it takes a monumental understanding to climb life’s most troubling challenges. When she fell ill my sophomore year of high school and battled debilitating vertigo and imbalance, she managed to continue to serve as a central beacon of support continually effusing energy and strength, even when I knew she had none left to give. If she was bedridden for an entire week, she’d find a way to muster up courage and shaky toughness to come support a cross country race, school musical or honors society induction. She would be in the hospital just days before my first Thanksgiving in college, but conjure up the energy to smile and be completely present for me as we sat around the

family room couch to eat dinner with her. When she was finally diagnosed with late stage Lyme Disease and the incurable, not fatal, yet all the while crippling Ménière’s disease, I recognized that a mother’s job is never on break or vacation. Because even when her body was attacking her mercilessly, she put positive energy out into the world, and used every ounce of herself to put my brothers and I first, circumstances aside. Her first priority is never and would never be herself. Perhaps this is a part of motherhood, or perhaps this is just part of her.

She once told me that her purpose in life was to raise my brothers and I, and now that we’ve grown up, she’s okay with not having a purpose as demanding anymore. She doesn’t work a nine to five job, and since being diagnosed with an unpredictable autoimmune disease it’s more difficult for her to pick up intensely demanding jobs or responsibilities. But I disagree with her sense that her purpose has become less of a demand, or that her job is lighter now. Your purpose and role as a mother only grows more demanding as your children find their footing, grow old enough to shake naivetes and truly see the world. My mother has an uncommon and salient purpose as a healer. She heals people with words and actions. In another life she may have been a therapist — she has a medicinal way of curing the deepest of wounds and reconciling concerns, whether grave or trivial. Maybe she’s just some sort of a saint. Her advice is therapeutic — realistic and honest, yet soft and careful.

She will constantly tell you that she is inarticulate or not as intelligent as she could be, but on this, she is wrong. She always has the right words in the most natural way, in her mind she has every answer. It’s not just me who sees this ability to remedy. She is an unbelievable, altruistic friend, saving the people she loves when they need saving, telling them the truth when they need reality. She is an extraordinary sister and I’ve watched her give her sisters the epitome of female love, be it as small as fashion advice to as monumental as pieces of herself. Whenever anyone in her life needs her words, her shoulder, her eyes, they give her a call. I am surprised her phone ever stops ringing, and try my best to wonder about her when I call too.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

TEE PEE RECORDS

A confusing release from The Brian Jonestown M. JIM WILSON

Daily Arts Writer

Going into The Brian Jonestown Massacre, I had no idea what to expect. Coming out of it, I have no idea what to think.

I had never heard of The Brian Jonestown Massacre before, and after listening to a few of their past releases, it was hard to get a firm grasp on the band’s sound.

Their most recent release is no different.

The album has so many influences that it’s hard to determine exactly what the album sounds like.

It’s not quite a modern version of classic rock, it’s not quite psychedelic, it’s not quite post-rock, it’s not quite neofolk, it’s not quite garage rock and it’s not quite shoegaze. Somehow, The Brian Jonestown Massacre is a menagerie of all these genres and many more, and when it works, it really works.

A quick glance at the Spotify page for The Brian Jonestown Massacre will reveal that the self-titled album is their 18th full-length release. The band has as many singles and EPs as they have albums. The band releases a staggering amount of music, but based on this most recent release, the band’s prolificity is not a hindrance whatsoever.

of the work, reusing the elements that made the album’s highs so great.

With this in mind, it is easy to see why The Brian Jonestown Massacre begins to skid. Despite its varied influences and multiple sonic motifs, The Brian Jonestown Massacre becomes a little monotonous as it runs. The reverb-soaked guitars and vocals begin to sounds washed out, and the grooves begin to be recycled.

The song “Remember Me This” is especially guilty.

As The Brian Jonestown Massacre one of the Tee Pee Records later songs on the album, “Remember Me This” needs to bring something new to the table, but instead it festers in the same sounds that have already been songs of the late ’90s and early used and abused throughout the ’00s. It’s bluesy and fluid, and album.

The album is by no means overall, it’s so much fun to hear.

The rest of the album struggles perfect, but it surely does not to match the highs of “Drained,” disappoint. The Brian Jonestown especially toward the back end. Massacre wasn’t made in an However, other standouts include attempt to attract new fans. the haunting “Tombes Oubliées” Rather, it was made for the and the bluesy rocker “Cannot band’s faithful fans that will end Be Saved.” Unfortunately, both up walking away from this album of these songs are found early content. The album seems like in the tracklist, which actually an unwarranted victory lap for hurts the album. Placing three The Brian Jonestown Massacre, of the best songs in the first four who could, if driven to it, most slots of the album is decidedly certainly craft a consistently not a good decision. It leaves the great album instead of just a few band playing catch up for the rest noteworthy songs.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s driving opener “Drained” proves to be an ambitious song to follow. It starts the entire album off on the right foot. “Drained” sounds like it could be the grittier, less grandiose little brother to some of the most popular Britpop

The Brian Jonestown Massacre

BOOK REVIEW

Queer history: In conversation with Robert Fieseler JOHN DECKER Daily Arts Writer

In 1973, a man purchased a can of gasoline from the Walgreens in the French Quarter of New Orleans. In an act that he would never be indicted for, he proceeded to “the Upstairs,” a New Orleanian gay bar, where he used the fluid to ignite the stairwell of the bar, a passage already conducive to flame, trapping many patrons inside. In a span of minutes, the Upstairs fire spread. The fire would ultimately claim 33 lives.

While dozens lost lovers, family, income and security, and as the community scrambled to understand the implications of the fire, response from government and police officials was dampened. Media reported on the event in unusual scarcity.

The attack on the Upstairs Lounge threatened to slip into oblivion. LSA alumni Robert Fieseler, however, is determined to stop that from happening. I had the opportunity to speak with him about his recent research on the Upstairs Lounge fire that culminated in his first book, “Tinderbox,” recently named a finalist for The Randy Shilts Award — a conversation that

proved amiable and educational.

Fieseler is rightfully confident in his understanding of the event. His passion is refined and prominent. He is as articulate in speaking as he is on paper.

“I look for the cracks in the concrete that I can fall down,” says Robert Fieseler on the writing and research of “Tinderbox,” which details the 1973 calamity. “Where it seems like something that’s solid in our society but actually doesn’t make any sense.” He’s talking about the cleavages in history that get smoothed over too quickly, events like the Upstairs Lounge fire that, while slighted for many years, act as something of a juncture, invisibly shaping the course of today. It’s these invisible histories — perhaps call them icebergs, with most of the story unseen beneath the water from a traditional view — that Fieseler looks for when he researches. “Tinderbox” is the product of the discovery of one of these quiet but salient fractures: the Upstairs Lounge fire.

“Tinderbox” tells the story of the Upstairs Lounge brilliantly, researched and presented in a fashion that remains both remarkably professional but intimate.

Fieseler’s account reaches beyond solely the events

of June 1973 and allows readers surveys of both the events leading up to the fire as well as its long-reaching consequences. The work provides well-researched evidence, filling between the bricks with careful investigations

countenance of victims, had to be traceable back to a source. “It was maddening,” Fieseler says. “It creates a level of accountability.”

The balance of character investigations and textbook facts that make “Tinderbox” so

Tinderbox Robert W. Fieseler W.W. Norton & Company Jun. 5, 2018

of those involved in the incident, relying sometimes on dutiful descriptions and literary imagery.

Fieseler spoke to me about the precariousness of writing about tragedy. He nodded to the fragile responsibility that accompanied both his descriptive writing of the 1973 events and the presentation of uncontested essentials. Everything he wrote, from the color of walls to the

compelling also made Fieseler’s research all the more important.

There was the need to be honest and fair to the victims and the city of the time, he explained, something he felt was impossible to contribute without entrenching readers into the lives of patrons and witnesses. It is this investigation that makes “Tinderbox” so evocative.

And so, research was both consuming and impactful.

Fieseler spent time in archives around the country to stack his nearly seventy pages of citations on the event, though it was mostly his conversations with those who had lived through the fire that he spoke to me about.

These talks were difficult but necessary. “Individuals sensed that although it would be painful to rehash and, to a certain extent, relive a lot of these events … that there would be some broader purpose,” he says of the interviews he conducted. “There were a couple conversations with people that were some of the greatest moments of my life and that I would never take back.”

Conversations happened both in and far from New Orleans, one even taking place in a jazz club.

Fieseler decided to directly quote these interviews in “Tinderbox,” and they are certainly successful.

The first-hand accounts from fire survivors scattered through the work make the event all the more real for readers.

When asked about the politicizing of the fire, Fieseler said that he doesn’t believe it’s possible to separate the event from the politics of the time. “It’s woven into the fabric,” he says.

He pointed to the people affected and the lack of a response from leaders and community members

that only worsened the scenario, leaving victims without funerals, families without income and thousands who refused to even acknowledge the term “homosexuality” when reporting on the event. “People forget the era of criminalization (of homosexuality),” Fieseler says, “and what criminalization meant … for the victims and how people suffered mentally.”

At the end of our conversation, I directed the dialogue to Fieseler’s experience at the University. He openly recounted his struggle as a gay college student in a time of remarkably low visibility, nodding to coverage of the queer community

by The Daily in helping him come out. “I hope that we live in a day and age where people aren’t struggling [with their sexuality] in college,” Fieseler told me.

“Coming out is a great thing. I mean, do it while you’re young and cute, please,” he laughed.

In a later and more thoughtful note, he nodded to the weight of the story “Tinderbox” tells, one far more important than any one individual. It is a horror that events such as the Upstairs Lounge ever occurred. And it is the research and passion of those like Fieseler that ensure it will never happen again.

Arts

6A — Wednesday, March 20, 2019

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

FILM REVIEW

TV NOTEBOOK

On courage in ‘Weekends’ ‘A Little Late’ is just in time JULIANNA MORANO Daily Arts Writer

I am always shaken by the courage of memoir. First, in the act of reopening those creaky doors, reentering those old rooms, going back through the old files and boxes which somehow contain our lives, and trying to make sense of what was there. Then, in the act of arranging these intimate exhibits and memory-laden objects on the page, on the screen for others to behold. These actions require courage I have yet to find.

But others do have that courage, and in abundance. I’m thinking of Trevor Jimenez, director of Oscarnominated short film “Weekends.” In the short, Jimenez rearranges his early-life experience of a fractured family in the story of three characters: a mother and father, newly divorced from one another, and a young boy who splits his time between the two, staying with his mom during the week and his father on weekends.

What is important about Jimenez’s representation of this experience is that the young boy is not in the middle of his parents’ divorce; he is at the center. Shots are angled to privilege his vantage point.

His dreams and nightmares of his parents’ reunion occupy space. He is the nexus of all the courage I was talking about, and everything Jimenez does with the film honors and centers around this strong little boy.

“Weekends” is hand-drawn and shaky, like a child’s sketches. The titles appear in embellished handwriting, wobbly but with ample serifs to make up for it. Its animation style reminded me warmly

of the way I used to write the title of the stories I penned in elementary school. The animation will do that to you: it will make you walk backwards until you can see things the way you did when you were young. In turn, you will see the strength required to occupy that position, amid all the competing allegiances and loves and desires.

“Weekends” is also silent film. No character verbalizes what they are feeling. Instead of reinventing dialogue or

Weekends New Europe Film Sales

putting words into people’s mouths, Jimenez makes brilliant use of other sounds to retell the tale, perhaps with the purpose of maintaining quiet reverence for the strength of the boy. One of the most brilliant, alternative uses of sound in “Weekends” is the devotion of musical themes to each parent: Erik Satie’s compositions for the mother, and Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing” for the father. When I saw the boy’s father turn the volume up on the radio in response to the opening riff, I quickly coupled that image with footage of my own memories, of my father’s own perfunctory turn of the volume dial whenever he would happen upon that same Dire Straits song. The songs in this film will do that to you: send you searching for

your own parents’ anthems.

They will transport you to your own scenes of listening to your parents’ songs and trying to make sense of these complex human beings from a complicated angle.

“Weekends” is rife with symbolism. A certain courage lies in the use of symbolism, especially when it involves excavating artifacts from memory, putting these intimate objects on display, and telling a story, perhaps a new or revised story, through them.

While these symbols take multiple forms — anywhere from a raccoon to a horse figurine — I want to talk about a symbolic act Jimenez portrays: the act of blowing out a fire. In an early scene, the mother leaves a pot unattended and the smoke alarm goes off; while she tries to fan the smoke away, her son blows at the alarm, in a heartrending display of care and of doing the best with what little power children have. Then, in one of the most stunning sequences of the film, the boy has a nightmare in which the top half of his mother’s new boyfriend’s head is replaced with a single candle which he tries to blow out, only for the fire to spread and engulf his house. This symbolic action will do that to you: it will make you experience that helplessness. It will make you think about impossible wishes, the fear when we realize they are impossible, and the strength it takes to imagine new ones.

“Weekends” will do all of this to you, and more. It will show you the courage of memoir, and perhaps even share with you some of its own bravery and inspire you to reopen those doors, reopen those boxes, make sense of it all.

EMMA CHANG Senior Arts Editor

It’s 2019 and, unfortunately, when you Google “late night television show hosts,” only three notable hosts stray from the classic formula of straight, white men — Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee and Busy Phillips.

Simultaneously, Hollywood audiences have been pushing for more representation and diversity in movies, with films like “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Captain Marvel” finally bringing Hollywood closer to a new, more interesting horizon.

Despite the calls for a more accurate reflection of our world in movies, late night talk shows have remained surprisingly untouched.

Although it’s frustrating that while casts, writers and production staffs are becoming ever more varied, the kinds of people interviewing them are remaining stagnant, NBC’s most recent announcement hopes to challenge this frustration.

On “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on Mar. 14, YouTube personality Lilly Singh announced her newest project: “A Little Late with Lilly Singh.” Her choice of entertainment, comedy, is a male-dominated profession and her success in the field is indicative of the fact that people are becoming tired of the same kind of person telling the same kind of jokes. Some of her more popular YouTube bits involve her dressing up as her

Indian parents, delivering jokes that many second-generation immigrants can relate to.

“A Little Late” marks a significant change in late night television: Singh will be the first woman to host her own show on one of the “Big Four” television networks.

Not only does Singh represent women of color, but

audiences want and how to give it to them.

Her ascendance to network TV also shows the influence that YouTube has had in recent years and the pressure it has put on companies like NBC to re-evaluate where they stand on the diversity front. More than ever people are turning to online communities like YouTube, where they can tailor their subscription boxes so that they are entertained by someone who looks like them, without having to hope the opinions of a network head coincide with what a specific audience member is looking for.

With Singh making a debut appearance on a major television network, it’s hard not to think about the impact YouTube had on her career and the criticism that many YouTubers receive for being “fake” celebrities.

It’s not surprising then, that NBC was the network to take the leap. The company hosts a slew of shows that meet the diversity demands of its customers, including Andy Samberg’s popular “Brooklyn NineNine” which boasts a bisexual and Latina detective, a Black captain and a man comfortable in his masculinity. The company provides a reprieve from the constant barrage of white men on our screens.

Singh represents the changes in Hollywood that are necessary to keeping the diversity train rolling – without diverse people in powerful positions, Hollywood may be doomed to a white, testosterone-laden, future.

Not only does Singh represent women of color, but she is also a shining light for the LGBTQ+ community

she is also a shining light for the LGBTQ+ community. She came out as bisexual in the month preceding her announcement and it only added to the value of her new show. However, her appeal doesn’t just come from her diverse background.

If anything, those details are a fringe benefit when considering her talents as a comedic personality. Singh has cultivated a following of 14 million subscribers on YouTube and consistently puts out highquality content, like her yearly “Twelve Days of Christmas” series in which she works with prominent celebrities to create holiday skits. Adding Singh to their line-up of shows demonstrates the network’s understanding of what

DAILY HUMOR COLUMN

Wonder Kid: Why we love Classifieds John Mulaney as a person In today’s tumultuous political climate, there aren’t many things we can agree on. We may not agree on the ideal thermostat temperature (72 degrees) or how much milk to put in your cereal (40 milliliters) or who is the best Coppola (Jason Schwartzman), but what we can all agree on is that we love John Mulaney.

Find me someone who doesn’t adore this dimpled comedy star, I dare you. We love John Mulaney because he is: A) Hilarious in a nonthreatening way.

B) Kind of hot, also in a nonthreatening way.

Here’s a fun game, walk into the UgLi (it gets better, I promise) and count how many John Mulaney meme laptop stickers you find. The fun part of the game is that you’ll find a lot. One time I was in The Michigan League and overheard not one, not two, but THREE conversations about how much they all loved John Mulaney. This anecdote is to prove that: A) Everyone loves John Mulaney.

B) I am skilled at eavesdropping.

We love John Mulaney for pointing out his neuroses and tearing himself apart for our entertainment and pleasure.

His observational humor makes us shout at the TV, “that happens all the time,” or “he gets me.” His standup perfectly combines tales from his childhood and his SNL days with a healthy heaping of self-deprecation. His stories of growing up make you think he was raised in suburban Illinois in the ’50s and not suburban Illinois in the late ’80s. Maybe he is a time traveler or an ageless wizard, which would

explain why your parents like him too. There is no other explanation: John Mulaney must be a timeless wizard of comedy, bending time and space to make us laugh.

John Mulaney is the friend you bring home to meet your

BECKY PORTMAN parents because parents love him. He is the guy who holds the door for people on the subway. He’s the guy who asks what floor when you get in an elevator with him. He is the friend who is a grandpa, but also down for anything. He is usually in bed by nine, but he’ll egg your ex’s house if you ask him to. He is the guy who has an extremely complicated order, but when the waitress brings him a different meal, he says nothing and pretends to enjoy it. He is the friend who kills it at trivia because he knows a lot of fun facts from being an unathletic kid and probably spent too much time at the Scholastic book fair. We love John Mulaney because he’s just so damn loveable.

But John Mulaney is so much more than his Emmywinning stand up. We mustn’t forget his work for six seasons as a writer on Saturday Night Live. Usually writing alongside

Simon Rich and Marika Sawyer, Mulaney thrived on the program creating such iconic characters as Stefon and Herb Welch (both played by my future husband Bill Hader). Mulaney has returned to Studio 8H twice to host the show, resurrecting sketches killed from back in his writing days in the form of Diner Lobster and Bodgea Bathroom. Mulaney also dazzled on Broadway (pronounced Broadway with an emphasis on the way) with his college improv buddy, Nick Kroll, in “Oh Hello.” Look how much college improv can help your career (@mom). Kroll also utilizes his buddy in his Netflix show “Big Mouth” to portray the awkwardness of Andrew Glouberman, the lightly mustached Jewish boy going through puberty, a role Mulaney was born to play.

Mulaney’s recognizable voice was also featured in the form of Spider Ham / Peter Porker in the all-time best movie, the Oscar-winning “Spiderman into the Spiderverse.” You can also find Mulaney on Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s IFC show, “Documentary Now.” He co-wrote (alongside SNL alum Seth Meyers) and starred in the Sondheim-inspired third episode of the new season.

Mulaney’s comedy is simply genius and it makes me equal parts delighted, jealous and vermouth. Listening to his routine is like a symphony, with Mulaney acting as the comedic conductor.

Each movement is timed perfectly to the beats of laughter and weaved together at the end in a crescendo of callbacks. God, I love John Mulaney, you love John Mulaney, we all freaking love John Mulaney!

Call: #734-418-4115 Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com

SERVICES

Release Date: Wednesday, March 20, 2019

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

ACROSS 1 About, in dates 6 Words With Friends and such 10 They form a “cage” 14 Bee-related 15 Cry while pointing a finger 16 Rebecca’s firstborn 17 General opening?

18 Breed also known as a Lion Dog 20 High regard 22 Nasty types 23 Warm feeling 25 Gridiron official 26 Angry display 31 Skill useful in delicate situations 35 Big name in gaming 36 Like the Javanese calendar 38 Swear 39 Catholic univ. in San Antonio 40 Facebook titter 41 Kagan on the bench 43 Symphonic rock gp.

44 Port-au-Prince locale 46 “Otello” composer 47 Towns on some maps 49 When the volume is the highest 51 Guffaw syllable 53 Prominent fox features 54 Alters to fit 58 Souvenir with a slogan 62 Survey surreptitiously 64 Sanction 65 Graph line 66 Westin competitor 67 Rope often coiled 68 Beer order 69 Pop 70 Moves rhythmically DOWN 1 Detective’s job 2 Nasdaq debuts 3 Breach

4 Hurricane strength term 5 Colorful reef denizen 6 The Eiger, for one 7 Work often recited 8 Sack holding a pig, in an old idiom 9 Winter sports mecca 10 Pass along, with dubious etiquette 11 “It’s clear now!”

12 Barbershop member 13 “X” author Grafton 19 Austin-to-Dallas dir.

21 Do some floor work 24 Singer Nelson 26 Well-known 27 Writer Calvino 28 Seer’s deck 29 Prescribed goal 30 “A tradition __ any other”: trademarked catchphrase for The Masters

32 Declares 33 Housing choice 34 Huck Finn creator 37 Setbacks 42 Pet control ordinance 45 Fitting 48 Least forward 50 Didn’t play 52 In the manner of 54 Bus alternative

55 Similar (to) 56 San __: Riviera resort 57 Transmit 59 Ingrid’s “Casablanca” role 60 Optimistic 61 There are five in ten 62 Word with dance or root 63 Sedona, for one

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

STUDENT SUMMER STORAGE Closest to campus, Indoor, Clean, Safe. Reserve now at annarborstorage.com or (734) 663‑0690

FOR RENT EFFICIENCY ‑ 1 & 2 Bdrm AptFall 2019/20 Rents range $875 ‑ $1850 most include heat and water.

Showings scheduled M‑F 10‑3 734‑996‑1991

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

03/20/19

NOW. @michigandaily

By Mark McClain ©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

03/20/19

Sports

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 — 7A

For ‘M,’ second bid means progress Wolverines defeat Western, 12-6 ROHAN KUMAR Daily Sports Writer

The year was 2006.

In the midst of her fourth season as head coach of the St. John’s women’s basketball team, Kim Barnes Arico reached her first NCAA Tournament. She was thrilled just to be there.

The team headed to State College, Pa., for the first weekend of the tournament. Connecticut and its coach, Geno Auriemma, were there, too. At that point, Auriemma already had five championships under his belt. He would be named to the Basketball Hall of Fame later that year.

Though the two teams never faced each other that postseason, the coaches still crossed paths while in the city.

“I said to him, ‘You know, I’m so happy to be here,’ ” Barnes Arico told Inside Michigan Basketball Radio Show. “And he goes, ‘The easiest part is getting there. The hard part is staying there.’ ” Back then, Barnes Arico didn’t fixate too much on Auriemma’s comments — she simply enjoyed the weekend and appreciated the work it took to get there. After all, Barnes Arico’s achievement

marked a successful turnaround.

The team hadn’t been to the tournament since 1988, and the season prior to her arrival, the Red Storm finished with an abysmal 3-24 record, losing all of their conference games.

But now in her seventh season at the helm of the Michigan women’s basketball team (21-11 overall, 11-7 Big Ten), Barnes Arico can contextualize Auriemma’s sentiment. On Monday, the Wolverines got a tournament bid for the second straight year — but it hasn’t always been that way.

“Here I am 10, 12 years later, 15 years later, saying, ‘Oh my goodness. To stay there is really, really incredible,’ ” Barnes Arico said. “For our kids to be able to do what they’ve done the last few years is just a credit to them and what they’ve meant to our program and what they’ve brought to our program.”

This realization comes by looking at the program’s history.

The team still holds a below .500 record of 605-698, and this season marks just the eighth time the Wolverines have made the tournament. They have yet to make it out of the second round.

Barnes Arico knows the

difficulty in taking a team to the tournament year after year. She brought Michigan to the big stage in her first season as head coach, then missed out the following four times. That fourth season, the Wolverines finished third in the Big Ten and had 22 wins going into the Selection Show, but still didn’t make it.

Thus, receiving a bid for the second straight season is quite significant for the program as a whole. There’s still a ways left to go, but it shows valuable progress.

And Barnes Arico makes sure her team doesn’t take it for granted — that they recognize the team’s roots.

“Yeah, they’re kind of getting spoiled,” Barnes Arico said jokingly. “But we talk to them a lot about the past. It’s important to realize where our program was and where our program is now and where our program wants to be. And I think as coaches, we emphasize that a lot and we talk about that a lot. “ … The players and the coaches that came before, they know really what it took to get to where we are now. And step-by-step, brickby-brick to build this, and to build really a program and not a team.”

ALEXANDRIA POMPEI/Daily

The Michigan women’s basketball team will play in the NCAA Tournament for the second straight season.

ALEXANDRIA POMPEI/Daily

Senior infielder Blake Nelson drove in two runs to help Michigan to a 12-6 win over Western Michigan on Tuesday.

KENT SCHWARTZ Daily Sports Writer

In the Michigan baseball team’s second midweek game of the season on Tuesday, it hoped to avoid the same pitching follies against Western Michigan that it had in the first.

Initially, it wasn’t obvious if it could.

Sophomore right-hander Blake Beers had his second start of the season — in his first, he cruised through until the third inning before he began to struggle. A feeling of déjà vu spread through the stadium as he did so again.

After making a great play to snag a ground ball for the first out, Beers proceeded to walk a batter, allow a double and an RBI single before he hit Bronco Blake Dunn in the head to load the bases in his last act.

Freshman left-hander Walker Cleveland came in, limiting Western Michigan to just two more runs after a single and a walk.

Despite the follies of the third inning, Michigan (14-4) trumped Western Michigan (6-13) 12-5, behind an explosive offense.

The Wolverines’ offensive onslaught began in the bottom of the first inning. Three walks by Broncos pitcher Jack Szott loaded

the bases, bringing an early visit to the mound by manager Billy Gernon to instill confidence in the pitcher.

Szott got his control back for senior infielder Blake Nelson, working his way back to a 2-2 count before inducing a ground ball to third base, only to watch the ball bounce over his third baseman Jimmy Roche’s glove. Two runs scored on the error and Michigan had an early lead.

The lead was snuffed out when Beers let in three runs in the third.

The Wolverines, though, would not stay down. In the bottom of the third, they recaptured the lead with a well-timed hit-and-run that put both runners in a perfect position to go up 4-3 on Nelson’s single to left field.

From there on out, it was all Michigan. Cleveland clamped down on Western Michigan, ending the day with his first collegiate win and only one hit allowed.

“He’s only thrown a third of an inning all year and he came in and settled the game down for us,” said Michigan coach Erik Bakich. “The game was very much in question and I thought he did a great job of coming in and putting up zeros to let our offense separate and put the game in the bag for us.”

Added Cleveland: “The team played really well today. They had my back the whole way, the batters put in a ton of quality bats together and swing to put us out ahead.”

Despite his humility, Cleveland was all smiles. As soon as the interview was over, he quickly shuffled back into the locker room to text his parents the good news.

The offense had a field day — in the fourth inning, junior infielder Jordan Brewer launched a tworun home run over the tall brick wall in left field to extend the lead to 6-3.

A 45-minute bottom of the sixth inning put the game firmly out of hand after the Wolverines scored five runs and go up 12-3, allowing Bakich to start putting in reserves.

“Playing time is one of those things that’s you’re fair but not equal,” Bakich said. “It’s great when you can get a wide margin in a game like that where everyone can get an opportunity or everyone can get an opportunity to get some reps. And those are precious, those are valuable, because not every game is like that.”

With a dominant offensive display and competent pitching, the last game of the five-game home stand ended up being no different than the games that preceded it.

Meghan Beaubien stymies Broncos in 3-0 win Defensive lapses costly MEN’S LACROSSE

DANIEL DASH

OWEN SWANSON

Daily Sports Writer

For the second time in the last week, Faith Canfield used her leadoff at-bat to jump on a pitch over the heart of the plate. And for the second time in the last week, the senior second baseman clubbed the ball over the Alumni Field fence.

The home run was all the No. 25 Michigan softball team needed to defeat in-state foe Western Michigan (7-12), 3-0.

Just two days removed from recording a pair of wins and a save in last weekend’s sweep of Kent State, sophomore lefthander Meghan Beaubien picked up right where she left off. The reigning Big Ten Pitcher of the Year was locked in from the start, retiring the first two Broncos with emphatic punchouts and surrendering only one hit in the first four innings.

When the Wolverines (16-10) tacked on a pair of fifth-inning insurance runs, Beaubien didn’t even need them. She kept the Broncos off the scoreboard all afternoon, tallying a seasonhigh 13 strikeouts along the way.

Beaubien finished with a four-hit shutout in her ninth complete game of the season. “(Beaubien) is throwing with a clear mind,” said Michigan coach Carol Hutchins.

“She’s throwing with conviction.

Her speed is up, her changeup is on. It’s tough to be clear-minded when you’re a young kid, so part of it is a learning curve.”

When junior right fielder Haley Hoogenraad stepped up to the plate with the bases loaded and two outs, she had the chance to give Michigan a sizable early cushion. Hoogenraad dug into the batter’s box, let her bat rest on her shoulder and crouched into a formidable batting stance.

Unlike Canfield, who worked a full count before unleashing a big cut, Hoogenraad took a swing

Daily Sports Writer

KELSEY PEASE/Daily

Sophomore left-hander Meghan Beaubien struck out 13 Broncos on Tuesday as Michigan beat Western Michigan 3-0.

at the first offering she saw from Broncos’ starting pitcher Reily Galloway. The barrel of her bat wound up in front of the offspeed pitch, resulting in a soft ground ball down the third base line.

Despite putting four runners on base in their first crack at Galloway, the Wolverines only mustered one run from the threat.

For returning players, the team’s failure to pull away brought back memories of last season’s shortcomings against Western Michigan.

Last May, the Broncos played spoiler when they made a late-season trip to Ann Arbor. Despite having 15 fewer victories than the Wolverines, Western Michigan amassed 13 hits en route to an 8-2 win — its first against Michigan since 2012. The loss put a dent in the Wolverines’ postseason momentum.

This season, sophomore lefthander Meghan Beaubien made sure it wouldn’t happen again.

Since her ERA reached a career-high 3.95 in a Feb. 22 loss to Stanford, Beaubien’s mark has gradually trended downward

(Beaubien) is throwing with a clear mind. ...

Her speed is up.

towards her 1.16 clip from a season ago. After Tuesday’s dominant showing, Beaubien will enter this weekend’s conference-opening slate with an ERA of 1.99.

“I think from the start of the year to now, my mental process has gotten a lot better,” Beaubien said. “Lately, I feel like it’s been really good, like this past weekend and today. For the most part, I have to forget last year and understand that it doesn’t matter and this is a completely new year. I just need to work hard and do my best and be what I can be this year to the best of my ability.”

After Canfield’s home run, Michigan’s offense remained dormant until the bottom of the fifth inning, when junior catcher Abby Skvarce made a pinch-hit appearance.

With sophomore shortstop Natalia Rodriguez perched on second base after swiping her seventh bag of the season, Skvarce laced a ground ball under the glove of Western Michigan shortstop Brooke Wyman that trickled deep enough into left field for Hutchins to wave Rodriguez home.

The successful small-ball

strategy allowed Michigan to pull away.

“It manufactured a run,” Hutchins said. “We weren’t swinging very well today, we were definitely not very offensive, so you have to find a way to manufacture runs. One of those is to steal their bases to put us in position. We get a pinch-hit single and it was a difference maker.”

Just one batter later, freshman left fielder Lexie Blair — who earned Big Ten Player of the Week honors last week after posting an .875 batting average and eight RBI — poked a ground ball through the gap on the Broncos’ right side of the infield. As the ball made its way onto the right-field grass, senior center fielder Natalie Peters rounded third. The relay throw came in from Broncos’ outfielder Machenzie Swinehart, but not before Peters’ right hand grazed the edge of home plate on her slide under the catcher’s glove.

Though Peters’ slide put the game out of reach once and for all, it was Beaubien who kept Western Michigan at bay all along.

My mental process has gotten a lot better.

With a minute left in the first half, the Michigan men’s lacrosse team had spent twice as long down a man as No. 11 Notre Dame, trailed in shots taken by six, leaned on fifth-year senior Tommy Heidt’s five saves and won only two of the contest’s 13 faceoffs.

It didn’t matter.

The Wolverines trailed the Fighting Irish by only a goal. Halftime, and the chance to regroup before the deciding 30 minutes, beckoned Michigan like a desert oasis.

But it proved to be a mirage.

Notre Dame’s lead grew twice and left the Wolverines with a halftime task three times as big as they expected less than a minute before.

The Fighting Irish’s two goals came from Thomas McNamara and John Hallenbeck, making the score 7-4 and continuing a concerning trend. Late-period, momentum-shifting goals have plagued the Wolverines so far this season, and they’re not going without notice.

“It’s something that we’re really focusing on,” said Michigan coach Kevin Conry. “In that last minute of the quarter, those are really, really important times where fundamentals are the most important thing. And we weren’t very fundamental on that pick, and gave the guy just a little extra room. But we’re learning.”

Michigan’s two primary faceoff men, sophomore Connor Cronin and junior Matt Dellacroce, have been out with injuries, causing a faceoff-bycommittee approach. Between junior defenseman Finn Goonan, freshman midfielder Andrew Russell and senior defenseman Nick DeCaprio, the Wolverines went 4-for-24 from the X against the Irish. The lack of competency at the X has made maintaining possession more difficult and contributed to the Wolverines’ poorly-timed lapses on defense.

It took most of the third quarter for Michigan to come

roaring back to tie it. Senior midfielder Justin Gibbons’ goal with 55 seconds left in third quarter seemed to have compensated for the Wolverines’ defensive gaffes, and the building momentum was a promising sign headed into the game’s final 15 minutes.

But yet again, the final minute betrayed Michigan.

Notre Dame’s Griffin Westlin sprinted through a fatigued Wolverine defense to reclaim the lead with 1.4 seconds to play.

After leaning on offense and goaltending for three resilient quarters, Michigan fell asleep in its own end at the most inopportune times.

A combination of fresh but inexperienced legs on the field and tired, experienced ones made errors on defense and took ill-advised penalties. The fourth quarter proved to be the most lopsided, as Notre Dame scored three unanswered goals — two within the first five minutes — to seal the victory.

“It’s hard when they go on a run and you’re deficient in the faceoff X,” Conry said. “That’s been one of the things that’s been plaguing us as this little stretch here continues. … I thought Notre Dame had a smart adjustment where they started to suck the life a little bit out of the ball and use the whole shot clock and that got our guys tired.”

The Wolverines have the offensive skill and ability to beat highly ranked opponents, but won’t until they play good enough defense to go on prolonged scoring runs of their own. No matter how big of an impact it had, injuries to Michigan’s faceoff men aren’t entirely to blame. And Conry knows it.

“When we could ride and create that tempo, it doesn’t really matter about our faceoff deficiencies,” Conry said.

“Health is something we need to keep working on. We need to get some guys back, that’s for sure. But overall, our attention to detail and our fundamentals are something we will consistently focus on.”

Sports

8A — Wednesday, March 20, 2019

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Student-athletes create group to help survivors of sexual assault MOLLY SHEA

Daily Sports Writer

In observance of Women’s History Month, The Daily’s sports section is launching its second annual series aimed at telling the stories of female athletes, coaches and teams at the University from the perspective of the female sports writers on staff. We continue the series with this story from Daily Sports Writer Molly Shea.

Sydney Wetterstrom and Sam Roy have a lot in common.

They both love yoga. Spending time with friends. Writing.

They’re both juniors, involved with athletics at Michigan and dedicated to school. If Wetterstrom’s not on the volleyball court, killing and blocking, she’s in the classroom working toward a double major in Spanish and Health and Fitness. In Roy’s case, she balances her new role as a student assistant coach for the women’s gymnastics team — after spending two years on the team as a gymnast — with studying Neuroscience on the pre-med track.

Beyond these surface level connections, Roy and Wetterstrom have a deeper common thread. Both are survivors of sexual assault.

In late February, the two women co-founded Student Athlete Sexual Health. It’s a support group specifically for student-athletes that identify as sexual assault survivors or know someone who has been affected by it. Meetings are held on a bimonthly basis and provide a safe, confidential place for athletes to share their struggles, triumphs and support.

“This group was started because we want people to know how real this issue is,” Roy said. “So many people go through it and sometimes people aren’t willing to talk about it.

We’re hoping to bring that stigma out of the word ‘sexual abuse.’ ” The stigma surrounding sexual abuse is undeniable, but it’s a topic that has to be discussed, especially given the statistics.

According to the National Sexual

Violence Resource Center, 20 to 25 percent of women and 15 percent of men are survivors of forced sex during their college years. And even more unsettling: More than 90 percent of victims do not report their assault.

“Pursuing legal action is hard,” Wetterstrom said. “You’re just some kid in some file cabinet, where your story may never be opened again. They may never find the perpetrator, that person may be out there affecting so many more young individuals.”

The two connected the same way everyone does — via social media. In November, Roy was scrolling through her Instagram feed when she found Wetterstrom’s post that detailed her sexual assault. She immediately reached out and offered support, plus an invitation for coffee.

“I knew I had had her number,” Roy said. “We weren’t the closest of friends but we knew each other.

I just reached out and said, ‘Hey I know what you’re going through.’

I know for me I’d always wanted to start a group. Syd had a similar idea, and we both jumped on board with it.”

And just like that, the framework for what would eventually become SASH was born.

The two spent the following months working out the details and logistics of the group before bringing it to the Athletic Counseling Team for approval.

Abigail Eiler, assistant director of ACT, was instrumental in getting the group on its feet. Eiler is present at all group meetings to provide support and assist Roy and Wetterstrom with facilitation of the difficult conversations that trauma entails.

But before these women could become allies for other survivors, they had to heal and cope with their own traumas. They believe the path

to healing isn’t linear. There’s light and dark. Good days and bad days.

Wetterstrom was forced to deal with the aftermath of her assault in the middle of volleyball season this fall.

“It was extremely challenging to return to play because the same physiological experiences occurred in both events,” Wetterstrom said.

“The fight-or-flight response in one situation benefits you and allows you to perform to the best of your ability and be strong and compete, and at the other end it allows you to survive. Any time I was in an intense fight-or-flight response situation, it was as if I was reliving the assault. It took time for me to separate the two and realize that I am safe.”

Roy suffered abuse while receiving treatment for a gymnastics injury. She spent the beginning of her healing process keeping her assault private and dealing with it internally. But watching other women, like her teammates and role models within the sport, come forward and confront their abuser, inspired her to open up about her abuse. With the help of her psychologist, Roy is working on moving past the trauma and sharing her story with others.

“For the longest time I was silenced,” Roy said. “I feel like I’m finally standing on my own two feet.

I’m standing up and using my resources.

Women empower women. I truly feel that me getting to use my voice has given me back a part of that I felt like I had lost.”

For Roy and Wetterstrom, that’s their favorite part of SASH — empowering and helping others to find their voices and heal. It’s about providing a space where anyone is welcome and everyone is ready and willing to listen.

We want people to know how real this issue is.

ANNIE KLUSENDORF/Daily

Junior outside hitter Sydney Wetterstrom helped co-found SASH, a group for student-athlete survivors of sexual assault.

The group emphasizes that there’s no universal path to dealing with the trauma of being sexually assaulted. But they want to help survivors find their way. Whether it’s mediation, keeping a gratitude journal or finding three things every day to be grateful for, they have a plethora of mechanisms to equip survivors with.

“We always talk about what coping strategies work for you may not work for the person sitting next to you,” Roy said.

“We might have something for you and it might work a couple times and then we have to switch something up, or it might work for the rest of your life.”

Roy and Wetterstrom want survivors to know that there’s light in the darkness. That they can, and will, get through it. They’ve experienced a surprising and welcome result since going public with their stories — other survivors are reaching out to them.

“By coming public with it and

telling your story, people then reach out to you,” Wetterstrom said. “You find you have similar pasts. And as brutal as those pasts may be, it’s comforting to know you’re not alone.”

While the group is currently only open to student-athletes, the university has support groups through SAPAC that are peer-led and open to all students.

“To make it an individual group for studentathletes because they exhibit the same stressors and opportunities and expectations is something that makes it specialized,” Wetterstrom said. “It’s just a safe place for everyone, and that’s the most important thing.”

But if you go looking for information on this group on any of the athletic department’s web pages, your search will come up empty. They want to change that.

“The University of Michigan has never done anything with malintent,” Wetterstrom said. “But

I feel like I’m finally standing on my own two feet.

two women can only do so much to spread the word. We’re creating a group for individuals in athletics and I know it’s not a glamorous topic. It’s not Big Ten basketball, or Big Ten football. But it’s an issue that we have on campus, on campuses down the road, campuses in other states, and yet I feel like it’s being swept under the rug and I would love more support from (the athletic department).”

While SASH is still in the beginning stages, its leaders have big plans for the future. Right now, they’re focusing on baby steps.

A logo. Creating a GroupMe for members. Acknowledgement from the athletic department. The bigger plans involve getting other Big Ten schools to create similar support groups and eventually every school in the NCAA. “Whether there’s three people in our meeting, or 300,” Wetterstrom said, “we’re happy to help anyone.”

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual assault, it’s not your fault. You are not alone.

Help is available 24/7. Contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE. The University of Michigan has a 24/7 crisis hotline 734-936-3333.

Roundtable: The Daily basketball beat on Michigan’s chances in March

ALEC COHEN/Daily

The Michigan men’s basketball team will play Montana in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Thursday, as it tries to return to the Final Four.

THE BASKETBALL BEAT Daily Sports Writers

Michigan is back in the NCAA Tournament. Now what?

The Wolverines’ selection to the tournament, which they will open by playing No. 15 seed Montana on Thursday night in Des Moines, Iowa, seemed to be met with a collective ennui.

After all, this was a team that, just an hour earlier, suffered a heartbreaking loss to Michigan State, this time in the Big Ten Tournament championship game, and went just 6-4 over its final 10 games — three of the losses coming to the Spartans. In opposition to previous seasons in which Michigan hit its stride in March, this team almost limped to the finish.

Still, the Wolverines didn’t start a program-record 17-0, win 28 games and earn a No. 2 seed for nothing. Despite an inconsistent offense, they have the second-best defense in the country, per KenPom — a stingy unit that should allow them to compete with anyone in the

bracket. In what appears to be a manageable West Regional, Michigan, should it put its recent struggles behind it, will fancy its chances of dancing deep into March and possibly April.

But will it actually do so?

The Daily men’s basketball beat writers offer their predictions of Michigan’s postseason fate: Aria Gerson: John Beilein has a reputation as a coach capable of March magic. With a team that won more games and earned a higher seed — No. 2 — than last year’s squad that made the national title game, expectations are once again high for the Wolverines.

Like last year, they should handle No. 15 seed Montana fairly easily. The Grizzlies have a lot of experience and can shoot, but lack size. That won’t serve them well against junior center Jon Teske. Ultimately, Michigan’s defense will overwhelm Montana in a low-scoring affair that may stay close in the first half.

In the second round, the Wolverines would meet either No. 7 seed Nevada or No. 10

seed Florida. The Wolfpack are not quite as good as their reputation, and while the Gators have a few impressive wins, they also lost to SEC bottomfeeder Georgia. Considering how Michigan looked against lowertier tournament teams in the Big Ten Tournament — beating Iowa and Minnesota by a combined 48 points — it should handle either of these opponents as well.

But once the Wolverines start playing better teams, they will run into trouble with a lack of offensive options. Michigan will find its way to the Sweet 16 for the third straight year, but that’s where their season will come to an end — most likely in a lowscoring slugfest against No. 3 seed Texas Tech.

Jacob Shames: Looking at the bracket as a whole, Michigan has to be pleased with its draw.

There’s no nightmare matchup in its way like a second-round run-in with Syracuse’s 2-3 zone, and Gonzaga is perceived as the weakest of the four No. 1 seeds in the bracket.

It’s hard for me to see the

Wolverines failing to make it out of Des Moines. They should handle Montana in the first round, Nevada’s talented, but isolationheavy offense plays right into their hands, and a cursory glance at Florida’s statistical profile seems to show a worse version of Michigan, essentially.

In the Sweet 16, Texas Tech’s defense, per KenPom, is the lone unit in the nation better than Michigan’s. But while shooting guard Jarrett Culver is legit, the Red Raiders’ offense mostly starts and ends with him. With Charles Matthews neutralizing Culver, the Wolverines will win a rock fight and move on to play Gonzaga.

But that’s where Michigan’s road will end.

Jon Teske is just one man, Ignas Brazdeikis doesn’t quite have a power forward’s size, and the Wolverines have had trouble guarding versatile forwards like Lamar Stevens, Luka Garza and Xavier Tillman. The Bulldogs have two.

Rui Hachimura and Brandon Clarke are absolute monsters

that can score, defend and crash the glass with anyone, and Josh Perkins, Zach Norvell and Corey Kispert can light it up from 3-point range. Don’t be fooled by the “Ain’t Played Nobody!” crowd: Gonzaga is for real. It might not have the reputation of a Duke or a North Carolina, but Michigan has yet to prove it can beat teams of the Bulldogs’ caliber.

In a game eerily reminiscent of the three games against Michigan State, Gonzaga pulls away down the stretch, the Wolverines can’t find a bucket-getter to elevate them over a superior team, and their season ends in Anaheim.

Ethan Sears: Across the board, Michigan’s draw wasn’t just considered favorable, but as good as it could have possibly been. Gonzaga is, universally, seen as the weakest 1-seed — and that seems to dictate how people are viewing this. I’m not entirely sure that’s correct.

You can chalk the first-round game against Montana up as a win. Barring some kind of disaster, the Wolverines win that on talent alone. But every matchup after that is deceptively tough.

Nevada has underperformed all season. Assuming they get past Florida, though, the Wolfpack also have multiple NBA-caliber players such as Caleb Martin and Jordan Caroline. It’s a game Michigan should win. It’s also a tough 7-seed to play in the second round.

Play out the rest of the bracket from there and the matchups all feel similar. The Wolverines should beat Texas Tech in the Sweet 16. Nobody would be surprised if they didn’t.

This draw isn’t easy, but it does put Michigan’s fate into its own hands. It won’t lose any of these games because it can’t match up with any of these teams, including Gonzaga. Whether the Wolverines play up to that potential is a different question entirely, and one their collective performances against Michigan State make hard to answer.

Right now, it’s hard to see this team putting it together offensively for enough games in a row to make it back to the Final

Four. The consistency just hasn’t been there, especially against higher-level competition.

Michigan’s season ends against Florida State in the Elite Eight.

Theo Mackie: On Sunday afternoon in Chicago, Michigan lost the Big Ten championship game to Michigan State — its third loss to the Spartans in three weeks. But despite the season sweep, it took mere minutes for the moods of the respective fanbases to turn.

While Michigan State was selected as the No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament’s East region, the Wolverines were sent out west — the prescribed punishment for being selected as the last 2-seed.

Except the West boasts the last No. 1 seed, Gonzaga, while the East is headlined by Zion Williamson and Duke.

Armed with a year of experience against Montana, its first-round opponent last year, Michigan should avoid the slow start that it had a year ago and cruise to the Round of 32. Neither of its two potential opponents there should inspire much fear.

Florida ranks 61st in adjusted offensive efficiency — a death knell if you’re hoping to beat the Wolverines — while Nevada’s individualistic offensive style should be no problem for Zavier Simpson and Michigan. The bigger reason that the Wolverines should stroll to the Sweet 16, though, is that this team rarely runs into trouble against mediocre teams.

The problem is that it also rarely finds success against elite ones, at least since late December.

And after a potential matchup with Texas Tech in the Sweet 16 that stacks up as a first-to-50wins defensive battle, an elite team is exactly what Michigan will face. That may come in the form of Gonzaga, one of the country’s most talented teams, or Florida State, one of its biggest and deepest.

And unless the Wolverines solve the offensive issues that have plagued them for months, that’s going to be a problem.

Ultimately, they’ll fall one game short of the Final Four.

statement

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

T H E M I CH I GA N DAI LY | M A RCH 20, 2019

Catch, exploit, release: How the prison system disrupts families

ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN KUZEE

2B

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 // The Statement

statement T H E M I CH I GA N DAI LY | FE B RUA RY 20, 2019

Managing Statement Editor Andrea Pérez Balderrama Deputy Editors Matthew Harmon Shannon Ors

Designers Liz Bigham Kate Glad

Photo Editor Annie Klusendorf

Copy Editors Miriam Francisco Madeline Turner

Running along

Editor in Chief Maya Goldman Managing Editor Finntan Storer

BY MICHELLE KIM, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

S

trewn in the corner was a pair of beat-up, grey and light blue Nike running sneakers.

“Are these yours?” my roommate asked.

“Yep!” I responded.

“Are you throwing them out?”

“Um … no not yet.”

She looked at me, confused, and walked away. From my desk, I could see my sneakers peeking out from behind the trash can.

I slyly tiptoed over, picked them up to inspect the rips around the laces and placed them back in my closet. I kept doing this for a week, putting my sneakers by the trash with the intent of throwing them out and then taking them back.

Yesterday I finally parted ways with them. As we left the apartment, my roommate watched reassuringly as I gave my sneakers one last longing look, took a deep breath and tossed them into the dumpster.

Dramatic, I know. It’s just that my feet had called this particularly pair of sneakers

home for eight years. They had molded perfectly around each toe and knew everything about where I’d been. I just didn’t think there would ever be a time to say goodbye.

The bottoms of these sneakers were practically shaved off due to my love for long-distance running — a hobby that stems from a childhood of long walks with my grandpa. What I remember most about him was his penchant for going on unreasonably long walks whenever he visited my family in America.

We would leave for hours at a time and meander around, hoping not to get lost with his limited English and my nonexistent map skills. I would stand next to him, trying to mirror the length of his steps and bending back to match his beer belly. Those are my favorite memories — walking side by side, town to town. Before cell phones, before growing up and before Parkinson’s, it was just us two.

The diagnosis came to us as a complete shock. My grandpa had been a force of nature, always on the go, but suddenly this disease made it seem like the older he got, the younger he became. It was painful to sit at the kitchen table and watch silently as he struggled to cut his food but refused to let us help and succumb to the disease. We watched as he lost his ability to move his body, his ability to be self-sufficient and, eventually, his memory.

He passed away because with everything he lost, he held onto his stubbornness.

Refusing to sit still, he insisted on walking so he could get better and get on a plane one last time to visit me in America. On his last long walk, he took a hard fall and was gone.

This is what you would have learned if you were in my shoes four years ago.

After his passing, the runs were long, angry and sad. When I ran, I experienced a pain that made sense and physically manifested itself. I could focus solely on breathing, and forget all the worries and

responsibilities in my life. I ran until I was so exhausted that I couldn’t feel. I was resentful that I couldn’t attend his funeral all the way in Korea, and I was devastated that the last thing I got to tell him was that I had been accepted to the University of Michigan. Never would I be able to walk alongside him and talk for hours about how amazing my life would become. During those runs, I was really heartbroken.

Eventually though, the runs got happier and freer because through my runs, I found closure. With every mile, I thought about the times I did get to have with my grandpa. How on our long walks, we would talk about his childhood in the rural areas of Korea, and how I would fill him in on the latest book I was reading or the new friend I had made at school. The runs became less about expelling anger and more about reflecting on our extraordinary relationship. I began to slip on my sneakers with enthusiasm, ready to take another joy-filled run for the day.

Those sneakers were my crutch for eight years. Throwing them away was hard because I was throwing away my sole companion in the especially difficult days after my grandpa was gone. They had been with me every step of the way, literally. There were hard times, yes, but I think back now that there had been even more great times.

I wore them for every field hockey game— celebrating in them after an incredible nationals win. We took the very first step out of the van and into Ann Arbor together, to the place where I would grow and learn the most. We avoided the ‘M’ on the Diag as we learned the nuances of college life, and trekked miles around cobblestoned Europe during an incredible semester abroad.

Today I got a new pair and presented them proudly to my roommate. “My feet have a new home!” I exclaimed as she laughed. Then I stepped outside, ready to log a new set of miles that would take me who-knows-where. I started with a left and ran, just not away from something or against someone. I ran towards another exciting, unforeseen eight years and I ran for my grandpa. Sometimes I even like to think he’s here again, healthy, and running with me.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

We could all be camels

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 // The Statement

I

3B

BY CHRISTINE JEGARL, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

went to Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Stuyvesant was a part of the eight “specialized high schools” run by the NYC Department of Education that “supports the educational needs of students who excel academically and/or artistically.” To be admitted, students needed to score well on an exam called the SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test). Stuyvesant stood at the top of the nine schools, and my experience there unfortunately both met and exceeded its grandeur and intimidating image.

The picture I am about to paint in your mind may seem like fiction, but all I can say is that I wish it was: Most students wake up at 6 in the morning to make a one-hour commute to school, they sleep about four hours a night, they have about eight to nine academic classes scheduled per day, of which about four to five of them are Advanced Placement or honors classes.

When school ends at 4 in the afternoon, most students have around one to two hours of extracurricular activities (which colleges love), then they get home around 6 or 7 to work on their mountain load of homework until 2 a.m. Yet, even the seven to eight hours of studying students do a night is not enough time to finish all the work assigned to them.

Of course, students did have the option to take fewer classes and not participate in extracurricular activities, but it simply was not a choice for many. The peer pressure and cut-throat environment of my high school severely limited students’ autonomy over their decisions.

You could only imagine the mental and physical toll this would have on the students. Mental health was a big issue at Stuyvesant. A year didn’t go by without hearing about a suicide attempt or students suffering from depression or anxiety.

Being in this kind of environment fostered a perpetual restlessness inside of me.

There was always something that needed to be done. It didn’t matter the month, week, day or hour.

This feeling of being chased by deadlines didn’t go away even during breaks or the summer months. There was always summer homework and the need to prepare for the next big thing —the SAT, SAT subject tests, next year’s curriculum and college essays. I don’t remember if there was ever a moment when I felt like I didn’t have something I had to do.

I became used to this kind of constant pressure and developed a persistent need to keep myself occupied. This is why I wrote notes from my biology textbook on train rides to and from church, why I brought my design homework to volunteering events, why I laminated my chemistry notes and studied them in the shower, why I read on my bus rides to school, why I read from small sheets of paper on my bike rides to school and why I studied while walking

to class.

Sustaining this lifestyle of constantly doing something developed into my need for constant stimulation. If I didn’t feel stimulated by anything, I felt like I was wasting time. Whenever I was in the shower, doing the laundry or washing the dishes, I felt the need to at least turn on a YouTube video or listen to music.

Being a child of immigrant parents and coming from an Asian family with high expectations also heavily influenced this type of behavior. My mother always compared me to other students and insisted that I must keep working no matter what.

She was quite emphatic of this to the point that whenever I slept, I would be terrified of my mother catching me in the act, because she always yelled at me when I was unconscious.

Everything changed when I entered the University of Michigan as a freshman. The main difference was that I began to have so much free time. At first I embraced this change; after all, who doesn’t like a break?

During my free time, I started to work on my unfinished novel from middle school, read books and spent time watching videos. But, eventually my pervasive habits from high school began creeping back into my life.

I started feeling restless again. I was conditioned to stress, so I wasn’t comfortable with any other state of mind. I was anxious whenever I didn’t have something to do in the upcoming hour. I felt guilty if I took an hour of break at the end of the day. I never did anything unless it had a purpose.

And you may find this the craziest of all: Whenever I walked into a bathroom stall, I found it necessary to console myself that I wasn’t wasting time.

When I stopped to reflect on why I would not let myself fully adopt the more relaxed lifestyle I had indulged in at the beginning of my freshman year, I arrived at three answers.

First, I feel like I am in a race — one that will not end until I die. Let me clarify: In this race, I feel like I am being tested as a human being. If I do not build up perseverance and a tolerance to stressful events now, I believe in 20 years I will feel inadequate as a human being. Of course, the ability to handle stressful events is not the only measure of human competence, but it is the one I find myself emphasizing the most.

Second, it was simply difficult to get rid of old habits. I kept telling myself, “Life won’t always be as easy as it is now.” I won’t always have a few hours to spare and relax every day. I won’t always have the oppor-

tunity to sleep eight hours a day. I won’t always be blessed with a light workload.

Hence, by indulging myself right now and not toughening myself up, I would become unprepared for life’s misery in the future, thus dooming myself to failure. These grim thoughts about the future, led me back to my first point: Stuyvesant taught me that what I experienced during high school would be what the “adult world” was going to be like. I couldn’t expect anything but a stressful future, because that was the only thing that life had given me in the past. And who can blame me? If the only thing that life teaches you is suffering, how can you hope for anything else?

I watched a TV show a couple years ago about a protagonist who suffered from child abuse and developed schizophrenia as a result. The protagonist compared himself to a camel. He explained how owners of camels tie the animals to desert trees during the night. The next morning, even when the owners untie their camels, they don’t run away. The camels remember their imprisonment to the tree the night before, so they remain “trapped” there the next morning — just like how we remember our past wounds. The pain manifests into a trauma and our past keeps us forever chained and imprisoned.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

4B

Wednesday, March 20. 2019 // The Statement

Catch, exploit, release: How the prison system disrupts families

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 // The Statement

5B

BY JOEL DANILEWITZ, EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

A

s a wall painter in Allen Park, Ryan Flores had been sober for over a decade after his arrest in 2006 for possession of cocaine and other narcotics. Through painting, he was managing to provide a steady source of income for his son, Andrew. Andrew’s mother, who also had problems with drug abuse, left them both when Andrew was born. As Andrew’s primary caretaker, Flores was a constant presence for his son. They went to nature parks, concerts, restaurants — as his sister Stefanie Veselaneck described to me, “They would do everything together. … They were inseparable.”

“I was able to save money and I had a vehicle. I don’t know. It was just a better life,” Flores said of the years after his release. He managed to grow his business and provide security for his son during this time.

About 9 years later, though, in November 2016, Flores was on his way to work when he got in a car accident, totaling his truck and injuring his back and wrist. The company that towed his car, Westland Car Care Automotive, connected him with the Southfield Pain Clinic, which would pick him up from his home and take him to various clinicians and doctors to treat his pain.

One of the doctors he visited, Dr. Johnny Trotter II, began prescribing him medications such as OxyContin and Xanax to alleviate his pain, his mother said. Flores disclosed his prior drug history with the doctor. However, he trusted Trotter’s credibility and took the prescribed analgesics, despite OxyContin being a potent and addictive opioid (Trotter has since been convicted of health care fraud totaling over $28 million in cash and property).

“That was probably one of the roughest times I’ve ever had … I think a lot of it had to do with the Xanax,” Flores said in a phone interview from prison, referencing the prescriptions he was given. “I mean I’m sure it was everything …

But like I was taking the Xanax and … the muscle relaxers that were prescribed.”

As the opioid crisis has demonstrated, OxyContin and oxycodone, the generic form of the drug, have also led people to turn to more potent drugs, such as heroin and fentanyl. Soon after, Flores began abusing his prescriptions, and when ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

he couldn’t receive any more, he started stealing them. Months after the accident, he broke into a home during a high stupor.

A week later, the police broke down the door of his mother’s house where he was living and arrested Flores, taking him away for questioning.

The effects of the drugs were still clouding his judgment during the interrogation.

“I felt like I was going to die … There’s really no way else to explain how that works,” Flores said while recounting the arrest.

He was told the prosecutor would seek a life sentence should he not accept a plea bargain.

Flores, still inundated by the effects of the opioids, accepted the bargain. He was charged as a fourth time habitual offender, despite not coming into conflict with the law in over nine years, with his other arrests occurring as a minor in 1996.

The plea and sentencing, which lasted a total of 18 minutes, sent Flores to prison for a five-year minimum sentence, mandated $3,700 in restitution and $1,300 in court fees. Veselaneck, a single mom who works at the Rusted Crow Distillery in Dearborn Heights, claimed the counsel was seemingly uninterested in helping Flores.

“Obviously we don’t have the money, so (Ryan) wasn’t able to go and get an amazing attorney,” she said, recalling the trial. “So he had to get a court appointed one and … they didn’t care.”

Her nephew, Andrew, claimed the lawyer said, “He had two honeys waiting for him in Chicago and he was just trying to get out for the weekend.”

In a letter Flores wrote to Judge Sean F. Cox, he said one of his attorneys said he “just wanted to get my arraignment over with.”

After the sentencing, the victim forgave Flores, who showed immense guilt for his crime. However, this was after the sentence was delivered and didn’t alter his conviction.

Flores appealed his sentence, claiming his counsel was ineffective due to the revolving door of lawyers sent from the public defender to work on his case and the waiving of a preliminary examination. He also appealed the imposed court costs of $1,300 on account of indigence, or extreme poverty due to his lack of verifiable employment at the time of the arrest. His appeal was denied and his sentence was reaffirmed.

Flores’ appeals lawyer, Jayne Carver, spoke with me about the nature of his sentencing.

“He did get a sentencing agreement. So he actually was sentenced to lower than his guideline range.” She said that there is a “big however,” which is called the “10-year gap rule,” where felonies more than 10 years old cannot be counted as habitual offenders.

“Unfortunately it’s from a discharge date of his last offense until the commission of the new offense,” she continued, “which in his case was I think about 9 years. So, in my opinion, his guideline score was artificially inflated.”

His background is something that may have come up during a preliminary examination. However, one of his court-appointed attorneys waived the preliminary exam, which would have determined if there was probable cause to proceed to trial, though it is unclear how much this would have impacted his trial considering he admitted to his crime. lores’ case is an aggravation of systemic issues facing working class individuals, both in Michigan and the United States.

It is also, in part, an example of the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged communities across the Midwest as pharmaceutical companies have exploited people like Flores.

Heather Ann Thompson, a University of Michigan professor in the History and Afroamerican and African Studies departments as well as a Pulitzer-winning author for her work on the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, described how this story exhibits the common practice of incarcerating people with substance abuse problems.

“Those who have run afoul of the law often do so for reasons of health, you know, addiction, public health reasons, not actual criminal justice reasons,” she said.

In a study conducted between 2007 and 2009 by the U.S. Department of Justice, over half of state prisoners and two-thirds of jail inmates met the criteria for substance abuse or dependence.

This study was conducted prior to the current opioid crisis and doesn’t take into account the massive increase in drug abuse that ensued in the years following. Such criminalizing policies also disproportionately impact people of color.

F

Once the system ensnares people like Flores, it exploits their families’ finances, as Thompson described.

“It requires poverty to get into the system to begin with,” she said. “And ironically, once you get into the system, the one thing you need most to navigate it as a family and as an incarcerated person is money.”

Incarcerated people on average have a median income of $19,185 prior to their imprisonment, a figure that is 41 percent less than non-incarcerated people.

Sandra Parker, Flores’ mom, spoke of the myriad of ways she is bankrolling her son’s health and safety from outside the prison walls of the Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson. One would assume the prison provides the items she buys for Flores. But often, some of the necessities that Parker has to pay for are not provided at all by the prison. In the items that are provided, the issue lies within the quality of the necessities they are receiving. There have been several recorded instances in Michigan prisons of maggots, mold and “crunchy dirt” found in the prison cafeteria food.

“Deodorant, toothpaste, soap, food, you know, socks, underwear. And with the winter, we had to buy him two sets of gloves and hats because they get stolen. And (the prison doesn’t) care,” Parker said. “A pair of socks is like $12. It’s like two something for one package of ramen over there.” A pack of ramen noodles at Meijer is typically about $1.

There are also transportation costs. From the area they live in to Flores’ prison, Flores’ sister said that to drive, “It’s about an hour and 10 minutes maybe.”

She noted that her car’s low mileage usually means that she has to refill her tank every time she wants to visit him. Sometimes, because her mother prefers not to drive on the highway, she will drive her. And if they cannot visit Flores that week, there are the costs associated with placing calls and sending and receiving emails.

When I asked how much these expenses totaled up to, she said some months it can reach up to $1,300. This may also include copays to visit the medical infirmary, which Flores says is usually around $5 a visit for something as low-mainte-

nance as a headache. Flores said he makes just 40 to 50 cents a day in his GED course, making it difficult to pay for such expenses on his own.

Though Ryan has the support of his mother, for others, not having family on the outside can exacerbate these issues. There’s also the concern over paying his restitution, which is the recompense that perpetrators are ordered to pay victims. This is usually taken from the funds put in one’s commissary and wages they accumulate from the jobs given inside prison.

This kind of spending strains his family’s finances. Parker is a special education teacher at the Creative Montessori Academy in Southgate, and the items Parker mentioned don’t begin to touch the payments Flores and his family will have to make if he is released on parole.

Flores and his family’s pecuniary engagement with the prison is not the result of his criminal background (which is a non-violent one that stems from issues with addiction, a health issue state and federal lawmakers have a penchant for criminalizing). It is the product of a web of private corporations capitalizing on families who try to care for their incarcerated loved ones and is reified by state and federal policies. This engenders an inter-generational struggle, creating a vicious cycle of indemnity that can easily damage families and communities. n March 13, the Carceral State Project hosted their fifth event at the University. The project, which was spearheaded in 2016 by Thompson, brings the community together to discuss the impacts of mass incarceration. At the event, the panel members discussed how incarceration disrupts and destroys communities — for example, how children can be adversely affected through policies that inure them at an early age to the criminal justice system. The panel of five consisted of experts, counselors and community activists. This included Kathie Gourlay, whose son had been previously incarcerated.

Gourlay and her husband, Don Campbell, who are an older couple whose years are dense with interactions with the criminal justice system, discussed the exhaustive list of costs associated with supporting a family member in prison.

“We only went (drove) five and a half hours,”

O

Gourlay said, describing the weekends her and Campbell took to visit their son, who was incarcerated in a prison in the Upper Peninsula. There are 31 prisons in Michigan, holding more than 45,000 inmates. Six of those prisons are in the Upper Peninsula, a far drive for most, especially considering that the majority of crime in Michigan occurs within the Metro Detroit area.

“And we’d have to spend the night and the bridge is eight dollars to go over,” she continued, detailing a trek that can be perilous during the biting cold of winter.

“Not to mention the gas,” Campbell chimed in.

“So you’re looking at $50 to $70 in gas.”

And despite the extensive lengths the couple would take, there was still the possibility they would be denied entry. If a prisoner were to get into an altercation, then they would be held in a secure facility that has separate visiting hours.

This happened on one occasion to the couple, and they were not informed of this until they arrived at the prison, after preparing and driving for a weekend-long trip.

“Once you’re in prison, they don’t care about the family,” Gourlay said during the program.

“The only time they’ll tell you anything is if your family member is almost dead.”

Later that week, I spoke over the phone with James Dankovich. Dankovich is a chiropractor who is involved with several criminal justice initiatives. His son, Chris, has been incarcerated since 2005. He said there were several instances in which he would drive over an hour to visit his son, only to be denied entry because of a security drill.

“Sometimes the facility will have what’s called an emergency count, which means you drive all the way up there to the facility and they won’t let you see your loved one because they’re running a security drill and they have a mandatory number of (emergency drills),” Dankovich said.

The panelists at the event discussed how time consuming these trips can be, especially for a lower-income family who already has to set aside money for such traveling. Often, this means a prisoner won’t end up receiving visitors.

“We spent one full visiting day in the winter.

We were the only visitors,” said Gourlay, describ-

ing one particular trip. “There’s 2,000 prisoners there.”

The emptied visiting rooms reflect the onerous journey that hinders a family’s attempt to see loved ones. One study by the Prison Policy Initiative found less than a third of people in state prisons receive visits from family or friends in a given month. Another saw, among incarcerated people locked up less than 50 miles from their home, about half of them receive visits. This number dwindles dramatically as the distance grows. And arduous travel is just one of systemic factors that separates families.

Several states have austere policies that further hinder a family’s ability to visit, despite studies demonstrating that visits and, hence, the maintenance of family ties, serve as one of the leading ways to reduce recidivism, or reentry into prison.

States such as New York are more lenient, permitting visits any day of the year. Others are more restrictive. North Carolina allows visits only once a week. Beyond limits on number of visits, there are also invasive policies such as those found in Arkansas and Kentucky, which requires prospective visitors to submit their social security numbers upon entry request. In Arizona, travel isn’t the only consideration made when visiting; visitors must also pay a $25 background check fee before a prison permits your entrance.

Some policies are so vague they can be interpreted at the whim of the correctional officer on duty. In Washington state, a ban on “excessive emotion” is a rule left to the discretion of officers, meaning they can remove people indiscriminately.

Some states have begun reforming these policies, looking to close the gap between family members on the outside and inside. While Washington state is home to such unnecessary legislation, it also passed the Family and Offender Sentencing Act, which lets judges impose community custody for primary caregivers of minors in lieu of imprisonment — a ruling where the convicted spends part of their sentence in the community instead of in prison.

In Michigan, nonprofits have been taking up the mantle where legislators fall short. Organizations such as the Oakland Livingston Human Ser-

6B

Wednesday, March 20, 2019// The Statement

“There seems to be little rationale for erecting such factitious monetary obstacles for something as crucial as maintaining contact with those on the outside.” vice Agency have spurred programs that allow incarcerated fathers to spend several hour-long visits with their children with room for activities.

Still, the barriers erected between the prisoners and their families exposes a cynical distrust of not only the incarcerated, but the relationships they have beyond prison walls. States like Michigan could unburden families by creating policies that place prisoners in facilities that are closer to their homes.

However, the hardline policies comprise the central problem of an institutionalized, overcrowded prison industrial complex. These policies send prisoners away in every direction to a network of facilities that resembles something ecumenical in its disproportionate presence and outsize influence on communities.

Since the 1980s and 1990s, state and federal legislators have crafted policy such as habitual offender laws that mandatesentencing that includes life without parole, even if the offense is nonviolent. There are truth-in-sentencing laws, which eliminate the possibility for prisoners to be released on “good behavior.” There are the racist, seemingly inexorable policies that disproportionately imprison Black and Latinx individuals, and the classist bail policies that favor the rich and ensure that those who cannot post bail remain indentured to the criminal justice system.

The problem with distance is inextricably tied to these esoteric policies long justified by the state and country to incarcerate as aimlessly as possible. If the U.S. didn’t have the highestincarceration rate in the world, perhaps seeing a loved one would not be such a formidable endeavor. *** Ashley Lucas is one of the University’s most prominent voices on criminal justice reform. An associate professor of Theatre & Drama, she also directs the Prison Creative Arts Project, an organization run through the RC that centers around artistic collaboration between prisoners and students as a means of restorative justice. She has written extensively about the impacts of the criminal justice system and moderated the most recent Carceral State Project Symposium panel.

Lucas spoke with me over the phone about the unending list of costs associated with communication between family members and their loved ones in prison. No matter

the channel through which a family member may contact someone in prison, there is always some kind of payment associated with it. One company that prisons contract with for email services is JPay. JPay is a private corporation that state and federal prisons contract with to provide e-messaging services.

Despite the free email servers provided outside prison walls such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail, JPay users must pay “stamps,” which are electronic tokens that fluctuate in price, typically covering about a page of information for anywhere from 35 to 47 cents per page. Prisons receive a commission based on this spending. Lucas described how, often, prisoners or family members will send a message without any clear indicator of how much they will end up being charged to send it.

“When you’re typing into the email textbox on your screen (through JPay), you can’t actually see when you’ve crossed onto another page,” Lucas said.“So right after you send the email, it tells you how many digital stamps it’s going to charge you … But because you can’t see where the page starts and ends, you could be just one line of text over and they’ll go ahead and charge you for that page, but if you had known that then you would’ve been able to edit your letter down a line or two in order to make it not charge you more.”

Paying for these on a salary that is typically well below a dollar an hour ensures that prisoners have to be extra wary, and their family members may have to be the ones to pay more. However, as Lucas said, often the person incarcerated was the one providing the most consistent source of income for the family.

“When you lock someone up, you’re taking a person out of the lifecycle of a family,” she said. “You’re taking away a financial contributor, you’re taking away someone who provides childcare, eldercare, you’re taking away a sense of stability in the household.”

In an interview with Wired magazine, Holly Kramer, a communications representative for the Michigan Department of Corrections, said, “Maintaining a positive network of support is really important to their future success when they rejoin the community.” MDOC has contracted with JPay since 2009.

In the same article by Wired, Jade Trombetta, JPay’s senior manager, said, “Part of JPay’s mission is to provide technology … (that) empowers those individuals with access to educational tools and assists in their overall rehabilitation process.” However, when asked by Wired to discuss the reasoning behind payments or price fluctuation, she declined to comment.

JPay continues to be a central source for communicating with family members, proving that their model capitalizes off of this market specific to prisoners is lucrative.

Prisons make a five cent commission off each message, which generated about $710,000for prisons in 2014. This continues to be profitable in Michigan, as 800,000 to 1 million messages are sent a month. Should families choose an alternative, such as phone calling, they will have to pay about 20 cents per hour, which goes to JPay’s parent company, Securus. This is essentially extortion. Ironically, when Flores called me to conduct his interview, the prison’s operator told me to hang up should he try to extort me.

The state budget for prison service that one would associate with paying for these services does not have money allocated for these communications. This is despite the $1.95 billion allotted to MDOC, making up a fifth of Michigan’s general fund. However, in the fall 2019 to 2020 list of appropriations, on which there were 21 changes in budget allocations, there was nothing regarding outside communications.

Even if prisoners are paying for their messages to be sent, correctional officers still peruse everything sent.

Lucas spoke briefly about this, saying, “All the emails are

still being read or censored or vetted by the prison mail room. It’s all being filtered through the prison for information control before it sees the outside world.” Whatever is being sent, prison officials are entitled to read non-privileged messages sent to and from facilities.

For those trying to keep in constant contact with the incarcerated family members, companies such as JPay and Securus ensure costly hurdles to communication. There seems to be little rationale for erecting such factitious monetary obstacles for something as crucial as maintaining contact with those on the outside. *** Family savings groan under the weight of institutional costs from incarceration even after the family member leaves prison, especially if it’s on parole. This issue is something Gourlay and Campbell were forced to familiarize themselves with after their son was released from prison.

“When you’re on parole, you have to pay specific fees every time you do something,” Campbell said. “There’s the supervision fee of $600. There’s the $50 a year fee. We spent probably, I’m guessing, over $25,000 in lawyers’ fees that our son use the appeals lawyer to get some things on his PSI changed.” A PSI is a pre-sentence investigation report and is used by judges when sentencing an offender.

“And lo and behold, that was $775 that he had to pay back.

You know, we didn’t even know that there was going to be a charge on that. You know it’s just one thing after another.”

In the case of their son, they mentioned they were lucky they could provide for these costs. However, for someone whose family may struggle in this regard, the likelihood of recidivism may increase. Probationers and parolees are often required to pay the costs for parole advisement, as well as for programs they may enter for drug treatment or rehabilitation after their time in prison.

Though the Constitution protects those who have exhibited indigence to the extent that they cannot pay whatsoever, those who demonstrate that they may have the means to pay are often required to do so.

In Massachusetts, there are 67,000 people on probation.

They are charged $50 to $65 monthly, depending on their “tier” of probation, which is either supervised or administrative. Failure to pay these fees can result in jail time.

These probation service fees total to over $20 million a year. This is just one state example of the laws states have put in place that have the potential to reincarcerate parolees.

This becomes an issue for those wishing to re-enter society with a fresh start, something that is already impossible considering the numerous barriers that prohibit those with criminal records from working. With new financial burdens to consider, recidivism becomes a more likely outcome.

This is something that causes Flores’ sister, Stefanie Veselaneck, frequent concern.

“I’m not sure how he’s going to look like, I don’t know how he’s going to feel about trying to go back to doing what he does, like painting and stuff,” she told me, her voice wobbly over the phone. “I don’t know. I just really worry about him getting out and not being able to adjust back to being an everyday, normal-life person.”

Despite the endless systemic pressures that supporting a loved one in prison entails, and the knowledge that even Flores’ release doesn’t mean the end of such concerns, Flores strives to be hopeful for his family. In a written letter sent to his son Andrew for his 20th birthday, he wrote, “I’m sorry for having to have made it so you and nan are take (sic) care of me now. I know how expensive all of this is an (sic) trust me Andrew it means the world to me. Without everything you do I prob wouldn’t make it or struggle really bad … I will get out of here and change my ways and be by your side and be the dad/best friend I am supposed to be! You are my everything Andrew!”

Wednesday,January March 20, 2019 // // The The Statement Statement Wednesday, 16, 2019

7B 7B

Facebook and privacy: from antonym to ally in 12 months F

or decades, Wall Street has been viewed as an antagonist of the American people. Banks are continuously under scrutiny for irresponsible money management, with the notorious Public Eye “Award” dishonors frequently being bestowed upon them. This narrative was only solidified by the 2008 subpar mortgage crisis, largely credited to the Street’s blend of inadequate due diligence and austere greed. But now, data is the currency of our business world, and it is one that we pay forward to use free services like social media. Tech companies have taken on the pressure that was once placed on Wall Street, and are now under the spotlight with an even larger obligation: using our credit card, address, contact info, social network, and purchase data responsibly.

One of the largest offenders of data irresponsibility is Facebook. While it is most known for its Cambridge Analytica data scandal, there is far more that may have missed major headlines. Let’s take a deep dive into what has happened over a tumultuous 12 months in Facebook’s rocky relationship with user data privacy: March 2018: Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm, when they violated Facebook rules by collecting 87 million Americans’ data for hyper-targeted advertising, and lied to Facebook about deleting the data. Facebook had learned about the data collection back in 2015, but did not follow-up on the data deletion until 2018. The three-week aftermath of the news? An 18 percent drop in its stock price, the stepping down of former Security Chief Alex Stamos, and an FTC investigation. Although #deleteFacebook started trending nationwide, many started to realize that #TooBigToFail also applies to tech companies.

April 2018: “Senator, we run ads.” As Facebook’s stock began to recover, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in front of the Senate was filled with apologies and optimism for the firm. The company began taking action, too, revamping its privacy tools to allow users easy insight into the comprehensive data that Facebook has from them. The bad news? Zuckerberg isn’t the only one with problems on his hands.

Regulators have a hefty task of figuring out how to create legislation that can reign in an entity more powerful and complex than Congress itself.

Late April-May 2018: Deleting about 200 suspicious apps, 800plus million spam posts and rolling out an apology ad during the NBA Playoffs, Facebook began cleaning up its act. Apologies turned from words to action, as Facebook agreed to comply with the European Union’s revolutionary data-privacy General Data Protection Regulation law.

June 2018: Spring cleaning, however, didn’t last long. June began with a New York Times accusation of Facebook sharing excessive user data with device manufacturers like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and BlackBerry. When users accessed Facebook on these devices, tech manufacturing firms allegedly gained access to Facebook user data as well as users’ friends’ data. And when it rains, it pours: Days later, Facebook found a software bug that caused about 14 million private accounts to become public.

July 2018: Privacy stayed center stage for Facebook. The month kicked off with yet another apology from Zuckerberg, as a six-day software bug that allowed blocked users to temporarily access and view the accounts of those who had

BY ROMY SHARMA, STATEMENT COLUMNIST blocked them. To wrap up the month, when dismal second quarter earnings revealed shockingly low revenue growth, Facebook saw the largest one-day loss in stock market history. The record-breaking abuse of data privacy had finally caught up to the company in a serious way.

October 2018: October wasted no time in spooking Facebook. News surfaced that hackers were able to access information from roughly 29 million accounts — including Zuckerberg’s very own. Just six months after the Cambridge Analytica disaster, Facebook had once again found itself at odds with user data privacy. In hopes of making progress through tumult, Facebook made a bold move in their playbook a week later, launching Facebook Portal: an in-home hardware device that functions like FaceTime, but with a wider screen and a camera that follows users during the call.

With the chronic misuse of data preceding the launch, many viewed the in-home device with skepticism. And while still

dealing with the data breach from the start of the month, Facebook announced a few days after the Portal launch that they had fixed a bug found in August that had allowed hackers to hijack users’ WhatsApp accounts when they answered an incoming video call. By mid-October, major investors expressed their exhaustion with the company’s irresponsibility, and called for Zuckerberg to step down from the company’s Board of Directors.

December 2018: Facebook wrapped up the year solidifying itself as the enemy of responsible data utility when the Parliament of the United Kingdom released a slew of internal Facebook documents, revealing that Facebook created an entire marketplace with its user data.It gave companies such as Netflix, Microsoft and Amazon special access to Facebook user data, while limiting this database access to Facebook’s

own competitors. Mid-December, Facebook continued what began to feel like empty apologies when they released news that a bug may have exposed unshared photos of roughly 7 million users to up to 1,500 third-party apps. A few days after, Facebook received news that the Washington, D.C. attorney general, was finally suing the firm for the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

January 2019: Mark Zuckerberg rang in the New Year with one resolution: fixing Facebook. But toward the end of the month, news broke that Facebook had been secretly paying people between the ages of 13 and 35 to install a “Facebook Research” VPN, letting the company acquire the entirety of a user’s web activity. The compensation? $20 per month. Within hours of the news breaking, Facebook shut down the iOS Facebook Research app. Despite the uneasy news, January concluded with a strong earnings report, sending the stock up nearly 12 percent.

February 2019: Facebook turned 15, but leaders worldwide were doing everything but celebrating. German antitrust officials wielded their gavels and ordered Facebook to stop merging the data it collects on users’ activities across the internet without their consent.

Weeks later, the UK Parliament released a 100 plus page document accusing Facebook of their beyond-thelaw behavior and recommended that the UK create a watchdog to oversee tech companies. Soon thereafter, New Zealand hinted at taxing multinational internet companies up to 3 percent.

March 2019: This month, while Facebook Coin is stirring conversation among cryptocurrency skeptics, Facebook made a colossal change to their blueprint that may just redefine the company as we know it: pivoting their strategy toward private communication. After a long year of broken privacy promises, this may look like a hollow tactic at face value. However, Zuckerberg’s lengthy blog post begs to differ. He is revamping the company on one big bet: the movement from public posting to small-group sharing. What does this really mean? Perfecting the art of encrypted messaging.

While action is yet to follow his words, this new strategy ultimately means leveraging its less-than-ideal reputation in privacy, and strengthening it to the point of focal purpose. How do we know that this is the real deal? Just last Friday, Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, stepped down, calling the shift a “big project” that demands leaders who are “excited to see the new direction through.” As one of Facebook’s first 15 engineers, it sounds like encryption didn’t sit too well with the executive.

The year 2018 was everything but kind to Facebook users, but the U.S. government is yet to properly penalize the tech mogul. While data privacy is a direct issue that all users equitably seek resolve from, the fact of the matter is that lawmakers and the FTC do not have the resources to suitably regulate companies of such massive size. The FTC’s largest fine to date is $22.5 million, charged back in 2011 to Google after the company tracked userson Apple Safari without their consent.

For a multi-billion dollar company, this is less than a slap on the wrist.

For now, users and legislators can only hold out hope that the move to private communication is a move toward data responsibility on Facebook’s chessboard.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

8B

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 // The Statement

VISUAL STATEMENT KATELYN MULCAHY BY

“ THE

MICHIGAN WOMEN’S GYMNASTICS TEAM IS ALMOST DONE WITH THEIR RECORD SEASON AND I WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO FOLLOW THEM BEHIND-THE-SCENES, SPECIFICALLY AT ELEVATE THE STAGE, WHERE THEY WERE COMPETING FOR THE 2019 BIG TEN REGULAR SEASON CHAMPIONSHIP. HAVING COVERED THEM FOR ALMOST THEIR ENTIRE SEASON, I WANTED TO EXPERIMENT WITH DIFFERENT PICTURES THAN BEFORE, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE IT WAS IN A NEW PLACE. WITH THE REGULAR SEASON CHAMPIONSHIP ON THE LINE, MY GOAL WAS TO CAPTURE EVERYTHING—THE PREP BEFORE A MEET, THE PAYOFF AFTER A GOOD ROUTINE AND ANYTHING IN BETWEEN. BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR MORE BEHIND-THE-SCENES PHOTOS AHEAD OF THE 2019 BIG TEN WOMEN’S GYMNASTICS TOURNAMENT CHAMPIONSHIPS AT PENN STATE THIS SATURDAY.”