2020-02-26

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Ann Arbor, Michigan

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Schlissel: endowment should not be political University investigates allegations against Provost, late Dr. Anderson EMMA STEIN, CALDER LEWIS & ARJUN THAKKAR EMMA MATI/Daily

Pence talks manufacturing jobs, re-election campaign at Troy rally Vice President Mike Pence rallies supporters at the Keep America Great event in Troy, Michigan Tuesday evening.

Vice President also touches on Mexican-American border, economic growth JULIA FORREST Daily Staff Reporter

Hundreds of supporters filled the conference room of the Detroit Marriott in Troy, Mich. on Tuesday wearing bright red “Make America Great Again” hats and chanting “four more years.” The crowd was there to hear from Vice President Mike Pence and rally in support of President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Pence’s stop in Troy was the

final leg of his day-long bus tour of Michigan. Pence spoke in Lansing at the Michigan Farm Bureau’s legislative seminar earlier in the day.

Though Trump won Michigan in 2016 by 10,704 votes over Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, Trump lost in Troy by 314 votes. However, Trump did win Macomb County, which borders Troy and is considered a key battleground county in the state.

The event opened with remarks from Laura Cox, Michigan Republican Party chairwoman, who spoke about her support for Trump and Pence.

“President Trump and Vice President Pence made a promise to fight for Michigan,” Cox said to the crowd. “And I know no matter what, and everyone here in this room will vote to re-elect the President.

Promises made and promises kept.”

Cox then turned the mic over to Sonny Perdue, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, to introduce and promote Pence.

“President Trump, as great as we know, he’s had a great wingman beside him all the way,” Perdue said. “I can tell you, I’ve never heard an administration that loves America and puts America first more than the TrumpPence administration.”

See PENCE, Page 2A

Daily News Editor & Daily Staff Reporters

Each month, The Michigan Daily sits down with the University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel to discuss important questions about University policy, commitments and challenges.

Topics discussed in this month’s interview included the endowment, Provost Martin Philbert, sexual misconduct policy, GEO bargaining and health services at U-M Flint and Dearborn.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Endowment The Michigan Daily: At the Regents meeting on Thursday, after many student protests, the board announced they were freezing all fossil fuel investments while they study the current investment policy.

Would you like to comment on

Students Activists discuss CSG President in health Ben Gerstein’s 2017 comments criticize Public speakers respond to previous statements on Palestine at meeting advising ACADEMICS

JULIA RUBIN

Many express frustration with months-long wait times, lack of advisers SAINI KETHIREDDY Daily Staff Reporter

LSA junior Kathleen Young is applying to medical schools this summer and said advisers are important to help address a “secret checklist” of requirements to be accepted into medical school. This checklist includes volunteering, research and shadowing doctors.

Young sees a pre-health adviser once a month to answer her questions regarding the process.

However, she said when she sees the adviser, it is rarely a one-onone appointment. Young said for one-on-one appointments, she has had to call months ahead to schedule them.

“For a scheduled appointment, I need to schedule it often three months in advance,” Young said. “When I see the advisers, I usually go into office hours. I very rarely have an actual one-on-one appointment with them.”

The Newnan Academic Advising Center holds pre-health advising office hours three times a week that are run on a dropin, group-based format, where students may ask a pre-health adviser their questions in front of the entire group. Young said she feels the office hours can be uncomfortable and stressful, especially when asking personal questions.

See ADVISING, Page 3A

Daily Staff Reporter

More than 50 community members, including proPalestinian activists, gathered in the Wolverine Room of the Union Tuesday night to discuss the impact of anti-Palestinian comments that Ben Gerstein, Central Student Government President and Public Policy junior, made as a senior in high school.

Four members from Students

for Allied Freedom and Equality addressed the Assembly about their experiences as Palestinian students on campus, and their subsequent conversation with Gerstein about his comments. LSA sophomore Jinan Abufarha said she felt hopeless and afraid when she heard Gerstein’s comments and called for the Assembly to recognize anti-Palestinian discrimination as racism.

“I don’t think a lot of people understand how disheartening it is as a Palestinian on this campus

to see an elected representative to say that all I know how to do is to fund terrorism and reject peace deals,” Abufarha said. “Real damage has been done by this video and (the Assembly needs) to correct that.”

LSA senior Reem Al-Khatib thanked Gerstein for apologizing.

She called on the Assembly to pass a resolution introduced by SAFE condemning Gerstein’s comments and affirming the presence of the University of Michigan’s Palestinian

community.

“This is not my first time bearing my trauma in front of a face of strangers that I don’t know,” Al-Khatib said. “We want initiatives, we want change, and I know that Benjamin is willing to do that. He’s opened the line of communication, we have a trust forming, and we want the rest of the Assembly to be on board. We want the change we should have had two years ago.”

See GERSTEIN, Page 3A

this?

Mark Schlissel: Well, they didn’t announce they were freezing, they said they weren’t bringing forward new, direct investments in fossil fuels. And they just want some time and space to study the question of whether our investment policies are correct or not. So, I think there is a shoutout due to student advocacy. I think the board hears the advocacy and wants the time to discuss what the smart way is to move forward. … But, you know, the board is responsible for this almost $12 billion endowment, and it’s a very serious fiduciary responsibility, and we have to live up to our commitment to the donors that gave us the funds that became the endowment to consider the potential yield, and then how much risk we’re willing to accept as the main factors in deciding about investments. So, the board has to really look carefully at its responsibilities.

See SCHLISSEL, Page 3A

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Speakers examine returning to society

Panel talks experiences of once incarecerated people in the world JENNA SITEMAN Daily Staff Reporter

A Brighter Way, an organization helping previously incarcerated individuals transition back into society, held a discussion Tuesday in the Learning Resource Center at the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office.

The event featured a panel of government legislators and previously incarcerated people, who discussed how citizens returning to society once they are released from prison. The event was attended by more than 100 community members, many of whom were previously incarcerated themselves.

Cozine Welch, executive director of ABW, shared what prompted him to create the organization and event.

Welch said he served a 19-year-and-nine-month sentence in Michigan prisons after being convicted at 17. He said having strong mentors when he was released from prison helped him realize he could make a change in other formerly incarcerated people’s lives.

ALEXANDRIA POMPEI/Daily Arwa Gayar, Ford School of Public Policy senior, speaks on matters regarding remarks from Ben Gerstein, Central Student Government President, and university actions at the CSG meeting at the Union Tuesday evening.

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NEWS......................... 2A Vol. CXXIX, No. 76 OPINION.....................4A ©2020 The Michigan Daily A R T S & N E W S . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 A

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2A — Wednesday, February 26, 2020

MONDAY: Looking at the Numbers

TUESDAY:

By Design

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WEDNESDAY: This Week in History

THURSDAY: Twitter Talk

FRIDAY: Behind the Story

Feb. 25, 1998: Hundreds rally for affirmative action Hundreds of students attempted to capture the essence of the ‘60s and ‘70s social movements as they demonstrated support for affirmative action at the University yesterday.

The National Day of Action, designated by the Rev. Jesse Jackson as a day to support affirmative action nationwide, was celebrated at the University by a rally and march on the Diag, two teach-ins and a sit-in at Angell Hall. Event organizers also encouraged students to skip classes for the day.

The day hit close to home at the University in light of two lawsuits filed against the

University last fall that target its use of race in admissions policies.

“It’s important for the students to show the media and the nation that it’s not business as usual when affirmative action is under attack,” said Law secondyear student Kevin Pimentel.

After the morning teachin, Pimentel stood before 250 students who gathered on the Diag to rally for affirmative action.

Pimentel described affirmative action as “the last game of the Civil Rights Movement that is still standing.”

Pimentel said that although his classes at the Law School were

not cancelled, his professors accommodated students by offering audio and video tapes of missed lectures to students who participated in the day’s events.

“I think we have had a great showing of the school,” Pimentel said. “The people are really listening to the speakers here at the rally and at the teach-in.”

University officials said no classes were officially cancelled for the events. But several professors and graduate student instructors offered alternatives for students who missed classes yesterday.

History GSI Alice Ritscherle said she encouraged her class to

attend the sit-in to learn more about how diversity affects the campus.

“I am going to let students make up their own minds,” Ritscherle said. “I think it’s an unusual case where a lot of different interest groups have come together and listened to each other seri- ously.”

About 20 high school students from Ann Arbor Huron High School and Detroit’s Cass Technical High School, several of whom spoke at the rally, came to campus to take part in the day’s events.

Alianza Co-chair Diana Derige said yesterday’s demonstration

in support of affirmative action should not be limited to one day.

“We need to think ahead and show our solidarity together,” said Derige, an LSA junior. “The plight of minority students on campus goes beyond affirmative action.”

After the rally, nearly 250 students marched through campus, crammed into the Angell Hall Fishbowl area and staged a sit-in. Students sat on the floor for three hours to hear testimoni- als about how affirmative action, racism and diversity have impacted the campus.

Organizers said they were

pleased with the number of students who took part in the day’s events.

“I’m really impressed with the tumout. I think it’s obvious that a lot of people support affirmative action and are willing to miss a day of class” said Law first- year student Meera Deo, a member of United for Affinnative Action.

Engineering sophomore Robert Green said he was impressed with the diversity of the crowd that attended the sitin.

“We need to take a stand as students,” Green said. “Awesome turnout, but there could be many more.”

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Editorial Staff ERIN WHITE RUCHITA IYER/Daily Panelist speaks on the hidden plight of moderm farmers at Food Literacy for All, a weekly lecture series sponsored by the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative in Angell Hall Tuesday evening.

Discussion examines opportunities for redevelopment of two city locations Urban designer from SmithGroup meets with community members to analyze and debate number of units of affordable housing included in various proposed plans ANGELINA LITTLE Daily Staff Reporter

Ann Arbor residents gathered Tuesday night to discuss developing affordable housing at a meeting hosted by the city and SmithGroup, an architectural design firm. Held in the Downtown Development Ann Arbor Authority building, the meeting served as a followup to a series of workshops held in December to garner community feedback about possible affordable housing sites.

Attendees were handed a fact sheet that provided information about affordable housing in the city. In Ann Arbor, the area median income is $101,200. Families with incomes at 60 percent AMI or below qualify for affordable housing developed by the state, with affordable being defined as costing 30 percent or less of the household’s annual income.

The lack of affordable housing in Ann Arbor has been a hot-button issue in recent years. In 2015, the city adopted a plan to create nearly 2,800 new affordable housing units by 2035, though less than 100 have been built

PENCE From Page 1A Pence opened his 30-minute speech by expressing his continued support for Trump and reminding the crowd that Michigan was a state Trump won back in 2016.

“Here in Michigan, you believed we could be stronger,” Pence said.

“You believed we could be prosperous again. You said

since then.

Discussion at the meeting focused on redeveloping 350 South 5th Ave., also known as the former Y-Lot, a site adjacent to the Ann Arbor District Library and Blake Transit Center. There was also a discussion of overhauling 415 West Washington St., which is adjacent to the YMCA and the railroad track.

Michael Johnson, an urban designer at SmithGroup, gave a presentation summarizing the results of surveys and feedback from community workshops regarding both sites. The results showed that respondents rated optimizing the number of affordable units for those with 60 percent AMI as the most important priority in redeveloping city-owned properties.

Johnson summarized the community feedback into a set of assumptions in creating possible designs for new buildings in each lot and presented the preferred options to the audience. As he presented the possible designs, audience members shared criticisms.

Johnson said the purpose of the meeting was to provide a space for the community to discuss and agree on requirements to set before the actual development process

begins.

“The hope is that based on what we’ve heard, we can begin a process that with the city’s assistance pre-entitles a series of criteria before even engaging a developer going through the next steps of that process,” Johnson said.

The proposed design for the former Y-Lot site included two buildings reaching a maximum of 200 feet and containing a total of 418 units, 130 of which would be affordable housing. Some audience members shared concerns about the height of the building, while others felt it did not provide a sufficient number of affordable housing units.

The 415 W. Washington proposal, which contained 173 total units with 15-20 percent affordable, raised additional concern from the community because of its location in a f loodway and f loodplain, which renders it ineligible to federal subsidies.

Some residents brought up concerns with parking and traffic congestion in the residential area. Others said they felt the location was unsafe for housing and advocated alternatives such as creating a park or community center.

Ann Arbor resident Julia

Goode expressed frustration with some community members’ unwillingness to consider the 415 W. Washington design proposal.

“It felt like a ‘not in my backyard’ meeting,” Goode said. “People all started out in support of affordable housing, but as soon as it starts to get dense, then people get concerned about how big the building is, how tall — even though it’s not taller than the buildings around it — and that’s the only way you have affordable housing, is to build it denser, and that’s how you get cars off the street, by having a dense community so it becomes walkable.”

City Councilmember Ali Ramlawi, D-Ward 5, who was in attendance, encouraged attendees to be more open to the proposals brought forth

by SmithGroup.

“I think the SmithGroup is listening to the community,” Ramlawi said. “I think we need to approach this with a little bit more optimism and go from there because we’re not really going to go anywhere if we think this is another exercise that goes nowhere.”

Reporter Angelina Little can be reached at anglit@umich. edu.

‘yes’ to Donald Trump in 2016, and I know that Michigan is going to say ‘yes’ to four more years of President Trump.”

Pence then talked about Trump’s immigration policies and the administration’s commitment to building a wall along the southern border.

“Under the President’s leadership, we have made historic investments in border security and working on the crisis of illegal

immigration on our border,” Pence said. “Once we secure our border, we’re going to pass immigration reform that puts America first.”

According to the 2018 Enforcement and Removal report, ICE made 158,581 administrative arrests in the 2018 fiscal year, as opposed to the 143,470 arrests made in 2017.

Lastly, Pence talked about the Trump administration’s track record on promoting

and creating manufacturing jobs.

“Now, as I stand before you here today, I’ll tell you here in Michigan, the American economy is booming,” Pence said. “Since election day in 2016, almost 8 million jobs have been created by businesses, large and small, including 120,000 right here in the Great Lakes state.”

See PENCE, Page 3A

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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.

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SCHLISSEL From Page 1A TMD: In late September, the Public Accountability Initiative released a report showing that $26 million of the University endowment was invested in private equity fund Lime Rock Partners as of October 2018.

The fund finances oil driver Tim Dunn and Empower Texans, a conservative group that has a major role in supporting farright rhetoric and legislation, such as opposition to same-sex marriage, in Texas politics.

In our interview last month, you told The Daily ideology does not play a large role in the endowment. Do you believe the University should work to incorporate the beliefs of the student body in its investments?

MS: No. So, what I said last month is still the same. Imagine if we start making, as a filter for our investments, the perceived political beliefs of the people that own or manage the firm that’s doing the investing. Who gets to decide what political beliefs are allowed? And why should we make decisions about investment opportunities, not based on the risk and the reward of the investment, but based on our perception of whether we like the beliefs or not of the person who owns the business?

I think that’s both inappropriate and very risky. You know, in a world where we value free speech and we value diversity, I think I can disagree with the owner of a business but still do business with the business. So, I don’t think those things should enter into investment decisions at all. … So, the student voice is important, but it doesn’t have a big input into the endowment.

TMD: I guess I want to push you a little on that, because some of these organizations oppose same-sex marriage or gender-neutral bathrooms.

Does the University not have an obligation to not invest in organizations that directly or indirectly might cause harm to others?

MS: My understanding is it’s not the organization that’s causing the harm, it’s an individual who is one of the owners of an organization who gets paid a profit because he’s running a business and that he decides or she decides what they want to do with that profit.

Can you imagine how difficult it would be to make investment decisions at all if what we had to do was not just look carefully at the company we’re investing in and what they do but look at the people who benefit from those investments and what they do with the money they’re benefiting (from). I think that’d be almost an impossible task.

TMD: Last interview, you said, and I quote, “We make a commitment to the donor to be a good steward of their money.”

In the past, when the Regents have divested from apartheid South Africa and the tobacco industry, was there a financial indication that divestment from these industries was the best way to steward these donors’ money? Do you think they made the right call?

MS: You know, it’s really tough to use hindsight to make these decisions. When it comes to the tobacco industry, it’s still a thriving, money-making business. So, it’s not clear that divestment affected the tobacco business, but way fewer people in your generation smoke than in my generation in college.

So, I think there has been a movement away from cigarettes, which is a good thing. So, I think it’s complicated to assess whether divestment played a role in decreasing the popularity of smoking as compared to lots of research and then some good public interest campaigns and advertising.

When it comes to apartheid, it’s also very hard. I think it’s unarguable that, in its day, apartheid was the most obvious and visible manifestation of evil in the world, affecting tens of millions of people. The fact that it was dismantled speaks to the consistency and bravery of many freedom fighters within South Africa, Mandela, the most famous of them. It speaks to a global pressure campaign that eventually influenced the government of that country.

And I could imagine that the

symbolism of people changing their investment patterns may also have influenced the eventual outcome. It’s hard to say what had the biggest responsibility for the very good change that occurred.

TMD: Do you think the symbolism of universities around the country divesting from fossil fuels could have the same impact?

MS: That’s a good question.

I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think so. And the reason I don’t think so is, where I’d be spending my energy is working on demand for fossil fuels. So, what the divestment movement is working on is the supply of resources that that industry has to meet the demand. But, if the demand for fossil fuels goes up, there’ll always be entities that invest in fossil fuels, and the degradation of the environment will continue whether Michigan’s heavily invested in it or not. The symbolism I think is important to many people, and I see why. What I would be focusing on is putting pressure on our elected leaders to develop rules that hasten the transition to a low carbon economy.

TMD: At the Regents meeting, a public commenter called on the University to make all endowment investments and records public. Is this something the University would consider?

MS: No. The reason why is we try to do research and hire smart people to help us invest our endowment to generate more money than the average investor. Over the last 20 years, we’ve averaged nearly 10 percent a year, and that’s with all the ups and downs of the economy over this very long period of time. It’s important to the University that we have a competitive advantage when it comes to our investment decisions. If we were to simply tell everyone what we’re going to do before we do it, we give up our competitive advantage.

Provost Martin Philbert and Robert Anderson TMD: The Detroit Free Press recently released an article claiming the University administration knew about Provost Philbert’s alleged misconduct. One example was a lawsuit the University settled in 2005 alleging Philbert engaged in inappropriate conduct with a female researcher in his toxicology lab. Another example is when former Provost Phil Hanson received multiple emails to investigate Philbert’s behavior. Do you have a response to these allegations?

MS: The things you mentioned are being investigated by the outside firm we’ve brought in to help us address allegations made against Provost Philbert.

While those things are being investigated, I’m not going to talk about the details of the investigation, other than to say we have asked the investigators to address questions dating from the very beginning, so when the Provost worked for the University. … This case from the mid-2000s was when Provost Philbert was running a research lab, and it was an employment case brought by a male researcher that he let go.

Nowhere in that lengthy lawsuit is sexual misconduct claimed against the Provost, and then during the adjudication case, there’s a discovery period where witnesses get deposed under oath, and nowhere was there a witness that said they observed sexual impropriety.

TMD: Recent allegations against the late Dr. Anderson, former UHS Director and team physician, came out. What steps is the University taking to ensure that this pattern of sexual misconduct among high ranking University officials — and claims that the University was aware of them — stops now? Instead of providing support after the fact, how is the University working to proactively stop this before it happens?

MS: I think the most important thing in the short term is to understand as many facts as we can. We can look backwards and say, “What are the things that we might have done differently that would have prevented this inappropriate behavior from going on as long as it did?” That’s part of the goal of the investigation, to learn what those things are. But in general, we need to develop a culture, and every time I talk about this topic I say the same thing,

News where people feel comfortable coming forward when they either believe they’ve been mistreated, sexual misconduct or any other kind of misconduct or harassment or if they witness or hear about somebody else being treated mistreated. Then on our end, the promise is to take every one of these things seriously and investigate them thoroughly. … In the case of Dr. Anderson, who passed away more than a decade ago, it’s a little bit harder to investigate so far backwards. But our police did a very thorough job. The prosecutor, probably because Dr. Anderson had passed away, decided there weren’t criminal violations to be brought, but we’re continuing to investigate.

We have a law firm helping us with that investigation.

GEO Bargaining TMD: During the public comment portion of the Regents meeting last Thursday, speakers claimed University Human Resources threatened not to negotiate over salary and benefits until the subjects of climate, housing and protections against sexual misconduct were dropped entirely from the coalition’s platform. If this is true, why is the University removing certain issues from the negotiating table completely?

MS: I have read — although I’m not involved in the bargaining — that GEO wants to include issues about carbon neutrality and issues about things that don’t just affect them but affect everybody. And you can imagine it might be difficult to have a negotiation with one particular subset of our community, or an issue that affects everybody in the community that we’re dealing with separately.

TMD: Both GEO and the University have agreed to reach a tentative agreement by March 1. What can you tell us about how this process is going so far and how the University is working to support its graduate student employees?

MS: I know that the clock is ticking as we’re heading towards March, so I would share a sense of anxiousness that we actually make serious progress, so we don’t bump up against the deadline. The graduate students are the lifeblood of the University, and we’re the biggest public research university in the country, if not the world. Most of that research is done by our graduate students. They’re our partners in scholarship, they’re our successors very often in the academy; they’ll be tomorrow’s professors and leaders in society. So, we’re invested in their success.

Health Services at U-M Flint and Dearborn TMD: The University of Michigan offers UHS care to all students at the Ann Arbor campus. While the median income on the Flint and Dearborn campuses is significantly lower than on the Ann Arbor campus, they have no access to campus health services. Why is this?

MS: Although you can walk in to the health service here, it’s not free — you’re paying for it. So, there’s a student fee charged in Ann Arbor that’s specifically dedicated to the health service that pays for their budget, so you are paying for the health service. Flint and Dearborn in the past have each had on-campus health services that turned out to be used very rarely, and we think the reason why is most of the students in Flint and Dearborn come from the communities that surround Flint and Dearborn; in other words, they’re very often still living at home or living with their families in a community where they’ve already been functioning as adults, so they have their own health care. … In Flint and Dearborn, however, in both cases, the University makes arrangements for students that don’t have health care to get convenient health care. … So, rather than maintain their own and charge students to maintain it when it’s rarely used, they have relationships with local health centers.

News Editor Emma Stein can be reached enstein@umich.edu.

Reporters Arjun Thakkar and Calder Lewis can be reached at arjunt@umich.edu and calderll@ umich.edu.

ADVISING From Page 1A “Sometimes you don’t want to ask your personal questions in front of other people, especially when everyone else is trying to ask their questions in front of you, too,” Young said. “If I wanted to talk about my grades, I’d feel very self-conscious doing it in office hours rather than in one-on-one office hours.”

Young also said she worries about the number of questions the pre-health advisers need to answer in office hours while giving every student there an equal amount of their time.

“At the office hours, I can tell that they are trying to get to everyone, so when I have multiple questions, I feel bad asking them when other people also have so many questions,” Young said. “So I have to ask one question, wait for others to ask theirs, and then ask another question and so on. I will hesitate and not ask a few, too, due to uncomfortability.”

David Brawn, associate director of the Newnan LSA Academic Advising Center, said two advisers have been added recently to help combat the extended wait times. Brawn advised students to also take advantage of other University programs for pre-health assistance. “(We are) aware of the wait times for a pre-health appointment,” Brawn said.

“We’ve been active in creating different ways for students to receive the guidance that they need. Additionally, students can take advantage of the University Career Center and the LSA Opportunity Hub, which also run excellent programs for students with pre-health interests.”

LSA junior Hana Chung had a few quick questions and did not mind attending pre-health office

PENCE From Page 2A

Under the Trump administration, roughly 6.7 million jobs were created over the past 3 years. In Michigan, over the first 30 months of his presidency, 111,300 jobs were created. By comparison, Obama created 205,000 jobs in Michigan in his last 30 months of office.

Pence closed out his speech by encouraging the crowd to vote for Trump in 2020.

“Between now and November we’re going to keep on marching,” Pence said. “We’re going to make Michigan and America more prosperous than ever before with President Donald Trump in the White House for four more years and with God’s help.”

Across the street from the Marriot, protesters stood outside of the Children’s Hospital to express discontent

GERSTEIN From Page 1A

LSA senior Sulayman Qazi said he was inspired by the speakers, the Assembly and Gerstein. He was discussing how his boyfriend purchased a scarf in Jerusalem from a Palestinian vendor to send a message of unity when Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, environmental toxicologist and Ann Arbor City Council candidate, interrupted Qazi’s speech, calling for the Assembly to condemn sending military aid to Israel.

“Heartwarming stories are not going to do it,” Savabieasfahani said. “Just pretty words mean nothing. Cut military aid to (Israel). Cut it off!”

Audience members called for Savabieasfahani to sit down.

Savabieasfahani continued speaking for approximately two minutes, at which point she left the meeting.

Gerstein apologized for comments he made about Palestine in a 2017 video interview and op-ed. In a public apology posted to his Facebook page, he called his comments racist and harmful.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 — 3A hours last December. She said a more timid student may not feel as comfortable, however. Chung said she chose to go to office hours last November because she wasn’t able to find a one-on-one appointment until the next year.

“It might have taken me more time, but it wasn’t necessarily a waste of time at all,” Chung said. “I’m usually not shy about asking questions or talking about personal things. I do think that it’d be stressful for someone who really isn’t comfortable being around other people and asking deeper, specific questions.”

LSA sophomore Natalie White said long wait times for the office hours can impact premed students’ mental health. She waited a month and a half for her one-on-one pre-health advising appointment.

“It definitely impacts your mental health when you’re really stressed out about your pre-med track and you have a resource there to call but they say, ‘We can get you an appointment, just stay stressed out for another month and a half,’” White said. “If I was a freshman (at office hours) and I heard a junior say they were doing volunteering, research, had a great GPA and they were still stressed out, that would have made me really nervous for my future.”

White said she believes prehealth office hours would be less daunting to students if they were tailored to students who meet certain criteria.

“For freshmen, it might be beneficial to section off the office hours for those who are literally just getting started,” White said.

“And different office hours for people who are applying this round… And I think that will be super helpful and will make the situation less intimidating to go into since you know where other people will be when you get there.”

LSA junior Ria Mahesh was able to get a pre-health

appointment within a week of calling the advising office as a sophomore. However, she said she was disappointed with the advice she was given at her appointment once the adviser noticed a few B’s on her transcript.

“All she could tell me was I need to be better, otherwise I’m not going to get into med school,” Mahesh said. “She was just kind of like, this is the general path of what kids take and here’s what you’ve done so far. But her main point was you need to be better.

I remember leaving not feeling very confident in my ability on being pre-med.”

Mahesh said she believes prehealth advisers should remember that though they see a large number of students every day, they should try their best to offer support and encouragement.

“I think when it comes to how they handle students that are struggling in a certain track or for guidance on how to exceed expectations in a certain track, they also need to understand there is someone there that needs support and not just needs to know what classes to take,” Mahesh said. “I feel if I had an adviser that had my back, I’d be much more confident in myself.”

Brawn also explained they have resources, such as general adviser meetings, readily available in the case of timesensitive matters. The Newnan LSA Academic Advising Center also has online resources that may answer some students’ questions.

“Advisers in the Newnan Center are trained to respond quickly to emergencies of all types and we regularly make sure that we either help students directly or put them in contact with the appropriate resources when addressing this kind of situation,” Brawn said.

Daily Reporter Saini Kethireddy can be reached at skethi@umich.edu.

with Trump’s health care policies. Since Trump has been in office, he has undertaken efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and roll back protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Deirdre Waterman, mayor of Pontiac, Mich., spoke at the Michigan Democrat’s antiTrump protest outside of the hospital to denounce how the president has dealt with health care since taking office.

“He has shown insensitivity and a total lack of understanding of the need to provide affordable, quality health care options that everyone can afford,” Waterman said. “In budget after budget, he fought to slash critical programs like Medicare and Medicaid, thus taking them from so many who depend on them. We stand out here today as the voice, speaking loudly and emphatically for those who you cannot hear. We want real solutions to real problems, not fake solutions and empty promises.”

Pam Borowi, a supporter of

Trump and Rochester Hills resident, spoke to The Daily after the rally about her consistent support of the President and her experience at the rally.

“I love Trump, and I love Pence, and I love everything they’re doing,” Borowi said.

“Mike Pence outdid himself. I’d never heard him speak before, but he’s very charismatic and I really enjoyed hearing him.

He tells it like it is. He’s very authentic.”

LSA senior Kate Nachazel, former vice president of the University’s chapter of College Republicans, said in a statement to The Daily she supported Trump and Pence’s choice to host a rally in Michigan.

“Pence coming back to Michigan reaffirms that Michigan will be a key swing state in 2020,” Nachazel said.

“Because it was so narrowly won in 2016, it is unsurprising to me that Trump and his team are starting early and prioritizing in Michigan.”

Reporter Julia Forrest can be reached at juforres@umich.edu.

“The Palestinian community at this University is a community of this University,” Gerstein said.

“We have a duty as a governing body to ensure Palestinian students don’t feel like they don’t have a space.”

Qazi then finished his comments with a call for unity.

The resolution condemning Gerstein’s comments passed with 25 in favor and four abstentions.

The Assembly then passed a resolution calling on the University to end its contract with Delta Airlines in response to the airline making hundreds of deportation flights for ICE in 2019.

LSA freshman and ex-officio member Drishaan Jain said the resolution is less about the financial impact on the airline and more about the Assembly and the University taking a stance on injustice.

“We talked more last week about how if the goal of this resolution is to be more of a monetary or financial step that we are trying to take or if it’s just a symbolic resolution to show that the University wants to end its partnership with the company that is doing the deportation flights,” Jain said. “The focus of the resolution is … more about

our partnership with them.”

Rackham student Siddharth Singh Chaudhari raised concerns about the resolution’s efficacy and sentiment, saying the resolution was a form of tokenism in regard to the experience of undocumented immigrants. He said the resolution achieves little due to Delta’s limited response to the CSG action.

“I think that a resolution of this nature smacks of us wanting to wipe off guilt without necessarily looking to achieve things that are tangible,” Chaudhari said.

Chaudhari also noted some Assembly members said they would want a Taco Bell on campus after the company has been criticized for its workplace practices.

“Taco Bell is notorious for hiring undocumented immigrants, absusing them through long hours of work, and underpaying them,” Chaudhari said. “Are we now going to pass a resolution sanctioning the University’s relationship with Taco Bell as well?”

LSA sophomore Sam Burnstein, an Assembly member,

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Opinion

4A — Wednesday, February 26, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

REID DIAMOND | COLUMN

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OWEN STECCO | COLUMN

An alternative argument against the Electoral College

C

riticism against the Electoral College has been mounting for decades. However, it has become a talking point for major presidential candidates after a 2000 and 2016 disparity between the popular vote and electoral majority collected.

Many Democratic hopefuls including Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have spoken out in support of a popular vote system, but candidates former Vice President Joe Biden and former Mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg have voiced concerns about the abolishment of the current system. The narrative around the Electoral College is frequently about how much power individuals in small states have. This narrative must shift to a voter power index weighing how much power someone in a “battleground state” has over every other voter.

The term “voter power index” is how likely your vote is to sway the overall electoral vote in a presidential election.

The mathematical calculation is coined as the Banzhaf Power Index, which allows groups to determine which states are crucial to the success of a candidate aiming for the presidency. By using a voter power index, we shift from the narrative of small states having all the power under the current electoral system to the idea that a select group of individuals and states hold all the power. The states responsible for deciding elections, a group of tossups, can be defined as the 13 that do not have uniform party support in the past four presidential elections.

The traditional measure of electoral power relies on the number of constituents per representative there are in each state, but the sparsely populated states never end up deciding elections. While

it is true that Wyoming has the smallest number of constituents per electoral vote, the state is considered one of the most reliable for Republican candidates and has not voted for a Democratic candidate since 1964. The same is true on the Democratic side with Vermont and the District of Columbia, which have been deemed two of the most reliably Democratic voting blocs. This model of understanding the downfalls of the electoral college is outdated as it has Florida, a state considered a consistent battleground state that frequently decides elections, ranked as the 50th most powerful state. These seemingly over-powerful small states have monolithic political support making their votes count even less under the system that is meant to ensure the equal nature of their vote.

In the 2016 election, the “battleground” states were home to 94 percent of general election campaign events, which in turn allows for candidates to build messages to appeal to narrow coalitions within traditionally indecisive states.

This disparity in campaigning played out across the board as the smallest nine states with high electoral power received zero combined visits while California, Texas and New York received a combined two visits.

The current system protects only those states deemed swing states, neglecting the states it was originally meant to protect, as well as those that make up the largest portion of the nation. Voter power is determined by how much a presidential candidate must pay attention to your state, rather than allowing for all votes to be considered equal and forcing a sweeping message from candidates.

The current system requires a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College process

and put in place a popular vote. Passing an amendment is virtually impossible as it requires two-thirds of the House and Senate, as well as three-fourths of the states.

While 65% of Americans support a popular vote, a divided government proves to be a hurdle we cannot overcome at this time.

In the meantime, the importance of having your voice heard takes precedent and the f lawed system works in favor of University students and Michigan residents. Behind Michigan, most students attending the University of Michigan are from New York, Illinois, California and New Jersey, all reliably Democratic states with low voter power indices. In contrast, Michigan is within the top most inf luential states in the upcoming presidential election. University students have the option to re-register to vote in the state of Michigan as they reside in the state for the majority of the year.

While the system is deeply f lawed, working against the states and constituents it’s intended to protect, the U-M student voice is more important than ever with one of the nation’s highest voter power indexes at our fingertips. The 2020 election will prove to be a tipping point in deciding the future of our country that directly impacts University students with lasting effects that will outlive most of the voting population. With an increased amount of voting power and the largest voting bloc, it is imperative for U-M students to register to vote, remain educated and take to the polls in upcoming primaries and the general election.

Owen Stecco can be reached at ostecco@umich.edu.

KEVIN MOORE JR. | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT KEVJR@UMICH.EDU

A

The conservative case for carbon dividends

new carbon tax has the possibility of revolutionizing our push toward carbon neutrality by 2050, but it isn’t from the progressive playbook, it’s from the Republican Party. Despite decades of proposed climate legislation from Democrats, Republican stonewall opposition has limited progress toward cleaner energy. Not only could this new carbon tax be revolutionary, it could also be an indication of a renewed Republican Party, one more willing to contribute to climate policy in the future.

Energy markets are commodity markets — they follow supply and demand. As any good consumer would in any commodity market, average Americans want to pay the lowest price for gas and their monthly electric bill. As such, there is demand in the energy market for low costs that is satisfied by the cheapest energy sources: fossil fuels. Yes, they are cheap, but they’re also polluting the earth, leading to the catastrophic events of the climate crisis. Market forces alone will keep the energy sector and the planet on the same current trajectory: private profit and collective human suffering. However, a carbon tax could reorient the priorities of the energy sector by providing an incentive for cleaner energy.

The leading concepts of a carbon tax involve a tax that would be collected primarily from the producers and importers of fossil fuels. Coal would be taxed at the mine, natural gas at the processing plant, petroleum at the refinery and imported fuel at the border. The tax would be based on the carbon content of the fuel, and the rate would increase over time. A carbon tax would incentivize companies to pollute less, and the market would trend toward cleaner energy.

However, a carbon tax has yet to be implemented in the United States because of the preoccupation with the harsh economic effects on consumers, especially those with lower income. Whenever the costs of production increase, a company will charge the consumer more, and that’s exactly what would happen with a carbon tax. A carbon tax makes energy production more expensive for the fossil fuel industry, and they would offset that cost increase by charging more for their

product. The cost of filling your car with gas and paying your bills at the end of the month would increase. When the French government attempted to impose a carbon tax on their population, there were mass protests lasting for months.

Dubbed the “Yellow Vest Movement,” French citizens took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands to protest the carbon tax. Wealthier people aren’t as preoccupied with a carbon tax since they can afford it, but those who are less affluent are much more affected as they have to spend a larger percent of their income than wealthier people.

A new plan, however, effectively implements a carbon tax without leaving a heavy financial burden on the consumers. The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends, conceived of by the Climate Leadership Council, describes,

A market based solution is the Republican policty of choice on most issues.

“All proceeds from a nation’s carbon fee would be divided equally among its citizens, and returned to all adults through a quarterly dividend check automatically deposited in their bank accounts.” In other words, the government wouldn’t collect the taxes, the money would go directly into the pockets of American citizens to offset the increased costs of buying gas and turning the lights on. This isn’t from Andrew Yang’s playbook.

It’s a conservative, Republican proposal, and it’s a derivation of universal basic income. This carbon tax proposal is supported by a coalition of economists, scientists, corporations and leaders in the energy industry such as Shell, BP and ExxonMobil, and 3,554 U.S. economists, many of whom are conservative.

A market-based solution is the Republican policy of choice on most issues, including this new and improved position on climate change. The conservative case for carbon dividends already has bipartisan support and promises

an economic and environmental benefit. This isn’t the same Republican Party that brought snowballs onto the Senate floor and vigorously denied the existence of climate change for decades. The Republican Party has an amazing opportunity here to accept the reality of climate change and grow environmental protections while sustaining economic growth. In comparison to enormous climate spending bills, such as the Green New Deal, a Republican climate stance could create an opportunity for the party to return to fiscal conservatism as well. Meanwhile, without an ambitious climate policy, the Republican Party risks losing younger voters who care about climate change. The party has everything to gain from embracing a conservative idea of carbon pricing, taking the lead on climate policy in a politically viable, economically and environmentally sustainable manner.

Even so, this isn’t to say that Republicans are champions of climate policy. They have never been, and they still are not. Their climate policy for the last 30 years has been complete denial, and still today a Republican president is stripping environmental protections in our national lands and pushing for increased use of fossil fuels. Whether they openly admit it or not, the Republican strategy has largely remained a strict denial. But the Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends may be an indication of a change in the Republican ideology that might prove essential for substantial climate discussion going forward.

The U.S. is not on the right track to reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. A one-sided approach from the Democrats has seen little success so far because of Republican opposition, but a rebirth of the Republican Party in terms of fiscal conservatism and environmental protections could be the answer for climate policy in the U.S. This conservative carbon tax may not be the whole answer, but it could be a symptom of a renewed discussion about climate change in this country, and a precursor of Republican contribution to necessary climate policy.

Reid Diamond can be reached at reiddiam@umich.edu.

EMILY ULRICH | COLUMN

C

Facing inevitable stress in college

ollege can be stressful.

For any student reading this, that statement probably seems obvious. Of course we are stressed when we have projects due and exams to study for while we also try to ensure we are making the most of our four years at the University of Michigan. But why are we stressing more than older generations did when they were in college?

Mental health disorders in adolescents and young adults have significantly increased within the last 10 years.

For the current generation of college students, stress seems inevitable. We are sent into college with a weight on our backs to come out knowing what we want to do for the rest of our lives. In reality, only 27 percent of college grads work in a job that is directly related to their major. I am a junior and have already changed my career path at least five times, and I can only imagine how many more times I will change my mind over the course of my life. All the extra stress that accompanies worrying about the future isn’t worth it.

Small amounts of stress may motivate you to complete daily challenges and reach goals, but when stress builds up it can affect your mental and physical health. Common symptoms of stress include headache, muscle tension, fatigue, irritability, stomach upset, sleep problems, etc.

A simple way to view stress is with the following analogy.

Imagine there is a volcano in the middle of a remote island. Villages surround all sides of the volcano and it is a central part of the island’s landscape. Each village on

the island performs different tasks. For example, one village grows fruits and vegetables to maintain nutrition on the island, another village constructs comfy beds out of the palm leaves to ensure that the islanders sleep well and a third village plans parties for all the islanders to attend. You are the volcano, and stress is the lava inside. If you don’t take care of stressors as they come up, they can boil up inside of you just like a volcano, until finally it erupts and lava spreads throughout the villages like stress spreading to all the parts of your life — from appetite to sleep to social interactions.

When stress builds up it can affect your mental and physical health.

How do we take care of stress once we identify that it is affecting our lives? This looks different for everyone and it is important to find what ways work best for you. Stress relievers can include working out, meditation, laughing with friends or, my personal favorite, playing with a pet.

Most of us don’t have our pets at school with us, but all of us actually do have access to this stress reliever. Every Wednesday there is a wellness dog at University Health Services that students can visit.

Multiple studies have explored the relationship between

human -animal interaction and stress levels. One study found a significant increase in plasma oxytocin levels after human animal interaction. Oxytocin expresses anti-stress effects by decreasing stress hormones and reducing stress-related parameters such as heart rate and blood pressure.

Another stress reliever we have access to is exercise.

There are three gyms on campus that have a variety of equipment and fitness classes available to students. If you are not a fan of the gym, there are also sports clubs on campus and recreational sports teams that you can join. Working out can reduce stress by decreasing adrenaline and cortisol. In addition to reducing these stress hormones, working out increases endorphins which can elevate one’s mood.

Counseling and Psychological Services at the University offers apps for guided meditation, along with other emotional and mental health well-being apps. CAPS also provides “Wellness Zones” that have massage chairs and sun lamps for students to use.

The Wellness Zone on central campus is expected to open in the Union after Spring Break.

Sometimes it would be nice to drop everything and travel to that remote island with the volcano, but realistically, we have to meet ourselves where we are. Since our generation already suffers from increased mental health disorders, implementing a plan to reduce stress may be more crucial for our health than we ever thought.

Emily Ulrich can be reached at emulrich@umich.edu.

Arts

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 — 5A

MUSIC REVIEW

King Krule grows just a little bit on ‘Man Alive!’

JIM WILSON

Daily Arts Writer

With his pale white skin and deep red hair, Archy Marshall is more like a human embodiment of a cigarette than he is a singer/ multi-instrumentalist. He’s got the voice to match, too: gnarled, deep and gruff. Rather than let his unconventional appearance and voice hold him back, he leans directly into it, using the combination to create stunning visual art and haunting recorded music.

His work under his given name is great, but his work under the moniker King Krule is, somehow, even better.

As King Krule, Marshall creates a moody, visceral amalgamation of punk and jazz (among countless other genres) and incorporates various art forms into his products, specifically his music videos. His videos alone are works of art; add music to them and they become transcendent. Each of his album covers are designed by him, too. He even included a 208-page book filled with visual art for his 2015 release A New Place 2 Drown. His career under the moniker

While not outwardly downcast, the lyrics detail the disintegration of Marshall’s relationships with loved ones and his relationship with the world around him took f light after the release of 6 Feet Under the Moon in 2015, carried by underground hit, “Easy Easy.” His next release, 2017’s sludg y and dark The OOZ, catapulted him to alternative stardom.

Marshall’s most recent release, Man Alive! makes his state of mind apparent immediately.

It opens with “Cellular,” a glistening, bassheavy rocker marked by weird horn blasts and electronic gurgling. While not outwardly downcast, the lyrics detail the disintegration of Marshall’s relationships with loved ones and his relationship with the world around him. The ominous atmosphere defines the first few songs of the album, reaching its apex at “Stoned Again.”

“Stoned Again” is Man Alive!’s crown jewel.

The guitar-driven instrumental is sludg y and scuzzy, not unlike Southern stoner metal.

Marshall’s voice is raw and downtrodden, if not angsty, delivering disheveled lines about the aimlessness of youth with drunken,

But maybe that’s what makes Man Alive! special — it shows a man wrestling with his thoughts in real time

stumbling precision. “Down in the dirt / I used to surf with my bucket from Kentucky / I had a scratch card, I scratched so hard / ‘Cause I’m feelin’ fuckin’ lucky, boy, I’m feelin’ so lucky,” he sings (shouts?) in the first verse, his disconnect with society around him almost palpable. With this song taken in the context of the previous two, it seems that Marshall is only going to spiral deeper into this hole as the album progresses.

However, it’s not so. Immediately after “Stoned Again,” the tone shifts. “Comet Face,” similar in sound and delivery to “Stoned Again,” marks a realization in Marshall that his mentality is not sustainable. The angst and disconnect with society completely fades away by the time “Alone, Omen 3” begins to play. Man Alive! comes at a pivotal time in Marshall’s life — he and his girlfriend and frequent collaborator had their first child in early 2019. “Alone, Omen 3” is a representation

COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW

WIKIMEDIA

of this change. It is a somber revelation that songs begin to wallow in letharg y, exacerbated the path of life you choose doesn’t matter — by the fact that each song runs seamlessly into all that matters is you got to this point at all. the next. But maybe that’s what makes Man His words are confident, yet his voice still Alive! special — it shows a man wrestling with his thoughts in real seems unsure, with time. lines like: “The ache and thunder in the As the album storms of your mind comes to a close, Marshall drops / Soak it in, for one more gem: the rain will pass “Energ y Fleets,” a in time / nothing sparse, beautiful wrong in sinking low / You’re omen song about turning King Krule the pages of life, of paradise.” It’s as True Panther Sounds eager and unafraid if he knows that his to see what’s life and everyone else’s is going to next. What makes “Energ y Fleets” turn out fine, but he special, though, just needs to see it is Marshall’s slow in action before he devolution into can believe it.

The remainder nothing more than a distorted voice of Man Alive! continues delving into Marshall’s revelation slowly chanting, “Such a funny life,” as if to on “Alone, Omen 3,” reckoning with his new, say that it’s worthless to try to make sense uneasy outlook on life and trying to figure out of it because life is just going to keep getting how he will move forward. Unfortunately, the funnier.

“Man Alive!”

COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW

‘And We Look On’ on the Black-and-white ‘Parasite’ world’s beauty and decay enhances the Oscar winner

recycled items used in the show. She found that art through movement and dance is a radically different experience from reading a headline or statistics, which can desensitize the public.

“I want the audience to be confronted, to I heard the piano’s haunting melody before I opened the door. Melancholic chords echoed reflect and be uncomfortable,” Kepler said. through the Dance Building’s underground “And by uncomfortable, I mean, opening up practice room. The production crew, director a dialogue that is important to have, but may and choreographer stood against the floor-to- not be something you talked about with your ceiling mirror while the dancers’ bodies moved friends on a day to day basis.”

While choreographing the piece, Kepler as if suspended in water. All I could hear was their feet skidding on the floor, labored wondered how we evoke emotion to spark breathing, the snapping of Hannah’s camera action.

“The way I’ve been doing that is making and the piano. There was a sign to remove shoes, transforming the subterranean space superhuman moments where there’s a clear human connection on stage,” Kepler said. into sacred ground.

Olson was floored by the cast and crew’s On that Friday night practice, the entire cast rehearsed for “And We Look On,” a willingness to take risks and help her bring puppetry and dance performance focused on this small idea to life.

During their break, I sat with the dancers environmentalism. Music, Theatre & Dance and LSA senior Isabel Olson described the on the floor as they stretched, tired but still show as “a 30 to 40 minute piece that touches smiling at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday. Senior Matthew on both the natural beauty of our world but also Standerski, sophomore Atticus Olivet, junior the decay and dilapidation that is being caused Alana Pollard and sophomore Claire Vogel, all Music, Theatre & right now by humans.”

Dance majors, spoke of This week, Olson’s their passion for their vision is coming to the performance’s message stage at the Duderstadt that combines activism Center Video Studio this and theatre.

Thursday, Feb. 27 and All the dancers Friday, Feb. 28 from 7 to Thursday, February 28 @ 7PM mentioned the cross8 p.m. disciplinary nature of The performance The Duderstadt Center the show, with members’ is a journey through majors ranging from an idealized world, history, theatre, dance our current reality and art. The group’s and the wasteland — a cross-disciplinary representation of our future. Conceived by Olson this past October, membership is a feature they consider one of “And We Look On” uses screen projections, their greatest strengths.

“Because it’s a piece that didn’t exist before, puppetry, dancing and original music written it feels deeply personal. You can point to and

by Cole P. Abod.

“Puppetry, to me, simply means animating say, ‘Oh, I remember the day that we decided an object and realizing that almost any object that was going to be in the piece,’” said Pollard. can come alive,” Olson said. “That became “I think the whole piece feels so deeply rooted a really good metaphor for this show where in collaboration. And that’s what makes it feel everything we touch in this world is trash. So really special.”

Standerski found that though “And We Look it is bringing to life the beauty of this world through waste just spoke to me, as that could On’s” uses minimal resources, a production can still do so much with so little. He noticed be puppetry so easily.”

In her role directing the cabaret dance show how it’s easy to slip into feeling helpless, but in the fall of 2018, Olson met Music, Theatre art is able to show the profound ways in which & Dance senior Johanna Kepler, a dance major people can make a difference.

“The cool paradox of it is we’re making and now the “And We Look On” choreographer.

For Kepler, the scenes depicting the “shadow something beautiful out of the trash and the world” presented the biggest challenge (but recycled material. And that will live in people’s were also the most fun). Staging the transitions minds longer than the trash that they throw between having dancers in 3-D and also away every day.”

“And We Look On” will perform at the behind a screen required her to stretch her Duderstadt Center Video Studio Thursday, Feb. imagination.

Kepler listed packing peanuts, Meijer bags, 27 and Friday, Feb. 28 from 7 to 8 p.m. It is free umbrellas and cellophane as just some of the to all audiences.

NINA MOLINA Daily Arts Writer

“And We Look On”

JACOB LUSK For The Daily

92 years after the creation of the Academy Awards, the acclaimed South Korean film “Parasite” made history as the first nonEnglish language film to take home Best Picture (in addition to Best International Feature, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, a sweeping victory that ties Bong Joon-ho, “Memories of Murder” director, with Walt Disney for most Oscars won by a single person in a single night). To the delight of fans, “Parasite” was re-released in theaters across the U.S., with distributor Neon hoping to capitalize on the inevitable surge in interest that follows any Best Picture winner, let alone one of such historicity.

Alongside this re-release is the special opportunity to see “Parasite” in a brand-new, yet old-fashioned manner: Neon has greenlit the release of a black-and-white version of the film, done on the special request of Bong.

Some might scoff at this practice — at one point it was all the rage to colorize old films, and now we’ve reached the point where we’re decolorizing new films. But this trick isn’t completely novel, having been done by recent films such as “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) — a movie which director Bong has declared himself a big fan of — in addition to Bong’s own film “Mother” (2009) back in 2013.

So what’s the point? It isn’t some creative choice vital to the artistic vision of the film; “Parasite” wasn’t made with a monochrome palette in mind, unlike 2019’s Best Foreign Language Film winner “Roma” (2018). In an interview at the black-and-white film’s premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival, director Bong explains how he, his director of photography and the film’s colorist had to go back over each frame and correct grading in order to make it look pristine. No, the answer is not so auteurist, but it’s still a matter of personal vision — in the same interview, Bong explains that part of the decision to decolorize was simple vanity, a sort of childhood wish fulfillment. To him, many of the classics are black-and-white, so why not make his crown jewel project a little more classic?

Casting the world in grayscale didn’t magically transform the film into some new creature; it’s still “Parasite,” with all the same thrills and laughs and gasps. This was my third viewing of the film, and it remained as powerful as my first, and that’s thanks to the masterful direction, writing and performances — elements that unsurprisingly proved stronger than the realism that color adds.

But the decolorization does have its consequences, and some of these effects were delightfully appropriate to the film’s portrayal of class conf lict. With only white and black and the grays in-between, the contrast between the aff luent Parks and the crafty but low-on-cash Kims is substantively starker (the film’s promotional materials, with black or white bars placed over the eyes of both families, comes to mind). The palatial home of the Parks is all the brighter, with the glass walls and wide windows letting in buckets of whitewashing light. While the aff luent are graced with lighter tones, the Kim sub-basement home is noticeably drearier, the dim light beam that leaks in from the narrow window feeble in contrast to all the deep gray that surrounds it. Without the distraction of color, movement and performance became more important, the sound of Min’s feet sticking to the unclean Kim home f loor becoming distinct. All these elements were there in the color film, but in the monochromatic makeover they are underscored and augmented.

Other aspects of the film are more or less in line with Bong’s aspirational musings.

He’d be happy to hear that being black-andwhite did lend “Parasite” a slightly more old-timey, prestigious feel. At the same time, the image quality was anachronistically clear and well-defined, lacking the grainy texture and slight haziness endemic to that era. This visual discordance isn’t a nuisance though — in fact, it imbued the film with something of a timeless quality. Despite being set in and specific to Seoul, “Parasite” has resonated with audiences across the world.In an interview with Birth.Movies.

Death., Bong himself credits this to the fact that “essentially, we all live in the same country: Capitalism.” The strangely classic yet modern feel of the film made it all the more universal.

NEON

Arts & News

6A — Wednesday, February 26, 2020

COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW

Review: ‘Clone Wars’ final season BRENDON CHO Daily Arts Writer

The following review contains spoilers.

“Star Wars: The Clone Wars” gets resurrected for its seventh and final season after a seven-year hiatus following its 2013 cancellation. Unlike Emperor Palpatine’s resurrection in “The Rise of Skywalker,” the final season of “The Clone Wars” sets itself as an expected progression of the “Star Wars” saga — a fitting coda to the ending of a trilogy.

Fans of “The Clone Wars” animated series may remember that season six was truncated down to 13 episodes from the original episode count in the 20s. The episodes, unable to be released under its syndicated network Cartoon Network, were released through Netflix.

Season six (also called “The Lost Missions”) began to lay the groundwork of the show’s grand finale with the potential uncovering of the Sith plot of Order 66, meandering toward the characterizations and adventures of multiple members of the Jedi Council such as

Mace Windu or Yoda.

The premiere of season seven, called “The Bad Batch,” spends little time situating you into the final stages of the Clone War — a marked change of pace that sets you toward the denouement portrayed in “The Revenge of the Sith.” While you are drawn back into the setting and tone of the final season, you may find yourself enamored with the character focus of the premiere: the clone soldiers (Dee Bradley Baker, “Family Guy”).

Have you ever wondered what your inner monologue may sound and look like?

Baker’s performance as clone hero favorites Rex and Cody alongside the titular Bad Batch commandos leaves very little to the imagination. Baker’s performance as the Bad Batch, clone troopers with “desirable” genetic mutations, is perhaps amongst the actor’s greatest vocal performances. While portraying each individual clone trooper with their own personality through different inflections of the pervasive “clone trooper voice,” Baker also perfectly encapsulates the bickering of the common foot soldier, dripping with the

balance of tension and camaraderie. You wonder if Baker’s inner monologue is as eclectic — perhaps even as chaotic — as his masterful portrayal of at least eight different clones.

Baker’s performance of the clones proudly displayed in the premiere paints a somewhat different tone and picture of the denouement of the Clone War. In “Revenge of the Sith,” the focus of the film lies in Anakin Skywalker’s (Hayden Christensen, “The Last Man”) fall to the dark side. True to the series’ role as a complement to “Revenge of the Sith,” “The Bad Batch” is the harbinger of the denouement of auxiliary fighters and characters — chief among them the clones. While it may be disappointing that neither Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein, “Avengers Assemble”) nor any Jedi have major appearances in the premiere, you can take comfort in the expectation and inevitability that each character will also find their own conclusion. While the premiere of “The Clone Wars” may seem underwhelming at first glance, it ultimately succeeds in setting up the conclusion of many of your favorite, auxiliary characters.

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

Break-up Series: Date in the MET NATALIE KASTNER Daily Arts Writer

My worst first date ever began at Steps on Broadway, an old dance studio on New York City’s Upper West Side.

I wore a purple leotard and grey biker shorts with my hair in braids to a full afternoon class.

I remember the gorgeous Spanish teacher coming up to me at one point during barre and instructing me to drop my tailbone so my butt didn’t protrude in a grand plié and thinking how out of shape I was.

I made eye contact with a younger man who had shaggy brown hair and an air of confidence about him that the professional dancers who take classes at Steps can never seem to leave at the door.

Still recovering from breakup depression, I just focused on completing the hour and a half.

By the time the last combination of jumps came around, I noticed this young man was allowing me to go in front of him. I was so zoned out that he gave me a short laugh and motioned me in front of him.

I jumped and twisted in the air, thanked the teacher and finished class. Safely in the hallway and feeling very good that I made my way here, the boy from before appeared in front of me as I was changing into street shoes.

“Hi. I’d like to take you to the Met,” he said.

“What?”

“I dance for New York City Ballet, so I get free tickets. I would like to take you to the American Ballet Theater’s end-of-season performance.”

He ran his hand through his shaggy hair.

“Um … okay. That sounds awesome.”

“Okay. So meet me at the Met at 8 on Saturday.”

“Like the Metropolitan Opera? At Lincoln Center? With the fountain and everything?”

“Yeah. Can I have your number?”

With my new Saturday night plans, I floated back to the couch I was crashing on at 191st Street.

Three days later, I wore a pair of Converse and a Scotch & Soda dress in front of the Met with a dead phone and only a vague memory of what this boy looked like. I eventually found him next to the fountain, and we walked in together.

“So there’s this guy called Balanchine, and he choreographed a couple of the pieces tonight,” he said.

“I know who Balanchine is.”

“Oh. Well, this company shouldn’t really be doing these pieces because City Ballet is trained specifically-” “I know. I actually know some people in City Ballet. I used to train with them.”

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

NEWS CONTENT

Black excellence gala closes out history month SARAH PAYNE For The Daily

Approximately 80 students, faculty and community members celebrated Black History Month at the Black Excellence Gala in the Union Tuesday evening.

The gala included cultural performances and a buffet of soul food and African dishes and was sponsored by the Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs.

The event drew attendees from several Black cultural organizations on campus and in the community. These performances included singing, dancing, spoken word poetry and music. Additionally, there was an art gallery in the ballroom that featured Black art, photography and other creative pieces.

Andrew Ward, Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs program manager, issued opening and closing statements for the gala.

He expressed his gratitude for everyone who helped with the festivities of Black History Month this year and said he is excited for the future of this event.

“It was such an incredible opportunity to work with these students, and it would not have been possible without them,” Ward said. “We want this to happen bigger and better next year, we would love to have all of your support next year as this is the final, closing event for Black History Month.”

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By Blake Slonecker 02/26/20 69 Wild West movie ©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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WHISPER ““Amirah B. is so cool + smart + funny + I’m in love w/ her”

“If you want a good laugh, look up Mingi’s high school XC pic”

Welch said his experience going through the prison and then the parole process makes him a good mentor for others.

“I realized that my personal history is a part of what forged the path for me to make communication and connection with people so we can resolve the issue as much as we can,” Welch said.

State Sen. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, and Kyle Kaminski, Legislative Liaison for the Michigan Department of Corrections, described resources provided to people recently released from prisons. Kaminski said he doesn’t feel there are enough resources for citizens returning home from prison.

“I don’t think we’ve done enough as a state,” Kaminski said.

“I think we’ve done a lot compared to other states, but there’s a lot of opportunity to make things better, and I think we’ve made some progress over the last few years, but I think there’s more progress to be made. … These types of discussions can have a far greater impact on communities around the state than most people are willing to recognize.”

Irwin shared his thoughts on the need for emotional support resources for those who have just returned home after being incarcerated.

“There’s the mental, emotional and social side of it,” Irwin said.

“That is very important and there are some policy things that we need to be doing in Lansing to address those issues as well.”

Malachi Muhammad, employee at The Lunch Room and formerly incarcerated person, said for many returning home who are Black or Latinx, there is a lack of mental health support, due to preexisting cultural stigmas in each group.

Mary Heinen McPherson, co-founder of the U-M Prison Creative Arts Project, also discussed struggles regarding mental health. She said she felt left behind by half of her former friends and family and was unable to contact the people she had formed bonds with while in prison due to MDOC regulations.

“When I came home, I was lonely,” Heinen McPherson said.

“My whole life had been inside of a prison along with those of us that were all locked up together.

So, to live with everyone that

Engineering freshman Maureen Thomas attended the event and reflected on her excitement for the cultural performances.

“I am a part of the Latinx community on campus, and I came to support the AfroLatinos and to celebrate the culture here and have some fun,” Thomas said.

University of Michigan alum Mariah Smith said she was excited to attend the event with her younger sister.

Smith, who was also a featured performer in the event, said she appreciated how the community came together to celebrate black history.

“For me, this event means a lot,” Smith said. “To see everyone come together and pull together this inaugural Black Excellence Gala is very important, and as an alumni to this University, it is very nice to be able to come back and be a part of this celebration and to be a part of history.”

LSA junior Madison Murdoch, who also attended the event, said she hopes the University will continue to host and support events like these.

“I find it really important to support Black History Month initiatives, their programming and events because if student support shows up then more of these events happen, and I think that it’s important,” Murdoch said.

Reporter Sarah Payne can be reached at paynesm@umich. you knew all those years in four different prisons and then come home and be told, ‘It’s a violation of your parole if you have contact with anybody,’ you’re like, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’

Everybody that you knew and loved was inside. I was ostracized from the community.”

Heinen McPherson shed light on the unique struggles that she encountered as a formerly incarcerated woman.

“I can tell you that out of the thousands of women that I knew all those years and that I know now,” Heinen McPherson shared.

“I don’t know anybody that didn’t suffer some major trauma, sexual assault, abuse or some terrible thing that shaped what happened to them before, mostly during, and after prison. With women, the primary consideration is children and family. There’s a lot of drama around kids and what’s happened to the mama and the grandma.

And that’s something that we don’t talk about much.”

As the Q&A session began, Kaminski discussed the ways in which formerly incarcerated individuals are often discriminated against while attempting to secure housing. He said landlords often use a felony as a proxy for race when looking at possible tenants.

“I think a lot of landlords use criminal history, which is an allowable exclusion, as a proxy for not allowed exclusions, like race,” Kaminski said. “I think folks need to be really careful about that, because why are they excluded based on criminal history?”

Irwin talked about eliminating the box on job or school applications that asks whether an applicant has committed a felony.

“We need our government to pass laws like ‘Ban the Box,’” Irwin said. “We need our government to rebuild these kinds of programs in the community like we used to have that would support returning prisoners. I think this really connects directly to this whole question of, ‘How do we help businesses feel comfortable hiring returning prisoners? How do we help landlords feel comfortable renting to these folks?’”

Welch also talked about the importance of voting and getting involved with politicians to pass legislation that will help formerly incarcerated people as well as those currently incarcerated.

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Sports

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 — 7A

Mann, Mayotte working to fix habits ‘M’ youth shines against Spartans BAILEY JOHNSON Daily Sports Editor

After practice ended Monday at Yost Ice Arena, after most of the team and the coaching staff had retreated up the stairs to the locker room, Strauss Mann and Kris Mayotte — and a handful of forwards — were still on the ice.

The sophomore goaltender and his position coach had a conversation at the far end of the ice before moving to the net at the near end. While Mann got settled in the crease, Mayotte explained what he wanted from the forwards he’d chosen to help with the drill.

Two steps to pick up speed, a quick catch of the pass and a speedy release on the shot, either shooting short side as Mann moved from left to right to the near post or pulling the puck to the backhand to go for the far post.

In many ways, it mirrored the goal Notre Dame forward Cam Morrison scored on Mann to make the score 2-0 on Saturday — a game that ended in a 3-0 loss for Michigan. Morrison flew down the left wing, waited just long enough for Mann to bite and roofed a shot short side, popping the lid off Mann’s water bottle in the process.

“It’s really the only situation that he’s kinda faced this year that he doesn’t have a real in-depth plan on how he wants

to play it, or at least a plan that he’s really comfortable with,” Mayotte said Tuesday. “We’ve talked about essentially the situation when Morrison scored, we’ve talked about that specific situation a couple different times this year and finally — I think he was like, ‘Aw, well, how often does it happen?’ But after that one he’s like, ‘Well, we need to figure this out and come up with a plan.’ ” It was at least the fourth goal Mann has given up in essentially the same situation this season.

Mayotte recalled similar goals against Minnesota in November, Penn State in January and Wisconsin earlier this month.

Mann and Mayotte share a similar goaltending philosophy — neither likes to work on specific situations week-to-week unless it’s truly necessary.

But, after Morrison’s goal, Mann decided he’d given up goals in that situation one too many times. Before practice Monday, he met with Mayotte to figure out a new plan. The two bounced ideas off each other, came up with a few things to try after practice and took the ice ready to solve it.

“My job is to know his game well, but he’s the one that ultimately has to execute it, so the plan has to be comfortable for him, not for me,” Mayotte said. “ … It’s just bouncing ideas off, going through the mental

ALEC COHEN/Daily

Strauss Mann has worked with Kris Mayotte on his positioning this week.

reps and then the physical and seeing what feels right.”

When making adjustments in the middle of the season — especially a season like Mann is having, as he is currently ranked sixth in the nation in save percentage at .934 — Mayotte knows he has to be careful.

Change too many things, and it could throw the goaltender out of the fundamentals and the rhythm that have brought him success throughout the year.

But with Mayotte’s focus on fundamentals and fixing bad habits only when it becomes absolutely necessary, he can find the balance.

“I’m a big believer that at this level, you have a lot of goalies who can stop pucks,” Mayotte said. “It’s making sure that they’re consistent. Helping them be consistent. They put in the work.”

Added Mann: “In season in general, for goalies, you try to look at things that need to be fixed but maybe not go into the deeper stuff. Like, if there’s something in the pre-scout of another team or just a bad habit you’re getting into, then you might try to fix that, but nothing too technical or about changing your whole game until after season.”

As Mayotte explained it, the situation Mann kept finding himself in is tricky due to the number of options the skater has with the puck. But with just a bit of work Monday after practice, Mayotte and Mann feel they’ve figured out a plan and fixed the habit without making changes that are too dramatic.

“It’s hard, because you’re trying to cover the whole dang thing,” Mayotte said. “When (the skater has) the puck all the way out (there), it makes the net more like eight feet wide rather than six because you have to get outside your posts to stay square.

“It’s a tough one, but we’re working on it. I think we came up with a plan.”

KENT SCHWARTZ Daily Sports Writer

Standing at the podium in front of TV cameras and a gaggle of reporters, Michigan State coach Suzy Merchant stared emptily into the background.

Her team just lost to Michigan, getting swept for the first time since 2015, and Merchant was looking for an answer.

“This was sort of a step backwards for (sophomore forward Kayla Belles and freshman forward Taiyier Parks),” Merchant said. “I think those two kids are very young, MILES MACKLIN/Daily first year kids. … I’m proud of Freshman guard Michelle Sidor is part of Michigan’s growing youth movement. how they’ve developed, but you Iz. We need your toughness, can also see their youth on a for 63 minutes and 13 points. night like this. They can have Since Nolan’s emergency we need your strength, today is some slippage.” call up to the starting rotation your day for that double-double.’

The two combined for 23 in early February, she’s been a And darn she was pretty close, stalwart defender and has found if she wasn’t in foul trouble so minutes and three points.

Twenty minutes earlier, a way to contribute to the team much, she probably would have Michigan coach Kim Barnes in any way imaginable, whether gotten it.”

When she sets foot on the Arico beamed behind the same it be blocks, assists or rebounds.

In her first 21 games as a court with Brown or sophomore podium, counting out on her fingers the names of the five Wolverine, Nolan played 6.33 forward Naz Hillmon, her players who finished Sunday’s minutes per game. In the last offensive talent is immediately noticeable.

65-57 victory over the Spartans. six games, she’s “Who’s going to be the next played 30.33 Varejão, in the per last couple of man up?” Barnes Arico said. minutes weeks, finally “And Maddie Nolan rotated game — only became the onto (Spartan guard Taryn costing the team bench threat when McCutcheon) and Michelle once, Barnes Arico Sidor took Maddie’s matchup she fouled out has needed all and those are two freshmen. So against then-No. season.

When we’re just talking about a lot of 19 Northwestern she gets on the young kids who just came in, on on Feb. 13. court opposing Sidor, the road, in a rivalry game, when defenses are the other team went back up and meanwhile, has immediately took the lead, and were able to emerged from win the game down the stretch. a slump to start the Big Ten thrown off-center, leading to “If you say Maddie Nolan, season. In part due to injuries, bursts of scoring.

So Sunday, when Johnson Michelle Sidor, Izabel Varejão, she’s earned Barnes Arico’s Naz Hillmon and Amy Dilk, trust to play in big moments and Brown fouled out and that’s three freshmen and two and be an offensive spark for the Wolverines’ youth was thrust into the most hostile sophomores.”

Michigan.

Varejão has had her own environment Michigan has Barnes Arico finished her patches, and her faced all year, they were ready. sentence with an emphatic, rough “Yeah!” and a fist pump, her continuous foul troubles detract The three had hit their stride.

Instead of leaving their from her potential as a day-in, smile nearly splitting her face. coach standing on the podium, With senior guard Akienreh day-out double-double threat.

“I told Izabel the last couple of blaming youth and talking about Johnson and junior forward Hailey Brown out with injury, days,” Barnes Arico said. “ ‘You what could have been, they left the three freshmen — Nolan, are getting a double-double. her beaming and dreaming of Sidor and Varejão — combined I’m feeling it, today is your day what’s to come.

A lot of young kids ... were able to win the game.

UConn exposes Michigan’s flaws Wolverines see pitching struggles LILY ISRAEL

ABBIE TELGENHOF

Four games. Three losses.

Two weekends. One opponent.

Through the last 14 days, the Michigan baseball team has grown familiar with UConn.

The Huskies weren’t the toughest opponent it faced in that time. It wasn’t even the best team the Wolverines played — that title is reserved for the likes of Vanderbilt and Arizona State. But there’s something special about UConn, the only one to find success against Michigan, with a win on Feb. 16, followed by a 2-1 series win last weekend.

UConn, having made the regional tournament three of the last four years, acts as somewhat of a measuring stick for Michigan.

Wolverines’ coach Erik Bakich preaches that if you want to be the best, you have to play the best.

But in a weekend series that could have solidified Michigan’s early-season prowess against a successful northern program that the Wolverines have aimed to emulate in the past few seasons, they fell flat.

It’s not that the Huskies’ strengths exploited all of the Wolverines’ weaknesses. It’s the simple fact that everything Michigan did wrong over the weekend, UConn did right.

Whether it was the production from the bullpen or stringing consistent quality at-bats together or gaining momentum at the right time, whenever Michigan faltered, the Huskies made exactly the right moves to exploit its mistakes.

“They just are solid in all phases,” Bakich said. “They have good starting pitching.

They have bullpen matchup guys that can come in and throw multiple pitches from the right and left side. They have speed and power in their lineup.”

Michigan utilized a total of eight bullpen pitchers in the series. Freshman left-hander Jacob Denner — the only Wolverine to earn a win — pitched four innings, amassing

During the second game of the Gamecock Invitational, Alex Storako stepped onto the mound in hopes of leading Michigan past Iowa State.

Replacing junior left-hander Megan Beaubien, in the top of the seventh with the score tied at one, the sophomore right-hander came in for a relief effort.

Getting into her normal groove, Storako allowed a sacrifice bunt and struck out the next batter.

But that groove was short-lived.

Storako walked the next batter and her pinch-runner stole second allowing an extra run to score on a single batter later. With two runners crossing home, the score was 3-1 for Iowa State. Things seemingly couldn’t get much worse for the Wolverines, until Storako walked the next batter and allowed for a double down the left-field line, scoring two more runs.

Eventually, Michigan coach Carol Hutchins pulled Storako for freshman right-hander Chandler Dennis — the first time this season Michigan has pitched three of its pitchers in one game. It was also Dennis’s collegiate debut.

“I think collectively as a team we weren’t at our A-game,” Storako said. “I just think that we came back from South Carolina with a

Daily Sports Writer

Daily Sports Writer

FILE PHOTO/Daily

Michigan’s bullpen struggled in the Wolverines’ series loss against UConn.

just two strikeouts as he closed out a blowout win on Saturday.

“Definitely the first and third day weren’t what we wanted,” Denner said. “But I really think we showed what we could do on day two from a hitting standpoint and from a pitching standpoint as well.”

In Friday’s game, freshman right-hander Cam Weston and senior left-hander Ben Keizer combined for four innings, six hits and two earned runs out of the bullpen. While this would normally be a solid outing, the Wolverines did not perform well enough to cling to the lead that starter Jeff Criswell left behind.

Each pitcher performed in a similar capacity in a relief effort on Sunday, earning comparable stat lines and the same result — a loss.

UConn’s bullpen, meanwhile, was able to sustain leads and allow its offense time to climb out of deficits.

“We let some innings get away from us,” Bakich said.

“That was uncharacteristic — we usually have a very reliable and capable bullpen.”

Inconsistent bullpen pitching coupled with a lack of consistent offensive production spelled doom for the Wolverines. Over the course of the series, out of

a total of 100 at-bats, Michigan hitters struck out 36 times. In the two losses, the Wolverines racked up 17 and 13 strikeouts, respectively.

“We need to do a better job hitting good pitches with less than two strikes and battling with two strikes,” Bakich said.

UConn’s strikeout count on the weekend? Twenty-four.

That 12 strikeout difference between the two teams is four full innings of hitters, potential base runners and hopeful scorers.

These strikeout numbers — an average of 12 per game in the three-game series against the Huskies — are a slight increase from the numbers from the opening weekend, where the team averaged just under 10 per game.

UConn did not exploit this weakness, but rather capitalized on Michigan’s selfinflicted harm. The Huskies simply did everything right that Michigan did wrong.

“Even though UConn is a very good club and has historically been a good club, a consistent regional team,” Bakich said.

“I thought the lack of success this weekend is us pointing the thumb at some of our lack of execution, and that is really it.”

We need to do a better job hitting good pitches.

lot of things to work on and I know that we’re really getting at those things and we want to get better for the next weekend coming up.”

Over the past two weekends, Michigan’s pitching has been lights out. This weekend, that wasn’t the case. Ultimately, pitching dug holes for Michigan that it couldn’t climb out of as it dropped three of four games on the weekend.

Even Beaubien, Michigan’s typically reliable ace, contributed to the struggles. She started against Iowa State and struggled.

While she had seven strikeouts and allowed two runs on four hits in six innings, facing Liberty her stats told a different story. She allowed one run on two hits pitching only a part of the final inning.

“We just gave up too much,” Hutchins said. “And whole ball over whole plate doesn’t usually work out very well. And it didn’t.

Video shows that those pitches that they hit out at very untimely times were just right there and well hit, well swung. But you know what’s done is done. This is our first day to get back and work a little bit on our spin and work on our movement, and really more than anything work on our mindset.”

While its pitching struggled this weekend, Michigan understands the importance of full team competition.

This weekend, pitching struggled tremendously,

and it put pressure on the offense to produce — another thing the Wolverines struggled with.

“I think our offense, we always are striving to kind of support our pitchers so kind of give her a cushion so we don’t put all the pressure just on her,” sophomore catcher Hannah Carson said. “So I think when there were hits here in there off of Chandler we were just thinking we need to start stringing our hits together, we need to start connecting with the ball so we can help all our pitchers out.”

Next weekend, the Wolverines play in the Judi Garman Classis tournament. It features the toughest teams Michigan may face in its nonconference slate, including No. 2 Washington, No. 3 Texas and No. 25 Texas Tech. Michigan will need to look toward sorting out its pitching struggles before facing some of the best power-hitting teams in the country.

“We can only do what we do,” Hutchins said. “We’ll need to pitch, throw pitches to beat, not throw pitches to not get hit. And the mindset of our pitchers has to be one pitch focus and throw every pitch to beat the hitter. We need to just throw with confidence, knowing that mistakes will get hit and we just gotta trust that (the pitchers) part of the game is to keep us in the game.”

ALEC COHEN/Daily

Sophomore right-hander Alex Storako struggled out of relief at the Gamecock Invitational, where Michigan went 1-3.

Sports

8A — Wednesday, February 26, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Through an open-door policy, Juwan Howard aims to shape Michigan’s culture DANIEL DASH

Daily Sports Writer Juwan Howard’s new job came with a new office.

As the calendar flipped to June 2019, he began moving cardboard boxes en masse into an office left vacant by former Michigan coach John Beilein’s abrupt exit a month earlier. Arms full, he walked down the second-floor corridor of the Player Development Center, hauling the boxes beyond the team film lounge, resource room and assistant coaches’ offices.

He carried them past every door until reaching the last one on the left, which opens to a corner office. The process of unpacking still isn’t finished, but nine months after his hiring, everything about the room has taken on a personal complexion.

That is, everything but the desk.

It’s the same wooden desk Beilein used, with one small modification. At 6-foot-9, Howard stands nearly a foot taller than his predecessor.

His knees didn’t comfortably fit beneath the desk, so he ordered a set of two-inch risers for the bottom.

Even still, Howard’s own bobblehead — usually perched on the edge of the desk — violently nods when his knees inadvertently jostle the underside. The desk chair was a tight squeeze, too, so he bought a bigger one.

Behind the desk, the back wall is glazed with framed pictures of Howard and the Fab Five. His wife, Jenine, ordered the photos. The collection includes a brush painting of Steve Fisher, Howard’s college coach from three decades ago.

It’s fitting that the corner office has undergone a makeover comparable to that of the program itself. After spending 25 years around the NBA — 19 as a player and six as a coach — Howard has implemented a pro-style system at Michigan.

On the recruiting trail, he’s assembling a level of talent Ann Arbor hasn’t seen since, well, his own Fab Five.

And now, whenever a player walks down that corridor, the last door on the left is open.

Sometimes literally. Always figuratively.

It’s the reason you can’t understand the Wolverines’ surge on the court without understanding what’s happening off it. In just nine months, a culture has taken shape — one that starts with the man sitting behind the desk on two-inch risers.

“I feel good about the fact that communication is important,” Howard told The Daily on Feb. 3. “I never want any of my players to feel like they’re isolated or in this bubble by themselves, so I’ve always told them, ‘Hey, if there’s anything on your mind, it’s important for us to have that relationship where you can come talk to me about anything.’

“My door is always open.” *** Since Howard’s hiring, everyone around the Michigan men’s basketball program has used the same two words to describe the first-year coach.

Players’ coach.

The label has become a de facto stamp, rolling off the tongue of seemingly every coach and player — both Howard’s own and opposing.

If there’s anyone who fits the bill, it’s Howard.

In short, he’s been everywhere a college basketball player dreams of going. Now in his first head-coaching job, that experience has proved to be a valuable vehicle in connecting with his players.

“He’s had some great experiences,” junior walk-on forward C.J. Baird said. “One of the main examples is his time with LeBron James. That’s

one of the greatest basketball players of all-time, and you see (Howard) come around with that sort of knowledge and that sort of story.

“It really gives us better perspective. He knows what it takes to be great on every level. It really helps us to understand we’re following a guy who’s done it all on every level.”

Howard’s past can’t be overlooked, but it’s only half of what endears him to players. Telling old stories only goes so far. The all-important other half is visible in the way he treats his players within his meticulously constructed program.

Experience is a reflection of Howard’s past.

The way he runs his program is an indicator of his future. And at the center of it all lies his opendoor policy.

“It started when he first got in,” sophomore guard David DeJulius said in December. “He has an open door policy — open, candid conversations — and you just grow to trust him each and every day, just by how he conducts himself as a man, and you look up to him both on and off the floor (for) what he’s done in life and on the basketball court. He just continues to inspire myself and my other teammates.”

There are no exceptions. Even when the last door at the end of the second-floor corridor isn’t physically open, all it takes is a knock. After hours, that knock comes in the form of a text or phone call.

“No matter the time of day, you can hit him up,” DeJulius said. “… When you have a coach that you know cares about you genuinely — both on and off the floor — you’ll run through a brick wall for him.”

Howard’s door is open to everyone, from captains to walk-ons. Over the last few months, seniors Zavier Simpson and Jon Teske have sought out Howard to discuss what it’s like to play at the next level. Freshman wing Franz Wagner, meanwhile, has sat in the same office chair for heart-to-hearts about adjusting to American culture after growing up in Germany.

Somewhere in the middle, DeJulius has used the policy to discuss the ups and downs of an expanded role this season.

“When you have an open door to a guy like (Howard), that helps you a lot,” Wagner said.

“You can just ask questions and have a normal conversation with your head coach, which I think with other teams might be a little different.

It makes everybody feel more comfortable and makes us stay more connected as a team when you know you have a guy like that at the top of the snake.”

Added junior guard Eli Brooks: “Anytime you need (Howard), he’s there. He’ll let you know that, too. You can really feel it. Some people say it’s not real, but with him, it’s real.”

Half of what makes Howard a players’ coach isn’t difficult to see. It’s easy to fetch an image of him hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and it takes even less effort to look up his lengthy list of career accolades.

The other half, however, is the one making the difference in his first season as a head coach. *** Howard is a 47-year-old father of six, four of which are boys.

The oldest starred at Detroit Mercy from 2012-15, and another is a senior starting forward at Brown. Two are still in high school, one of which is set to join Michigan next fall while the youngest — currently a sophomore — is starting to put together an impressive college-offer list.

Howard is no stranger to fatherhood. More specifically, he’s no stranger to being the father of Division I basketball players. Even still, the 15 players on the Wolverines’ roster have forced

him to straddle the line between fatherhood and coaching.

“I’m old enough to be all their fathers,” Howard said. “I treat them like they’re the young men they are. I also take into consideration that I can be their dad, and I want them to feel like I’m not hovering over them, but I am a nurturer. I love them like they all are my kids. I don’t want to love them, I do love them like they are my kids.”

That understanding, coupled with his emphasis on communication, makes Howard’s open-door policy all the more valuable. “He thinks of us as family and we do the same with him,” senior center Austin Davis said.

That’s why Howard, on a chilly mid-January morning, threw DeJulius a curveball when he requested a meeting to discuss his role on the team. Instead of convening in Howard’s office, he suggested they meet for breakfast at Sava’s, a popular Ann Arbor restaurant on State Street.

“I don’t like to always (talk in) my office,” Howard said. “The office just seems like it’s a dungeon, where it’s like, ‘Oh, here comes the big coach’s speech.’ And then it can be intimidating for players to want to be locked in the coach’s office. I enjoy being off-site, where it can be more of a relaxed setting so the guys can be more comfortable.”

The meeting came almost a year to the day after DeJulius, then a freshman, was denied a pre-practice meeting with Beilein. He recalled requesting it over text just a few hours beforehand, which failed to meet Beilein’s preferred 24 hours’ notice.

“Last year, it wasn’t the same policy,” DeJulius said. “So for sure, it’s a lot different stating at this stage that you can just walk into his office at any time of the day and just talk about anything.

“It doesn’t even have to be about basketball. A lot of times, he’ll pull you in and talk to you and it won’t have nothing to do with basketball, ‘How’s your family? How are you? How’s school? How are you doing mentally?’ ” With four boys of his own, Howard knows the importance of those questions as well as anyone.

Where he excels most, though, is the way he goes about asking them.

“I have a little practice in communicating with these young adults today,” Howard said, flashing a grin. “At times, I still think I’m a young adult.” *** For a while, the idea of being a head coach was merely a budding seed in Howard’s mind.

The idea of an open-door policy, on the other hand, was a fullysprouted tree — a decision rooted in his own experience as a player.

Howard admired coaches with similar policies during his NBA career, specifically citing Erik Spoelstra, Jim Lynam and Nate McMillan as those with open doors.

“Some players have been around certain coaches where they didn’t feel comfortable going to talk to the coach,” Howard said. “Whether it’s about playing time, shots, or if it was about anything personal, I’ve always — since I was a player in the NBA — my

coaches have always given me that freedom to come in and talk whenever I needed.”

When Howard was tabbed the 17th head coach in program history in May, an open door policy was already part of his vision. At the team’s first practice in July, he told players they were going to learn how to “share the game,” according to associate head coach Phil Martelli.

To Howard, sharing the program is a necessary key to sharing the game. Knowing what it’s like to play for coaches with open-door policies, he decided to make it a pillar of his own vision.

“An (open-door policy) helps when you allow your players to have an empowerment that this is a part of their team,” Howard said. “It’s an active, collective group and how we can both figure out (and) come to solutions that give us the best chance to be a fun, successful program. I’ve always talked about it.

Players, they are part of the process and it cannot, and should not, always come from the coach.”

Howard’s open-door policy is a vital component to Michigan’s aspirations, both this season and beyond. The Wolverines’ current five-game winning streak has thrust them back into the Big Ten title conversation, and with the nation’s fourth-ranked recruiting class set to arrive on campus next fall, this season could be only the beginning of sustained success.

Perhaps Howard’s senior captain put it best.

“That’s the type of coach he is,” Simpson said.

ALEC COHEN / DAILY | DESIGN BY JACK SILBERMAN

SPORTS

statement T H E M I C H I G A N DA I LY | F E B R UA RY 26 , 2020

The pulse of perfection

PHOTO BY KEEMYA ESMAEL

2B Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement

statement T H E M I CH I GA N DAI LY | FE B RUA RY 26 , 2020

Managing Statement Editor Magdalena Mihaylova Deputy Editors Emily Stillman Marisa Wright Associate Editor Reece Meyhoefer

Designers Liz Bigham Kate Glad Copy Editors Madison Gagne Sadia Jiban

Photo Editor Keemya Esmael Editor in Chief Elizabeth Lawrence Managing Editor Erin White

Ode to vintage stores P

ink and yellow flowers covered the ovular bead that hung on a dainty gold chain swinging in the window of BRECA, a vintage shop in Pristina, Kosovo. The necklace attracted me from the street on a day I’d set out exploring the city which would become my temporary home during a summer project. I rushed into the store to purchase the piece, and once inside, found myself circling the aisles uncovering more jewelry, headwear and fabrics like none I’d encountered before. I purchased the necklace and perused every other item in the store, feeling that I had stumbled on a treasure trove of untold stories in the secondhand items.

When I feel uncertain about a new place I’ve moved to, I first head to vintage shops: They feel like places protected from the threats of consumerism and corporate harm. The items on the shelves bring with them lives, histories and stories about which we can only speculate. To what event was the silken scarf last worn? Did someone hike a mountain or ford a river in those shoes? Was that ring gifted as a sign of affection to an antique love? Shopping at vintage stores makes me feel closer to the places I’ve moved because the items I purchase are spared the sterility of newness. It’s easier to start my own story in such a place because every find reminds me that the story does not begin with me.

The stories uncovered in vintage stores are not the same histories popularized in textbooks, with dated details of long-gone battles or forged legal codes. Instead, antique collections reveal the personal, accidental and private: Postcards between long-distance lovers, clothes faded from years of wear and diaries with sprawling drawings in the margins all fuse to tell the human stories of a particular place. Shopping at vintage stores shows me a place’s history better than anywhere else.

Vintage store finds harbor more than their own stories, too. I grew up performing in the theatre, where clothing from vintage shops was a necessity for stocking the dressing room shelves. Historical time periods came to life authentically in the costumes we cobbled together with found textures and already-worn garments of vintage stores. The costumes used in one play were saved in warehouses for the next and always worn by someone else, who would enact an entirely different storyline — before myself or another became the bearer of it. The same piece of clothing served countless fictional lives during its tenure in the theatre and likely many more in reality, too.

Clothes and thrifted objects seem embedded with stories, both real and fake, and when we donate old clothes, their meaning multiplies with new ownership. Thrifted objects are a way we share stories — they are a physical object in which our lives intersect.

Growing up, I loved the story of the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” which imagined a pair of faded jeans that magically fit each of the four main characters who tried them on, carrying with them the lives of each other. Each

BY EMILY RUSSELL, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

KEEMYA ESMAEL/DAILY

friend wears the jeans and then writes about the experience to the others to tell them what type of lives the pants themselves have lived. There are stories embedded in the jeans, and as the girls go on experimenting in their lives, the pants collect and carry that storied trajectory. Collective ownership is more meaningful than single-wear, single-use purchases. The meaning objects hold multiplies when it is shared across lives and experiences.

I recently found a heavily annotated copy of W. H. Auden’s collection of poetry at my favorite vintage bookstore in Ann Arbor, Dawn Treader. I picked up the copy to find notes scrawled in smudged blue ink from cover to cover. The prose in the corners, handwritten by its previous owner, was just as resonant as the poems they encompassed.

By the end of the book, I not only knew the chronological publishing of Auden’s work, but the nuances of a personal story of grief and heartache that a previous reader recounted on their journey through the poetry. In reading from an already-treasured copy of the book, it became clear to me how often we write our stories in the margins, and between the lines, of others.

Beyond our personal histories, thrifted objects can tell us the pasts of places and systems bigger than ourselves, too. It

is not hard to imagine the many antique tourist items scattered across vintage shops that serve now as relics of places which are no longer: a replica of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in its fullest form preceding the fire that destroyed its likeness last year, or postcards presenting images of natural lands across South America now lost to endless deforestation across the continent.

In this way, vintage shops may also be places of despair, reminding us of lives that were, places that used to be and times in both personal and political histories which are long gone. When living in Kosovo, I wondered if I would ever stumble upon a sweatshirt emblazoned with “YUGOSLAVIA,” naming an empire that dissolved decades ago in war, maybe featuring embroidered skylines now lost. Kitchy reminders of a country that went on to carry a dark history, serve, too, as important pillars of remembrance. Before secondhand items can serve as generators of new stories, they first are collections of the old.

Vintage shops, then, can help us understand our place in this complex and historical world, in places under constant change. The personal and political present themselves to us in relics. As any historian knows, what will be always starts with what is and what has been.

No place(s) like home

BY ELLIE KATZ, STATEMENT COLUMNIST T

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement 3B 3B

here was a big pond behind the third house of my childhood.

The first night we moved in, all five of us ran down to it — my two brothers, mom, dad and me — and we slipped, slid and pushed each other across the ice. Snow was coming down from the sky in big chunks. (It was one of those typical winter nights, I’d later learn, that poised you well for a snow day the next day). We ran up from the pond after our new neighbor kindly asked us to quiet down and ripped off our sweatshirts and jeans — none of us had bought winter coats yet. Later that night, we all piled into the car and went to a store called Meijer that we’d never heard of before, picked out our own frozen meals and ate them in foldable chairs with disposable forks before falling asleep on air mattresses in empty rooms.

A new childhood was dawning — just like the two previous childhoods had. I’d spent the first eight years of life catching tadpoles and prancing around bayous in Houston and the next four finding ways to entertain myself in 110-degree Julys in Dallas, but moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan at age 12 was something distinctly foreign. The oceans, humidity, prairies, indefatigable heat and roaming steer of my early memories didn’t translate to the fenceless, green, freshwatered, snow-covered rolling hills of West Michigan.

I had to change my words, too: I quickly learned to say “you guys” instead of “y’all”; “pop” instead of “soda”; to put the emphasis on “sur” in “insurance” instead of on “in.” There are twangs my friends still tease me for which I never could quite kick, like how I pronounce “museum” or how I intonate “Grand Haven.” Certain words, pronunciations and phrases still walk out of my mouth like little skeletons from the South who refuse to be fully laid to rest.

This past December, I returned to Grand Rapids for a few days. I’ve gone each New Year’s Day since I left for college, which was around the same time my parents moved away again, this time to the West Coast. The first two years I returned to visit satisfied the 12 months’ worth of nostalgia for the place I came into adolescence — they satisfied my desire to

return to the place I still considered home, even though my family had left. Even in December, my friends and I would drive to our old haunts, sometimes just to sit: Frosty Boy for the lemon soft serve, the Blue Bridge for a good view of the river, Lookout Park for another of the city, that one Meijer on the Beltline for whatever else we craved (the same one my family and I first ventured to 10 years ago for a snow shovel and frozen meals).

But this past New Year’s Day was distinct. Instead of filling the ache of a homebound itinerant, the city made me feel like a stranger. New strip malls had appeared in place of what I remembered as roadside forests. The sandwich shop I’d worked at the summer I turned 17 had been replaced by a Thai fusion restaurant.

The ice cream shack on the river we’d ride our bikes to before we could drive was gone.

Even the people I saw — the ones who I see once a year at New Year’s Eve — felt like new people I was getting to know, not classmates, neighbors and teammates I’d grown up with. Few of us still belonged to the city we’d once held in common. Even if we ended up in the same college towns, we were no longer bound by the ritual duties of a shared hometown. Outside of Kent County, duties like jumping off the camelback bridge into the Thornapple River at dusk, like stumbling drunkenly through the Coast Guard Festival or like flocking to the 28th Street Steak ‘n Shake when you were high on a summer’s night no longer mattered. Ann Arbor has different rivers, different festivals and different Steak ‘n Shakes to be experienced.

It seems like three years is the right amount of time for strangeness to set in — the right amount of time for the duties to fade and for new ones to take their places.

When we were all together this past New Year’s Eve, we all seemed older to me, more mature for certain. More than that, each of us now belonged to new places and new people. It was like being wavering between two realms of reality. In the first realm, I knew the whole and complete picture of my friends’ lives: their classes, their sports, their hobbies, their other friends, their houses. All of this became uncertain in the second realm. Their lives

became more blurry.

I understood. Places change and people get older. I had my own new places and people back in Ann Arbor. The kids living in Grand Rapids now — who are familiar with the new strip malls, and the nonsandwich shop, and the ice-creamless river, and the duties of home among a shared reality — will come back five years from now and feel the same way. It was still unsettling that for the first time since I was a teenager, Grand Rapids didn’t feel like home to me.

When does a place start to feel like home, and when does it stop feeling like it? Even if I were to walk down the first block I have a memory of, Lymbar Drive in Houston, I’d be just another passerby with the vague recollection that I had drawn chalk on this sidewalk once, that I had scraped my knee on that curb, that I had learned to ride my bike over there.

But Houston does not feel like my home — it hasn’t for a long time. Nor do Dallas and now Grand Rapids. I have a hard time understanding why.

I can’t help but wonder whether or not these places would feel like home if I’d lived in them for longer. What’s the threshold for acquiring a permanent home? Eight years, three decades, a lifetime? How long gone is long gone enough to feel like a tourist in the place that raised you?

The places I remember growing up have morphed into an indiscernible yet colorful bundle of houses, stoplights, sidewalks, fences, schools and people. Instead of watching seasons pass by in the same backyard each year, I saw green summers and brown ones — ones with big fir trees and ones with dust. I saw winters both warm and cold — ones with shorts and soccer at the playground and ones with frozen ponds and snow days. As jumbled as my many homes and childhoods become, they will never be short on variety and I will never be short on empathy for those trying to make a new home in a new place.

Going “home” now to my parents’ house in Oregon is a day-long parade of early morning flights, layovers in Las Vegas, or Minneapolis, or San Francisco, or Seattle and an unhealthy dose of airport food.

But miraculously I always end up on the

opposite end of the continent feeling as though I’ve somehow traveled through time.

I have, in a way: Instead of a singular, fluid place, my idea of home is interspersed with hiccups and gaps, with changes and intervals. There is no handprint in the cement, no tree I always climbed, no one long, unhalting, unbroken memory of a home to which I can return.

There are odd interruptions in the otherwise continuous flow of a lifetime with each uprooting; odd interruptions that inevitably feel like time travel once I look back at them. Like how my family and I traveled through time as we drove northward to Michigan almost 10 years ago, watching winter become something unrecognizable as it passed us by in the car windows. Like how I traveled through time when I returned to Grand Rapids just a few months ago, only to see an entirely new city in its place. Like how I travel through time after coming back to Ann Arbor each fall with a breath of relief. No matter what I’ve been up to, this city feels the same. This city is home, at least for right now.

I’ve been here long enough to reach some of the typical benchmarks: My Ann Arbor address is on my I.D. and I have an Ann Arbor District Library card.

There are the unwritten ones, too: I can figure out how to get back to my house without GPS if I’ve driven too far away, give a stranger directions and restaurant recommendations or tell you where and when the city’s swing dance group practices in the summertime.

Then there are the things which truly christen it as home, like the time my brother and I dove to the bottom of the Huron River over and over again to find the glasses he’d lost the day before. Or the time my roommate came to jump my stalled car in the middle of Liberty Street during rush hour. Or the evening they closed down all of State Street before the art fair, and I rode my bike back and forth down the middle of the road without a single car or person to look out for.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN KUZEE

4B Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement 5B

The pulse of perfection M

y favorite part of a Pure Barre workout is when we go into bridge lifts — upper back on the ground, pelvis pushing up toward the ceiling — because it’s the most overtly sexual thing we do, and it means class is almost over Pure Barre was founded by Carrie Dorr in 2001, just outside of Detroit. Driven by a results-oriented “lift, tone, burn” mantra, Pure Barre focuses on low-impact, muscleburning movements intended to tighten and lengthen the body. Pure Barre Classic is the company’s original workout: Each class is designed to isolate various muscle groups using a ballet barre, two sets of light weights and tomato-colored balls and bands.

Each class is uniform and scary, the lights turning on, dimming, turning back on and turning off as a lean woman with hair the color of a maraschino cherry screams over the “50 Shades of Grey” soundtrack for you to “take your seat to your heels, halfway up and hold.” don’t know if anyone here is a sucker like me and does those barre classes where you’re supposed to sculpt your clit into an ancient arrowhead or whatever … ” (Jenny Slate said in her Netflix comedy special “Stage Fright.”)

Barre started as a way for women to strive toward and successfully experience better sex. In a piece for The Cut, Danielle Friedman writes that the woman who created barre, “Lotte Berk, a free-love revolutionary who began teaching the regimen in 1959, specifically wanted to advance what she called ‘the state of sex’ by encouraging women to pursue sex for their own pleasure.”

Berk was a German-Jewish dancer who sought refuge in London after the Nazis inhibited her career, and she radicalized a brand of fitness that was acutely erotic and prioritized female gratification. “Perhaps most famously,” Friedman writes, “she is rumored to have told clients, ‘If you can’t tuck, you can’t fuck.’ And her clients loved her for it.”

While modern-day barre isn’t about sex, there is a promise that it will make you sexier. This promise is buried in the fantasy that, one day, you’ll be desirable in the way that all “Barre Babes” are.

I imagine a Barre Babe as this: She has healthier hair than you and abs you can see through her tank top. She has clear skin and never wears makeup in class, which she takes every day because she’s tougher than you. She’s the exercise equivalent to author Gillian Flynn’s “Cool Girl”: Being the Cool Girl means I am … hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry;

I

they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

We barre-goers pelvic thrust in an orbit around Barre Babe, hating her and the fact that we’ll never quite be her. She threatens and tinkers with our self-worth, so we pay for monthly memberships and $25 socks and tank tops that say “oh, tuck” because Barre Babe is toned and sexy, effortless and happy.

We feel good about ourselves after each hour in the studio and book our next class from our beds, under a weighted blanket and a bag of chips.

Barre3, a cardio and strength-based workout, was designed by Sadie Lincoln in efforts to defy the Barre Babe mentality.

Each class is similar without being identical: We warm up and hit each major muscle group, liberated to take or leave modifications along the way.

Lincoln and her husband Chris started the company in August 2008, with their flagship studio in Portland, Ore. There are now 148 franchise studios around the world, all led by entrepreneurial women. She admits on National Public Radio’s “How I Built This” that when she first opened her doors, she was teaching 19 classes a day. “My body broke,” she said. “Literally, my back went out, and I remember my mom saying to me, ‘Honey, you’re embodying your business.’ “ “I learned that to be healthy,” she continued. “It really is okay to pause, to not move, to not achieve, and to not have an outward expression of what exercise means.”

Barre3 and Pure Barre are not the same, but they’re clumped together in the world of boutique fitness, where Lincoln’s dream of murdering Barre Babe with selfempowerment is brazenly weakened by female competition and the collective mentality that the grass is always greener on the other side. If only we could drop lower, if only we could hold a side plank, if only we could manage heavier weights — she’s doing it.

The summer of 2016, I started going to Barre3 in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri because I wanted to look better.

It beat the shit out of me, but I kept going back. My waist was getting smaller, and my thundering thighs were starting to slim. My arms were shedding the meat I’ve always hated about myself, letting muscles ripple to the surface.

Sumo-squatting once a week turned into two times, which eventually grew to four or five, and sometimes even six. I loved the escalating lightness of early morning

classes, which I’d take with my mom before she left for work. The sky blushed, its rosy fever creeping onto our opening breaths as the sun rose on our thickening layer of sweat.

Barre3 made my whole body shake, pain giving way to a numb and premeditated quiver which instructors would croon was “my body changing.” I loved those changes; I felt powerful in them. Go ahead, make me pulse, I thought. I don’t mind, I’m the Barre Babe. ellness is “the state of being in good health, especially as an actively pursued goal,” as stated by Merriam-Webster. Per mainstream refinement and capitalism, wellness is a catch-all. An empire has been built around the concept of “wellness” with various territories holding stake: boutique fitness, athleisure, minimalism, diet culture, antidiet culture, CBD, yoga. On and on and on.

The paradoxes of the wellness world — inclusivity and unattainability, envy and admiration, authenticity and superficiality, business and recreation — have no bearing on its ability to turn a profit. Wellness is an absorptive and active phenomenon, both in practice and principle, and it’s driven by results. People are making money, be it through genuine intention or a preying on pure anxiety, from other people wanting to become Barre Babe. The never-endingness of that becoming is what continues to perpetuate and fund the culture. We can plank and step-tap and carousel-horse and squat and tuck and fuck however much we want, but it’ll never be enough. We’ll never be done. dear friend and forever muse recently took up yoga. Jack Brandon, recent LSA graduate and Daily Arts King, started in July 2019 for a few different reasons: “The first is that it became an easier option than going to the gym, which had started to become a chore and stopped being a comfortable way to exercise,” he said.

“The second reason is that my boyfriend had been doing it for a while and that made it a little more interesting to me. My friends had been doing it before, but I had assumed it was too expensive or too hard. I was fairly inflexible and wanted to save myself the embarrassment of not being able to hold poses. The third is

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that a yoga instructor I had met once told me I had a ‘very sexual energy.’ ” Jack’s approach to yoga is deliberate: He wanted to be comfortable, he wanted to work out with his boyfriend and he wanted to feel sexy. The curiosity driving these wants — will it work? — is what keeps him going back.

Every Pure Barre class, after weightwork and a thigh sprint, we stretch. The music slows into an acoustic serenade, or some melancholic electronica, and we’re all facing ourselves in the mirror, panting and alive, as we’re told to lean into our version of the splits, “pushing for equal strength and flexibility each class.” Sliding into the stretch, folding into my inner thighs as they settled on the ground without pain or force, took months of classes. And then I did it, and I felt comfortable and sexy and like something was working. This money I spent was working, my body was working. Jack, look, it works. n the past decade, the ability of good health to serve as a marketing tool has blossomed, partly thanks to Gwyneth “I’d Rather Smoke Crack Than Eat Cheese From A Tin” Paltrow. She started her lifestyle brand, Goop, in September 2008, sending the first newsletter out to 10,377 subscribers. The company went on to design detoxes and recipes, soon expanding their content to encompass understandings and anxieties experienced largely by women. A household name herself, Paltrow recruited other divinely feminine

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celebrities to contribute to Goop’s operation: Bryce Dallas Howard wrote a personal essay on her journey through postpartum depression and Beyoncé donated a pair of shoes to Goop’s “annual charity closet sale.”

Goop’s mission is simple. They want to create change, whether that be in your or for you: “We don’t mind being the tip of the spear — in short, we go first so you don’t have to.”

The current culture of the wellness industry offers the control that Goop is advocating for, straddling a marketable line between the choices we’re currently making and the choices we could make, if only we had the right guidance. You have to buy into the ethos that Goop proposes, which isn’t hard to do when you’re burdened by the deeply human struggle of trying to navigate who you are and who you want to be. The wellness industry sells the merging of the two, monetizing the possibility of being at peace with yourself while capitalizing on the potential that you might have to be even better.

Writer Jia Tolentino talks about the phenomenon of self-improvement in her recent collection of essays, “Trick Mirror.”

In a chapter titled “Always Be Optimizing,” she acknowledges the “real pleasures” available in self-improvement, like the ability “to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control.” She also asserts that the beauty ideal promoted by the endless search for a best-self can drag women into “a paradigm where a woman can muster all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually try to become that idealized self, and where she can understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist — or just, without question, the best way to live.”

What happens when you find your “best self,” only to realize that this self isn’t who

BY ARYA NAIDU, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR you thought it might be? Where do you turn when you’ve exhausted the avenues you believed to be in your best interest, avenues you invested in under the impression that you were investing in yourself? What now, Barre Babe? ure Barre tracks your class milestones: 100, 250, 500, 740, 1,000, 1,250. There are barres outside of the studio room, nailed to the wall for people to autograph at each mark. When I hit 100 classes, I signed the barre closest to the ground and got a free pair of sticky socks, fresh with a silvery “100” circled in glitter.

I started Pure Barre when I started college, and only because there’s not a Barre3 in Michigan. I grew to crave it — maybe I have an addictive personality, maybe I just like mindlessly air-humping to a club remix of “Losing My Religion.”

Nearing my 250 mark, my socks are still impressively sticky and beginning to thread.

They catch the light that’s always dimming and keep my toes from betraying me during the plank at the beginning of class and the end of class and sometimes the middle, if I have the pretty instructor with the foot tattoo. Once I hit 250, I’ll get new socks, and then I’ll get another pair at 500. The stakes keep rising and I keep going and paying and lifting and toning and burning in the name of self-improvement. For a workout that’s supposed to slow me down, I feel like I’m moving faster, racing no one and competing against everyone for the next milestone that I have to have, even if no one but me cares that I have it. You got me, Jia — I’m relentless. fter my 229th class at Pure Barre, I walked home to make dinner.

Stirring my layman’s version of Goop’s Vegan Cashew Tomato Soup recipe next to a poster of the man Gwyneth Paltrow consciously uncoupled from in 2016 (Here’s looking at you, Chris Martin), I asked Jack to take me to yoga. He said yes and we made a date for the following night, when I fed him the soup and we walked to his regular studio together.

Like Barre, yoga is sexy, especially in dim rooms that pulse with a warm glow and boast temperatures over 90 degrees.

The practice bloomed from India, the word “yoga” derived from “yuj,” which is Sanskrit for “to unite” or “to join.” India is also home to the Kama Sutra, or “Teachings on Desire,” which is an ancient

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Sanskrit manual for emotional and erotic fulfillment. Google “yoga” and “Kama Sutra” together, and you’ll find headlines like “Kama Sutra or Sex-Yoga?” and “The Yoga of Pure Sex.” You won’t believe what you can do with your body, we’re told, and we want to know.

We put our mats down and Jack immediately took off his shirt, laying on his back with the soles of his feet pressed into one another and his knees spread wide. I looked down at my covered chest and leaned back to copy him.

Yoga was hard and hot, and I sweat more than I was ever allowed to at Pure Barre, where fans tirelessly thrum in the hopes of keeping everyone’s hair comely enough for life outside of the studio. The men in the room kept peeling whatever fabric they could from themselves as the women flowed in their damp sports bras. There was a liberation in moving however I wanted to move. I left loose and warm, a feeling I haven’t had since my sunrises at Barre3. our months into his yoga practice, Jack can now fold over his legs, hold a bridge pose, and kick up into a handstand (I saw this last triumph confidently and drunkenly executed against the string-lighted, cotton candy blue walls of a friend’s Kerrytown apartment. Very cool.).

“I keep going back because I like feeling that strong, graceful feeling,” he said. “(It’s) like holding two things I thought were in opposition together in one. It feels very yin and yang.”

And I guess the merging of this dichotomy, the “yin and yang” Jack feels when he’s doing something he thought his body might never be able to do, is what “optimizing yourself” feels like, as Tolentino would put it. I feel this whenever I go to Pure Barre, and still, the grass could be greener, my body could do more, my mind could rest easier. That’s why Pure Barre will never be Barre3 and why Barre3 will never be yoga and why yoga will always make me crave the former of the two even more. I can be tough enough to tuck and strong enough to squat and balanced enough to breathe through a backbend, but to what end? oftness is critical to success in yoga — and barre and breath and sex, even. You have to abandon the mentality that failure looks or feels a certain way and surrender to the experience. I’m a sensitive person; I always have been, and surrender doesn’t come easy. I was often told to “toughen up” and “be less delicate” and these demands had consequences, devilishly redefining the facets of a gentle person into fears: soft mind, soft heart, soft stomach.

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In the summer of 2017, I was diagnosed with celiac disease, a lifelong autoimmune condition in which the intake of gluten attacks my small intestine. Celiac is a result of a genetic predisposition and can be developed at any age. My gastroenterologist — one of the three women who I’m pretty sure saved my life — thinks I had celiac for roughly two years before being diagnosed.

At the end of those two years, I spent eight hours in the emergency room getting a stranger’s B+ blood pumped into my left forearm.

When someone with celiac eats enough gluten, they’ll eventually become malnourished. I needed iron infusions and two units of blood and a bronzer that would distinguish me from a ghost (something I hope another South Indian woman never has to say).

My body no longer operated under the agreed upon terms and conditions of the organized fitness I was actively participating in, but that didn’t stop me from trying. I made deals with myself: If I had the extra drink or ate the extra chocolate, I had to book a workout. I wasn’t soft, and I wasn’t going to stop just because I didn’t feel well.

I hauled myself to Pure Barre through the snow, during dusky, undiagnosed February mornings — the same month I started getting charley horses in my calves from just walking to class. After the night in the emergency room, I took four days off before returning to barre. I pushed myself until I broke, and then I kept going.

I started toeing a fine and fragile line once barre became a habit: Barre Babe is cute, but at what cost? Was I going because I needed to do something that made me feel like myself, or was I going because I was worried about what would happen to my body if I stopped? ownward Dog in the back of the room, I glanced over at Jack, who was dripping sweat as he shifted his body’s weight to rest on one leg, leveling his waist for balance as he lowered his chest to the floor. I was jealous — not that he could move his body this way, but that he was brave enough to move fearlessly. After I got diagnosed with celiac, I showed my body no mercy. Soft mind, soft heart, soft stomach. I’d remind myself what to resist — not pausing, still moving, forcing myself to achieve, as though there was glamour to be won in being strong enough to suffer.

“Health” became an empty word. I forgot, either tenaciously or in a blind rage, what the woman behind Barre3 wanted her community to know: Taking a break is okay, failing is okay.

Seeing Jack’s sweat slip down the new contours of his back as he lost and gained

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his stability filled me with purpose: a new way to pause, a new way to move, a new way to achieve. spent the past three summers working the front desk at Barre3 in St. Louis. I kept the studio sunny and followed the morning and evening checklists for glorified janitorial duties: mopping the floors, deep cleaning the bathrooms, bleaching the weights.

The best part of the job was the complimentary classes, quickly followed by overseeing child care. Our studio offered free babysitting for members, many of whom I got to know as I bonded with their children, who were anywhere between 6-months-old and 12-years-old.

I befriended the kids, especially when my shifts started falling into a groove, sticking me with the same 9 a.m. crew every Tuesday morning. Returning each summer, I’d see the same littles, only a bit bigger and sometimes with a new sibling on the way.

The humid months I spent barefoot in the studio completely immersed me in a deeply physical and feminine environment. I became more aware of my own body and the ways in which I took up space both within the studio and outside of it. I noticed the kids I was watching — especially the young girls, still years away from puberty, hormones and many rock-bottoms with the potential to deeply fracture their relationships with their bodies — peering over the wooden door of the childcare corner and into the studio. They’d make faces at the women, spotting their own mothers and replicating her postures.

More and more, fresher demographics, especially young girls, are tempted by the vague novelty of the wellness industry’s practices. This past August, Weight Watchers released Kurbo, an app designed for “adolescents” aged eight to 17. In a statement for USA Today, dietitian Sheri Kasper said “The problem with tracking foods, as Kurbo has its users do, is that it can become an obsession and result in control-driven behaviors that can lead to eating disorders.”

We’re living in a moment of feverish preoccupation.

To quote Mariah Carey circa 2009, “Obsessed, obsessed, obsessed, obsessed, obsessed.” We obsess over ourselves and devote energy to molding ourselves into Barre Babes or Cool Girls or whatever else we can, and the wellness industry helps us. But what happens when this obsession blooms in kids? I’m 21 years old and obsessed with redefining my own health as it exists today. I hate to think of an eight-year-old feeling the same way, and I wonder what my mom would think of what I think, and what her mom would think of what she thinks. arre Babe is sexy, Barre Babe is at peace with her body, Barre Babe doesn’t exist. Flickers of her live in our sticky socks and the moxie that makes us put them on, but she’s a caricature of a woman who will never be done becoming whatever it is she wants to be. We can control this becoming through Goop or Pure Barre or Barre3 or anything, really, that the wellness industry offers a subscription to, but at some point, tomato soup and barre start to feel rigid. We crave softness and ease because we want what we can’t have, or what we think we never could be.

We don’t want to quantify or compete, we just want to flow. So we go to yoga. And we look at our friend, who smiles through his sweat as he beams his body down with candor, not worried about grace or failure, and we’re envious and heartbroken over the years we spent struggling with both. want a perfect body / I want a perfect soul,” (“Creep,” Radiohead).

Perfection is overrated, and that’s a hard conclusion to come to. It’s hard to spend years and money trying to make your body the best, only to realize

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that you’re only ever going to get better. It’s hard to get so warped by the world of wellness that you can’t stop subscribing to it, even when you’re about to die. It’s hard to return to the person you were before you entered this world because she’s gone, and you’ve got a workout at seven.

We see a result and we want more.

We see a new result and we want them all. With progress comes obsession, and everyone’s obsessed with something. So, we go to the workout — be it to get perfect or better or even just a little bit closer to fine, as the Indigo Girls would say. y most recent visit to Pure Barre was tough. I didn’t want to go, but the $15 cancellation fee was too bitter to bite.

My favorite instructor took us through all my least favorite postures: We hovered our thighs an inch above our ankles and circled our hips, we dipped our hips side to side in a forearm plank.

But I’m tough, too, and I circled and dipped until the end of class, when I settled on my back, drinking in our stretch like water. I put my hands on my stomach, making a point to exhale.

I let my flesh jut out to round the band on my leggings, let myself be soft, let myself just be.

Curling into a ball and rolling up, I straddled my legs beside me and leaned into each one, heart to ceiling, heart to floor. The same woman who just made me pulse like a chump in a wall-sit against the barre knelt behind me, massaging my muscles. She pushed me further into each knee, further into myself. I moved to the center, crawling my torso in front of me, reaching for the front mirror as her tattooed hands lowered me into the carpet.

I sat up and pulled my legs together, reaching for my ankles, my toes. I inhaled, my deepest of the day, and then I let go.

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Arya Naidu is a senior in LSA studying English. She is the former Managing Arts Editor and can be reached at anaidu@umich.edu.

It’s hard to spend years and money trying to make your body the best, only to realize that you’re only ever going to get better.

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7B Wednesday, 26,2019 2020////The The Statement 7B Wednesday,February January 16, Statement

BY MEGHANN NORDEN-BRIGHT, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

n the universe of college student organizations and meetings, icebreakers are a necessary evil — universally hated, yet they persist in a futile attempt to personalize meetings beyond the generic name/year/ pronouns/major introductions. At their best, icebreakers provide a tiny, mostly insignificant insight into the tastes and preferences of the people around you. At their worst, they tend to feel like a forced game with no real objective — a bunch of young adults sitting around naming obscure colors, their favorite ice cream f lavor or the direction they face while they shower (I particularly despise this one). Who wins this game? Don’t we all lose, in our inevitably-doomed efforts to sum up the complexity of existence with a few carefully-chosen words?

Of all the icebreakers I feel strongly about, the one I hate the least is: What’s the coolest thing you’ve done in the shoes you’re wearing? It has several redeeming factors.

You can’t answer in a single word, there’s no default vanilla ice cream answer and, most importantly, you ideally learn something about what the person answering deems “cool.”

Plus, there’s the added benefit that I’m usually wearing my brown Blundstone boots whenever this question is asked. This allows me to tell the story of the time I went to a “very cool” drag bar in an underground warehouse in Berlin with a friend I’d just met while wearing said boots, and casually established myself as a worldly, cosmopolitan individual.

I’ve told the Berlin story many times, each time adding in a new detail: the jungle-themed karaoke room, the spontaneous game of limbo with a feather boa, the saxophone player I befriended on the 5 a.m. metro back to the hostel.

The story’s become an animal of its own, an opus to a free-spirited, Europe-roaming character.

Which is why it pains me now to admit that the Berlin warehouse drag bar story might be just a wee bit disingenuous, in terms of how it represents me as an individual. It is a “very cool” story, this is true. It did also really happen. But it makes up a small percentage of the time my feet have spent in these boots.

Truth be told, since I got the boots as a Hanukkah present two years ago, the vast majority of their showtime has been

not in Berlin drag bars, but on the sidewalks of Ann Arbor. They have trudged the blocks from my junior year apartment to Mason Hall. They have pounded out the path between my senior year home and Espresso Royale, my yoga studio and friends’ houses.

I’ve gotten to know the particular quirks of the Ann Arbor sidewalks — the tufts of grass poking up between the cracks, dips in the concrete that tend to flood when the snow melts, the spot on State Street near Huron where you have to tread carefully as it’s usually littered with broken glass shards.

The Ann Arbor sidewalks have gotten to know me as well. They’ve heard the conversations between my roommate

and me as we walk to class, loudly airing our complaints about the world for every square of pavement to hear. The sidewalks have witnessed my panicked fastwalking when I’m running late to work, swearing out loud and promising myself I’ll never make the mistake of starting the grilled-cheese-making process so close to my clock-in time again. They’ve generously said nothing when I plug in my earbuds and listen to the same Bright Eyes album for the third time in one day, only looked on in stoic, concerned, concrete silence.

I usually call my parents when I’m walking somewhere. The 10 or 15-minute walk provides the perfect opportunity to catch up and the perfect excuse to promptly hang up: “Can’t talk about my post-grad plans right now, I’m at

I’ll muse over a problem or distraction, bouncing my thoughts and theories off the concrete. “No,” the sidewalks will say, “you shouldn’t text that person.

You should find validation through yourself.” Or “yes,” the sidewalks will say, “you should apply for that job,” and I’ll realize I’m self-sabotaging yet again.

You should just go for the thing, damn it, Meghann.

The sidewalks are pretty much the only space in Ann Arbor where I can have these conversations with myself, where nothing pressing pulls at my attention — I’m not going to be doing my reading for class while walking, or applying to job positions on LinkedIn. The freedom from these distractions and obligations is desperately needed — a space where I have no obligation to be productive or sociable for the world.

Due to the University of Michigan’s size, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with the sidewalks as my companion.

On an average day, I’ll spend at minimum an hour in transit on the city sidewalks. I must have walked hundreds of miles by now on their paved surfaces, chronicling joy and heartbreak and love on the trek to the UGLi, No Thai or the CCRB. The sidewalks of Ann Arbor witnessed me at my worst and loneliest, walking home late at night from the library, brimming with self-pity during the winter months of sophomore year when it felt that everyone around me had found their forever people except for me. Two years later, I tread those same squares of pavement on my way to brunch with friends that had ILLUSTRATION BY DORY TUNG been there since freshman year ly, but the overall effect can be suffocat- — it just took some more hours walking ing. Time to just exist in college, without these sidewalks to come to this conclucontrolling the image you present to the sion.

So here’s to the sidewalks of Ann community, is elusive.

On the pavement of the sidewalks, Arbor, in all their salt-scored, crowdI’m in full view of the world, yet in trodden glory. These sidewalks certaina private enough space I can tell my ly do not make for as good of a story as mom about the particularly rough day a Berlin nightclub, this is true — and I I’ve had, maybe even shed a tear if I will, therefore, most definitely continue need to. I’ll pass by others, of course, to tell my Berlin nightclub story whenbut they’re all concerned with their ever said icebreaker is proposed. But, own conversations, podcasts or playl- when it comes down to it, I’ve left more ists. The sidewalk is comforting in its of me on the pavement of these streets impassiveness, its utilitarianism, its than I have in any club. So this is an ode to the concrete squares that have been anonymity.

Occasionally, instead of calling up my my loyal companions — or, perhaps more mom or plugging in a podcast, I’ll make aptly, to the person that’s walked and the daring decision to brave the walk to cried and laughed and grown on these class distraction-free — no earbuds, no sidewalks of Ann Arbor these past four walking partner. As I trod the sidewalks, years. class, have to go, talk later, yes, love you too, bye now!” But the walk also proves the ideal place to talk freely and honestly — the sidewalks offer a certain type of privacy difficult to come by on a college campus.

Freshman year, sharing a tiny South Quad Residence Hall dorm room, the sidewalk was often the only place I could truly be by myself, in ten-minute gaps in a calendar crammed with classes and extracurriculars. Even later on in college, when I finally moved to my own room, there’s still more often than not housemates lingering in common spaces and familiar faces to run into at the library and coffee shops. They are people I love dearly and value immense-

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement

VISUAL STATEMENT: BRUTALISM IN WASHINGTON D.C. PHOTOS BY MICHAEL BAGAZINSKI