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Without Jim Harbaugh, Michigan runs all over Penn State, 24-15

Managing Sports Editor

S

TATE COLLEGE — Somewhere in Pennsylvania, Jim Harbaugh watched his No. 3 Michigan football team face No. 10 Penn State. Maybe he was alone.

Perhaps he was a few miles from the stadium. Nonetheless, where he wasn’t — the sidelines, thanks to a Big Ten suspension — mattered most.

But Sherrone Moore was in charge, and he guided Michigan (10-0 overall, 7-0 Big Ten) to a 24-15 victory over Penn State (8-2, 5-2) that preserved its perfect record and postseason hopes.

And he did so in the way he knew best: calling for the Wolverines to run the ball in 46 out of 54 offensive plays.

“This was a tournament game for us, a playoff game for us,” Moore said.

“So we knew we had to do whatever we needed to do to win. So it’s been a

crazy 24 hours but at the same time our team is built for this. Our staff is built for this and we’re all built for this.”

Built from the trenches, that is.

For a coach whose motto is “smash,” Moore put the fate of the game in his linemen’s hands. At first, Penn State and its defense wreaked havoc — especially edge rusher Chop Robinson, who blew past graduate right tackle Karsen Barnhart multiple times. On their ensuing second drive, the Nittany Lions drew first blood with a field goal.

So, Moore schemed around offensive line play. At first, he threw tight ends and fullbacks on the field to give the line help. Then, he reached deep in the playbook and brought out extra offensive linemen for some sets with graduate tackles Myles Hinton and Trente Jones on the field. It’s a set he’s had in his back pocket for some time, but Saturday proved the time to

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utilize it.

That created an offense in which Moore might as well have forgotten the forward pass. McCarthy didn’t make a passing attempt in the second half — though one throw was taken off the stat sheet for pass interference.

Meanwhile, senior Blake Corum and junior Donovan Edwards combined for three touchdowns, 197 yards and four 20-plus yard rushes out of the backfield.

Put it this way: Moore’s adjustment worked.

“They just had weird formations as in multiple tackles and multiple linemen on one side that’s different than any other team we play,” Nittany Lions edge rusher Dani DennisSuttion said. “We went over it all week and didn’t do our job.”

But in the trenches, Michigan knew its assignment. The o-line created space for the run game thanks to Moore’s play calling. Even

while juggling the unexpected job of head coach among his other duties, Moore coached one of the better offensive line games this season by calling the plays he knew best. And as Penn State kept bleeding yards and clock as the game wore on, Michigan earned a victory that kept its season goals on track.

“I think one of our strengths has been being able to adapt to what the defense has given us,” McCarthy said.

“With one of the best offensive lines in the country, and obviously two of the best backs in the country, we just gotta take what they give us. We adapted, we adjusted, and we kept rolling.”

The Nittany Lions didn’t. They kept trying to hit check downs with quarterback Drew Allar, but the Michigan secondary locked down those short yardage plays. When Allar responded by scrambling, the Wolverines recovered a fumble

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when they punched the ball out.

Even though the Wolverines let up a season-high points with a late touchdown, the defense did enough to stay in the driver’s seat once the offense took the lead.

By the time Corum punched in a fourth-quarter 30-yard touchdown to go up 24-9, the game was all but settled. His score ushered fans out of Beaver Stadium — a crowd that booed its own program and James Franklin as he left the field. The Nittany Lions scored once more, but a failed twopoint conversion sealed the 24-15 win.

Without Moore’s guidance to coach them to a top-10 win on the road with Harbaugh suspended, the Wolverines couldn’t have pulled off such a victory. As Moore exited the field crying tears of joy, he hugged and high-fived his players — particularly the offensive linemen who won the game up front.

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“When someone gives it their all and we go out there and execute the way he wants us to, it’s just like a proud dad moment almost,” McCarthy said. “And that’s what we love about (Moore). He just coaches with so much passion and he believes in every single one of us. And with that passion, it’s a dangerous little mix.”

Moore got the job done against Penn State, but the coaching situation is anything but stable from here.

Harbaugh and Michigan hope to argue for a temporary restraining order in court Friday, facing the Big Ten’s lawyers in court. Losing Harbaugh on another game day could prove difficult.

None of that mattered Saturday.

Moore leaning into his strengths in unexpected circumstances did. And because of that, Michigan walked out with its season intact and its confidence higher than ever.

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CAMPUS LIFE

Black Student Union More Than Four platform: 1 Year Later

One year after the University of Michigan’s Black Student Union released its More Than Four Platform, community members gather to speak on its importance ELLEN DREJZA

Daily Staff Reporter

About 40 University of Michigan students and faculty gathered in the Trotter Multicultural Center Thursday evening to discuss the U-M Black Student Union’s platform, More Than Four, one year after the platform was released.

The platform addresses the U-M administration and calls for four action items: Increasing Black student enrollment to 14% of the student body, combating anti-Blackness on campus, improving diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and making K-12 education more equitable. Though

Black or African American people make up 14% of Michigan’s population, just 4.5% of the University’s student population identifies as Black or of African descent.

BSU’s central initiative, Enhancing Black Student Representation & Experiences, is focused on the inclusion of Black students on campus. In an interview with The Michigan Daily during the event, Kobby Nyankson, LSA senior and BSU treasurer, said the More Than Four platform represents BSU’s efforts to ensure Black students feel like they belong at the University.

“I think it’s important to spread visibility and awareness of the plight of Black students at the University of Michigan because it’s basically faced by a lot of kids at (predominately white

institutions),” Nyankson said. “We want to be representative, we want to feel like we belong and I feel like the More Than Four platform (includes) just a lot of things that can be done to ensure that we do belong.”

The platform reflects BSU’s founding aim to promote an inclusive atmosphere for Black students by working to improve different spheres of growth for students of African descent in the U-M community.

In October, BSU hung up flyers around campus with the words “MORE THAN FOUR” to increase awareness of the organization’s demands for the University. During the Nov. 10 meeting, members discussed how, shortly after being posted, many flyers were torn down. BSU members

Michigan’s Black Student Union discusses their platform one year later at Trotter Multicultural Center Thursday Evening.

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said they were disappointed by this reaction, and are committed to continuing their work of educating the University on the platform.

Dominique Pruitt-Wright, LSA sophomore and a member of the BSU Community Outreach team, spoke with The Daily about why the fourpoint platform is important to her.

“It’s really important for me because it needs to be something that’s emphasized more in the community,” Pruitt-Wright said. “More people need to know about the four-point platform and the things that we’re trying to push forward for Black students at the University, such as admissions and correcting DEI. The University has duties that they need to take seriously; they need to recommit to K-12 education so that we can prepare students to be able to come to these universities. We need to prep them to be able to foster an environment where they feel comfortable, they feel accepted and they feel knowledgeable in these spaces.”

Bryce Sayles, LSA freshman and BSU member, told The Daily that he believes the University should use its resources to make student enrollment more representative of the surrounding population.

“Coming here to a public university, I would expect (the University) to emulate what the public looks like,” Sayles said. “I believe that with the amount of resources and power that the University has, they should be taking the students seriously because, at the end of the day, we’re the ones that gave them that power in the first place.”

ADMINISTRATION

USAS demands end of UMich Nike contract

United Students Against Sweatshops demanded that University of Michigan administration publicly condemn Nike for alleged wage theft SNEHA DHANDAPANI Daily Staff Reporter

Members from the University of Michigan student organization United Students Against Sweatshops delivered a letter to the Alexander G. Ruthven Building on Nov. 1 demanding that U-M administration publicly condemn Nike. USAS’ letter calls on the University to take action following Nike’s alleged wage theft at the Hong Seng knitting factory in Bangkok. According to USAS, Nike stole $800,000 from workers throughout the COVID19 pandemic. Nike has supplied the University with uniforms and apparel since 2016 and the partnership is scheduled to continue until 2027.

USAS first took action following a 2021 investigation into Nike by the Workers Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitoring organization. The organization held teach-ins for students and informational meetings about the Hong Send case before delivering the letter to the University.

On Oct. 20, the President’s Advisory Committee on Labor

Standards and Human Rights recommended in a meeting that Nike uphold its contract and pay its workers per the U-M supplier code of conduct.

Though the University expected communications from Nike

by Nov. 1 on their contract compliance, Nike has not paid its workers at Hong Seng before the Nov. 1 deadline. University President Santa Ono addressed USAS in a letter on Oct. 20, shortly after the PACLSHR recommendation was made. Ono wrote that he asked his Office of General Counsel to urge Nike to comply with the PACLSHR committee’s recommendations.

“The University of Michigan continues to be dedicated to the continued improvement of labor standards and human rights in the global supply chain,” Ono wrote. “Although it can take time to make progress on these sorts of complicated issues, I am committed to continuing our engagement with Nike to try and move towards a more just resolution.”

USAS’ letter to U-M administration, which was written 12 days after Ono’s letter, demands that the University deliver a public statement to the

U-M community, peer institutions and Nike expressing support of garment workers’s rights. The letter, which is signed by about 150 U-M students and 7 student organizations, also demands that the University begin a process of contract termination with Nike and advocate for ethical business practices.

“U-M must not tolerate Nike’s conscious violations of its contract and supplier code of conduct,” the letter read.

“As such, U-M must respond immediately in order to uphold its institutional integrity and commitment to labor and human rights … the University of Michigan is the leading institution working towards more ethical, sustainable, and accountable supply chains.”

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Public Policy senior Ruthy Lynch, a USAS member, said the letter’s demands are to ensure Nike feels pressured to take tangible action.

“It’s been communicated to Nike that U-M wants them to pay their workers, but this is really a PR thing,” Lynch said. “Nike is not going to pay these workers until like, it costs more to their reputation than it does to pay up

the $800,000.”

In an interview with The Daily, LSA junior Mark Tallents, co-founder of the U-M chapter of USAS, said though they believe the University has not done enough to support Nike’s garment workers, the administration’s Oct. 20 letter did acknowledge the wage theft as a violation of their contract.

“We’re actually the first university to get our administration to recognize that this is a violation of our contracts — at every other university across the U.S. that has been organizing on this issue,” Tallents said.

“We’re the first university to say … that Nike should pay the workers, which is huge.”

Lynch said USAS will continue to demand action against Nike because the organization believes that Nike’s actions are wrong.

“We may be on the other side of the world, but students care about workers,” Lynch said. “Students don’t want to wear clothes that were made by workers who didn’t get paid. … So I think we just want to keep showing up, keep showing that we care and keep pushing them to really make those more concrete steps to really put some pressure on that.”

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ACADEMICS

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 — 3

Sitting down with University of Michigan Provost Laurie McCauley

Provost Laurie McCauley talks generative AI, faculty well-being in exclusive interview JOEY LIN & JI HOON CHOI

Daily News Editor & Daily Staff Reporter The Michigan Daily sat down with University Provost Laurie McCauley Tuesday afternoon to talk about generative artificial intelligence and future projects from the Office of the Provost. Appointed in March 2022, McCauley will serve her term until June 2027. She discussed the launch of DEI 2.0, using AI to enhance the learning experience, a new vice provost position focused on student success and more.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Michigan Daily: What would you say is your proudest accomplishment over the past semester?

Laurie McCauley: I’m not too crazy about the word “proud” because it carries a self-focused connotation, and the work I do as provost is quite the opposite. It’s a collective effort. One of them would be our launch of DEI 2.0, which is foundational work for everything we do on our campus and I think it brings a sense of optimism and hope. I’m also very excited about the strategic visioning that our campus is doing. University President Santa Ono was really keen on gathering input from the entire community to create Vision 2034. What I loved about this process is that it was incredibly inclusive in its outreach.

For instance, there were over 5,000 inputs over the spring, and we’ve been reaching out again in this fall to stakeholder groups, like Central Student Government and students, faculty and staff. It’s really starting to come together now and we’ll anticipate presenting a more final

product to the Board of Regents in January and then a rollout in March to the greater community.

Vision 2034 has also been going on in partnership with Campus Plan 2050, which is the physical structure that will underpin what we need to meet this vision. The third thing that I have enjoyed personally this fall is connecting more with the community. I’ve been attending faculty meetings to hear about what’s going on in different academic units, meeting with some student groups and just trying to be out more having conversations and listening to the community.

TMD: Regarding the rise of generative AI and the development of U-M GPT, how does the Provost Office envision the role of AI in the University’s education model and other administrative operations?

LM: This is a really exciting time. I had the great opportunity to partner with Chief Information Officer Ravi Pendse and he’s an incredibly visionary leader in this space. We’ve put together a task force on generative AI in the spring to give recommendations for leading in this space. Their report came out over the summer and was distributed across campus so that faculty could learn from their peers. Some of the recommendations are starting to roll forward, one of which was to increase the resources available for our entire community.

One of them is a University ChatGPT 4.0. The principle for that was to have something accessible and equitable for our entire community so all students, faculty and staff could use this platform without a cost. The other resource is U-M Maizey, which is available to faculty to utilize for their teaching and research. For instance, a Ross School of Business faculty member put five

years of his course materials into Maizey to develop a personal tutor for the students in his class. I’ve also heard that School of Pharmacy faculty are putting prescription information into Maizey such that anyone learning how to write prescriptions will receive automatic feedback. It’s a really exciting time to use technology to the benefit of our mission.

TMD: Regarding the campuswide internet outage at the beginning of the semester and the information compromised in the related breach, what potential steps beyond the password reset will the Provost Office take to ensure information security of students, faculty and staff?

LM: The outage was handled

by Ravi Pendse and he’s got a fabulous security team who acted quite quickly on that. The Provost Office doesn’t oversee it. We partner with them to communicate their recommendations to the communities that we serve. But we’ve not taken any actions outside that.

TMD: At recent Senate Assembly meetings, faculty have mentioned feeling burned out due to student accommodations. How do you aim to address faculty burnout and improve faculty well-being in general?

LM: The well-being of our faculty, staff and students is a critically important issue. What we can do is try and educate our faculty so that those accommodations come naturally and become part of the educational mission and the work they do, instead of being something additional. My belief is that our faculty love teaching and they love educating students, and they’re committed to educating all students in a very inclusive manner, including students who need

Provost Laurie McCauley sits with The Michigan Daily to discuss DEI 2.0, extended winter break and more Tuesday afternoon.

JULIANNE YOON/Daily

accommodations, but sometimes it’s challenging for faculty if they feel like they have to add on things that maybe they’re not familiar with.

Some of the other things that we do for well-being is that we moved the academic calendar so that the Winter Break was a week longer. We did that in response to comments from faculty, staff and students that their ability to have a mental break in between terms would be better if the break was longer. The Well-being Collective has also addressed and is onboarding more and more faculty perspectives in dealing with wellbeing on campus as well.

TMD: As the largest university in the state, how do you see the University’s role in shaping the future of higher education both locally and globally?

LM: We look at ourselves as incredible support for the state in educating the residents of the state of Michigan. More than half of our undergraduate students are residents of the state of Michigan, so there’s a commitment there for us to educate people who ultimately will work and live in the state of Michigan.

I think some of the things that we have committed to do as a university will be incredibly impactful for our state and that’s in the context of climate and sustainability. I think we lead the state in those initiatives and we can be not only a leader in helping the state manage residents to be great citizens of our natural resources, but we can also be models in that regard. I think we lead in the area of health and wellness. With our work on the Well-being Collective,

we set the stage for many other institutions in the state for assuring the mental health and well-being of our students, faculty and staff. We’re also leading far beyond the state in the incorporation of generative AI. I think we’re making noted impacts in Detroit through the Detroit Center, as well as launching the University of Michigan Center for Innovation in Detroit, which not only will be a magnet to bring people into Detroit and help with the revitalization of Detroit but also will go far to help with workforce education.

TMD: Are there any new projects that you’ve envisioned for the coming year, specifically for your office, that you would like to share with the campus community?

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NEWS

Deer breaks into UMich Law Library

A deer broke through the first floor window before walking out main door GRACE SCHUUR

Daily News Contributor

When students walk into the University of Michigan Law Library, they expect to get hours of studying done in one of the most beautiful college libraries in the country. But on Oct. 27, the library’s ominous silence was broken when an unexpected guest, a whitetailed deer, made an appearance in the library halls. The deer broke through a first-floor window of the Law Library.

Though the deer was safely let outdoors shortly after, the buck has quickly become a campus meme.

Later that afternoon, the Law School posted a statement on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter, saying that no one was harmed in the incident, and the deer was let out through a main door.

The photos of the deer inside the building posted on the library’s social media feeds were taken by Law School student Emma Duggan.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Duggan said she discovered the deer along with fellow Law School student Sylvia Mueller after hearing a crash while hanging up a poster.

“I heard a crash,” Duggan said. “I thought somebody had fallen off a ladder … so I was going to go check and see if they were OK. And as I approached, I heard the sound like when a dog’s skidding on the floor. …

I wasn’t sure what’s going on.

I was continually approaching what I thought was a dog that had gotten loose.”

Duggan and Mueller said they decided to go into the bathroom and shut the door when the deer started to approach the pair.

Once safely inside, they called

The well-being of our community means everything.

KEITH MELONG/Daily

the Law Library information desk. When the two opened the door a few minutes later,security personnel had let the deer outMueller said she thought it was important to be wary of her safety. Given the unusual location of the deer, Mueller said she wasn’t sure if the deer was aggressive so she decided it would be safer to avoid confronting the deer.

“Especially when you see a (wild) animal, you’re not sure if he has rabies or has some sort of infection or something, and with the antlers, too,” Mueller said. “So it’s not totally safe.

(I was) glad there was a door separating us.”

In the past, Ann Arbor has handled the problem of the rising deer population with “deer culls,” an issue that Ann Arbor community members have protested. Deer culls control deer populations through sharpshooting and sterilization. According to the University Record, the University began participating in the Ann Arbor-organized deer management program in 2017.

In an interview with The

Daily, Christopher Dick, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, said October and November are months when bucks are in a rut, a period when hormone levels in male deer rise as they look for a mate. Dick said this was a possible reason behind the Law Library deer’s erratic behavior. “(The deer become) very territorial, very flighty,” Dick said. “(The law school deer) was not acting normally, not traversing the normal paths that he would normally traverse.

And then all of a sudden, he finds himself surrounded by people or in some threatening situation and just leaps through a window.”

Mueller said the experience was over before she knew it. The pair came out of the bathroom, the deer was gone and students had returned to the halls. Other than the broken window and the photos on Duggan’s phone, there was no evidence that the deer had entered the building.

“Everybody was just walking around like, ‘What just happened?’ ” Mueller said. “It did feel a little bit like it might have been a hallucination.”

Learn how U-M is supporting mental health.

The Well-being Collective is pleased to announce that we have partnered with The Jed Foundation on a multiyear effort to enhance U-M’s existing student mental health support and services and to create positive, lasting, systemic change on our campus.

Helping Leaders Feel Their Best: wellbeing.umich.edu

Arts

4 — Wednesday, November 15, 2023

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Why ‘Stranger Things’ has the ‘It’ factor OLIVIA TARLING Daily Arts Writer

I’m a big fan of popular horror franchises. Particularly, I like one where a group of tweens ride around on their bikes sometime during the 1980s and fight supernatural beings that only seem to target their hometown. This group contains four boys, who are friends from the story’s beginning, and new allies they pick up along the way (including a girl with badass tendencies that stem from her tortured past with an abusive father figure). It also features a friendship with unspoken and possibly unrequited romantic undertones between Finn Wolf hard (“Supernatural”) and his short, nervous best friend. And, most importantly, it includes a found-family who come into each other’s lives at the right time and change one another for the better.

I’m a fan of Netf lix’s “Stranger Things” and Stephen King’s “It.” But when I tell people about my love for the two near-identical stories, I receive two very different reactions: “Oh, I love ‘Stranger Things,’ too!” and “Oh… I could never watch that.” And my question is, if you’re so capable of enjoying “Stranger Things,” what makes it so hard for you to give “It” a chance?

For starters, I’m sure having the name of a man whose least scary book is called “The Body” slapped on the front of every movie poster certainly doesn’t help to encourage nonhorror fans to watch “It.” As the reigning champion of the horror genre, any association with King is bound to put an image of what to expect in a viewer’s mind: blood, guts and

terror. What people often forget is that King didn’t just create the horrifying and disturbing “Carrie” and “The Shining,” but also the previously mentioned “The Body,” better known by its iconic movie adaptation’s title, “Stand by Me.” As much of a red f lag as this author can be for any scaredy-cat, he’s not limited to one strength, and, as “It” and “Stand by Me” prove to us, he is not incapable of creating stories of the “Stranger Things” variety — ones filled with adventure and friendship that take precedence over the darker elements of their plots.

“Stranger Things” differentiates itself from “It” in the way that it’s marketed.

Obviously, this is a King project — it’s supposed to look scary.

But despite the similar levels of scare factor in “Stranger Things” and “It,” the former just doesn’t seem as terrifying.

And I’m sure this has to do with the fact that while Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård, “The Devil All the Time”) the clown tends to be the face of the entire franchise despite not being one of the seven leads, each and every poster promoting “Stranger Things” contains the leading characters. Rarely, if ever, is a Demogorgon or another terrifying being of the “Upside Down” the sole feature of “Stranger Things” promotions. It seems to me that, despite their nearly identical messages and character dynamics, Netf lix wants to highlight these tamer aspects of “Stranger Things” while still allowing the series to contain darker elements.

Meanwhile, the “It” team wanted to highlight the darker elements while still allowing the film to contain tamer ones.

The R rating of the “It” movies might also be a red f lag

for viewers, signifying that this must be a terrifying movie. But something I noticed the first time I watched the movie was that, to my surprise, it really wasn’t. “It” may contain more jump scares, but in terms of gore and overall scare factor, “Stranger Things” is equal to, if not higher on the scale than the “It” franchise. I can’t say that seeing Pennywise attack someone is any harder to stomach than watching poor Bob (Sean Astin, “The

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Brent Faiyaz has been a busy man as of late. After his 2020 single “Dead Man Walking” became a TikTok sleeper hit, he landed features left and right, lending his buttery vocals to rapper Baby Keem’s Melodic Blue and afrobeat artist Tems’s If Orange Was a Place. He subsequently broke through the Billboard 200 top five last year with his star-studded smash album Wasteland and further cemented his spot in the R&B sphere earlier this year with the formation of a multimillion dollar music label under UnitedMasters.

To appease hungry fans, he dropped Larger Than Life, a short and sweet batch of tracks, some of which dip below two minutes in length and none that cross the four-minute mark. As an indication of his prospective longevity in the world of R&B, he replicates the hallmark vibes of late ’90s hitmakers like Usher, Dru Hill and 112.

The stiffly orchestrated string arrangements and pristine attention to detail of Wasteland are swapped for liquid guitars, glittery synths, shuffling knocks and skittering hi-hats which coalesce into cyclical swirls of sultriness. Larger Than Life may not put forth the most original sounds, especially since Faiyaz’s ideas don’t expand much beyond the R&B blueprints he is clearly pulling from, but the mixtape successfully cultivates a languid, risque vibe. Tracks like “Forever Yours” and “Best Time” are fleeting frissons, perfect for soundtracking one night stands as they barely creep past a minute and are entirely toxic and forgettable. Yes, toxicity can be louche, but pairing it with flagrant machismo is a total turn-off, and unfortunately on Larger Than Life, Faiyaz lets his ego get the best of him.

On Larger Than Life, Faiyaz plays the cocky asshole. He uses sex as a form of manipulation and control, made all the more blatant by his intolerably mundane

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Daily Arts Writer

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my two favorite scary stories.

While people often look beyond the horror-related elements of “Stranger Thing”’ and through to the heart and soul of the series, “It’s” author, marketing and rating cause it to be undoubtedly and inseparably intertwined with the horror genre. So if you’re a “Stranger Things” fan patiently waiting for season five, don’t be too scared to dabble in the world of “It” while you wait — you won’t be disappointed.

On his newest mixtape, Brent Faiyaz’s chauvinism is ‘Larger Than Life’ ZACHARY TAGLIA

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helps it keep a tamer rating than “It,” and therefore hold onto an illusion of a tamer level of horror.

I’m not a horror-obsessed person by any means; I’m simply a lover of coming of age stories, especially those that follow true friendship and contain strong comedic elements. But for whatever reason, despite their extremely similar plots, characters and themes, the world just doesn’t have the same approach to

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Goonies”) be eaten alive by a pack of “demodogs.” So, why does “It” have the R rating that signals a scarier film, while “Stranger Things” holds onto the TV-14 rating? I genuinely believe that if “It” never contained the “f-bomb,” it would keep a PG-13 rating with its relatively tame level of horror. However, “Stranger Things”’ lack of “intense” swearing, and its lack of Richie Tozier’s (Finn Wolf hard) constant sexual innuendos,

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lyrics. On “Wherever I Go,” his toxicity reaches new levels as he cleverly rhymes “things” with “things” before crooning, “I’d take care of you / You could’ve skipped the line.” Similarly bitter is “Last One Left,” the mixtape’s worst track, in which Faiyaz gives his girlfriend (or one of the women in his line of available girlfriends) an ultimatum: She must choose between him or her friends, whom she shouldn’t trust because all of their boyfriends left them and she’s “the only one left, got someone to call (her) home.” Though he fails to justify himself as the better choice, he does make a pretty good argument for why he’s a misogynistic prick who loves to watch women turn against each other over him. What’s worse is the dismal guitar loop that barely stays afloat in the mix, putting the listener to sleep.

Redeeming moments on the mixtape are few and far between. “Moment of Your Life” is convincingly sexy, as featured singer Coco Jones’s coy pleas match Faiyaz’s bravado. The song isn’t anything special, but Jones gives the vocal performance of her life and saves the track from becoming another perpetual slurry of dumbed-down throwback aesthetics. “Outside All Night” is another highlight, not for the A$AP Rocky feature or the glistening string loop, but for the willful, amusing ignorance that Faiyaz projects. He’s “been outside all night long,” claims to be “looking for some signs in the stars,” pining for “insight to (a girl’s) heart,” though even his love interest knows he’s full of B.S. In layman’s terms, he’s outside all night long for all the wrong reasons. Intentional or not, Faiyaz using his confused spirituality as an excuse for his debauchery is funny enough to earn this track a pass.

Whether or not his pillowysoft vocal delivery and leisurely swagger outshine his overinflated ego and undercooked songcraft is up to his loyal audience. As for everyone else, the only place this womanizer’s mixtape belongs is the garbage pile.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Arts

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 — 5

‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ faithfully rebuilds Swift’s pop grandeur OSCAR NOLLETTE-PATULSKI Daily Arts Contributor

It’s an understatement to say that Taylor Swift has had a big year. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’s summit to the top of the Billboard 200 helped Swift break the record for most album number ones by a female artist. Her multibillion dollar “Eras” tour has been ongoing since March and won’t conclude until the fall of next year. Fans who couldn’t get tickets “Taylor-gated” outside football stadiums around the country hoping to hear the concert secondhand, or perhaps they even watched the sport for the first time to catch Swift cheering for the Chiefs. Or maybe they danced in the movie theater to its recordbreaking concert film, or started comprehending the rotation of the earth in mysterious, 112-day cycles.

Though Swift has achieved new levels of astronomical fame, it’s worth noting that back in 2014 — when 1989 was first released — her level of fame was still, well, astronomical. In a Rolling Stone

profile from that year, perennialcollaborator Jack Antonoff compares having her songs on his hard drive to the possession of Russian secrets. “It’s terrifying,” he admits. Being that famous, your mid-20s are as good a time as any to have a rebirth, and in Swift’s case, a rebirth from country into 1980s-inspired synth-pop, scaled appropriately upward for the 2010s.

As with the rest of Swift’s re-recordings, 1989 is nearexacting in its loyalty to the original.

Most tracks are co-produced and engineered

by Taylor’s Version standby, Christopher Rowe, who largely maintains the status quo, save for minute updates on certain sonic elements, like the claps on opener “Welcome To New York,” or the high-pitched “Stay” in “All You Had To Do Was …”

Swift’s voice, naturally, has changed too; her smoother and stronger delivery has lifted already strong tracks to new heights. Take “Wonderland,” where Swift uses the imaginary world of Lewis Caroll as a metaphor for a destructive

relationship. In 2014, she told the tale with a rushed enthusiasm, trying to catch her breath on a rollercoaster pre-chorus. Now, the lines “Didn’t it all seem new and exciting? / I felt your arms twisting around me” are delivered with the vocal prowess and measured confidence that comes with humility and distance.

Where it works, these subtle changes are welcome, even if it’s a game of Spot the Difference, refreshing last decade’s pop sounds for this one. Other times, it can lead to an uncanny-valley effect, like on “Style,” where the trademark guitar riff gains a disorienting metallic flavor.

Otherwise, “Style” and other singles from the original album remain musical successes. “Out of the Woods,” one of Swift’s first songs with Antonoff, effectively uses ’80s-inspired drum loops to create a sense of running and momentum. Its scream-worthy bridge rightfully breaks open the forest canopy; it’s the sense of wide open spaces, physical and emotional, that makes 1989 the commanding album that it is.

It’s disappointing, then, to

reach the five Antonoff-assisted “vault” tracks and find the mega pop sky retrofitted with a low drop ceiling, à la Midnights. No exclamation points are to be found in “‘Slut!,’” which finds Swift leaning into and reclaiming the sexist media attention she has encountered throughout her career. Though the track takes pleasure in defying Swift’s carefully curated image, “Blank Space” accomplishes a similar feminist goal in a much more interesting way.

“Say Don’t Go” falls victim to its long length and lack of iteration; the lyrics dance in metaphors that rarely add to the song’s message. “Now That We Don’t Talk” and “Suburban Legends” face the opposite problem; the former is the shortest track in Swift’s entire discography. The two are remarkably similar in terms of production, steering toward minimalism, and both tracks contain Swift’s trademark specificity. Unfortunately, the storyline of “Legends” doesn’t quite earn its ending, and “We Don’t Talk” doesn’t have much of one at all, concluding on an

awkward, sonic cliffhanger.

The final vault track, “Is It Over Now?,” is the most successful, building on the other’s sensibilities and elevating them to a higher grandeur. It also feels the most at home with the original 1989. Minimalist phrases like “When you lost control / Red blood, white snow” carry meaning between rather than within the lines. Verses are less freewheeling and more controlled.

Swift’s delivery is calculated for maximum rhythmic stickiness.

Its production is in the same synth-pop style as the rest of the record; glimmers of sound are layered to achieve a nostalgic glaze while Swift recounts and questions what happened in a relationship’s final stages.

It’s Swift approaching her most effective and also her most vindictive: 1989 was a departure from the emotionally charged portrayals found within her first three albums, instead opting for a more nuanced and yearning approach to love (see “Clean” and “I Wish You Would”). “Is It Over Now?” breaks this rule, and accusations like “You search in

every maiden’s bed for something greater” fly with a delightful fury.

At the heart of 1989, “New Romantics” best exemplifies the rest of the album’s more mature take on love. It’s the song she used to announce Taylor’s Version back in August, singing over acoustic guitar to thousands at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. It’s also the track that most directly references the decade she seeks to emulate, referring to the English youth subculture where soaring synth-pop was the standard and maximalist dress was the minimum.

Though Swift’s vocals can feel over-produced throughout the new version of the track, she deftly recreates the movement’s confident nonchalance over warm, dancy drum loops.

With a knowingness that has only become more justified with time, Swift belts: “Baby I could build a castle / Out of all the bricks they threw at me.” Staring back at the stadium-sized pop anthems that fill the rows with passionate fans nine years later, it becomes all the more clear: build one, she did.

CMAT does what she wants on ‘Crazymad, For Me’ — and it works NINA SMITH Daily Arts Writer

Crazymad, For Me is only CMAT’s second album, which may not surprise you if you are less familiar with her. As an avid admirer, it surprises me. From her habitually unserious Instagram captions to the outrageous ensembles she wears while performing, the Irish singer-songwriter approaches everything with a sense of surety befitting a much more established artist, setting her unequivocally on the path to stardom.

In the meantime, she generously doles out banger after banger, crafting whiplashinducing lyrics like nothing you have heard before and belting them with the stamina of a first-rate racehorse. Her 2022 debut, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, was already a genre defier — something like the mutant child of folk rock, Europop and a more cynical Dolly Parton. But Crazymad, For Me f lies even further in all different directions. Unified by CMAT’s powerful vocals, clever songwriting and trademark lovable weirdness, it sticks the landing.

“California,” the dramatic opener, is somewhat of a thesis statement for what CMAT describes as “really and truly just a break-up album.” Over a moody verse and soaring chorus, CMAT ruminates on what it means to create art out of pain: “You can call me cheap / But you did this shit to me / Made me brilliant, you fucked me up / And I’m reaping what you’ve sown.” After an extraordinary outro of echoing vocals and drum breakdowns, she concludes, “It’s all for nothing, should’ve just tried being happy.”

It’s awful in its selfawareness, something

This image is the official album cover for Crazymad, For Me.

CMAT specializes in. In fact, throughout the album, she’s almost so aware of herself that she isn’t herself anymore, like on the moody “I… Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny.” Over an eerie instrumental featuring shuff ling drums and deep, resonant piano, CMAT sings distantly, “I wanna have grace / I was born with no face.” The lilting “Vincent Kompany” finds CMAT similarly unable to recognize her younger self.

In an isolated bridge that takes us to the major mode she brings yet another layer of analysis: “Bit of shame, bit of arrogance to put ourselves down.”

Delving into similar themes of alienation and growing out of things, “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” sees CMAT

wandering through a party she no longer finds fun and, distressingly, comparing herself to her mother. The track features John Grant and begins with a hollow, sirenlike sound before escalating to an orchestral chorus as the duo’s desperate voices mirror each other like anachronistic ref lections.

Crazymad, For Me is full of these crescendos — something CMAT’s blazing passion and cutting lyricism lend themselves to well. But nowhere is the combination more powerful than on “Rent,” a magnum opus kind of track that lies inconspicuously toward the album’s soft center. “Rent” begins modestly with a simple guitar strum, distracting us

from the abrupt devastation of the very first lines: “Sliced my hope in two and put it on ice, put it on ice / Your bed and cartoons could have been my life / I found lashes on the DVD case, you said they were mine.” After a pared-down, intimate chorus, with CMAT’s voice raw and close to the ear, the last minute of the track is overtaken by tumbling drums, twangy guitar riffs and an indescribable instrumental cacophony as CMAT repeats that final heartbreaker: “It’s like I’m paying all this rent I can’t afford for two / And now, baby, the rent is due, and I don’t know anything about you.”

It’s a surprising follow-up to “Such a Miranda,” the album’s slowest, most understated song.

Over wistful, ambient guitar and little else, CMAT regrets a relationship in which she was constantly compared to her partner’s last girlfriend: “She was a good girl, so I pay the price / I have to stay broken to be worth your nights.” It’s the same dilemma of being wanted for your suffering, but this time, she’s taken it to heart.

“Phone Me” is a cheekier take on this theme, as CMAT asks a potential lover, “Does my aff liction turn you on?”

Padded by synthy strings and a funky bassline, “Phone Me”’s tight, theatrical melody is more similar to a Donna Summer song than any of CMAT’s past work.

But if Crazymad, For Me proves anything, it’s that CMAT can take any sound we may think

is easily categorizable and turn it into something different — something entirely her own.

She showcases this ability on nearly every track, from the loose, jazzy instrumentation and doo-wop-ish background vocals of “Whatever’s Inconvenient,” to the folksy finger-picking and discordant strings of “Torn Apart,” which uniquely refuses to climax.

“Can’t Make Up My Mind” is a head-noddable standout with a dark, vintage croon as CMAT tackles themes of instability and codependence by way of her signature humor: “I’ve the constitution of lemon and lime / I’m fizzy and I can’t make up my mind.”

But if Crazymad, For Me demonstrates CMAT’s capacity to experiment, it doesn’t leave fans of her older sound high and dry, either. “Stay for Something,” the album’s penultimate track, is a country pop ballad as good as any on her debut record, if not better. As we near the story’s end, CMAT tries on forgiveness, singing over an instrumental loose and wild, “Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

The album closes with “Have Fun!” — because CMAT knows that the best way to end the break-up album is with the I’mover-you song. “Have Fun!” is poppy and cheerful with a sprinkling of fiddle as CMAT declares breezily, “You did me wrong and lost out / I’d wonder what you’re up to now / But I don’t care, I don’t care.”

It’s more of a resolution than one might have anticipated, but CMAT is better at the element of surprise than an anxiety-inducing magician.

Sonically, Crazymad, For Me is unexpected, but it retains that endearingly astute, pleasantly tongue-in-cheek quality that CMAT brings to everything she does.

The Chicago International Film Festival: ‘La Chimera’ MAYA RUDER Daily Arts Writer

Alice Rohrwacher’s (“Happy as Lazzaro”) “La Chimera,” awarded the 2023 Silver Hugo for Best Cinematography and Best Ensemble Performances, screened at the 59th Chicago International Film Festival. This film, Italianmade on Italian soil, stars Josh O’Connor (“Mothering Sunday”) as the scruffy Englishman Arthur, a temperamental and forlorn tomb raider with a mysterious ability to intuit grave sites. What originally appears as a heist plot is, in fact, a love story — a ghost story, rather.

Arthur, unlike the other thieves he is in league with, is not interested in riches. He is in search of a key to the other side, with which he can be reunited with his lost love, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello, “Corpo Celeste”).

A Chimera is a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology: a female with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail. Aatish Tasser of the New York Times parses the cultural subtext of the Chimera with far more eloquence than I am able to achieve: “‘Chimera,’ the word — with a small ‘c’ — (has) passed into our lexicon, becoming shorthand for all that (is) illusory, grotesque, wondrous and out of reach, a threeway bridge between the human, the divine and the netherworldly.”

A Chimera is also an unattainable desire — a non-reality that balances carefully between the physical and the arcane. The film explores this balance through the unsanctioned excavation of Etruscan artifacts the characters steal and pawn off to the elusive fence Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher, “Hungry Hearts”).

“La Chimera” is an archaeological film. It spotlights

a practice that is dusty, muddy and morbid, but also romantic. The dead, who we are meant to pity and even fear, lay peacefully in the cool ground surrounded by their most valuable possessions, not able to stir even when their resting places are disturbed. They are immortal beings in this way, their memories kept by the clues left behind in bodily trauma and well-preserved treasures. Beniamina’s spirit is preserved by Arthur’s enduring love for her, found in the spiritual space he is able to momentarily access. There is a recurring visual of a red string in the film, one end in Beniamina’s hand and the other in Arthur’s. A Japanese legend my mother once told me came to mind: Tied to everyone’s pinky is an invisible red string that leads to someone whom we are destined to meet. Rohrwacher plays on a version of this idea to emphasize the tie between the living and the

dead.

Rohrwacher’s film is a love letter to Tuscany — her birthplace.

This film captures Italy, a setting that already vibrates with the mystique and romance of history, anew. Despite primarily taking place in a real countryside of little extravagance, “La Chimera” is a dreamscape in which the viewer is immersed. Charming characters dressed in odd frocks occasionally speak directly to the camera in their romantic tongue, as if hooking arms with the viewer and pulling them along in their strange escapades. What results is a vacuum of time and space, in which only this story exists.

“La Chimera” changes pace when Arthur and his cronies discover an immaculate statue surrounded by a magnificent array of treasures beneath feet of tightly-packed sand. A red herring lures them from their cache, and

they run away with the head of the freshly decapitated statue.

Discovering their spoils stolen, the band of thieves set out to redeem their profit and find Spartaco presenting the incomplete statue to a room of art dealers.

Spartaco tells her audience that the anonymity of the beheaded statue is what makes it exquisite.

She, a lost artifact without name or face, is a priceless shapeshifter.

She is whoever the eye of her beholder longs to see. When Arthur holds the statue head in his hands and admires her features, we know it is Beniamina he sees.

“You were not meant for human eyes,” he whispers, only to her.

She is his Chimera, a heavenly fantasy that haunts him, and that he can only touch by crossing into another world.

Rohrwacher does not set out to compel Arthur to let go of his Beniamina — to release

the red string that binds them — as more optimistic tales of love and woe would. This story, one of magic and other worlds, observes a truth often ignored by the idealist’s perspective on romance: grief and love are not so easily extinguished, even in death. “La Chimera” refuses to paint death in an ugly light, and instead embraces the wonder of its mystic, even immortal properties through passionate expression. It challenges the idea that life and death — past and present — must, and do, remain on separate planes of existence. The line between the living and the dead is just that — a line. Perhaps there is not so much separating the two worlds, and what endows Arthur with the sole power to move between them is his grief.

Pull on the red string that “La Chimera” grasps the other end of, and stray into another world.

MiC

6 — Wednesday, November 15, 2023

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

When Poetry meets Math and they get drunk KENNETH SUN MiC Columnist

*Poetry and mathematics find themselves chatting at a dinner party.* Poe: Hey, are you Mathematics?

Maryam: Yeah, but you can call me Maryam. You’re Poetry, right?

Poe: Yup, but I go by Poe. Not very creative, I know.

Maryam: I’m sure you’re fine.

Poe: Do you know who’s hosting this party?

Maryam: Probably Business, right?

Poe: Yeah. Probably. *A waiter comes by with a tray of drinks. Maryam takes the wine. Poe takes the brandy and chugs it.* Maryam: Woah.

Poe (shrugging): You gotta get your alcohol where it’s free.

Maryam: … Is poetry that bad?

Poe: You know that Netflix show, “The Midnight Gospel”?

Maryam: To be honest … no. I don’t really watch TV, or have one. What’s that?

Poe: Okay … weird. Well, in the last episode, they talk about meditation as a way to “step out of yourself.” It’s this really beautiful idea of taking a step back from the smoke and mirrors of daily life, like entering spectator mode in a video game. All of a sudden, you realize that things like grades aren’t really important, but reading, writing, seeing friends — those things are. Poetry is like that.

Maryam: Ah, I see.

floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief – Victoria Chang, Obit.

Maryam: … Damn.

Poe: Or this: Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story.

There is no other version of this story.

— Richard Siken, War of the Foxes Maryam: Oh, wow. I really felt that.

Poe: You do, right? You see how you’re not thinking about how expensive alcohol has gotten or about your next deadline at work, filling out school and job applications or anything like that.

Maryam: I do see that, yes.

Poe: See, exactly. I try to break them out of their dreadful, banal realities and remind them what being human

lot to what you’ve said, warts and all.

A lot of what you’ve said about poetry is also true of math.

Poe: Oh, shit. For real?

Maryam (sipping her wine): Yes! Like what you said about breaking people out of their world, pure math is very much about constructing a world through reason inspired by, but ultimately separate from, the “real” world.

What is true in this mathematical world is true universally — across time, space, nationality, religion, race, and whatever else people divide themselves by. Like, even if everything happens to have been a simulation, everything we know about a vector space is still just as true in the universe of the beings running the simulation. So even though everything in pure math is just stuff people made up, it’s arguably more real and more permanent than… all of this.

Maryam: So I also think math does a very good job of bringing people out of their own heads and giving them a different perspective from which to view the world. You’re immersed in this other world which, if you believe to be more real, then that becomes sort of the plane that you’re looking down from. It’s kind of meditative, I think, because you get to detangle yourself from ordinary “reality” and be immersed in the extremely expansive world of math. There’s an intrinsic beauty to some theorems, but also in how frequently and powerfully they can apply to what’s in the “real world”.

Maryam: There’s a book called “Mathematics for Human Flourishing” by Francis Su, which talks about this a lot more.

But speaking of “transcendent mathematical beauty”, he writes, “We may feel it when the sensory geometric beauty of a majestic architectural space hits us at a deep

*Maryam unpockets a piece of chalk and writes the following on a chalkboard.*

— Euler, Euler’s Formula.

Maryam: This formula achieves both kinds of beauty, which is probably why it’s one of the most celebrated formulas in math. Put shortly, It says that imaginary exponents describe rotation around the complex unit circle. It’s a surprising and elegant connection, but it also appears ubiquitously everywhere in nature. Theorems and formulas are like poems because sometimes you find these beautiful truths that, as Jordan Ellenberg puts it, “make you feel like you’ve reached into the gut of the universe and put your finger on the wire”. Not everything is a poem, of course. Just

*Poe lifts a bottle of brandy from a passing waiter. It’s reasonable to assume he’s going to drink it all.* Poe: Yeah. It’s supposed to pull people out of the sauce. But nobody ever talks about how fucking hard it is to write something like that.

Maryam: The what?

Poe: The sauce. You know: homework, job applications and the like. They spend most of their lives lost in the sauce, and I have to get them to remove their heads from their asses. But, of course, they keep trying to dive back in. Like … listen to this: *He taps a square on his chest where the heart would be, and it pops open like a drawer. He takes out a slip of paper and reads it.* If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the

Avery Nelson/TMD

should mean. It’s universal human experiences that we use to try and take people out of their bubbles. And it’s hard because you can’t just get those at Trader Joe’s.

Poe: Yet we don’t get paid much, hence the taking advantage of free booze.

Poe (burps): Excuse me. I’ve been acting a little drunk. Anyway, it’s nice to see that some STEM subjects appreciate poetry. *The camera pans to show Chemistry, who’s scribbling some hexagons on a napkin and explaining them to Biology.* Maryam (laughing): I think it is perhaps just me. Honestly, I relate a

*She gestures broadly at everything around her.* Poe: Ah, so the mathematical world is analogous to the pure, inner self that people can access through meditation, and the greater human experience that people can access through poetry.

Maryam: Yes. You are very quick : ) Poe: I’ve never thought about such extreme scenarios like our world being a simulation, but I suppose that universal feelings and experiences are still, in some sense, real. Even if the world is a simulation, surely the concept of grief or of love still exists… Anyhow, do go on.

Maryam: That’s precisely the idea.

level. Or when we see a simple idea appear in many forms across multiple areas of mathematics. Or when we grasp that a certain elegant proof can generalize to many other situations.

When you see the same beautiful idea pop up everywhere, you begin to think that it is pointing to some deeper truth you haven’t yet grasped.

When you realize that you’ve had exactly the same mathematical thoughts as another person… you begin to believe there might be a universal, enduring reality that you are both somehow accessing.”

Poe: Wow… this is really interesting.

Wait, what’s the mathematical equivalent of a poem, then?

Maryam: Oh … if I had to pick one, it’d be this:

like how a poem has many words, sometimes an important theorem is built from many other theorems.

Maryam: Anyway, it’s like how you said meditation makes you realize what is important, and how reading poetry pulls you out of the sauce. I think learning and doing abstract math really puts you in touch with permanent, unambiguous truths. It lets you converse with the essential parts of the universe, if you will.

Poe: Preach.

Maryam (excited): Even the lines drawn between different areas of math blur with time and experience. We asked about how integers worked and got number theory. Then, we asked about solutions of polynomial equations

and got group theory. We noticed a possible connection between the monster group (an absurdly large group whose existence was proved by a U-M professor in 1982) and a function from number theory, and proved it when someone noticed that they both had a connection to string theory! What are either of these things doing in a fundamental theory of quantum gravity with 11 dimensions!?

Poe: Yeah, that does sound kind of wild.

Maryam: Right?? But it was inevitable that groups and numbers are related in this way, through string theory. The universe deals heavily in symmetries, which we can understand with groups, and groups are heavily related to prime numbers.

Euler’s identity, too, feels inevitable in hindsight. This sense of inevitability and elegance accompanies many mathematical theorems, and it … I can’t put words to it, but do you get what I mean?

Poe: I think I do. It’s like a poem so perfect that when you look at it, you can’t pick out a single fault, from design to execution. Every stroke is so natural and, in hindsight, so obvious that it could not possibly have been any other way.

Maryam: Yes … yes, that is it. You understand.

Poe: I see what you’re saying, how math is able to lift you out of the smokes and mirrors of daily life, as poetry and meditation does. And you’ve got these wild connections between different fields as well. I wish we had that in poetry… Well, I guess we do. The poem I showed you of Victoria Chang is such an example.

Maryam: See? Like I said, you and I have a lot in common.

Maryam (quietly): Not to mention that math people also don’t get paid very much. *The waiter comes by again and smartly leaves the drinks tray with the two friends.* Poe: You don’t either? But from what you’ve said, math sounds so useful!

Even by human standards they shouldMaryam: Applied math is useful, and there’s a lot of it in certain industries, like finance. Pure math, though — people say it’s “impractical.” They ask, “What is the point?” What is the point of truth, you mean? Of knowing something to be true, once and for all. Or did you mean to ask: What is the point of beauty? Of discovery?

Of surprise? Of understanding something fundamental about the world?

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20 years, 20 tears KARIS RIVERS MiC Columnist

On my birthday, I will cry. Before that, I will wake up and go to class.

After, maybe I’ll get a cake to sing and celebrate with friends. I might buy some candles, blow them out, make a wish and pray it comes true. I may laugh and allow myself a moment to indulge in the joys of life, but at the end of the day when I’m finally alone, I will turn towards my pillow and cry.

My birthday is a reminder of everything I haven’t done. It tells me that time goes on even when I stand still. Every year when the day rolls around, I wonder how I got here, and why I’m not somewhere else. I can never understand how I haven’t gotten somewhere where the days have meaning and the nights are tranquil. I thought by now, I would have found my key to happiness and a way to love life, but yet again, I am lost.

When I turned 16, I never wanted to make it far past that. Life was a task and a struggle that I was entirely apathetic to. When I turned 17, I felt like a failure because nothing had

changed within the duration of a year. Life was hard, and I hated living it. Waking up was painful.

School was agonizingly lonely.

My only solace was falling asleep.

I wasn’t happy, and yet I was still here. Between 17 and now, I have lived three years. With 20 steadily approaching, I am filled with mixed emotions. I am certainly happier, in part due to maturity. I am excited to turn 20, enter a new decade of my life and discover what the next year can offer me. I am starting a new chapter of my life, and I am amazed and grateful to be able to do so, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t unnerved.

There are so many things I was supposed to do before this day. There are so many places I was supposed to see. There are so many things I was supposed to have said. There are so many feelings I was supposed to have felt. These are pieces of my life that are missing and time is running out to find them before they vanish, and all I can do is mourn the loss of something I never really had.

I know that in reality, anything I could say or do before 20, I can also say and do after. These pieces won’t

disappear; instead, they will come in unexpected forms. But while I watch them change, I can’t help but feel like I’m losing a battle against a clock that’s keeping track of how long it takes me to finally find peace, happiness and love.

Teenage love sounds stupid, but for my entire life, it was the one fairytale I desperately wanted to come true. As a young girl, I was socialized to seek out love and use romantic attention as a marker of worth. I grew up watching love stories unfold on my television screen and used them as standards for my future. To me, my Troy and Gabriella love story was certain.

I would spend my days dancing in the rain on the school rooftop, having picnics on a golf course and letting the world fall away to sing karaoke and fall in love.

But high school, as we all know, was not anything like a movie. The rose-tinted dreams I had were simply not possible, but I was so caught up in my picture-perfect fairytale ending that I never let myself live. Now I reminisce on the past and realize I let the days pass me by. That teenage love that I dreamed of for so long is

quickly growing out of my reach. I want so badly to hold on to those childish fantasies and romanticized versions of love, but as my birthday approaches, they start to fade. Once I turn 20, a teenage romance will become impossible, and I won’t be able to stop the disappointment that settles when I come to terms with the fact that I lost my chance.

Even outside of love, I had wished by now I would have found some light to guide me to a sense of purpose and give life more meaning, but I just feel more confused than ever. I don’t know where I’m going, and I’m not sure if I even like where I am. I had thought by now, I’d feel more accomplished. I had dreamed that college would be the place where I felt capable, but it has made me feel anything but. My freshman year, I went home every Thursday night and came back every Monday morning because I felt so out of place and lonely. It has taken me the past three years to build up any sense of worth and identity on this campus. In high school I felt isolated, depressed and worthless, and I can’t fathom how I still feel exactly the same.

Beyond that, I wanted more

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than anything to finally be secure in myself and love myself for who I am. I wanted to wake up, look in the mirror and love the girl who stared back. I spent so long hating and criticizing the way she looked and acted. If she made a bad joke, misspoke or made a mistake, I would never let her forget it. By now I wish I would’ve learned how to hold her hand and whisper sweet nothings in her ear. I should’ve learned to feel comfort in the presence of a lonely day, to crave moments of silence rather than fear them and to feel at peace — not at

war — with my thoughts. But I failed, and that failure beats louder and faster than my own heart.

But hope is a beautiful thing. It is a saving grace and final resort, and fortunately, hope doesn’t end when you turn 20. Despite all my failures, I hope that my fears are not permanent.

I hope I can learn to live with my shortcomings. I hope that all my dreams will come to fruition. I hope one day I will find love. I hope one day I will be at peace. I hope that one day when my birthday comes, I’ll blow out the candles and feel joy to be able to celebrate it.

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STATEMENT

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 — 7

I am my own Rosetta stone

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VALERIJA MALASHEVICH Statement Deputy Editor

I have a problem. I have finally realized, after decades of digging for something that sets my soul on fire, of searching for just the right epithet to adequately nominate my passion, that the moment has finally come. For better or for worse, I am now attuned to the fact that the rest of my life must be devoted entirely to language — to sipping on the sweet juices of fluency and bathing in the endless streams of meaning of other worlds.

To say this was a conscious choice would be reductive, for it feels like I’ve spent the majority of my undergraduate career dubiously poring over a monstrous heap of scrap at the local junkyard, trying to parse out every man’s trash from my personal treasure. Within the last month, though, I have uncovered what feels like the holy grail in my hands.

Semantics, strummed through chords of syntax and sentence structure, are my symphony.

Language is all-encompassing — it’s fascinating how subordinate we are to the sounds and slices of meaning that cut up our world. Many of us think that language is a tertiary step in the perception of our reality and that each word is meaningfully attributed to the objects around us, a process as banal as assigning mere terms to mere images. Not only is this explanation intensely lackluster, but it is also, in my opinion, completely incorrect.

When we speak, our lips and vocal cords create magic. Our words manifest reality.

This manifestation is what’s known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The idea that languages don’t just contribute to the way we perceive our world — they are the way we perceive our world. The hypothesis posits that we are mere serfs to our mother tongue, subservient to the vocabulary available in our language, and that how we think is limited by what we can utter.

It’s quite simple, and almost suspiciously susceptible, to discredit the influence that language has on our lives. Our linguistic definition of time, for example, measurably affects our saving behavior. Speakers of futureless languages where you would say “tomorrow it rains” rather than “it will rain tomorrow,” are 31% more likely to have saved money in any given year, 24% less likely to smoke and 29% more likely to be physically active. That’s because languages that do not differentiate between the present and future have speakers that are encouraged to make more future-oriented choices.

Another great example of feelings directly being constrained through

vocabulary is German, with its numerous strings of meanings that simply do not have an English translation. It’s not that we haven’t felt schadenfreude or gemütlichkeit before, but not having a singular word for those associations makes it nearly impossible to vocalize the essence of such feelings.

If education opens up windows of new opportunities, then to gain insight into a new language, to acquire and master scripts and soliloquies in an entirely foreign medium, is to blow apart the walls of the house entirely.

Ich kann alles und irgendwas mit anderen Worten sagen, die ich nie auf Englisch ausdrücken könnte. Je peux parler et penser sur différents niveaux. Je peux créer des mondes jamais vus auparavant.

You begin to feel feelings in different dimensions: Sadness is no longer a meager melancholy malaise, it’s saudade; depression becomes more than enumerative ennui, it becomes тоска; unconditional attraction is no longer simply love, it’s ʿ‫( قشع‬išq). As a writer, the freedom granted to me through multilingualism is everything I could ever ask or beg for. But this value wasn’t always so apparent or appreciated.

I grew up with two distinct mother tongues, and they couldn’t be more dissimilar. When I speak Russian, I like to imagine that it flows like honey off my lips. In all actuality, it is not very refined: My accent protrudes, my sentences break syntactic rules and I have a tendency to repeat similar phrases that I otherwise cannot find vocabulary for.

Still, it’s the only language that my family speaks, and when I speak it, I taste an intimacy that I cannot quite describe. I feel at my most essential when I call and beckon in Russian, as if the Cyrillic script can penetrate the cortical layers of my brain in a way that other languages cannot.

Yet, when I intend to profess, when I intend to orate and persuade and enchant, I rely on English. I’ve attained a level of academic and colloquial fluency in English that I otherwise cannot reach in Russian — when speaking to friends, professors, and to you, my audience, English becomes my mother tongue. When I speak it, I dance. Words flutter in my mind and land and erupt in harmonious poetry, following a pentameter that varies with each cue and declension, deviating and diverging as its meaning unfurls.

My A-tier vocabulary and flexible equipment of expressions are startlingly unusual for an immigrant, and the only language I truly have an accent in is absolutely not English.

In turn, such a fluent-familiar dichotomy has caused great dissonance in my mind for quite some time. One tongue is decisively mine, taking root in my family

tree — an intimacy that cannot be easily revoked — despite my underdeveloped fluency. And the other tongue is a stranger, someone with stiff, cold hands who smokes distance and brevity into my lungs, but whom I crave and cannot bear to live without.

For much of my life, I had preemptively convinced myself that I was trapped in such a cycle — doomed to swing like a pendulum between strange fluency and erratic intimacy. No one place or voice was just right for me.

If you had told me, when I was still young, raw and vulnerable, that acquiring foreign languages would unlock and reframe my selfidentity, I wouldn’t have believed you. I would’ve laughed you off. In fact, I did. I scoffed at my middle school teacher when he made us read Le Petit Prince. I admonished my mother for making me take French lessons for half a decade. She herself had spent years acquiring French in school, before she immigrated and began to prioritize English, and was seemingly adamant that I should grow up as more than a bilingual speaker. Inconceivable verbiage and senseless conjugations were shoved down my teenage throat, and I, in rebellion, began to hate the very thing I’m preaching for today.

My disdain skyrocketed after my AP French exam — where I scored only a two — despite years of pounding être tenses into my brain. I felt like I had failed; clearly, my effort had been applied in vain, and time was just taunting me through the promise of fluency.

And yet, my world inverted when I stumbled upon German — it was something new. It was something alluring. I soon decided to spend the winter of my junior year of college in Berlin. I was ready to hit the ground running, conversing with strangers and friends alike, tumbling through niche phrases and elucidating abstract phenomena in the Germanic dialect. This, however, was not my reality.

I spent my first few weeks in Berlin in silence. Isolated in a studio apartment with blankwhite walls and distanced from my closest friends by thousands of miles, I became starved for human interaction. Despite how much I wanted to chat up the elderly couple poised on the park bench, or ask the cashier ringing me up how their day was going, I could not. I was afraid of being laughed at, of having intentional meaning misconstrued, of being judged for my accent. In an almost evil way, I finally felt what my parents must’ve felt upon arrival in America — sanctioned to silence by fear of being misunderstood.

I began to fight for fluency through ferocity, obstinately determined to understand what I yet

could not. I would listen to podcasts during my commutes to class and practice vocabulary recall through context, squinting at advertisements plastered inside the tram as I tried to make sense of what was being conveyed. Not again, I’d mutter to myself, never would I surrender again. And somehow, along the way, between brute bull-headedness and ephemeral self-will, I fell back into love with language.

After years of defiance and distaste for language acquisition, the trajectory of my life had pulled me right back into linguistic immersion, drowning me in its awe.

I guess sometimes we have to prove ourselves wrong before we admit that others are right.

Language has become a way of rebranding myself. Redefining myself. Recreating worlds that already exist within me. With every new Russian idiom I pick up and with each new stroke I master in Hangul, I expose yet another undiscovered self.

In the most paradoxical of ways, I am also starting to realize that I am more than what I speak. I am no longer a victim of my vocabulary — I have new ways of affirming myself, deciding myself and breathing meaning within myself. Gone is the bilingual dissonance that used to perturb me, as I am no longer left feeling incoherently incomplete due to my vernacular.

I can transcend the spoken word. What I cannot express in one language, I can easily communicate in another. I might be more with language, but I am also more than just language. I am the same story, retold in different dialects and transcribed through different scripts. I am my own harbinger of meaning — I am my own Rosetta stone.

I have become addicted to uncovering new meanings like hidden treasures, to sipping and slurping on fresh knowledge as I heed the path to fluency. I have finally discovered a power within myself that I never acknowledged existed. I cannot continue to live if I cannot continue to hear and breathe other languages.

But perhaps, a tragedy has occurred. Perhaps, a glass has been knocked over on the counter, and, in the distance, I feel the faint resonance of shards careening across the kitchen floor. Perhaps, I hear exclamations coming from the living room, shouts and screams of shock.

But perhaps, I do not hear anything at all. Perhaps — and quite likely — I am going deaf.

It took weeks for me to feel comfortable speaking German. It took years for me to sharpen my comprehension skills. And it took me decades to finally realize the value of language. But it took me only one warm day in September to learn that the ability that feeds my linguistic

passion is now fading from my eyes with each breath. Heave-ho. In … and out.

So much drive and determination spent devoted to the languages of others. So many hours spent listening to podcasts until my brain began to bleed, and so much mental real estate dedicated to foreign vocabulary.

And now, what has enabled me to reinvigorate my life with joy and purpose — what has made it possible for me to listen to the stories of strangers — is an ability I soon may no longer possess.

How ironic it is, that after spending the majority of my life unfurling the nature of my desires, I have lost the key before I’ve even opened the door. The universe, I believe, enjoys taunting me, poking its spindly fingers in my face and seeing just how much it’ll take to break me.

But I am nothing if not an optimist.

And the goal I’ve been tasked with now is the challenge of remaining present.

So I may be losing hair cells in my inner ear. I may no longer be able to drown myself in the vocals of my favorite music, blasting foreign lyrics into my head beyond reasonable decibel levels. I may have started to look at mouths more adamantly in conversation, as I attempt to connect morphemes to lip movement. And even though I may be losing a part of myself, I realize I haven’t lost it yet.

Even with all the breath exculpated from my lungs, as I sleep fraught with worry, and even as my knees remain scarred from pleading

for forgiveness on my bedroom carpet, I have come to realize that the universe has actually gifted me a blessing. It has provided me with a new perspective.

With the realization of what I may come to lose, I have developed a heightened appreciation for the abilities I still retain. Now, I try to listen closely. I listen diligently. I practice gratitude with the most banal of tasks, from watching the German news in the morning to observing the sweet flow and cadence of my father’s voice. I indulge in the stories and ruminations of my friends like it may be the last time I hear their voices. I am attempting to hear with my heart.

In quite an unexpected way, my love for language has been reborn once more, as we often cannot feel full gratitude for the things we have now until we’re about to lose them.

I think I am slowly beginning to re-learn what it means to listen.

In a few months, I will have a follow-up appointment with an audiologist, where I’ll finally be presented with a diagnosis outlining the extent of my condition. I will have my prognosis jotted down on paper, and my abilities restricted to a set of refined and arbitrary medical definitions. My hearing loss, along with my most menacing fears, will become official. But until then — and for as long as the universe will allow me to — I will continue to listen with fire in my lungs until I begin to hear others speak colors and mumble symphonies.

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8 — Wednesday, November 15, 2023

STATEMENT

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Growing up with my parents: The realities of being a child of teen pregnancy JOSHUA NICHOLSON Statement Contributor

In my high school introduction to criminology class, the teacher asked us if we knew where our parents were on 9/11. The question opened our terrorism unit, which coincidentally started around the terrorist attack’s anniversary.

After a chorus of students sharing that their parents were working at a hospital, sitting at home or, even in the case of one student, giving birth to their older brother, I recounted a loose amalgamation of my mom’s, stepdad’s and dad’s stories. At some point in the morning, their high school classes were interrupted as faculty members entered their rooms and whispered something in their teachers’ ears. A few minutes later, staff rolled in old-school televisions on carts and turned on the news.

As I relayed the story to my classmates, the entire room erupted with a reaction difficult to name, but closest to disbelief, as if I was making these details up. Multiple students called out a question, asking how old my parents were. In my sophomore year class, most students couldn’t imagine parents who were only 15 in 2001.

I was born in 2003, while my mom was 17 years old and my dad 18. Like most ’90s kids, my parents enjoyed both stupid and classic ’90s movies, Missy Elliot, Eminem and the Mortal Kombat games. They played Nintendo 64 and watched Rugrats. My dad played high school football, and my mom competed in high school wrestling. Unlike most ’90s kids, they began raising a child before they were even adults.

My mom always says that having a child at that age comes with a choice: You can either keep living your life, presumably pawning off responsibilities to parents or relatives, while you party or go to college; or you can make sacrifices.

Instead of following dreams or living out your early 20s, either by traveling, getting an education or trying new things, you can choose to take care of yourself and

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a child. That’s what my mom did.

One time, in high school, she left during her lunch period to pick me up from home. She brought me back to school, showing me off in the cafeteria and taking care of me, instead of spending time with friends, during that small gap between classes.

Now, when I look around at my friends and peers, all between 18 and 22 years old, I feel a better sense of appreciation for what my parents did for me. Rather than handing me over to grandparents, my mom raised me while my dad served in the army. Eventually, my stepdad, the same age as my mom, stepped in as well, fulfilling his role as a second father figure in his mid-20s. Personally, after seeing Instagram stories of Halloweekend parties or scrolling through the social event photos for my club sport, I can’t imagine any undergraduate at this university being a parent right now.

If I had to pinpoint the biggest difference between having young parents and older ones, it would come down to my younger parents’ lack of life experience.

Inexperience is not a negative thing — it’s natural that teen parents don’t have much life experience to inform the raising of a child at 17 years old; rather, it’s an interesting approach to growing up. My parents were prematurely thrust into parenthood, and it does feel like we all grew up together.

As a kid, when I made a mistake or faced a common childhood problem, it was usually my parents’ first time facing that problem, too. Whenever my parents had to punish me, they only needed to think back a handful of years to reference what my grandparents did. When I reached middle school, I could sense them improvising as they went, trying to steer my confused, pubescent self in the right directions and

adapting, like everyone else, to a rapidly changing world of smartphones and technology — all while managing early careers, finding stable incomes and buying a first home.

As for my childhood experience, having young parents didn’t affect me as much as it affected the way I interacted with others. When I went to my friends’ houses, I felt a disconnect, due to our parents’ differing ages. Most of my friends’ parents, especially in middle and high school, were closer in age to my grandparents, which granted my friends a far different upbringing. In middle school, I began to notice the surprise some people experienced from my parents’ ages, and the stigma they associated with their youngness.

I also became hyperaware of the very different stages of life that my parents and my friends’ parents were experiencing. In high school, when my friends had parents

nearing the high points or end of their careers as surgeons, police captains or restaurant owners, mine weren’t even halfway to retirement. Even now, in college, my friends have parents who are the CEOs of nonprofit organizations or are established lawyers with practices of their own. In contrast, my parents are just now reaching the upper trajectory of their careers, earning more money and being granted promotions closer to the top of their fields.

Finding out that a 6th grader’s parents are only 28 usually elicits a strange reaction of condescension.

In middle school, my mom once attended a meeting with my teachers to discuss a lisp I had retained for far too long. She had met the teachers earlier in the year at an open house event. Upon entering the meeting room, my English teacher looked at her and said, not asked, in a tone dripping with the condescending, impolite

politeness of old southern women, “Oh, you’re his mother. I thought you were his sister.”

While no one expresses audible surprise now that I’m nearly 20 years old and in college, there is still a certain look I recognize when my parents’ age is mentioned. It’s not altogether condescension or shock, but it reveals a sort of jolt in the person’s brain, as if some aspect of their worldview has been momentarily broken. This specific reaction may come as a result of the demographics of the students I’m talking to. The University of Michigan ranks first among selective public universities in student family incomes, with the median income being $154,000.

While teen pregnancy is by no means exclusive to people outside the top 20% of incomes, it is less common within higher-income communities. In fact, existing data suggests a correlation between teen birth rates and state income inequality: States with higher income inequality see higher teen pregnancy rates. This discrepancy isn’t because of a lack of good parenting or any moral failings.

Rather, teenagers of higher-income families can simply afford abortions.

It’s important for me to note that I grew up in a middle-class household with strong familial support. I’ve grown up with all of my grandparents — an experience I recognize as uniquely beautiful.

A rarely discussed side effect of having young parents is having young grandparents, as well. Even now, my grandparents are only in their late 50s. For most of my life, I experienced my grandparents in their 40s and early 50s, prime ages to not only spend time with them but get to know them as people.

At every turn, every milestone of my childhood, my grandparents were there. Whether I was spending workdays at my maternal grandmother’s house with my similarly aged uncles, helping my maternal grandfather do yard work, visiting my paternal grandparents at their offices or going to my step father’s parents’ house to swim in their pool, I always valued my time with them.

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Elegies to animals ELIZABETH WOLFE Statement Columnist

If pets were a key part of my childhood, then my childhood was built on Lou’s Pet Shop in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Lou’s has supplied nearly all of the animals my family’s owned: a dozen fish at a time, five gerbils and a hedgehog. As a kid, going to Lou’s felt like a playdate; running to the pet store for fish food and gerbil fluff was one of the only errands I enjoyed. The shop was small, and we knew the owners, so my parents were comfortable letting my sister and I roam the store on our own. We’d laugh at the mice falling over themselves on their wheels and try to get the birds to chirp with us. Sometimes, after school, if my mom noticed I was feeling down, she’d say to me, “We need fish food. Do you want to come with me?”

This was code for, “Do you want to go to Lou’s and see the animals?”

There were a handful of notfor-sale animals kept in the store, but perhaps the most unique was Franky, an African spurred tortoise who was donated to Lou’s in 2007. With thick legs and a slow gait, he was free to roam up and down the narrow aisles of pet food and toys. I was five when Franky joined the store, but I can’t remember being introduced to him. Franky always just was. For years, while my parents would consult the owners over which fish would be comfortable in our tank or peruse for new cat toys, I’d slowly trail him around the

store and run my hands along the hard ridges of his shell. I grew up alongside Franky. There was a joyfulness and comfort in knowing that he would always be poking about the store. At 21 years old, I’d still occasionally check in on Lou’s Facebook to see pictures of him snacking on lettuce.

On Oct. 30, my parents texted in our family group chat that Franky had passed away. It was a sudden death, they told my sister and I. He was only 26 years old, when he could’ve lived past 70 years. I joked that, on Halloween, I’d pour one out for him. I texted my friends in Ann Arbor: Remember the tortoise I showed you? Yeah, he f-ing died.

Humor is not antithetical to grief; I’d argue humor can be fundamental. But just laughing about Franky’s unexpected death didn’t help me cope. When I received the news of Franky’s death, despite my joking texts, I wished more than anything that I was at Lou’s. I wished I was giggling and petting Franky like when I was a child. Better yet, I wished I were a child again, when I could mourn Franky without shame. Really, it felt wrong to say I needed to cope at all.

I’ve experienced the deaths of people, of family, friends and figures who I’ve watched from a distance. These are the deaths I dwell on — the deaths that have shaped me much more than that of a tortoise. Somewhere along the line, anything less than the pain of losing people seemed to become trivial.

I sat alone in my room the night I learned about Franky,

mentally kicking myself. I was caught between two camps of thought: Why are you so cold inside that you can’t just say you miss Franky? And why do you miss Franky when there are real people you could be thinking about? I sat between the two, wallowing in guilt.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve needed to confront my ambivalence towards grief and coping. We always had fish growing up, most of which we couldn’t tell apart, but there were a few we gave names to. Two of my favorites were GAWD, a silver dollar who was more than 10 years old. That’s an incredibly long time for a fish of that kind, so we named him GAWD as an offshoot of God — a name Mom disapproved of. There was also Beelzebub, a little orange fish who was the only survivor of dozens of surprise fish babies, and whose name my Mom also disapproved of.

In February of this year, I was lounging in a rocking chair in the Union, procrastinating the completion of my homework, when my sister FaceTimed me. During an ice storm across southeast Michigan, my parents had lost power for several days.

Without any heat, my sister relayed to me, all of the fish in the tank had died.

“I want to cry right now, but I can’t,” I told my sister.

I didn’t want to show such emotion in public, and even if I was comfortable enough to cry right there, it was as though my body wouldn’t let me. “This is so embarrassing.” We laughed, instead, at the absurdity of the

situation, at the way we’d just lost years, if not decades-old pets in a single freak accident.

If I were younger, I could see myself standing over a toilet bowl, singing a mournful song as we flushed the fish away to their resting place. Instead, I tried to clamp off any more wistful thoughts toward the fish. Despite my laughter, I was devastated. My “coping” ended there, at least on the surface.

There is no perfect way to grieve, but I think my younger self did a better job of mourning her pets than I do now. For many children, a pet’s passing can be their first experience with death. Personally, this rings true. Squeeky was a goldenfurred gerbil; my first real pet that wasn’t a family fish. Despite not doing much except running on their wheel, my sister and I loved playing with Squeeky and her sister, May, the first of many beloved rodents in our home.

Everyday after school, we’d take out Squeeky and May from their pen and sit on the floor with our legs straddled out, pressing the soles of our feet together into a diamond shape. We’d let the gerbils roam in the area between our shins and thighs, quickly grabbing them before they could hop over our man-made barrier. My sister and I would laugh and chase after the gerbils as they explored our kitchen, rolling around in hamster balls.

I spent hours of my third grade free time building houses out of empty PopTart boxes for them to chew.

Grief introduced itself to me on a Tuesday morning in May of 2011. My sister and I

were getting ready to leave for elementary school when my mom gathered us into the den and stood in front of the gerbils’ glass home. My 9-year-old self hadn’t noticed, but Squeeky had been growing weak, scratching at herself and balding. I don’t recall the exact language she used, but my mom made it clear to us that Squeeky wasn’t simply going to sleep; she was dying, and we needed to say goodbye.

I tearfully told Squeeky I loved her, and that she would be with God soon. We watched, solemnly, as she curled up in her gingerbread house and didn’t come back out.

As we huddled around the pen, the clock ticked close to 8 a.m. — the start time for our all-school Mass that day for the crowning of Mary. Instead of ushering us into the car, my mom looked over to her crying daughters and told us that we could miss church to bury Squeeky. We put her furry body in a little box resting on a piece of felt pulled from the sewing room. We laid her in the backyard dirt, among the budding hydrangeas and astilbe.

Perhaps it is morbid to describe my memory of this day as fond. Really, it’s a bittersweet memory, but my appreciation for my mom’s compassion outweighs the sadness of losing Squeeky.

She was the greatest loss I knew when I was younger, a naivety and simplicity I no longer possess. But that morning, my mom mirrored for me, on a small scale, how to acknowledge grief, before I would grow older and face heavier deaths.

I do believe that anything is a practice for everything after it. I

could justify my grief for Franky and others that way. If we grieve the little things — pets, severed ties, childhood memories — maybe we’ll grieve better, or more healthily, when worse losses come.

On the other hand, does this grief need a deeper meaning?

A metaphor for my childhood being chipped away? My failure to appreciate what I had in the moment? Does my age have to play a factor? It could, sure, but can I let myself mourn a tortoise simply because he is gone, and I miss him?

When I learned that Franky died, I didn’t need to cry on my mom’s shoulder or hold my sister’s hand as I did when Squeeky passed — I just wanted to acknowledge that I truly missed him, without bogging myself down with notions about being childish or dramatic.

Maybe the best way to grieve isn’t to justify it at all.

My sister visited home last summer, bringing with her two small painted canvases. The first was of GAWD, with glimmering silver skin and orange highlights, and the second was of Beelzebub, a speck of orange in a blue sea with little bubbles coming from his mouth. The portrait of GAWD now stands on the lid of the empty tank, and Beelzebub’s rests on my shelf.

It’s a simple act, but looking at the little canvas gives me a small sense of comfort that even our fish are remembered. It’s still uncomfortable, reteaching myself to mourn my pets, but when has mourning ever been easy? Perhaps Franky could use a portrait as well.

Opinion

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Submit to Survivors Speak THE DAILY OPINION SECTION

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ver the past few years, students, staff, faculty and alumni at the University of Michigan have addressed on-campus sexual misconduct through activism, policy development and increased discourse. While these developments are critical to changing campus culture, we believe it is also important to re-center the stories of survivors in the broader cultural conversation on campus.

With that in mind, the Opinion section has space for first-person accounts of sexual misconduct and its various implications. In Survivors Speak, submissions underpinned by the experience of survivors will be published,

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Road (not) work ahead

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NICK RUBECK

Opinion Columnist

W

alkability is a hip goal for urban spaces. Increasingly, citizens want the ability to navigate their city independent of a private motor vehicle.

Safety and pace of life are among the top priorities of the urbanist movement promoted in forums like Reddit’s “r/ Urbanism,” organizations such as Strong Towns and by dedicated creators like City Beautiful.

Ann Arbor is, by American standards, a fairly safe place to get around. The organization Walk Score ranks the city at an impressive 98 points out of 100 for ease and safety of walking, as well as 89 for biking and 76 for public transportation.

Nevertheless, the city is still working to reduce serious injuries and deaths caused by cars. Ann Arbor’s Vision Zero plan, which was announced in 2021, hopes to reach that goal of zero road casualties by 2025. Since the plan was finalized, Ann Arbor has reviewed or passed several measures to promote the safety of non-car travel, including the designation of new bike lanes

on Division and State streets and the prohibition of right turns for cars stopped at red lights.

While far from a thing of the past, road deaths and injuries are decreasing year after year in Ann Arbor, based on data collected as recently as 2021. As a supporter of lowand no-car urban spaces, I’m inclined to linger on the city’s problems, which, in reality, feel inescapable for most North American cities. Still, I want to celebrate Ann Arbor for its successes and hope for even more safe and efficient infrastructure. To shape the city into the one we want, we should appreciate what’s already here.

The weekend before Halloween, I was out on my bike working on this story. To a regular reader of urbanist opinions, this might sound like the beginning of a horror story involving a missed red light and an unfortunate trick-or-treater.

Instead, I was delighted to find a cluster of white tents in place of the usual rows of parked cars on North Fourth Avenue and East Ann Street. I stopped by to explore what I learned was the third annual A2 Artoberfest, hosted by the Ann Arbor non-profit Guild of Artists & Artisans.

The two-day festival featured live music, local food and drink and, of course, the work of about 100 artists. Despite the cold weather, pedestrians of all ages wandered from booth to booth, chatting with the artists and volunteers.

Some young attendees were in their costumes from the Downtown Ann Arbor Trickor-Treater Parade held a block away on Main Street. To better understand the event’s impact on the community, I spoke with some of the volunteers at the festival.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Allison Buck, senior director of marketing and partnerships at the Guild of Artists & Artisans, explained the process of organizing traffic and getting people involved. “(To reserve the streets with the city) we applied 6 months in advance, but the application is straightforward,” Buck said.

“A lot of people, despite our aggressive marketing, stumble on this, especially from the farmers market and trick-ortreating events.”

I was one of these surprise attendees, having only stopped thanks to the large construction barrier at one of the event’s entrances. Buck went on to describe how pedestrian safety measures like bollards can both

help and hinder street events like Artoberfest.

“We worked with the city to temporarily remove these bollards,” Buck said, pointing to some of the remaining gray poles surrounding the corners of the sidewalk. “These bollards make people safer — I’m a walker myself.”

Buck explained that the barrier poles take up valuable space when setting up temporary booths.

“Sometimes when street improvements are made, like these bollards, they impact our footprint,” Buck said.

Nevertheless, Buck said pedestrian and cycling infrastructure still seems to help business. This claim is supported by research indicating a 24% jump in retail revenue for stores on protected bike lanes in New York City.

The partner volunteers also appreciated the potential of events like Artoberfest to boost public support for safe, walkable spaces.

In an interview with The Daily, Heather Vingsness, educational outreach manager at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum, explained why pedestrian access is so important to the Museum and to the community as a whole.

“It’s about half and half,” Vingsness said, referring to how many people drive or walk to the museum. “But yeah, we have a ton of people that are just walking around and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know there’s a museum here’ — and I love this sort of walkable event.”

Vingsness strongly agreed with the sentiment that events like Artoberfest contribute to a sense of pedestrian community. “(T)hese sorts of walkable events really help bring the community together because you’re not just driving somewhere in your car — you’re not just driving past people wondering what they’re doing as you drive, you get to actually interact with the people around you,” Buck said.

“Especially because it’s treat parade day, there’s gonna be so many people from all over Ann Arbor coming here at once and it’s going to be kind of like a good celebration of the vitality of the city.”

Nonetheless, Ann Arbor’s street-accessible buildings and events are still destinations for car traffic. The Guild’s website helpfully recommends nearby parking structures for people who need to drive.

Vingsness also told The Daily that the Museum receives frequent requests for

a dedicated parking lot.

While cars can be isolating, inefficient and unsafe on the whole, they are necessary for many people who cannot get around otherwise, especially with the high priority car traffic maintained in North American urban planning.

The future of urban development needs to account for the benefits of cars, while mitigating their risks and offering viable alternatives like accessible public transportation. This mediation between the car and the sidewalk is not exactly a hot topic of contemporary urbanism, and private vehicles are generally less necessary and accessible than many give them credit for. Still, in the spirit of appreciating what we have now, Artoberfest can show us that we can truly share the road, even for just a weekend or for outdoor dining options.

Buck said Artoberfest plays a role in building the community. “(The festival) definitely adds to the urban setting. (Ann Arbor is) in the top 10 cities for the art scene, and these events really help,” Buck said. “When people feel safe walking around these events, they become aware of how they are actually navigating the community.”

Opinion

10 — Wednesday, November 15, 2023

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Should you trust Wikipedia?

HAYDEN BUCKFIRE Opinion Columnist

T

he internet is dominated by giant companies — Google, Meta, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft. These technological hegemons have become increasingly powerful in the digital age. Among the most used websites in the world, one sticks out like a sore thumb at No. 7: Wikipedia.

Though the online encyclopedia is one of the most impressive grassroots accomplishments of the information age, much of the negative stigma surrounding it persists. Despite some of the inherent drawbacks of Wikipedia, it should be integrated and legitimized in a broader range of settings.

What makes Wikipedia so remarkable is that it is fully written, edited and managed by people all over the world without much centralized coordination. The fact that there are people dedicated enough to contribute to this widely utilized service is impressive: Millions of hours have been poured into a wide variety of articles and topics.

The diversity of Wikipedia articles is immeasurable — abstract scientific theories, art history, conspiracy theories and everything in between. There is always something new to learn on Wikipedia. A key beauty of the site lies in the hyperlink — with dozens of links on each individual page to other pages, the site is an interconnected

web of ideas.

Another remarkable aspect of Wikipedia is the speed at which it is updated on current events.

For example, after Queen Elizabeth’s passing in 2022, her Wikipedia page was edited mere minutes after the news was announced, making the information widely accessible and easy to find for the 4.5 billion people who visit the site. Just hours after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a Wikipedia page on the topic was already highly detailed with maps and statistics. Wikipedia lends itself well to rapidly unfolding events in politics and pop culture due to the collaborative nature of its editing process, unlike other online encyclopedias such as Britannica.

That being said, Wikipedia has not gone without its fair share of criticisms; in fact, its reputation precedes it. Michael Scott on the television show “The Office” ironically jested about Wikipedia, a sentiment recently echoed as Elon Musk also joined in on criticizing the online encyclopedia.

While these criticisms are not necessarily serious condemnations of Wikipedia, they reflect a larger trend of misrepresentation and the overemphasizing of Wikipedia’s faults.

A common point brought up against Wikipedia is vandalism.

Since anyone can edit the majority of pages on the site, this can cause obvious and inevitable problems. A common phenomenon, for instance, is for

sports fans to edit the Wikipedia pages of rival head coaches and players. On a more serious note, thousands of Wikipedia articles were defaced with hate imagery in 2021. However, it is important to note that vandalism is usually corrected within minutes, with the help of automated bots. And as technology progresses, error mitigation techniques are only bound to get more sophisticated and efficient.

Wikipedia has also had issues with bias in its articles. For example, a recent study found that there was significant racial and gender bias in coverage on Wikipedia, as its editors are predominantly white and male. Biographical articles about women are more likely to focus on relationships and family-related issues, while also hyperlinking to male biographical pages more than male pages link to female pages. This is concerning, of course, although Wikipedia’s parent organization is working to remedy this problem by revamping the learning process associated with becoming an editor.

It has been reported that government and corporate employees have edited Wikipedia to remove negative information about their respective employers. In one case, former MLB umpire Joe West was caught editing his own Wikipedia page to remove unflattering aspects of his major league career. These edits were promptly removed.

While events like these are

Putting a microscope to science journalism ZHANE YAMIN

Senior Opinion Editor

O

n Jan. 28, 1986, the U.S. Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger exploded 46,000 feet above the ground 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven people inside. The causes of the disaster were fiercely contended, so much so that a government commission was chartered to investigate them.

At the end of the investigation, the committee released and submitted a 442page report to President Ronald Reagan, detailing the context and causes of the incident, as well as recommendations to ensure future safety. The investigation found that the disaster was fundamentally caused by a lapse in truthful scientific communication between NASA engineers and executives. The engineers knew that the shuttle had several weak points, but these concerns fell on deaf executive ears. In pursuit of its 24 f lights-per-year goal, NASA was too focused on deadlines and productivity than the safety of the mission itself.

In a poll conducted by commission member Richard Feynman, engineers estimated the probability of failure to be one in 100, while management gave figures closer to one in 100,000. It was this disparity in risk assessment between what was and what could be that — in his eyes and in the commission’s — caused the disaster.

While safety measures have improved, at least enough so that fatalities are usually avoided, the disparity in scientific communication persists. Technolog y is often perceived as a black box of utility — something happens in a laboratory somewhere and, all of a sudden, our lives are made a little bit easier.

Inevitably, this means that we put a considerable amount of trust in the entities that communicate scientific discoveries to us, entities like the news.

But with many journalistic entities, the distinction between what technolog y is and what it could be is seldom made clear, especially in headlines. If we don’t make this distinction, however, public opinion on scientific issues can become heavily optimistic and ill-informed, leading to unproductive science policy, poor investments and an eventual distrust of scientific experts when reality conf licts with public opinion.

In this way, journalism and other publications have a responsibility to relate the scientific truth, which is usually never black and white.

One of the most salient tenants of the scientific process is self-criticism.

Because of the tendency for science to prove itself wrong as often as possible, nothing scientific is ever truly certain, only certain so far. Which is why, in order for something to be considered a breakthrough, it has to pass some tests first, not the least of which is replication. If it doesn’t

replicate — if someone else somewhere else can’t perform the exact same breakthrough — it’s hardly a breakthrough.

Recently, numerous reputable journalistic entities reported that a roomtemperature superconductor, named LK-99, had or may have been found. Some publications nuanced more than others and some, like The New York Times, could have been more diligent to avoid hype. As a result, LK-99 gained a brief f lame on social media, stoked by more and more people and organizations writing about it, even though the material was proven to not be a superconductor somewhat immediately. While many articles did explain the complexity of the situation, the aggregate contribution of LK-99 content led to an inf lated perception of it in the public eye, a recipe for scientific letdown.

Nuance, as maintained by a few sentences-to-a paragraph in a 900-word article, isn’t enough. It might seem minute now, but the devil is in the details. The industrial and research applications of a roomtemperature superconductor would be enormous, and the discovery of one would lead to real and tangible financial consequences.

But here lies an interesting point. In order to spur scientific and technological growth, financial investment is needed, which goes hand in hand with public optimism.

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Design by Avery Nelson

concerning, it is important to note that Wikipedia is still broadly accurate. A study done by researchers at the University of Oxford found that Wikipedia may even be more accurate than Britannica.

For all of the aforementioned reasons, Wikipedia is seen as lacking legitimacy in professional and academic settings. These problems are hardly exclusive to Wikipedia — many are also evident in other mediums of information, even in those regarded with much more legitimacy. For example, scientific papers are often found to have falsified or plagiarized information, and news media is often accused of containing bias in coverage.

We should seriously consider Wikipedia’s place in the world of academia and information.

Writing a Wikipedia article isn’t all that different from other scholarly pursuits: citing factual sources to corroborate information and synthesizing them into a coherent article.

Wikipedia articles, at least those that are highly read and closely edited, shouldn’t be seen as less than other sources of information.

I have been a frequent reader of Wikipedia for quite some time. I was so fascinated by the premise of Wikipedia that I made an account to make edits on the platform myself. I am no longer solely a reader but an editor; I make edits on popular

pages and create new ones, or add a comma here and split a sentence apart there. Perhaps I am bettering the world, in some minute fashion, one grammar fix at a time.

Just as political activism requires tedious door-knocking and canvassing to win elections, Wikipedia also requires a similar principle of collaboration. It takes a group of active global citizens, with contributions both big and small, to maintain and expand the largest source of gathered information ever.

The beauty of a website like Wikipedia is that not only can everyone reap the benefits of an expansive, constantly-updating encyclopedia, but they can also contribute substantially as well.

America’s war on free speech LUCAS FELLER Opinion Columnist

O

n college campuses, feeling unsafe has often been used as a trump card to prevent discussion of contentious topics, a notion that has only been exacerbated by the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Many comments offering historical support for Israel have been branded as anti-Palestinian hate speech, while criticism of Israeli policy has been lumped together with real antisemitism.

As society has grown more polarized, it has forgotten the proper constitutional standard for prohibiting speech. Speech, especially political expression, can only be censored if it poses an evident danger.

Hate speech is a considerable problem on college campuses, but a distinction must be drawn between its legally actionable and non-legally actionable variants. When dealing with hate speech that incites violence against members of a certain group, censorship is a permissible response. But if hate speech poses no material danger, education and discourse remain a far better solution than ideological suppression. The Supreme Court has long been clear on speech restrictions as a matter of both legal doctrine and morality; college students across the country would do well to remember its principles.

In 1989, when the United States Supreme Court decided in Texas v. Johnson that the burning of the American flag was constitutionally protected political speech, Justice John Paul Stevens was distraught. A World War II veteran, Stevens became visibly emotional as he read his dissent from the bench: “The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force … If those ideas are worth fighting for … it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection from unnecessary desecration.”

When one is absolutely certain of their convictions, any dissenting speech seems less valuable, and therefore deserving of censorship. Stevens, firmly believing the American flag to be an object worthy of protection, became willing to legally prohibit its desecration. While Justice Stevens can certainly be admired for his passion and candor, his dissent was nonetheless an attempt to constitutionally prohibit political expression not because of its danger, but because

of his personal disagreement.

The opinion of the majority, authored by Justice William Brennan, strikes far closer to the heart of free speech.

“The flag’s deservedly cherished place in our community will be strengthened, not weakened, by our holding today.

Our decision is a reaffirmation of the principles of freedom and inclusiveness that the flag best reflects, and of the conviction that our toleration of criticism . . . is a sign and source of our strength.”

Brennan’s opinion conclusively articulates the value free speech offers to a pluralistic society. By engaging with the views of others, no matter how disagreeable, Americans have the rare opportunity to reinforce their own convictions while positioning public discourse for growth. To secure such improvement, the challenge all organized states must overcome is the natural desire to suppress hateful or disagreeable speech.

The path of progress is paved with honest and civil discourse, not the capitulation of censorship.

Today, 34 years after Texas v. Johnson was decided, the United States stands at another crossroads of free speech, as citizens and politicians of both mainstream political ideologies call for the censorship of their opponents.

After Disney voiced its

LSA COLLEGIATE LECTURE SERIES

opposition to the Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis revoked the company’s self-governing status over the property it holds around Walt Disney World. Legal retaliation against a corporation for its political expression is standard practice in corrupt and autocratic regimes, but such practice is unacceptable in the United States.

In doing so, DeSantis has made an unambiguous threat to come after any corporation or individual who seeks to speak out against his agenda. Such conduct deprives Florida of the political discourse it desperately needs right now, especially regarding the proper role of government in addressing social issues. In his war against “woke” ideology, the governor seems willing to sacrifice the essential American liberties he purports to defend.

Seeking to silence dissenting viewpoints is not limited to Republicans. While conservative politicians have pursued legislative means of censorship, liberal-dominated college campuses, self-proclaimed bastions of free speech, are often in practice — when opinions start clashing in the Diag and in the classroom — exclusionary to conservative viewpoints.

ReadmoreatMichiganDaily.com

Tuesday, December 5, 2023 4:30 p.m.—6:00 p.m.

Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

On the Road to Truth GORDON BELOT Lawrence Sklar Collegiate Professor of Philosophy

Decision Making and the Accuracy of Beliefs JAMES M. JOYCE Cooper Harold Langford Collegiate Professor of Philosophy

The Physics of Ignorance: Believe It or Not? LAURA RUETSCHE Louis E. Loeb Collegiate Professor of Philosophy A public lecture and reception; you my attend in person or virtually. For more information, including the Zoom link, visit https://events. umich.edu/event/110150 or call 734.516.1027.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com FOOTBALL

Sports

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 — 11

SportsMonday: Jim Harbaugh wasn’t a martyr — until Tony Petitti made him one

CONNOR EAREGOOD Managing Sports Editor

Ten weeks ago, I got a lot of heat for saying Jim Harbaugh wasn’t the martyr that his players made him out to be while suspended. I still stand by it.

But on the eve of another suspension, I must recognize that Jim Harbaugh has become one.

This time, he was preemptively punished before an investigation by the Big Ten and NCAA into sign-stealing allegations could be completed. Acting on public pressure instead of the letter of its own law, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti took extralegal action.

In the process, he made Harbaugh the martyr that Michigan and its rabid fans thought he was.

For everyone who cares about the Wolverines football team, Petitti hung Harbaugh on a wanted poster, exiled him to St. Helena, banned him from his home on a trumped up charge.

And with that, Petitti gave Harbaugh immense power.

“We’re one. It made us stronger,” senior running back Blake Corum said, on the heels of his best performance this season at

Penn State. “Obviously we wanted Coach Harbaugh to be here but we did it for him today. And we’ve been going through a lot lately, you know what I’m saying, but it’s only brought us closer together.”

Petitti made it that way by acting decisively, and he had a reason. The accusation of such a serious advantage puts an asterisk on anything Michigan has achieved in the past three years. For opponents, letting the Wolverines play unpunished puts them up against a group who they think has the upper hand. Where’s the fairness in that?

But the Michigan side asks where’s the fairness in sidelining a coach who hasn’t been found guilty? While evidence exists that the Wolverines probably cheated — including a “Master Spreadsheet” turned up by the NCAA and a lot of ticket receipts — the Big Ten couldn’t prove that Harbaugh played a hand in it.

Petitti acted on suspicions of guilt, in the process contradicting legal logic throughout his statement about the suspension.

He said he didn’t care about procedural arguments or technicalities to one of the most pedantic alumni bases in the country. Three

ANNA FUDER/Daily

months ago, the Michigan program was protesting a suspension levied by its own athletics department. For an outsider like Petitti to go off script, he made his worst blunder.

He won Harbaugh’s image fight for him.

I don’t need to drone on about due process or technicalities — you’ve either heard those arguments or made them yourself anyway. What I’ll argue is that this is

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

Michigan looking to build on complementary point guard play ZACH EDWARDS Daily Sports Writer

This season and last season have presented two completely different point guard situations for the Michigan women’s basketball team.

Last year, the Wolverines lacked a true point guard, and Leigha Brown served as the main communicator and facilitator throughout the season. This time around, however, Michigan is in a polar opposite position.

The Wolverines are looking to run a system that incorporates not one but two point guards — graduate Lauren Hansen, the starting point guard, and freshman Macy Brown, the backup coming off the bench in relief. And while this could create potential conflict with the two true point guards

fighting for minutes, thus far, the Wolverines and both players have complemented each other well.

“They’re both doing a really good job for us,” Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico said after the win against Purdue Fort Wayne.

“They’re both contributing and they’re both a little bit different, which is great.”

Although only one official game in the season, Barnes Arico has shown confidence in both players and given the two point guards a similar amount of on court minutes to showcase their abilities.

On one side, Hansen provides stable scoring abilities. In Michigan’s first game of the season against the Mastodons, she showcased her ability to create flashy opportunities, recording 11 points in the process.

One of Hansen’s flashy chances came in the final second of the first half against Purdue Fort Wayne when she took an inbound pass around the paint and layed it in for an and-one.

That not only showcased her ability to create buckets that most players can’t, but it also gave Michigan a much needed three points and momentum boost going into halftime.

“Lauren has that scoring mentality,” Barnes Arico said. “…

She’s just an incredible scorer.

She’s got a little bit of swag to her.”

That swag and ability to score the ball is what helped drive many offensive chances, including that final-second moment of the first half. Her contributions were especially helpful for the Wolverines during a game in which some shots weren’t falling for other players on the team.

While one of Hansen’s main strengths is scoring, one of her weaknesses is her one-to-three assist to turnover ratio — and that’s where Brown comes in and shines.

Coming off the bench, Brown provides crucial minutes facilitating and finding teammates for open looks. In Michigan’s exhibition win against Saginaw Valley State, Brown had six assists and zero turnovers. Against the Mastodons, she had four assists and one turnover. As one of the most inexperienced players on the team, her ability to pass the ball efficiently is something the Wolverines don’t take lightly.

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about the best way for this situation to unfold for the Wolverines.

Not only can they make a mockery of the Big Ten and NCAA. They can also delegitimize the disciplinary process with how bad Petitti bungled it. Michigan is also more motivated than ever. You want to take its coach? See how the players respond.

“Everything that went on yesterday (with the suspension), we’re gonna be battle-tested,”

senior guard Trevor Keegan said Saturday. “There’s gonna be adversity. We know that there’s a target on our back right now and we love that shit. … ‘The storm’s coming?’ Nah, we are the storm.

That’s our mentality.”

The calculus might seem off — how does losing a head coach help a program? But look at it this way: The Wolverines have a chance to beat the suspension with a temporary restraining order in court Friday. Then, Harbaugh would be on the sidelines anyway. But the insult of the suspension coming when he was on a plane, en route to a top-10 matchup — that sting won’t go away. It will only serve as further fuel for the fire Harbaugh wants to stoke.

For players who swear fealty to their coach, it doesn’t matter what outside opinions of him are. Harbaugh has uber-motivated everyone that matters to him, all thanks to Petitti. Imagine the scene when Petitti has to hand Harbaugh a Big Ten Championship trophy should the Wolverines win out. Think about what beating Ohio State for a third time would mean for them — for Harbaugh.

Petitti’s actions united Jim Harbaugh, Warde Manuel, the regents

and president all in one fell swoop.

Considering years of tension between all those parties, such a miraculous feat speaks to the power he gave Michigan.

That’s the motivation that Petitti gifted over, alongside a PR victory. Whether he wanted to punish Harbaugh or not, he actually ended up helping him. And as the sycophantic Michigan fan base erects the infamous “Blue Wall” in the media, he only creates the feedback cycle that lets the Wolverines overcome everything.

Suspension or not, Harbaugh will serve his main job of motivating his team. And whether there’s an asterisk in beating an incompetent coach like James Franklin, Sherrone Moore also proved Saturday that Michigan can win with Harbaugh off the premises.

Will Harbaugh make his return or face further discipline? Who knows. The Wolverines might even face stricter verdicts down the line. But that’s the thing about martyrs that I failed to realize months ago — they don’t have to be right. They just need to be believed.

And by losing the faith of so many people, that’s what Tony Petitti gave him.

MEN’S BASKETBALL

Michigan surmounts Youngstown State behind Dug McDaniel’s leadership, 92-62 LINDSAY BUDIN Daily Sports Editor

Following the Michigan men’s basketball team’s 99-point seasonopening win, associate head coach Phil Martelli was quick to offer some perspective, looking beyond the singular game: “I don’t think it’s always going to be ice cream and balloons.”

And for the majority of the first half in Friday’s matchup against Youngstown State, it wasn’t, as the Wolverines allowed sloppiness to define their play. But a 13-0 run entering halftime fueled Michigan (2-0 overall) past its lackluster start, defeating the Penguins (0-2), 92-62.

It wasn’t just the 13-0 run that acted as ignition for the Wolverines, though — it was who led the charge itself: sophomore guard Dug McDaniel.

“I thought that there was a lull, midway through the first half,” Martelli said. “And then (McDaniel) made some kind of wiggle plays, and went downhill and that kind of opened up the floodgates.”

These offensive sets were a stark contrast to what Michigan displayed for most of the half. The Wolverines struggled stringing together defensive stops and building offensive momentum, playing like five players instead of one team on the court. Meager passing, lazy rebounding and poor shot selection overshadowed the Wolverines’ abilities.

Something had to change, and the onus fell on McDaniel, leading from the point.

LUCAS CHEN/Daily

“Dug is the engine,” graduate forward Olivier Nkamhoua said.

“Dug is the engine that gets us going, he’s the engine that moves us. He’s our engine, he’s our sparkplug. … Dug sets the tone, sets the pace and we do our best to keep giving him that confidence.”

Re-entering the contest with six minutes remaining in the first half and just a nine point advantage for the Wolverines, McDaniel demonstrated exactly why that confidence is warranted. With a three-minute scoring drought, Michigan was at a loss offensively, unable to get anything going.

McDaniel changed that.

Desperate for a spark, McDaniel lived up to his sparkplug moniker.

Flying into the paint, McDaniel put the Wolverines on the board again with a hook shot off the backboard.

But he wasn’t done there. As McDaniel continued attacking the paint, the offense around him relaxed and found more opportunities. Instead of rushed shots and self-inflicted turnovers, the Wolverines established rhythm.

Displaying chemistry more akin to its first game, Michigan finished the half on a commanding 13-0 run.

“When you have an aggressive point guard, it opens up everything,” Nkamhoua said.

“Because now, the defense has to worry about him, now they have to take things away from him. And the more they take away from him, the more bodies surge. When he has a drive, the easier it is for him to make those plays, pass the ball out, throw lobs.”

Read more at michigandaily.com

ICE HOCKEY

Michigan hangs on, wins 3-2 in Big Ten shootout against Minnesota LYS GOLDMAN Daily Sports Editor

If you’ve watched the No. 8 Michigan hockey team this season, you’ve probably felt a sense of dejá vú.

The Wolverines have consistently struggled to close out games, finding themselves in an undesirable pattern of squandering leads in the final period. That’s exactly what happened in Friday’s loss to No. 6 Minnesota. And through two periods in Saturday’s rematch, clutching a 2-1 lead, Michigan was in the same position.

But this time, despite some all-too-familiar third-period blunders, the Wolverines finally finished strong by clinching an extra point in the shootout.

In an aggressive and hardfought matchup, Michigan (5-5-2

overall, 1-3-2 Big Ten) outlasted the Gophers (5-3-2, 1-2-1) in a 3-2 shootout win, beginning to turn the tides of its overarching struggle to close out games.

“We needed a win after losing three in a row,” Wolverines coach Brandon Naurato said. “I think we played good hockey, never gonna play perfect hockey, but we just haven’t gotten it done. So I think it’s huge for the guys.”

The game counts as a tie in national standings, while giving Michigan two standings points in conference play. Regardless, following a tough stretch of losses and season-long inconsistencies, Naurato put it aptly: “It’s a win in the locker room right now for sure.”

From the opening faceoff, the Wolverines and Gophers fought for the upper hand, finding themselves neck and neck in an aggressive battle. Despite relatively even

competition throughout the first period, Michigan held an ever-soslight advantage heading into the first intermission.

Scrambling around the net with just about seven minutes left in the period, the Wolverines peppered Minnesota goalkeeper Justen Close with five shots in quick succession before freshman forward Nick Moldenhauer buried the sixth — giving Michigan a 1-0 lead.

Finding themselves in a familiar position through 20 minutes, all eyes were on whether the Wolverines could sustain that advantage.

After successfully killing the first penalty of the game — boosted by some extra energy from the crowd following an appearance by the Michigan football team — the Wolverines couldn’t hang on during their second penalty kill.

Minnesota forward Brody Lamb

nailed a wrist shot top shelf with just over two minutes left in the second period, knotting the game at 1-1.

However, it wasn’t long before Michigan responded and reclaimed its advantage. Mirroring the Gophers’ goal-scoring play from the opposite end of the ice, the Wolverines capitalized on their first power play opportunity of the night with a wrist shot from sophomore forward Frank Nazar III. Up 2-1 to start the final period, Michigan was once again in control of its own destiny. The Wolverines needed 20 more minutes of good hockey — just like they’d been playing for the first 40 — to close out the game and get back in the win column.

But the third period still proved insurmountable.

Read more at michigandaily.com

ANNA FUDER/Daily

SPORTSWEDNESDAY

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

The Michigan Daily — 12

The ART OF

SARAH BOEKE, JULIANNE YOON/Daily Design by Lys Goldman

MOORE Sherrone Moore out-coaches James Franklin in last-second promotion JOHN TONDORA Daily Sports Editor

S

TATE COLLEGE — The often calm, cool and collected Sherrone Moore had broken down.

In a postgame interview, with television cameras in his face and the populated remnants of a brutal football game swirling around, the No. 3 Michigan football team’s acting head coach could keep his emotions contained no longer. With tears streaming down his face and his voice cracking, Moore delivered a message: “I want to thank the Lord, I want to thank coach Harbaugh — f***ing love you man; love the shit out of you man,” Moore said. “Did this for you, for this University, the president, our AD. We got the best players, best university, best alumni in the country. Love you guys. These f***ing guys right here, these guys right here man, these guys did it. These guys did it.”

It was an emotional and expletive-laden burst of passion that perhaps would have been

unexpected of any coach, let alone an interim, under other circumstances. But these weren’t other circumstances — Moore had earned his fervor. In a matchup in which the lack of a head coach could have led to the Wolverines’ downfall, they found one that was capable.

Because Sherrone Moore out-coached James Franklin in Happy Valley.

Walking out with a win, Moore out-maneuvered Franklin and No. 10 Penn State’s blunders, trusting his players and staying patient amid a chaotic game.

Moore coached trifold, acting as the offensive line coach, offensive coordinator and head coach — all in one.

He displayed poise and coaching maturity to outlast a veteran in Franklin.

At the end of the first half, the Nittany Lions marched into the endzone for a touchdown to make it 14-9. Recapturing some momentum going into the half, Franklin made a puzzling decision to go for two and bring the game within a field goal — with over a half of play to go.

“I felt like points were going

to be at a premium,” Franklin explained “… At some point you’re going to have to score enough points to get back in the game and just trying to get the game back into a one possession game and we didn’t know how many opportunities we were going to get to try to maximize it.”

Hindsight is 20/20, but even at

pressure for an explanation on his mistakes boiled over. In his own display of emotion, Franklin bluntly put it: “You didn’t agree with it.

I’m just telling you that’s the decision.”

The decision, though, evidently came from a place of impatience — and it ended up making all of the difference.

In a matchup in which the lack of a head coach could have led to the Wolverines’ downfall, they found one that was capable. the time, the decision prompted some questions. Penn State was certainly not lighting up the scoreboard, but to that point, it had scored on two out of four of its offensive drives. Explaining it like revisionist history, Franklin avoided addressing his coaching blunders.

And as Franklin dismissively pontificated postgame, increased

After a field goal out of the half by Michigan, the Nittany Lions found themselves on the backfoot for the rest of the contest. Continuously behind by eight points, it was apparent that any successful touchdown score would require another attempt simply to tie the game.

It was a day where an impatient, nervous and unprepared acting

head coach could have wilted under the spotlight.

Comparatively though, Moore stood tall. In fact, he coached with a patience that even bordered on a lack of urgency.

Calling for Michigan to rush the ball 30 straight times — barring a pass interference call and two kneels to end the game — Moore had the luxury to play from ahead, but the patience to make it work. Flighty mistakes could’ve derailed Michigan, but Moore’s guiding hand — and hard-nosed run mentality — kept them ahead.

Playing more field position than offense at times, the rubber met the road for the Wolverines.

As Moore’s patience met Franklin’s petulance, Moore won out.

In a much more drastic moment, the Nittany Lions found themselves down nine points after scoring a touchdown with two minutes to go. Suddenly, the decisions of the past haunted their present.

Franklin’s previous impatience made their current position all the more difficult. After punching in the touchdown, the Nittany Lions could either go for two and make

it a seven point affair — all the while risking the game in the process — or take the extra point, make it a one-possession game and live to see another play.

In impatient and untrustworthy fashion, Franklin bit — and the moment bit back.

“The early one I was pretty surprised with, but the later one I thought that they would go for it then,” Moore said. “But the early one I was pretty surprised myself. Decision that they made and I’m glad that our defense is our defense.”

Missing the two-point conversion, Franklin effectively lost the game before it was over.

Up nine points and under two minutes to go, Moore had all the cards. Throughout the entire game, Moore could have reacted emotionally.

He could’ve attempted to run trick plays; he could have faced the staunch pressure of the second largest crowd in Beaver Stadium history and a 13-year head coaching veteran; hell, he even could have thrown the ball.

But he didn’t. He coached calm, cool and collected.

Until the very end.