Former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, won the 2024 presidential election, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in a contest that capped off one of the most contentious election cycles in U.S. history. Trump, who secured a nonconsecutive second term, ran a campaign focused on reducing crime, promoting economic growth and strengthening immigration enforcement. Trump reclaimed the White House by flipping several key battleground states, including Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania, which delivered 277 electoral votes as of 5:34 a.m., passing the 270 electoral votes
threshold needed to secure the victory.
In his victory speech at about 2:30 a.m. from Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Trump focused on the importance of unity, delivering an almost 25-minute address.
“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” Trump said. “It’s time to unite … success will bring us together.” Vance, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022 before being selected as Trump’s running
U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., won Michigan’s highly competitive U.S. Senate race, defeating former Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open Senate seat. As of 4:09 p.m. on Wednesday, Slotkin had received 48.63% of the vote to Rogers’ 48.29% with more than 95% of the vote in. Earlier in the day, the Associated Press projected President-elect Donald Trump would win Michigan’s 15 electoral votes. Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and three-term congresswoman, centered her campaign on protecting reproductive rights, expanding health care access and strengthening Michigan’s economy. In remarks early Wednesday afternoon, Slotkin thanked voters for electing her to the Senate and vowed to keep fighting for all Michigan residents during her term.
ANDREW BAUM, SHANE
mate, also gave victory remarks, emphasizing the hope resulting from a Trump presidential victory.
“I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America,” Vance said.
“And under President Trump’s leadership, we’re never going to stop fighting for you, for your dreams, for the future of your children. And after the greatest political comeback in American
history, we’re going to leave at the greatest economic comeback in American history under Donald Trump’s leadership.”
The Trump-Vance ticket benefitted from a resurgence of support among rural voters and working-class communities, which helped Trump win in 2016. Harris had not yet conceded the race Wednesday morning, as of 6:17 a.m. when the Associated Press called the race for Trump. Harris canceled her post-verdict
speech at Howard University, noting that the results were still unclear when doing so.
“We still have votes to count,” said Harris’ campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond. “We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue, overnight, to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken. So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell wins sixth congressional term Dingell takes the seat with 70% of the vote
ANDREW
Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., has won her sixth consecutive term in Congress, representing Michigan’s 6th district. Dingell, a prominent voice in the Democratic Party, won her reelection bid early Wednesday morning with about 62% of the votes as of 12:50 a.m. She defeated Republican opponent Heather Smiley, who earned about 36% of the vote as of 12:50 a.m. On her campaign website, Dingell emphasized her commitment to expanding affordable health care, protecting union workers’ rights and addressing climate change in the state. Smiley campaigned on election ballot security and domestic manufacturing but was unable to close the gap in a district that has consistently favored Democratic candidates.
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With all eyes on Michigan, Ann Arbor takes on Election Day
Michigan set early voting records with 45.7% of active registered voters voting before Election Day
ANDREW BAUM, SHANE BAUM & MARY COREY Daily Staff Reporters
Editor
Before the sun rose in Ann Arbor Tuesday morning, about a dozen students gathered in line at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as they waited for polls to open. These students are among the millions of voters across Michigan and the nation who cast their ballots Nov. 5. Michigan voters could vote in person at the polls from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and about 3 million cast their ballots through absentee or early in-person voting.
As one of seven battleground states projected to decide the 2024 presidential election, Michigan set early voting records this election cycle, with 45.7% of active registered voters voting before Election Day. More than 2.1 million absentee ballots were returned by voters and more than 1.1 million early in-person votes were cast across the state.
At about 1 p.m., U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, encouraged students to vote while standing beside a campaign tent outside the Michigan Union. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Slotkin spoke about the importance of student voting.
“There is a ton of people here,” Slotkin said. “It feels very different than previous elections, and we know that Michigan students can literally make the difference in the election.”
Business graduate student Luke Powers was in line at the UMMA when the polls opened on Election Day. Powers said he felt lucky to have easy access to a voting center and was excited for the opportunity to vote in a swing state.
“I feel good, I feel fortunate that we have a good voting center on campus and good access,” Powers said. “I’m from Massachusetts, but Michigan, it’s a swing state, so I feel even more empowered to vote here. I’m happy — I’m going back to sleep now.”
Business sophomore Farafoluwa Akinola, who was also in line to vote early Tuesday morning, said though election season can be tense and political conversations can be uncomfortable, voting is an important obligation.
“I feel I always wished I could vote to have an impact,” Akinola said. “So I feel I made my younger self proud, and obviously, we won’t know the results, probably for a while, but I’m excited. I think that this experience is part of adulthood.”
Rackham student Vanessa
Johnson also voted in person at the UMMA Tuesday morning. She said voting in Michigan for the first time was different from her experiences voting in other states.
Johnson said she felt that, as a swing state voter, politicians paid more attention to earning her vote.
“It is actually my first year ever living in a swing state,” Johnson said. “Prior to this, I lived in Washington and Utah, and so living in Michigan has definitely been different, considering it is a
swing state. And there’s so much interest in the votes here, which is understandable.”
LSA junior Eric Settineri set up a table outside the UMMA Tuesday afternoon to support former President Donald Trump between two large “Harris for President” tents outside the polling place. Settineri said he chose to support Trump in a prominent space on campus because he wanted other Republican students to feel like their voices were valued on Election Day.
“I think it’s great that you have two parties out there voting — that’s what makes America great,” Settineri said. “However, we feel like there was not much conservative representation on campus, so we wanted to make sure that students like us felt their voices were heard.”
Settineri said, as a conservative student at an overwhelmingly liberal university, he sometimes feels hesitant to share his political views.
Kyra Harris Bolden, Kimberly Ann Thomas win election to Michigan Supreme Court
Both Thomas and Harris Bolden won with 61% of the vote, giving liberal justices a 5-2 majority on the court
MARY COREY Daily News Editor
In the state of Michigan, judicial elections are nonpartisan. However, each Michigan Supreme Court candidate is nominated by a party. This party is not included on the ballot.
Democratic nominee Kimberly Ann Thomas beat state Rep. Andrew Fink, R-Hillsdale, in the race for Michigan Supreme Court with
61% of the vote as of 8:39 a.m. Democratic nominee Justice Kyra Harris Bolden also won reelection to the Michigan Supreme Court against Republican nominee Patrick W. O’Grady after serving a partial term on the court beginning in 2022. Harris Bolden won with 61% of the vote. Harris Bolden’s and Thomas’s victories bring liberal justices to a 5-2 majority on the Michigan Supreme Court.
A professor at the University of Michigan Law School,
Thomas serves as the director and co-founder of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and was appointed to the state’s task force on Juvenile Justice Reform by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Before joining the University in 2003, Thomas worked as a trial attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. She was endorsed by groups including the United Auto Workers, EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan and emphasized the importance of
ethical law practice throughout her campaign website. Harris Bolden was first appointed by Whitmer in 2022 to fill the vacancy left by former Justice Bridget Mary McCormack. Her endorsements include the Michigan Education Association, the Progressive Courts PAC and Reproductive Freedom for All. Harris Bolden previously served in the Michigan House of Representatives, where she was a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
Ann Arbor Proposal C fails
by 72% of voters
Ann Arbor voters rejected local ballot Proposal C early Wednesday morning, with 72% voting against it. The proposal would have amended the city charter to eliminate the August primaries for Ann Arbor elections and remove indicators of party affiliation next to the candidates’ names on the general election ballot.
Many Democratic politicians opposed Prop C, including Mayor Christopher Taylor and other leaders from the state.
Democrats for Ann Arbor, the leading coalition opposing Prop C, said on their platform the implementation of Prop C would reduce transparency and increase racial and gender bias toward candidates. They also expressed concerns that the inclusion of many Democratic candidates in the absence of primary elections would split the vote. Taylor said he was pleased that the proposal, along with Ann Arbor’s ballot Proposal D — which would have created a public fund to finance local candidates — did not pass. “I’m delighted that Ann
Arbor has rejected these unwise proposals,” Taylor said. “Proposals C and D would have resulted in harm to our electoral process and distance the public from its representatives.” Prop C was put forth by the Coalition for Ann Arbor’s Future to encourage a more representative voting population by eliminating August primaries since many people — especially University of Michigan students — are gone during the summer. The proposal also aimed to list candidates on the ballot without a party label, which
the proposal’s authors hoped would incentivize voters to research candidates individually rather than voting along party lines.
John Godfrey, spokesperson and organizer for Coalition for Ann Arbor’s Future, said the coalition will continue the fight against monetary influence on local elections after the failure to pass Proposal C.
With the proposal’s rejection, the city will continue to hold August primaries and list candidates’ party affiliations next to their names.
Ann Arbor Proposal D fails
70%
Ann Arbor voters rejected local ballot Proposal D early Wednesday morning, with 70% voting against the measure. The proposal, which faced controversy leading up to Election Day, would have created a public fund to finance local candidates’ campaigns.
The proposal, put forth by Voters Not Money, would have set aside 0.3% of the city’s general fund — amounting to approximately $425,000
— to match donations nine to one for qualified candidates. Candidates would have been eligible for city funding if they agreed to only accept donations in small amounts from natural persons, rather than larger political entities like a Political Action Committee.
Votes Not Money states on their website that they believe the proposal would lead to more representative elections because the funding would remove financial barriers for citizens to run for office.
However, many local politicians including Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher
Taylor and local advocacy groups such as the Huron Valley Area Labor Federation and the League of Women Voters of Washtenaw County, opposed the proposal. Taylor and the League of Women Voters cited concerns that the proposal does not include protections against candidates fraudulently taking money and does not require candidates to meet a funding threshold before receiving money from the fund. Taylor said he felt glad the proposal, along with Ann Arbor’s ballot Proposal C, which would have called for making city elections nonpartisan, did not pass.
“I’m delighted that Ann Arbor has rejected these unwise proposals,” Taylor said. “Proposals C and D would have resulted in harm to our electoral process and distance the public from its representatives.”
In September, The Michigan attorney general’s office determined that Proposal D was inconsistent with state law. A lawyer for the Coalition for Ann Arbor’s Future released a statement disagreeing with this claim. Had the proposal passed, the city may have entered litigation at the state level to determine whether it could legally be implemented.
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There is something magical about October.
The leaves are browning, the sun is setting earlier and the realization that the year is ending is
just beginning to dawn. The air is filled with an eerie sense of mystery and wonder, and as the temperature drops and the sun continues to wane, there’s a significant change in the kind of art we consume. Many of us go from lighthearted romance novels and summer road trip playl-
ists to scary movies and angsty, fall-themed soundtracks. Iconic fall media come out of hiding — “Hocus Pocus,” “Gilmore Girls,” Harry Potter — reappearing on our living room televisions for their yearly showings. Through the art we love, we immerse ourselves in the autumn way of life,
consuming the spookiest, most haunting media we can find. But art can also haunt us in a different way — sometimes a show ends on a cliffhanger and we can’t move on from it until we get the answers we need. Other times we finish a book and are haunted by the last line forever. Like a ghost
Haunted by the Beirut I left behind
Every day I walk the streets of Ann Arbor dragging the ghost of my life in Beirut behind me. It died when I left, and what’s a ghost if not the dead coming back to visit?
It’s comforting, really. I’d forget its face if it wasn’t standing next to me, filling every empty space, and then it would be gone forever. That life is eternal now. It can’t ever really die if it keeps living in the crevices of my mind, teleporting to me across the world and through so much time. It welcomes me, like an old friend greeting me for tea. It engulfs me and brings me back to the only place my heart has ever felt warm. The ghost brings me back to memories of hilly streets and wind flowing through the car windows, Fairuz blasting from my parents’ radio. Back to highrise apartments that felt more like castles to the 6-year-old in the back seat, smiling at the thought of the princesses up there. Back to the excitement at the bakery when the man behind the counter handed us our manakesh and the giddy giggles my sister and I shared as we took our first exquisite bites. Life was never as sweet as this, and it never will be again.
The city felt alive to me, singing with every honk of a car horn and shout from the vendors at the marketplace. I didn’t know anything then. I didn’t know how hard it was to keep electricity going in our city apartment, let alone my aunt’s house in the village. I didn’t know what pullback from civil war meant. I didn’t know why we had to leave. My family tried to explain, but what does that even mean to a 6-year-old? What do the words “leave forever” mean to someone who can’t see past tomorrow?
Now, I can’t see past yesterday. All I have are fragments of Beirut, memories I can’t fully trust because they might have just been mirages. The city haunts me, and I hope it never stops. I hope I never stop seeing those high-rises when I close my eyes, or feeling transported to its roads when I drive with the windows down. The only time I’ve been able to go back is in my dreams. I walk through the hilly streets wearing the fanny packs my mom used to make us lug around on hot days. I sit in the living room watching reruns of American shows dubbed in Arabic. I lounge on the beach and watch the waves from the shore, too scared of sharks to wade through the water. I fall back to recollections of the day my class threw a goingaway party for me and my sister. With pink paper crowns sitting on our heads, I only half-understood why everyone was making such a fuss, but I didn’t care. I was a princess like the ones in
the castles. I didn’t understand why my Arabic teacher gifted me her favorite jewelry box or why my French teacher warned me not to lose the language when I became fluent in English. I didn’t understand why my best friend was so upset, why she wasn’t as happy for me as everyone else. At the time, I thought she was jealous of my pink paper crown — and maybe she was, but too bad. This one was mine, and she couldn’t have it. Why did she have to make it about herself? She could have a crown at her going away party, and I’d be back by then to celebrate her. That’s how things worked: You go somewhere and then you come back. The same way I’d go to school in a gray uniform and when it was over I’d go back to our apartment in the heart of the city, watch cartoons and eat pastries from the little shop across the street. I’d be back. She could have a crown then, but this one was mine. She couldn’t take it. When it was her turn to go to America, she’d see. It has been 13 years, and I haven’t set foot in that apartment since. I was only supposed to be gone a little while, right? Just a few months?
When I’m awake, I lament what I’ve lost. I might never walk those streets again, or lounge in that living room or sit on that shore. But it’s more than that. Some of those places don’t exist anymore. The school I walked to every day toppled after we left, replaced by some municipal building. The bakery I loved closed its doors when our economy took a hit, along with half the shops on our street. The narrow roads I loved driving down got wider to make more space for cars and less for pedestrians. The city is a stranger to me now, one who wouldn’t invite me in for tea, let alone remember my name. The Beirut in my dreams exists only there — it is not a place I can ever go back to. It’s as tangible as the ghost haunting my life in Ann Arbor.
I lost who I was supposed to be when I left Lebanon. The specter of the girl I should’ve been clings to me like a shadow, as real as my memory of the city itself. I should know the streets of Beirut like the back of my hand, not the ones in Ann Arbor. By all accounts, I should never have had reason to set foot here. The kids in those gray uniforms were supposed to stay my best friends, not the people I am so grateful to know now. Arabic was supposed to stay the language rolling off my tongue, not the English I write in now. I was supposed to live a short drive away from my aunt’s village, able to see my cousins grow up and marvel at how they look just like I did at their age. But something has gone horribly wrong, and I have been pulled from home.
When did my thoughts switch from Arabic to English? When did I forget the address of that old apartment and memorize the one for my house in America? When, exactly, did I lose myself?
I can’t quite remember.
I can’t remember my best friend’s name, or her face, for that matter. All I can see is a prim bundle of dirty blonde hair and a gray uniform. Her image follows me around like a ghost I just can’t shake — my constant companion. She hasn’t aged, forever trapped as a 6-year-old girl whose small hand I hold as we walk side by side. I wonder what she looks like now, how she’s doing. If she’s still in Beirut, laboring through French classes neither of us ever really had any interest in. Did she want to leave? Did she ever get to? How long did she spend waiting for that pink paper crown and that one-way ticket to somewhere new? Would she have wanted to go back just as much as I do?
When I think about her, I imagine we’ve swapped places. I finally get to reclaim that apartment and it’s the same as it’s always been. She finally gets her pink paper crown. But it’s just a dream. Intangible. Imaginary. Dead.
Now, when I see glimpses of Beirut, I am watching it burn. I am watching roads turn to rubble and residential buildings turn to ash. I am watching my people try to outrun the roaring of bombs only to find there is nowhere to go. They all look like me. They all speak the language that first came to my tongue. They all deserve better than this.
My family back in Lebanon smiles when we get to FaceTime. My aunt has new lines on her face, ones I never got to see form. When I see my little cousin, just learning her alphabet and too shy to do anything but stare at me through the screen, I can’t help but see myself. She has the same brown hair, the same crooked smile, the same small hazel eyes, but she goes to bed every night afraid that the sounds of explosions will get closer — and I get to fall asleep to silence. How is that fair?
The life I left in Beirut was not lost, it was snuffed out. By endless wars and exploitation, by negative external intervention and internal turmoil. It’s why we left, but we shouldn’t have had to.
The question I keep coming back to is: how many times? How many times will we as Arabs be subjected to the same violence? How much more can be taken from us when we already have nothing left to hold? What will it take for the world to start seeing us as people deserving of peaceful lives instead of expendable, inhuman damage to be taken for all we’re worth?
I’m still waiting on an answer. I want to hold out hope that I’ll get to go back; I want to believe that, someday soon, my people will stop living in fear of the next disaster. I want to tell my mother her dreams of retiring in the Lebanese countryside are not as outlandish as my being a princess. But that would be too painful a dream to see shatter. Until the day it solidifies, I will cling to the ghosts holding my hand.
following in our wake, the art we consume stays with us forever, embedding itself into the deepest crevices of our mind and changing the way we think. It lives within us, long after we close the book or turn off the television — and isn’t that the beauty of it? The way that the people we meet and the
It’s time I break my silence: I’ve been haunted since preschool
It was fall in small-town Alabama, a comparatively chilly day in October — Halloween, to be exact. I had on the most perfect princess costume the world had ever seen, with gold paisley, shimmery fabric and pink satin with pink ribbons. I was wearing one of my sister’s pageant tiaras to prove that I was, in fact, a princess. I even convinced my mom to let me wear the tiny high heels I typically was only allowed to wear for the Christmas program at church. It was Halloween in the preschool hallway of my primary school, positively the best day ever. I just got back from eating my favorite school lunch: chicken fingers and french fries. The lunch ladies had made them especially tasty. Everything was going perfectly in my little 4-year-old head. Lunch was good, I was wearing a tiara and it was time to nap.
As I turned down the hallway to walk into the wonderland of washable markers and wood blocks (also known as Mrs. Riddle’s room), I heard my classmate’s mother talking about candy. This day could get better. I realized we were having a party! Parties meant there would be cupcakes and chips and candy — I was a very food-motivated kid, so I started to skip. I could see the door covered in pumpkins. I could almost taste the purple icing. And then I stopped skipping.
I was filled with more fear than I had ever felt before.
I screamed at the top of my lungs and then burst into tears.
I ran into a supply closet and shut the door.
I had just seen the scariest sight of my entire life: a clown.
This is when everything else fades to black for me, but I’m told this is how the story goes: My mom came to pick me up from school and my principal, Mrs. Keith, told
my mom she had to come inside because they had a situation. I had seen my classmate’s mom dressed as a clown and locked myself in a supply closet, absolutely refusing to come out. They had tried every method that my angelic, Ph.D.educated principal could think of, all to no avail. That little redheaded princess was not budging. My mom walked into the school and saw the perpetrator, with clown makeup running because she felt so guilty that her pure-intentioned costume had become the root of my life-changing meltdown. Surrounded by extra boxes of crayons and washable paints, my mom opened the door to find me “curled up in a ball crying and terrified.” She had to carry me to her white Mazda Crossover despite my having two working legs. I remember not opening my eyes for the entire ride home.
That originally exciting day turned into one of my life’s most defining moments. I don’t really know why if I’m being honest. The absolute terror that consumed me after seeing the clown has bled into my everyday life. I was scared of every person in costume for years. I hid under tables to avoid the Chick-fil-A cow and Chuck E. Cheese. I refused to be in the room when my family watched horror movies and closed my eyes just like I did when I was 4 until I was entirely too old to be doing so. I avoided haunted houses at all costs. Despite being a sophomore in college, I still live in constant fear of clowns and really anything that brings the possibility of feeling scared. My skin crawls anytime I hear “Pennywise.” For me, all roads of fear lead back to that supply closet. I wear slutty costumes and pretend to be a “cool
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REBECCA SMITH Senior Arts Editor
The first time I made a Halloween costume, I was in elementary school. Having recently been taught how to sew, I was determined to sew a tail onto an old red dress that I’d had a go at with scissors for a “weathered-inHell” look. Under the long-suffering supervision of my mother, I paired it with some handmade aluminum foil horns and went out trick-or-treating as the cutest little demon the world has ever seen. Years later, I see this as my first-ever successful sewing project. There is a long history of sewing and fiber arts in my family. Having grown up in post-World War II China, my grandmother knew how to make clothes and was a master of cloth and yarn before she developed arthritis. My dad has hand-made sweaters that are older than me and still in great shape. My mom learned some basic tailoring and fiber techniques from my grandmother and passed them onto me. In our family and culture, sewing is as much a hobby as it is an economic habit, and while I never picked up on enough knitting to make anything substantial, I eventually became enamored with how a needle and thread could keep my hands busy and mind calm. Throughout middle school, I routinely made small parts of my costumes for Halloween. One year, I made wrist cuffs and fingerless gloves out of socks for a Pokémon trainer vest and hat I got off the internet. Despite my annoyance that everyone thought I was Ash Ketchum instead of Trainer Red — the protagonist of Pokémon
My cosplay anthology
Red and Blue — I had a blast and was super proud to show off my costume. That Halloween was the first time I properly cosplayed. The line between what is or isn’t cosplay remains a source of toxicity and discourse in the cosplay community. I grew up in a community where there were strict guidelines on what made you a cosplayer and no one agreed on what those rules were. In the 2010s, you could only call yourself a cosplayer if you made something or if it looked good enough. As a child with no income and no time to invest in elaborate projects, I didn’t feel allowed to self-describe as a cosplayer. And honestly, sometimes I still feel like if I do, the cosplay police are going to come arrest me. Recently, though, the cosplaying community has gotten a lot more open-minded as the hobby has become more mainstream and a new generation of cosplayers seek to do
better in terms of not gatekeeping the community.
“Closet cosplays” became a lot more popular over the pandemic, likely as a response to TikTok and its character cosplaying sounds. Previously looked down upon as the “lazy” option, it’s now a widely accepted “gateway” method for getting into cosplaying. For me, this concept was revolutionary since the previous culture around cosplay had been so inaccessible to most people both monetarily and timewise. I did my first closet cosplay in college, as Morpheus from “The Sandman” on Netflix. As the local black hole to any and all color, Morpheus was a character that I already dressed and kind of looked like, with my Michigan winter paleness and dyed black hair. I felt good — far better than any of the “proper” cosplays I’d done in the past. Because these were my actual clothes, they fit better and were of higher qual-
ity than what I’d be willing to invest in a one-time costume. I was recognized several times on Halloween weekend, including by some of the kids I was coaching in Learn to Skate, which was a cool moment. My most recent cosplay project was for last year’s Michigan Renaissance Festival. For non-anime cosplayers, Ren Faire season is our second Halloween. It’s a chance to show off your creations and admire others’. I wanted to go all out for my first Faire as an adult, so I decided to learn a new skill for it: EVA foam molding. Armed with scissors, a hot glue gun and several YouTube tutorials, I made plans for and clobbered together a shoulder pauldron. Making it was a journey; despite meticulously using all my handy skills to recheck measurements and cut out shapes, there were inevitably parts I needed to improvise. For example, ny original plan for hinges
didn’t work out, so I had to rush to the hardware store to buy the tiniest PVC piping I had ever seen in my life. I made it work, though, and have never felt prouder showing off my foam armor. Cosplay is a unique way of laying claim to something. Among all the different art forms I work with, it’s the most intimate and personal. Whether you’re creating an outfit from bolts of fabric or assembling one out of clothes in your wardrobe, you are making yourself part of the art and thus attaching yourself to the legacy of whatever you’re cosplaying. It’s the only type of art I do where it’s impossible to not do it for yourself — while you can draw or write exclusively for others, the things you make as a cosplayer are custom for you. In the 2010s, there weren’t nearly enough characters like me. Western media had no Chinese men that weren’t martial artists or a racist cari-
cature, and certainly not Queer ones. In a way, cosplay is me laying my claim to this period of media that excluded
Ease, as fears
73. Golfer's pegs
1. Amos Alonzo ___ (legendary University of Chicago football coach) 2. Cry from a judge 3. Ranchero's rope 4. Stamp a raised design on 5. Pepper's counterpart 6. Rat-___ 7. "Sex and the City" actor Chris
8. On a scale of one ___
9. Advil alternative
10. "Hey! Over here!"
11. Goes over the line?
12. Critical hosp. area
13. High elev. place 21. Go ___ flames
22. Remove from power
26. Life partner?
27. Perturb
29. Focal points
30. "___'Clock Jump" (Count Basie song)
31. Extends across
33. Monet medium
34. Photographer's shout-out, informally
35. Test episode
36. Newspaper essay representing a personal view
38. "___ I" (formal expression of agreement)
39. ___ Madrid (La Liga team)
41. Heart test: Abbr.
45. Keyboard error
46. Bear or Berra
50. Place for a plug
53. On the ocean
54. Start of the "Yellow Submarine" chorus
56. Glide
57. Spooky
58. Adams and Clapton
60. "You're So ___" (Carly Simon hit)
61. Two-part
62. Words preceding date or record
63. Low card
64. Director DuVernay
65. Outer edge
When my stepdad first moved in with us, I hadn’t spent much time with him. I knew he was a nice guy and that he made my mom happy, but there weren’t many opportunities for us to bond one-on-one. Although I was excited for the change, I knew it was going to be just that: a change.
Part of me worried that things would be awkward or that I wouldn’t know how to interact with him.
He officially started living with us at the end of my freshman year, just before summer break. Coming home from college made the adjustment even stranger. Even though the number of people in my house doubled almost overnight, it gave me the chance to get to know my stepdad better. During that time, I realized we had more in common than I thought, especially regarding our taste in movies.
When “Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain in January of 2022, all hell instantly broke loose.
Taking advantage of this newfound freedom, filmmaker Rhys FrakeWaterfield (“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2”) announced a slasher film based on the beloved children’s story. “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” follows Christopher Robin’s (Nikolai Leon, “The Killing Tree”) return to the Hundred Acre Wood five years after leaving for college, only to find that his childhood friends Pooh (Craig David Dowsett, “The Area 51 Incident”) and Piglet (Chris Cordell, “The Viking Revenge”) have become bloodthirsty killers in his absence.
The movie received horrible reviews, which only enticed me to watch it more. I was surprised to find that my stepdad shared my enthusiasm.
After a short battle with my mom for control over the family room TV, we sat down to watch the film.
We were not disappointed. With its atrocious writing and somehow even worse acting, my stepdad and I found ourselves screaming with laughter rather than fear. Despite being a lowbudget film, the gore was surprisingly impressive, the kills making up for the film’s low quality with their absurdity. Watching Pooh chuck a
lost traveler, Tina (May Kelly, “Mega Lightning”), into a wood-chipper was an eventful start to my evening. My stepdad and I finished the movie having been changed for the better. I think I shed a tear as the credits rolled. There’s something cathartic about sitting on the couch with your mouth open and eyes glued to the train wreck on the screen in front of you. I know I shouldn’t waste my time on these movies, but my curiosity always gets the better of me. Besides, I’d be lying if I said they weren’t fun to watch. “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” is only the beginning of a larger horror project, which FrakeWaterfield calls “The Twisted Childhood Universe” or the TCU. Frake-Waterfield plans to expand the universe to include many different children’s stories, with films like “Pinocchio: Unstrung” and “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare” currently in development. Trust, I will be watching “Bambi: The Reckoning” as soon as it’s released. While butchering famous children’s stories makes for solid comedy, I deeply appreciate terrible horror movies with original plotlines. Films like “Zombeavers” and “Bad CGI Gator” have proved that creativity has no bounds, and that no matter how terrible a movie premise sounds, it can always get worse. “Bad CGI Gator” delivers exactly what it promises: a group of college friends being terrorized by a poorly CGI’d alligator on their spring break vacation. The premise is simple but ingenious, presenting itself as a bad movie from the moment you read the title. Most often, bad horror movies are upfront about their quality so viewers know exactly what to expect from the experience. The best part of a terrible horror movie, though, is experiencing it with other people. Even my more horror-averse friends are willing to sit through a bad scary movie together. The entertainment comes from the poor movie quality, but also from the commentary we share with one another. I personally love to chat during movies, and shitty horror provides no shortage of conversation topics.
Maisie Derlega/DAILY
Evelyn Mousigian/DAILY
MORGAN SIERADSKI
PARK MiC Columnist
Me and love, specifically the romantic kind, have been at odds with each other for as long as I can remember. Of course I now know that other kinds of love hold just as much importance, but I think something about being an only child and not having friends in middle school messed with my brain chemistry from an early age.
I held romantic love on a pedestal, constantly in search of an elusive “soulmate,” and the idea that someone could complete me or fix me became my saving grace. In my childhood, this resulted in comically intense crushes, limerence being a constant state of mind, always infatuated by someone. Looking back, I’m still unsure if I was a hopeless romantic or simply lonely.
Prove me wrong, prove me right
my “research.” Worst of all, I was starting to have to admit to myself that deep down, I still longed for a soulmate kind of love. is the love from your soulmate a warm embrace that only feels right after decades of building walls, each distracted with life? or is it something that appears unassuming at first, insisting for more and more attention until you can’t ignore how its roots have intertwined with yours? is it an all consuming moment, fate’s own personal gamble, something historians can’t shut up about? is it the prize at the end of the tunnel, the secret ingredient not being waited on? something you cultivated yourself, planted, sowed, watered, harvested, with hard work and patience? something to be strictly observed, until there is no feasible flaw, a logic that transcends human intelligence, a perfect circle making its infinite loop? is
Later, as I navigated my first “relationships,” I started to regard love in a different light. High school dating was nothing like the fairytales I had created in my head, and I began to think that maybe love should be more practical than magical. I threw away the idea of a soulmate completely, dumbing it down to a myth or fairytale, something I should grow up and stop believing in like a little kid’s faith in Santa Claus. I refused to let love take control of me in the way it had before, that was embarrassing and behind me now. In fact, I started to think I could outsmart it. Love was the biggest maze and logic was the map, I thought. If I could figure out all the algorithms and mechanisms behind it, it would never catch me by surprise. I would never again be love’s fool.
of it to my personality and how I prioritize thinking above feelings.
I hated that people “in love” were unable to name exactly what they liked about the person in question.
A lot of this sounds like a defense mechanism, and I’m sure a part of it was, but I attribute a lot
Indignant, I vowed to write down everything I liked about the people I claimed to love, as if I was preparing some premise and argument to reach a conclusion of love. I would scoff at friends who claimed to be “in love” when it
was so obvious they were simply attached because of physical affection or the idea of them. I also forbid myself from ever seriously talking about marriage or anything about a “forever” in my relationships, insisting that love was something of its own force with its own will and could only be temporary by nature, that it would only be permanent if someone could prove me wrong.
As my relationships started to get more serious, however, my avoidance of anything permanent started to become a pattern, and the way I was treating each relationship as a philosophical thesis was probably getting annoying to everyone involved. My theories were preventing myself from getting hurt, but I was no happier with love, and there was no conclusion in sight to all
my heart, my soul, my liver
Yuragim, My younger cousin Muhammad sets the breakfast table, Running to the local grocery store across the street–Alone, 9 years old, no fear in his heart, Returning with a tub of butter and yogurt I haven’t tasted in 14 years, Treating himself to a lollipop with the change. Jonim,
My grandfather hobbles down the stairs for breakfast, Replaying the video of my younger brother practicing piano for the fifteenth time, Immediately stepping outside to tend to his garden in our courtyard, As if the flowers and vegetables are his dear children, Discretely passing Muhammad another 2,000 so’ms to buy candy from the store.
Jigarim, My older cousin, my Asal apa, invites herself into our home,
Extending invitations for this week’s weddings and gatherings in the neighborhood, While her daughter – my niece –runs into my arms, Exclaiming she’s missed me so much in the two days we didn’t meet.
Azizlarim, My paternal aunts, my ammas, call the house down for breakfast, Making me take over for meal prep, as they’ve been up for hours, Stepping outside to gossip with my apa and the other married women,
the meteorologist i grew up with cried on live tv.
climate change is affecting?
Debating which gatherings they should attend, why, and for how long.
I haven’t walked these streets or seen these faces in over a decade, but nonetheless, I am a daughter of the house.
In all my time at Uzbekistan, I felt no distance greater than that of a daughter or a sister: I am my neighbor’s older sister apa, the local shopkeeper’s daughter qizim, and my grandfather’s soul jonim. This proximity is regular in my
experience as a Persian, Where the language is inherently poetic: Simple phrases translate to grand expressions, And countless terms express endearment, love, and all forms of relationships. Yet unheard of in my experience as an American, Where endearment is extended only to partners and direct relatives, And referencing a person by their relationship is outdated to the point of nonexistence. It was in America I learned to distance,
Where I learned to not acknowledge strangers, or approach them shyly when I did, Though I would have approached them as my cousins and sisters, It was here I learned indirect translations of our Persian phrases, Where I express gratitude to my friends sharing a dish with a thank you, it tasted great, Though I would have wished for their hand to never break, had I spoken in my tongue.
the meteorologist i grew up with cried on live TV.
i find myself worn out and scared more than ever.
i grew up in Miami, Florida. often saying i grew up where you vacationed. but soon enough, it won’t even be able to hold its own natives. there are always warnings about flash floods, storm surges and strong winds.
we drill sheets of steel onto our windows, collect every canned good we can find, plan a basic evacuation plan if need be. being 1,000 miles away from home, i forget about hurricane season until my mother calls naomi la lluvia no para.
“naomi the rain won’t stop,” i just choose to sigh and hope for the best.
today i woke up scrolling through my news feed, and the first video is the longest
tenured TV meteorologist in South Florida, voice cracking at the sheer image of Hurricane Milton on the satellite radar. this hurricane alone is breaking every mathematical calculation possible; it strengthened from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in only 12 hours. it is heading straight towards Central Florida, and the Panhandle is still recovering from Hurricane Helene.
it’s been a while since Miami has been disastrously affected, but there’s no doubt another one is coming. and there’s more at risk than we even think. i grew up with the news, it’s the only way residents know what’s going on. what a privilege it must be to able to ignore this harsh reality. waters are getting warmer. at Milton’s peak, the water reached 88 degrees Fahrenheit. the coastal reefs are dying. the once-colorful underwater forest is overtaken by algae. its red, yellow and blues turn to grey and brown hues. every invasive species you can think of is in my backyard. When will people finally see who
Hurricane Katrina was one storm everyone will remember.
New Orleans was left devastated; Black communities were left to rebuild on their own.
Hurricane Maria is one we often forget — Puerto Rico will always remember. and yet we vacation here. these places are rebuilt only for consumers to take. every year has turned into a phone call and text of best wishes.
money saved to be sent to family and friends.
but one day it won’t be enough. i will admit for the longest time i didn’t want to process this reality, but it’s here. whether you believe it or not, communities have been facing this slowly. this evident death of our environment will be more than we can handle. the earth is for us, and we are destroying it — in turn, it’s destroying us. ecological terror is being pushed onto the people who live off these lands; all i ask is for you to second guess your tropical spring break this year.
If Something’s Not Right, Say Something
Being safe at U-M requires building a culture where we all feel comfortable reporting problems so we can improve our work areas and prevent them from happening again. Every voice on campus is crucial to creating a safe research environment.
It’s important to report all types of research safety incidents — including near misses — so we can identify the causes, implement corrective actions, and share lessons learned with others across campus.
VIVIAN
Aamina Hussain/MiC
MADINABONU NOSIROVA MiC Columnist
NAOMI RODRIGUEZ MiC Columnist
Lauren Hahn/MiC
NADIA JAHANBIN MiC Columnist
I attribute my insatiable love for literature to the Garcias. Every year of my high school experience was enriched by the privilege of being mentored by a Garcia — freshman year English with Mrs. Garcia, and every year after with her husband Mr. Garcia (JG) as my teacher and slam poetry advisor. Both taught me more than just life lessons: They opened the doors to new ways of examining the world, offering literature as a lens.
I wasn’t sentimental about graduating high school, but JG’s farewell speech on the last day of class — my last day of senior year — brought tears to my eyes. I think of the Garcias every time I stumble upon a quote that pulls me back into my body, grounding me with its poetic curation of words.
In those moments, I hear JG, arms flailing, running across the classroom, breathing life into various passages. I see the shared glances and smiles between my peers and me, the quiet acknowledgment of how deeply we are moved by his teaching. Room 219 wasn’t just a classroom; it was a world we stepped into, never knowing what to expect but always mourning when the bell dismissed us.
It was nearly impossible to walk away from any book we finished in JG’s class; however, one book in particular left me intrigued: “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner. No matter how intently I read, reread and studied each chapter, I still found myself bewildered when a detail arose in class that I had somehow missed. Each discussion unearthed something new, something I had overlooked despite my growing obsession with the novel. It felt like the more I tried to grasp it, the more elusive it became. Its stream-ofconsciousness writing style, oscillating between different years and perspectives, consumed me.
After graduation, I set out to re-read it. Armed with background knowledge from class, I thought it would all click into place. But that summer, I found the second read similar to my first — each time I returned to a passage, a new layer revealed itself. If I even allowed myself to turn back a few words within the same sentence, it felt as if an entirely new detail would rise to greet me. I was humbled. As someone who loves literature deeply, it’s hard to admit that reading, for me, isn’t effortless. I don’t love it
Slow reader apologist!
because it’s easy or because it allows me to escape reality. I love it because it forces me to acknowledge the unique patterns, diction and style of each author. It’s a means to dissect their brain, drawing you closer to the constellation of sentiments and ideologies that adorn it.
To continue my ongoing battle of comprehending Faulkner, I turned to other professors’ online lecture videos. In the comments, I found a community of people just as confused as I was, yet the discovery of this audience brought more comfort than I could have imagined. These were older, wiser, avid readers, exempt from the consequences of doom-scrolling. Despite their optimal attention spans, literature degrees and habitual consumption of poetry and prose, I found them — albeit in rather elegant language — expressing their own continual confusion with the content. But they did not see it as a shortcoming. Instead, they approached it like a Rubik’s cube they enjoyed picking up when they had a moment. They were never frustrated by the chaotic 3×3 square displaying its incompleteness; rather, they expressed gratitude towards the gradual process of learning, for each attempt brought them closer to solving it. As confused as they were, they were equally adamant about returning to learn more — treating each new piece of understanding as a gift, not as evidence of a flaw in their comprehension. They nourished themselves with literature, eager to satisfy every genre within it, but even they lingered at the bakery of books. Carefully, they considered the most tempting pastries, asking questions about those that piqued their interest, unapologetically holding up the line for a few extra moments to make the perfect choice. Once settled at their tables, they patiently picked their selections apart, savoring each bite to truly digest the experience. They didn’t rush their order, gulp their delectables in one bite, and they certainly didn’t feel guilty for craving seconds.
Adopting this patience can feel unrelatable at times. I’ll walk into buzzing cafes, and despite waiting my turn, drop my patience when it arrives, forgetting to extend the same time and grace to myself that I was more than happy to give to others. I’d tell a friend I’m reading a book, yet when we next meet, my tongue pulls back before I remind them that I’m still immersed in it. When logging my library on Goodreads, I’d claim I fin -
ished a book a few days earlier than I did, or avoid the date altogether if I felt like the time span was too long. I’d choose shorter books to meet my monthly goal or prematurely rave about stories I was only halfway through. Though my opinions were genuine, I’d rush to share them rather than fully cultivating them first. I was rushing to order, eat and run out the door without acknowledging my hunger for more, without allowing myself to appreciate the experience.
In group discussions at least one person, if not myself, will apologize for taking just a minute or two longer to finish a passage. Others might have skimmed the reading, knowing they take longer but not giving themselves the grace to do so. They skip paragraphs and twiddle their thumbs, comforted by the false victory of conveying a reading speed that hardly shrinks their fear of being a burden. These tendencies of behaving out of convenience for others have pervaded much of my thoughts — a constant cycle of apologizing for taking up space or, especially, time. We are told these elements are scarce, and the consequence is that, in a Western, individualistic society that places capitalist values on a pedestal, we strive for excellence, often in comparison to our peers. We obsess over materialistic possessions like land, appearances, time and opportunity. We value rapidity, hoarding outcomes as if they directly benefit us, feeling guilty for using resources without an immediate reward — why waste time sitting in a cafe when you could be studying in one? Why waste time slowly reading a challenging book, or, god forbid, rereading any book, when you could quickly read one and lengthen your list of accomplishments?
I’ve watched trends in literature rise and fall, shifting attitudes about reading along the way. Unsolicited critiques over genre choices, and countless 10-second videos rush to showcase “15 Must Reads!” without explaining why. Often, creators lack genuine reasons for these assertions and instead focus on fabricating content and opinions that boost their profile. Somewhere along the way, reading became advertised as an effortless addition to your personality rather than a slow, fruitful process. Reading has become something to be consumed and devoured, rather than softly picked apart, chewed and digested with composure.
Reading is a wonderful pastime, but it is also an art form
and skill to be continually cultivated; less shame should be cast on those who indulge in reading, or life, in this way. I’ve hardly heard anyone apologize for finishing an assignment, ordering, or reading too quickly, but there’s often guilt that pierces the skin of those who take advantage of the gift of time, punished for acknowledging their confusion or feeding their intrinsic curiosity.
Ultimately, you cannot conquer time. You have no hold on it. By prioritizing outcomes and rapid production, you cannot speed it up. By operating in a functional freeze, waiting for the perfect moment to tend to your aspirations, you won’t slow it down either. Time will pass, regardless. What you do with it will never match the inevitability of its passage. Reading is like waiting for a wave with just the right height to slide under with the least risk of wipeout. It’s multiple attempts to thread a needle. It’s pausing after someone speaks to ensure you’ve truly appreciated their string of words. It is patience. It is difficult. It is a talent to be cultivated, not a list to be exhausted. The quantity of books you read or the speed at which you finish them is a tasteless attempt to assert dominance in a world where education is a privilege, though it should be a right. To frame reading as a competition instead of an art form grossly reduces who you are to what you produce. You are not your accomplishments, nor are you defined by how fast or young you achieve them. When you make the time, you learn that you have it. That, yes, it’s fleeting but less scarce than you’ve been conditioned to believe. You come to appreciate the slight grasp you have on it; it was always yours. I write this not for you to cling to time, but to encourage you to forget about it now and then, if only for a moment. So, take slower breaths. Drink the sun while it still peaks through the autumn’s trees. Watch as their leaves catch flight, and you may find you are less surprised when, one day, you look up to find it’s already December, and they’ve shed their crimson winter coats. Take the stairs instead of the elevator; choose the long route home. Give yourself the grace to explore your passions outside of academic validation. Unravel the same sentence if its syntax scratches your brain just right — even if it takes longer, even if it makes you a slow reader, to take your time is a celebration of curiosity.
‘Dear students, faculty and staff:’
NADIA JAHANBIN MiC Columnist
You look in the mirror and still see yourself as righteous?
You face that reflection — eyes unflinching, hands steady when the lifeblood of the oppressed runs silently beneath your touch?
You wake, say ”Let me do it again.”
You unleash billions of dollars without a blink, unfazed by the consequences they carry. You tip the scale in favor of one side, ignore the rest of us.
You deem us no more than a whisper, while the others are granted speeches.
You try to bury us in silence, but we return louder with every breath.
How do you sip your coffee, calm and warm, while children’s throats burn with ash from their homes?
While you walk your dog through manicured lawns, children tiptoe through the remnants of their shattered lives, afraid to disturb the ground beneath their feet.
You count minutes in meetings, they count seconds between airstrikes.
You calculate profits, they measure the distance between life and death. You shuffle papers, they bury their dead.
Your silence is complicity.
Your inaction is an action.
You may not pull the trigger, but you stand by as the bodies fall.
You may not drop the bombs, but your guilt will answer this call.
You speak of peace, but your hands drip with blood. What does democracy mean when you turn a blind eye to the violence you fund
You talk about human rights — but not for us.
You are quick to condemn, but only when it’s profitable.
Do you see us?
Or are we just numbers on a screen?
How can you watch children cry for their mothers and feel nothing?
How can you see homes turned to ash and call it necessary?
Is your soul untouched by the suffering you create? Does your heart not break for the innocent?
Or have you learned to switch off your empathy, so you can sleep soundly at night?
When will your silence finally speak?
If not now — when will your heart break?
Photo courtesy of Nadia Jahanbin
Maximilian Schenke Lindsey
You might be a UMich NPC
MAX FELDMAN Opinion Columnist
Something dawned on me when I was people watching in the Diag last week. I was sitting on one of those concrete slabs that border the block ‘M,’ gazing blissfully at the crowds of students walking by. As I watched them angle their movements to avoid stepping on the ‘M,’ it occurred to me that not one of them had the faintest idea that I was thinking about them in my head. To them, I was just another student on campus, a fixture in the background on their way to class. To them, I was an NPC. Yes, I just called myself an NPC. No, I am not a 13-year-old TikToker. For those who don’t know, an NPC is a “non-player character” in a video game, whose actions are automated. The term has been coopted in online culture to describe people who are basic, boring or unoriginal. In short, NPCs are background characters both in virtual and real life.
It’s undeniably an insult to call someone an NPC; you’re essentially saying that the person is a mindless drone who lacks individuality and exists solely to fit in the background of your life. No one wants to be called an NPC. Yet, at a large state school like the University of Michigan, this tends to be our default perception of each other. There are tens of thousands of students and faculty members at the University, and the overwhelming majority are strangers to you. Even I, your favorite Opinion columnist, could be sitting next to you right now as you read this article, and you’d probably have no idea. But it’s not just the fact that I’m a stranger that makes me an NPC. It’s the fact that, even if I were near you, you’d likely choose not to interact with me, deciding — consciously or unconsciously — to treat me as part of the background. That’s what makes me an NPC. The truth of the matter is that, to most of those who perceive us, we are all U-M NPCs. That is, to other U-M students, we are all superficial versions of ourselves conjured up in their heads. Each of us has the capacity to acknowledge the complexity of strangers, the vividness
of their triumphs and tribulations and the uniqueness of their individual experiences. But our deliberate decision to limit our social interactions is an indication that we view strangers as nonentities and, therefore, lifeless. This can’t just all be about talking to strangers though, right?
It has never really been reasonable or socially acceptable to spark up conversations with every student or random stranger in Ann Arbor, not to mention that an interconnected web of relationships exists and connects our campus community in more ways than most students realize. Additionally, students still regularly interact with people they don’t know — it just happens over the internet, rather than in person. While the term NPC has migrated from online culture into real life, the normalcy of interacting with strangers on social media has not followed suit. This is the root of what I’d call the “NPC epidemic.” What does it say about our generation’s ability to form real connections when we feel that it is more accessible to feel connected to a random social media influencer than the people around us in real life?
Students have no real incentive
to bolster their social circles with strangers or alter their perspective because we automatically consider ourselves the “main characters” of our college story. Each of us has our own friend groups, academic pursuits and campus struggles, so it’s only natural to cast the peers you don’t know in the non-player character category.
The issue with this “main character” perspective is that it’s hypocritical. When we label others as NPCs or view them as such, we’re implying that college is inherently for the individual. But the very nature of college revolves around forming friendships and connections that rely on acknowledging the importance of the people around us. You can’t thrive in our community if you view everyone else as background characters. If all of us are NPCs, then we are bound by a lack of originality. We all might look at one another and see redundancy, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In recognizing the onedimensional space we often occupy in strangers’ minds, we can better understand the diverse perspectives of those around us and ultimately make our time at the University a more fulfilling experience.
ISABELLE PORZONDEK Opinion Analyst
Earlier this October, social media influencer
Jonathan van Ness made his way to the University of Michigan to broadcast a live performance of his podcast, Getting Curious, and discuss the importance of voting as a college student. The “Queer Eye” star sat down with a number of academic leaders and they discussed what it means to be a college student during an election and why it’s important for students to vote. While lighthearted and fun, it meaningfully opened up an important discussion of how young students can use their voices on a larger scale.
After leaving the event, I began to wonder why I haven’t attended more on-campus events like Ness’. While learning about voting is important, there are so many other things that I am interested in and would love to learn more about.
Getting involved doesn’t have to mean attending political events; students should explore opportunities related to their different interests, backgrounds and cultures. Every semester, the University hosts hundreds of on-campus events that are catered to students and are often free. These events are the perfect chance for students to learn more about their own interests and identities, expand their perspectives and find active communities to become involved in.
Unique hobbies and interests offer crucial breaks from the rigorous classwork U-M students often face. It’s important for students to explore their interests, regardless of whether they are taking a class on them or not. The University has events that range from art and music exhibits, to musical productions to scientific panels. Attending
an event like a workshop, where students can develop skills and enhance existing ones, empowers them to grow personally and professionally. There are also events that are less participatory; want to relax and listen to some music by a worldrenowned artist? Or experience an in-person reading by a poet or writer? The University frequently offers free tickets to live performances, which are a great way to explore your taste in the arts.
Our university is made up of a population that is diverse beyond gender, race and religious background. Student social identities range from socioeconomic class to ethnicity. These identities shape the way we live, how we view the world and even our interests as we grow as individuals. And while college is an exciting time of life, it can often feel daunting when it comes to finding out who you are as a person. Campus events provide opportunities to meet people who have similar passions, while offering different perspectives that encourage complex and wellrounded conversations that can alter or enhance our outlooks. Learning is key when it comes to understanding identities. While it is important to stay true to our own personal identities, embracing difference can allow for progression and growth.
One of the major struggles of college, especially as a first-year student, is finding a space where you can take a break, as well as finding a community to be a part of. Living on campus away from home can feel isolating and may lead to feelings of stress and anxiety. Recently, Active Minds reported that 64.7% of students feel lonely and isolated; these feelings often correlate with a decrease in social skills as well as negative impacts on academic achievements. When you find yourself actively spending time among your peers and
making genuine connections, you end up creating a space of belonging. This is a good way to create support networks where you can find others who may be struggling as well. This helps students understand that everyone experiences stress or loneliness during their time in college.
Students may find themselves swamped with school work and other extracurriculars, and they may not have the time to attend different events. Fortunately, many of these events only take up an hour or two of your day, and they can range from early in the morning to later in the evening. The opportunity exists for all, as long as you make the time for it. That doesn’t mean you should skip studying for that midterm or putting aside that essay you’ve been writing, but it’s imperative that students prioritize their well-being and give themselves time to recharge.
Students may also worry about how these events may cause a distraction to their studies, however they may have the opposite effect. Experts have observed a positive correlation between students’ involvement in different organizations with cognitive development, multicultural awareness and an increase in well-being. I urge you to step out of your comfort zone and see where it leads you. I was one of those people who was worried about how to manage my time and, in all honesty, I’m still figuring it out. But even as an introvert who spends at least five hours studying every day, I have found that campus events are an opportunity to get out there and explore, meet new people and have fun. The whole point of college is to find your interests and find your identity in the context of the world. Maybe that event or club meeting you’ve been putting off is a great place to start.
Billionaire sports team owners should not hold cities hostage
HAYDEN BUCKFIRE Opinion Analyst
Sept. 26 marked the Oakland Athletics baseball team’s final game in Oakland following the announcement of plans to move the franchise to Las Vegas. The team, infamous for its bottomof-the-league payrolls (enough so to warrant a Brad Pitt movie), has played in Oakland since 1968. The National Football League’s Oakland Raiders, who also played in California for decades, also relocated to Las Vegas in 2020. The basis for the move?
The Athletics’ stadium. The decrepit Oakland Coliseum, long considered one of the worst in professional sports, was desperately in need of replacement. The team’s owners and the city of Oakland spent decades attempting to complete a deal to build a new stadium, to no avail. Most recently, the city of Oakland put together a $375 million offer to build a new stadium on San Francisco Bay.
Taxpayers previously paid
tens of millions of dollars in 1995 to finance a now-hardly used
assortment of seats; the team was forced to lay a tarp over it. This came when Oakland was forced to lay off police officers due to financial constraints.
Current owner John Fisher, heir to $8 billion clothing retailer Gap, opted to instead relocate the team to the larger TV market of Las Vegas, planning to rely on a mixture of private funding and $380 million of public funds to build a stadium along the Las Vegas strip.
This pattern raises a question: Why are large cities, many of which are struggling with underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure and housing crises, willing to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars for sports teams?
One of the most common justifications for public subsidies of billion-dollar sports projects is that they spur economic activity in metropolitan areas. Proponents argue that new stadiums attract tourists, boost local business and create jobs, thus benefiting the city’s economy as a whole. But this claim doesn’t tell the whole story.
Numerous studies have shown that the economic impact of sports stadiums is vastly overstated. They often divert money away
from more productive uses like community development, displacing spending that would have gone elsewhere in the city.
For example, all of Alameda County was recently granted a comparatively paltry $14 million by the state of California to address the intersection of mental health and homelessness, seemingly a much more important issue. Experts feel similarly about the Las Vegas deal.
For many Oakland residents, the move felt like a betrayal, a gut-wrenching conclusion to decades of loyalty and support for a team that’s now leaving for greener financial pastures. Many fans spent their entire lives rooting for the Athletics and the Raiders.
Take the example of the St. Louis Rams, who relocated to Los Angeles, the second-largest television market in the U.S., in 2016. While owner Stan Kroenke has certainly profited from the move — CNBC values the team at $8 billion — the fans and city of St. Louis were left behind, while the new Los Angeles stadium plays host to a nonexistent fanbase. SoFi Stadium, which cost an eye-popping $6 billion to build, regularly sees visiting
teams’ fans outnumbering Rams fans by a hefty margin.
Six billion dollars is a lot of money; what does it buy you? Essentially, a glorified playground. SoFi Stadium boasts 260 luxury suites, 13,000 premium seats, 12 club spaces, 7 suite experiences and a dualsided elliptical video board. And, of course, it’s close to Los Angeles International Airport for out-of-towners flying in to attend games. But it’s questionable how much of the $6 billion goes toward making the game experience better for the average fan.
This same issue hits closer to home. In the mid-2010s, the Ilitch family, owners of the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Tigers and no strangers to the University of Michigan, secured more than $400 million in taxpayer-funded grants from the city of Detroit to construct Little Caesars Arena. The Ilitches promised the creation of “District Detroit” — a thriving entertainment district that would surround the stadium and provide long-term economic growth. But, almost a decade later, the “District Detroit” remains little more than a sea of parking lots; the promised development failed to
materialize.
In 2023, the Ilitch family, along with developer Stephen Ross, another billionaire heavily associated with the University, announced that the project was finally moving ahead thanks to another $133 million in tax breaks. The issue is not necessarily that all tax breaks for construction projects are bad; but they are bad when the beneficiaries previously received hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds only to renege on their end of the bargain. For all intents and purposes, giving taxpayer money to those who haven’t delivered in the past is an unintelligent investment.
In Los Angeles, Detroit and shortly Las Vegas, billionaires underdelivered.
Time and time again, cities have been left scrambling to meet the demands of billionaire team owners, funneling hundreds of millions into stadiums while neglecting essential services like education, infrastructure and housing. Despite claims that these deals spur economic growth, the reality is that the promised benefits often fail to materialize, leaving cities and their residents to bear the cost. Instead of prioritizing profit-
driven ventures (with oblique value adds for the average person), cities should focus on investments that most directly improve the lives of their citizens.
The value of professional sports teams has already more than tripled in the last 10 years; owners have evidently done fairly well for themselves. Sports teams will always chase the next best deal, but cities must listen to the public before approving hundred million dollar projects. Cities should also think more critically about whether future help should not come from public coffers.
I’m as big a sports fan as the next person — I spend my Sundays watching the Detroit Lions and my summers watching the Detroit Tigers. I am sure that many residents of Detroit, and other cities, would feel devastated by losing their favorite sports teams. There is a genuine social value added by playing host to professional sports teams; however, cities must prioritize listening to public input on whether preserving that value warrants a significant opportunity cost of not funding several important public services.
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Rumaisa Wajahath/DAILY
University priorities
UMich is failing, but DEI is not
On Oct. 16, The New York Times published an investigative article titled, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” The article described the “failure” of Michigan’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs, citing that even after a $250 million investment, students feel like the campus climate is worse than before. Per the article, students and faculty are scared to speak their minds, minority groups feel alienated and low enrollment numbers for Black students have remained stagnant, despite major efforts to increase enrollment rates.
The sentiments expressed in the article aren’t new. AntiDEI rhetoric and legislation are heavily prevalent in conservative areas — deep red states like Florida and Texas have already banned DEI programs in schools. Former President Donald Trump thinks DEI is anti-American propaganda. The University’s alleged “DEI failure” will only embolden the anti-DEI agenda. Yes, the University of Michigan’s DEI programs are producing lackluster outcomes, especially given the $250 million investment. DEI seems to have mainly heightened campus tensions by alienating groups based on their differences. Yet DEI is necessary, especially in a predominantly white institution. In having a DEI program, the University acknowledges its historical and contemporary failure to serve minority populations.
and community for minority groups, the University is, to an extent, helping right generational wrongs. This brings us to the current impact of DEI at the University of Michigan. Why doesn’t it
increased. This means that the University is not only creating a more diverse student body on track to align with national averages, but that students of Color are still choosing Michigan because it is a good
members of all groups.
That’s not to say some of the critiques of Michigan’s DEI programming aren’t valid. For $250 million in spending, there’s been little tangible benefit. Despite this
University of Michigan? It’s hard to attract conservative students and faculty to an area and school with a vast majority of liberal voters. Furthermore, the field of academia itself is increasingly of a lack of support from the university, and prospective ones are weary of applying without that support. While the U-M DEI programs might not be perfect, they are much better than having no DEI
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Abigail Schad/DAILY
Emily Quinteros/DAILY
E LIZA PHARES Opinion Columnist
AYA FAYAD Statement Correspondent
The inconspicuous art of survival from the outside
Content Warning: This article contains mentions of war, violence, death and grief.
Apathy. Apathy is the silent killer. When I say the word, it feels heavy in my mouth. After so many months of watching dead children through a screen, I feel sick when I say it. Like carbon monoxide, I imagine that its curly, colorless edges unfurl slowly, that apathy makes its way through the nostrils, mouths, eyes, ears, that it binds to the hemoglobin in the red blood cells, taking over where the oxygen spreads to the rest of the body, poisoning us, killing us, slowly from the inside — attaching to and attacking the single source of trust that the human body retains within itself.
For the past year, apathy has defined my life. It has changed my plans and dreams, it has determined the way that I carry myself, it has entirely overturned the things that I thought I cared about. The past year of death and destruction has drilled into my mind the uncomfortable question of what if?
“What if?” means to feel close to death. It is a feeling steeped in the realization that pure luck — mixed with displacement, refugee statuses and parents moving across the ocean to unknown countries — is the sole determinant of your life as you know it. Survivor’s guilt, like anything else in life, is another type of “What if? It is a knowing, a constant feeling in your entire body and throughout your entire life that, while others are perishing, you may be getting a coffee from the store, or sleeping in an actual bed and not in the streets.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Reem AbouSamra, an American Culture lecturer specializing in Muslim American patriotism and identity at the University of Michigan, defined survivor’s guilt in the Arab diaspora as the struggle to cope with the reality of an indirect loss.
“So many of these (students) are seeing their family and their community, or even just people from the same ethnic, religious or racial group being killed, and they’re internalizing that reality,” Abou-Samra said. “Had they not been a generation removed, if their family hadn’t moved a generation before, or two generations before … (they) would have suffered that
same loss firsthand.”
“This leads to believing that you’re inferior or you devalue your own culture,” she continued.
“That is something that takes place without a doubt, especially for those who are a few generations removed because they have been educated in a system for a couple generations that has been perpetually dehumanizing them.”
I remember my pretty friend with her brown hair and shy smile. A year of death has not worked to take her memory away from me yet. The day that she died, I opened her social media pages and went through the pictures, wondering what happens to the Instagram accounts of dead people. Does anyone know to delete or disable them, that the murdered person no longer has any use for their social media accounts? I have always found it unfair that these accounts simply stay up, a cruel reminder that the person trapped in them used to be alive, that they once walked among us.
Farah was the reason I wanted to be a journalist — her even reporter voice, her seamless Modern Standard Arabic, her adorable little press vest. Funnily enough, she is also the reason that my mom told me last November, after watching a video of her blazing, fiery death, that she doesn’t want me to be a reporter anymore.
“Do you see what they do to us?” she told me, crying. “I need you to know that you’re not removed from this either.”
Farah, whose name means happiness in Arabic, was only 25 when she was burned and killed in the airstrike that set her car on fire. I am now only left with remembering the kisses she used to plant on my cheeks every time I walked past her in my village in Lebanon.
I laugh now, at the dream that was to go back to Lebanon and report on the atrocities committed against the people of the Middle East — like it would make a difference. Even funnier is the dream where I would be a journalist in America. To be able to truly stand amid life and death, and to visualize where you fit in in the context of it all, means to never see anything the same again. When Farah died wearing her press vest, only an hour after she had finished her last broadcast, no one did anything about it. It was then that I decided I could not partake in that same system.
As we discussed what it feels like to have to cope with the loss of loved ones while away from home, Abou-Samra described it as a jarring shock in the backdrop of everyday life.
“The only way I can describe (survivor’s guilt) is like … when you have goosebumps on your
body,” Abou-Samra said. “The question of just putting yourself in their shoes so readily and easily to think where would I be in the context of this war. … And that’s the really scary part of it because you end up envisioning an alternate reality had you been there, and you feel it like it’s your real reality.”
I think about how much my life is worth: Try to piece together the value of the limbs, the abdomen, the blood, the beating heart. How valuable is each, and at what point do they cease to be? Is it when I speak my mother’s native tongue? When I step foot into the Rafic Hariri International Airport in Beirut? When the brownish tinge of my skin becomes darker in the summer sun? Or perhaps, it is the moment I give up my American citizenship. How much until I am allowed to die and everyone is allowed to not care? I wonder, and laugh slightly, at the talking points and misleading language that might be used to justify my imagined murder, just as they have been used to justify the murders of hundreds of thousands of people in the past year.
I can only attempt to describe, though probably not very effectively, the experience of knowing that, by stroke of luck, it is them and not you. This is my attempt.
When I was younger, I read a story about Jenny whose head
Haylee Bohm/DAILY
falls off her shoulders when the green ribbon around her neck is untied. In a modern rendition of this narrative, the untying of Jenny’s ribbon is not marital deception or a questioning of female trustworthiness, as it usually is, but instead an ode to the chattel-like objectification of women. I cried for hours after reading this story.
I imagine the moment that Jenny’s breath must be hitched in her throat. When her body no longer has a head, and the final exhale is waiting there in perpetual anticipation. Jenny has accepted the betrayal, giving in to ceaseless wanting, by allowing her husband to greedily untie the green ribbon around her neck.
I imagine how this acceptance slowly nestles deep into the bones, like a sinking ship, and how you can track it all the way down as it travels through the body to the tips of the toes. The feeling that I could have just as easily been killed is like this too. Like concrete that weighs the body down and a sinking feeling in the throat and chest. There is a kind of quiet horror there too, the same as sleep paralysis or when someone puts their hands over your mouth — like the pathetic reminder that you must not scream out loud.
It is the feeling that your body decides your end — the realization that it marks you in a certain way
and that you will never be able to do anything about it. It is in the way you look, in the color of your skin, in the hijab that your mom wears, in the fact that your dad still cannot speak English. It is the unending, all-consuming feeling that one day, something might happen to you, and that there is absolutely nothing you can do to change it. It is the moment your breath is hitched in your throat, when you are trying to talk but the words will not come out because you cannot breathe, the feeling that you may dance around it or escape it momentarily but that, for your entire life, it will be right there, just behind you, waiting for the right moment, the most unexpected, the most shocking, to come out and hit you right in the face.
A father is a small black speck in the midst of the gray heap of debris and rubble that used to be his apartment complex. He is delirious and frenzied, crying and screaming, and, with a small hammer in his hand, he is unsuccessfully attempting to break at the mound of stone and brick that used to be the foundation of his home. Other men are attempting to pull him back from the mess of the apartment, the ugly gray that used to house life. To take the tiny, useless hammer out of his hands, but he keeps screaming at them: “My four kids, my four kids, I can’t hear my four kids.” One man, with a camera in hand, approaches him and asks what he is looking for, and the father says, in a despair that I will never in my life forget, that his four kids were at home when the airstrike hit, that he cannot find them or hear them anywhere. His son was named Saeed. One of his daughters was Salma. He then goes back to pounding at the stone with the hammer. I saw this video from three different angles, taken by three different people at three different points of the day. Each time, the father is in a different corner of the mess, trying at new piles of stone and brick. They tried to hold him back at first, calm him down, to just get him to stop and sit down for a minute, but eventually, they gave up and took to recording instead, thinking that sharing this deep, irreparable pain may compel the humans of the world to understand, to care. I personally do not think that it worked, but I know that I myself am forever scarred. That stupid hammer follows me around in my nightmares.
During times of high stress and turmoil, people do all kinds of activities to keep their minds occupied. Some might solve thousand-piece puzzles, some bake sweet treats in their kitchen and others run laps for miles. Personally, my designated form of relaxation and distraction is filling in my extreme dot-to-dot book, which has more than 30,000 small spots scattered throughout its intricate designs. There is always something therapeutic and satisfying to me about not knowing the end product until I get to the very last dot on the page and finally zoom out to admire what I’ve made.
I ordered the dot-to-dot book this summer while working for my first full-time internship. I was trying to maintain my social life with friends and family while also balancing my hobbies like art and writing. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed with competing priorities, deadlines and responsibilities. Ironically, it was a wellness meeting for employees at work that inspired me to buy this book. After listening in on a discussion about how my adult coworkers unwinded and de-stressed after a long day, I took it upon myself to find something to help me decompress at the end of the day. That something happened to be reigniting my childhood
obsession with connect-the-dots coloring books. Growing up, I found any excuse to color or doodle. I loved watching a bland coloring page transform into a creative masterpiece or a blank sheet of paper change into a made-up mini-universe of its own, no matter how strange the doodles appeared. Connect-the-dots, in particular, held a special place for me because of how mindlessly I could run my pencil across the page. Yet, the resulting image was always beautiful and somewhat unexpected.
After leaving that meeting, I hopped online to find a dot-todot book — a remedy that I knew could both bring out the joy I once experienced as a child and help me reduce my feelings of burnout with my love of creativity and visual art. Shortly after receiving my Amazon package, I ripped it open and excitedly unboxed it to reveal the book and its accompanying art utensils. Opening the first page, I was excited to start losing myself in a world composed only of numbers, lines and small dots. However, instead of turning to a connectthe-dots challenge, I flipped to a page of rules and instructions. Most of them were pretty standard and straightforward to a seasoned professional like me, but the last one struck me as oddly comforting. It advised me not to worry about making an error (or multiple) because the final image’s complexity would render any
mistake unnoticeable.
Indeed, I have found this to be true. Not one dot-to-dot page in my book has been completed without flaws — something I have come to accept with time. The integrity of the bigger image isn’t compromised just because I make a few mistakes along the way. In fact, I seem to be the only person who can identify them, simply because I made them. Aside from its role as a unique coping mechanism to handle my stress levels this summer, my dotto-dot book has also taught me a life lesson: Blunders I make big in my mind by overthinking are actually quite small and inconsequential in the greater scheme of things. After all, dwelling on one or two incorrectly drawn lines doesn’t do me any good when the only way to move forward is to finish the rest of the picture.
As someone with a fear of failure and making mistakes, I consider myself quite risk averse. It also doesn’t help that I grew up in a household where getting a 100% on tests or first place in competitions was the expectation, rather than the goal. I remember how after every exam I took as a freshman in college, I would go home beating myself up for misremembering small details that cost me four points. I couldn’t stop obsessing over my mistakes when I forgot a detail about cell transporters on my molecular biology midterm or forgot to draw a portion of a reaction on my organic chemistry
exam. I was sure that this would result in my ultimate demise — specifically, that a B would ruin my pristine 4.0 GPA. Now, knowing the decent grades I received overall, it’s interesting how I have gone from joking about how I once let those test questions haunt me relentlessly to laughing about them like it was all just a bad dream. What was once a terrifying and world-ending experience for me has now become a funny story of my naivete. I approach my friendships with a similar overthinking mindset. Sometimes I let it get to my head that I might have sent a text message with the wrong connotation, and I will lose a friend with a stroke of
the keyboard. I have a fear that even a small squabble or debate could weaken my friendships and taint people’s perceptions of me. Yet, in reality, these arguments and small fights usually bring me closer to that other person. Now, as a junior in college with academic and social experiences to both reminisce on and wince at, I can definitely say my perfectionistic tendencies caused my brain to spiral unnecessarily. Not only that, but I became so tightly wired that I would always second-guess myself and never allow myself to be fully present. I was always looking for my next flaw to fix. If I were to give advice to my younger self or any
other student in a similar position, I would tell her that one bad grade on your transcript won’t disqualify you from getting a good-paying job or from applying to
MICHELLE
Maisie Derlega/DAILY
` Is it weird that I talk to myself in public?
IRENA TUTUNARI Statement Columnist
I have a confession to make. Before you call me unorthodox, allow me to preface this by saying that we all have our unique vices when faced with stressful situations. Some people take to, say, smoking. Others ball up their fists and hit the gym (I’m definitely not included in this demographic). And perhaps some individuals really go ham on the “Dear Diary.” But when I’m starting to feel like a single mom in a mop commercial, I have my own coping mechanism that I like to employ. And it might be a doozy.
I would like to admit that I, being of good health and sound mind, choose to walk around and talk to myself. Now I (hopefully) know what you’re thinking: Well that’s not so outlandish. I do that too sometimes. And to correct the Toms, Dicks and Harrys out there, I’d like to clarify that no, I’m not referring to the mindless mutterings we may do when home alone or the argument reenactments we perform in the shower (I’ll keep saying “we” for my own peace of mind. No need to correct me).
I’m referring to a habit of mine that involves popping AirPods in my ears, discarding my dignity at the door and walking around campus yammering to none other than me, myself and I. Yeah … a little more outlandish now. This is not to say that I find solace in violating minute social norms and raising the eyebrows of those around me. No, that’s just an added bonus. In fact, I avoid any confused stares, thanks to the inconspicuous presence of my headphones. People typically don’t spare me so much as a glance due to the assumption that one, I’m simply on the phone and, two, I’m really not letting the person on the other line get a word in edgewise. Or perhaps they just avoid eye contact as a safety precaution, the same way I avoid eye contact with people trying to pass me ambiguous pamphlets and QR codes on the Diag.
Regardless, whether I’m headed to class or to a friend’s house, my nifty AirPods typically shield me from judgment and let me continue on my merry way! But if the purpose of my activity isn’t to disturb the peace of those around me, then what is it? I’m so glad you asked.
I sometimes engage in this habit
STATEMENT
of mine when I have tasks or assets that I need to settle — I’ll be walking across the Diag and recite something like, “So I’m gonna meet my friend to study, submit this assignment, head home, unload the laundry, leave it on my bed for another day and then go to a cappella rehearsal.” As someone who’s more lax when it comes to planning, this helps me assign some semblance of structure to my day without wasting my time sitting down and creating a list. Other times, I’ll talk to myself when I have drama or an ethical dilemma that I need to rant about, and neither my best friend nor boyfriend answer the phone: “And then Susan left the party with Harold and told me not to tell anyone. But don’t I owe it to Bob to let him know that he’s pining after someone who’s otherwise occupied?”
But there are other days when I employ this strategy out of sheer necessity.
When thoughts are heavy on my mind and I feel like they’re not yet coherent enough to explain to a close friend, I’ll put my headphones on and unpack it slowly to myself. I don’t like not understanding how I’m feeling, so I’ll talk to myself in an attempt to
understand my thoughts before I ask others to do the same. But because I don’t want to subject anyone — let alone the wider internet — to the loopy ramblings of my most complex feelings, I ask that you use your imagination on this one.
Being a busy college student can make it difficult to carve out time for self-reflection or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes, the only blocks of my day that I have for myself are the times in which I’m walking to and from commitments — which is funny, because clearly I have enough time to get myself roped into “Susan and Harold’s drama.” Go figure.
But all in all, I find talking to myself as I walk to and from places to be inexplicably therapeutic. It’s like my little secret — to the eyes of an unsuspecting observer, I’m just a girl who really knows how to hog up a phone call. I bother no one, and I help myself put a leash on my feelings so that they don’t start barking out of turn.
But if talking to myself aloud is helpful, why does it feel so weird telling other people about my little habit? I mentioned it jokingly to my roommate over the summer, and I watched her already blasé face
Beaches,
coastal areas of Michigan as beaches.
It’s a house party at the University of Michigan. The energy is high, and the lights are low. People are dancing, smiling, laughing. Sipping mysterious blue-ish liquid from red Solo cups. I’m wading through the crowd, growing bored as the aspiring DJ plays the same remix I’ve heard twice tonight already, when I have an idea. A devious smirk suddenly crosses my face. I’m about to start a fight. Not a physical brawl, of course. No, I try to be slightly more civilized than that. But it will be brutal and animalistic nonetheless. I know exactly how to propel this room full of wellmannered, intelligent 20-somethings into madness, animatedly debating their hearts out and accidentally making new allies. How will I do it, you might ask? Let me explain.
I’m from Grand Haven — a small tourist town nestled on the west side of the state up against Lake Michigan. I grew up taking the sandy shoreline for granted. Beautiful sunset walks saw me barefoot and bored, naive about the privilege of growing up in such a beautiful small town. I was, like most teenagers, too focused on the lack of new faces, places and things to do past 9 p.m. to realize I was going to miss it. When I moved to Ann Arbor, I lamented that I could no longer contemplate my worries while gazing out at a seemingly boundless body of water. In a classic case of growing up, I realized how much I loved Grand Haven after all. So, despite my occasional blindness to its beauty, the beach has always been a fixture of my childhood. Yet, early on in my time at the University, I discovered just how many people take issue with my referring to the sandy
I discovered this hot debate topic in the fall of my freshman year at a party where I only knew one person. Naturally, due to this social ineptitude, I was doomed to a few hours of awkward wandering and talking to strangers. Eventually, I struck up a conversation with a guy from New Jersey, and we began the classic get-to-knowyou routine. All was going swimmingly until I referred to Grand Haven as a “beach town,” and the tepid conversation soon turned to a passionate argument about whether or not lakes have beaches; the conversation spanned at least an hour and resulted in both of us dragging over friends and strangers to try and back us up. We never did come to any sort of conclusion, but when all of us debaters saw each other during the rest of the night, we gave friendly nods and joked about our disagreements. The conversation flowed more easily after that, and I realized I had found my way in. Though I went home satisfied that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about our intense debate and how I’d never even known that people perceived my hometown differently than I did. Ever since then, I’ve asked just about
give me an even blanker stare than I was used to — who knew that was possible? After a pause, she laughed uncertainly and said, “You’re kidding right?” To which I replied, “Of course, just joshing! How outlandish would that be!”
I’m not totally sure what I expected — perhaps reassurance that this habit was more commonplace than I thought. But, as I suspected, talking to yourself in public is either something that not many people do, or something that not many people admit to doing.
I decided to cast a wider net before writing this piece, because heavens forbid I confess my innermost secrets on a public forum and no one has the scarcest inkling of what I’m talking about.
I consulted my a cappella group — which is likely not the most reputable representation of what’s “normal” at the University of Michigan — and while most of them gave me perplexed reactions, a few of them nodded enthusiastically and said, “Wait yeah, I do that too!” One girl pulled out her phone and showed us her oodles and oodles of voice memos she makes for none other than herself while walking to class. And the next
week, another girl tried it out for kicks and gave my little habit some glowing reviews. Now this is probably a biased sample; I wouldn’t be awfully shocked if I somehow managed to attract the only other people on campus who pretend to be on the phone and talk to themselves instead. We all know what they say about great minds, right? But this less-than-statistically significant poll at least convinced me that there may be others out there, who, just like me, walk around and cope in the same unorthodox way that I do. Or perhaps people who’d be willing to try out something new, because YOLO. Either way, I never would have found out about the shared nature of this quirk if I hadn’t brought it up to other people first. It feels like talking to yourself in public is this unspeakable, almost taboo thing that people classify as “weird” or “abnormal” due to its violation of the social norms of communication. The act of talking to yourself, especially in public, purports a great deal about the stability of one’s mental state, when really, there is little connection. This assumption not only stigmatizes the beneficial habit of talking to oneself,
lakes and friendly debates
everyone I know what they would call places like the Grand Haven State Park, given that it’s on a lake. It’s been two years, and the results are still entirely split down the middle. I once took to polling the South Quad Dining Hall in an attempt to gauge more support for my stance (for better or for worse, University President Santa Ono agrees with me). I also
everyone has a strong opinion. My obsession with this argument is about more than just proving I’m right (which of course, I am). The lake versus beach argument (as I’ve come to call it) fascinates me because I’m not the only one that’s so enthralled by it. I didn’t expect everyone to form such rock-solid opinions on the issue. The debate usually kickstarts
grasping at anything they’ve got to prove a point. It’s a chance to learn about new friends and strangers in a bit of an unconventional way, which is part of what college is all about. I had no idea anyone even thought about the definition of “beach” before I got here. Now, I deliberate it at least twice a week.
followed up by asking where people were from. What I learned in these many conversations is exactly what you might expect: Michigan natives agree that they are beaches and people from the East or West Coast tend to disagree. They say that the title of “beach” is reserved for oceans and resort to calling sandy Michigan coastlines lakefronts or waterfronts. Anyone from a noncoastal state or outside of the U.S. can swing either way. Whatever their stance is, nearly
a conversation about people’s lives before college: their hometowns, their family beach weekends, their sister’s husband’s dog who really loves to swim. It’s an icebreaker that everyone relates to — and what beams more nostalgia into a college kid’s heart than talking about where they came from? It usually takes a while to crack people open and find little details that help you piece together who they are, but I think I’ve found a shortcut. A debate like this one gets people
but it also completely misunderstands the cluster of symptoms that characterize mental disorders such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective or schizotypal disorder, all of which involve some level of hallucination or delusion — not to be confused with self-talk.
Most of us — whether it varies from mumbling under our breath once or twice while doing the dishes or, if you’re more dramatic like me, faking a phone call — engage in selftalk to some degree. The purpose of self-talk is often questioned in its research, because communication itself usually serves the purpose of exchanging information from one party to another. However, a person cannot have and lack information at the same time, can they? Ergo, what the heck is the point of self-talk?
I don’t mean to crap on empirically proven research (I’m no Dr. Phil) but I must raise a wary finger in protest. At least for me, and for those I’ve spoken to that share this habit, talking to oneself doesn’t necessarily carry any “communicative intent.” At least, not in the conventional sense. It’s true, I can’t have and lack information at the same time, but I can lack a robust understanding of the information that I already possess. And for me, talking about difficult emotions or complex dilemmas one-on-one with myself is the most effective way for me to process them.
Of course, I’m hardly the spokesperson for self-talk, and I’m in no way seeking to pioneer the “Talking to Yourself in Public” movement. After all, I do hide behind the protective guise of my AirPods and the questionable fake phone call. I just wish it came off as a little less weird when I tell people about it — though I suppose I pinned the tail on my own donkey here. Amid the enthusiastic nods and camaraderie I’ve found with others who also do this, I’ve also endured my fair share of bizarre glances and speechless reactions when people can’t relate to my five-star ingenious habit. I get it, some things just aren’t as commonplace as others (we can’t all be gym rats), but if you’re able, don’t knock it till you try it! At the end of the day, no one can tell if you’re talking to yourself or to your long-lost great-grandmother on the phone. So if you ever see me running my mouth on South University Avenue with my AirPods in, rest assured — I’m obviously, definitely on the phone with my best friend. No further questions.
What you’re left with instead is a new friend and a never-ending topic of conversation.
Beyond digging deeper into the details of my classmates’ lives, it’s my go-to conversation starter because it’s a debate that lands in the rare intersection of passionate and unproblematic. There are certain topics society has agreed not to bring up in casual situations so as not to start a fight. We all know not to bring up the election during Thanksgiving dinner with extended family, or to ask a new friend if they believe in God.
But this isn’t politics, it’s not religion, it’s “what do you call the sandy shore of a lake?” And while everyone launches with full-force bravado into the reasoning behind their answer, there’s no particular way to leave someone bitter by bickering over locational terminology. To date, I can’t come up with another argument that fills a room with so much intensity, yet still fails to make anyone truly upset; there are no moral ramifications to such an argument.
It’s easy to believe you can make friends through shared hatred or common ground — that’s why friendships thrive at grueling food service jobs and in the worst classes you’ve ever taken. But I’d argue that you can just as easily make friends by disagreeing. That’s not to say that every initial conversation you have with someone should be an argument, but it’s widely believed that productive arguments can strengthen relationships. If you spend too much time tiptoeing around your true opinion by agreeing with someone all the time, you’ll never fully understand all the things that make them who they are, and you’re likely to get fed up in the process. The lake vs. beach argument is the perfect segue into a relationship based on more than just some mutual friends or a shared love for football.
With that in mind, I’m not one to shy away from respectfully disagreeing with a person I’m still getting to know. How else would I have learned that my roommate pours her milk before her cereal? Or that my best friend doesn’t like Italian restaurants? We bond by expressing our opinions in low stakes environments all the time, and that’s why the lake vs. beach argument does such a good job of breaking the ice. So, I continue to wreak just a little bit of havoc anytime you put me in a room full of people I’m trying to get to know better, because I’m confident that it will result in everyone feeling a little closer to one another. You might never get me to cave when it comes to Michigan beaches, whether water is wet or how to pronounce the word “bagel,” but if we’ve argued about it, consider yourself my friend.
PAIGE WILSON Statement Columnist
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Dusty May’s rise to Michigan coach through fostering relationships and the little, everyday moments
call and hit a few.”
As a member of the Michigan Basketball team strolling through the Player Development Center, walking past Michigan coach Dusty May is very common — at any hour of the day. May, who lives and breathes basketball, spends much of his time in the facility gaining any possible edge he can. Through listening to podcasts, watching tape, playing with players and especially building relationships, May does everything he can to put his team in a position to succeed.
Walking past May in the facility is common and seeing him in his office watching basketball isn’t shocking. So as a result, getting a meeting with May isn’t a hard thing to do. All his players have to do is walk through the facility and run into May — because he’s there all the time and always willing to talk.
“This morning I met with three players just in passing,” May said Monday. “I just saw them and said, ‘Hey, let me know before you leave. I would love to just check in, see how you’re doing, see how you feel after yesterday’s practice.’ So there’s every single day trying to text,
That’s the type of relationships May builds. It might not be a long-winded conversation, but meaningful bits of information and consistently checking in builds trust between him and his players.
And those conversations can be as simple as a burger.
“It’s not an hour-long conversation, but when he thinks of something, whether it might be like a burger, for instance, he’ll remember when his former players liked a particular burger, and he’ll call them and say, ‘Hey, remember this burger?’ ” Michigan assistant coach Akeem Miskdeen told The Michigan Daily. “He doesn’t necessarily call someone and say, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ He thinks of something and he thinks of that person and he spends a couple of minutes with them.
“That’s just the small doses,” Miskdeen continued. “Just imagine if you get hit once every week or once a week with some small doses of conversation, versus just spending an hour on the phone with someone. I think that’s more impactful.”
With a multitude of experience — working behind high-profile coaches and being a sponge to all the tactics and strategies used by his colleagues — May found his own coaching style.
Priority number one for Dusty May is effective and efficient communication — and with that, everything else falls into place.
Through his constant presence in the facility and small doses of conversation with players and coaches, May ascended his way through the ranks of college basketball and now is in a position to lead Michigan into a new era.
***
Born and raised in Indiana, May was surrounded by basketball. He played in high school at Eastern Greene High, but unlike many head coaches in today’s age, May didn’t play collegiate basketball.
By no means, though, does that mean he doesn’t have collegiate experience. In fact, May had probably one of the most influential introductions to collegiate basketball, and one that he still finds himself impacted by today.
“There’s no question I wouldn’t be here today without … being around Coach Knight every day,” May said at Big Ten Media Days Oct. 3.
As a student manager under legendary former Indiana coach Bob Knight, May learned many valuable lessons. But one in particular stuck with May as he became a head coach.
“Immediately after becoming
SportsMonday: Michigan needs
The majority of Michigan coach Sherrone Moore’s posts on X fall into one of two categories: birthday wishes to his players and iterations of the side-eye emoji or “Yes sir! #smash” to indicate positive recruiting news. His birthday posts average 10,000-20,000 views, while his vague recruiting posts incite massive engagement, often garnering hundreds of thousands of views.
There’s good reason for Moore and the Michigan fanbase to be excited over recruiting news,
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a head coach, I caught myself saying a lot of his expressions and phrases and thinking about a lot of the things that he talked about,” May said. “But most importantly, his ability to take complex concepts and make them seem simple, make players understand in a quick, efficient manner and efficiency of language outside of the four letter words was something he was very adept at.” Effective communication, the
more
type used to build relationships with players as a head coach, isn’t a skill May fully harnessed over the next 19 seasons. He worked his way through the coaching tree from staffer to assistant, and only when he became a head coach were those tactics fully utilized.
Dusty May coaches the team. Holly Burkhart/Daily. Buy this photo. Immediately after college, May worked at USC for two seasons as an administrative
But his understanding of basketball through the lens of his experiences with Knight only continued to grow. And through the next period of his life as an assistant under many different coaches and coaching styles, May prioritized acting as a sponge and focusing all of his energy on basketball to set himself up down the line.
than recruiting wins to signify the program is trending upward
especially amid a dreary season on the field. And Moore deserves to celebrate his wins after he was dealt a bad hand to start with, taking over for former coach Jim Harbaugh in late January and immediately facing a mass exodus of coaching personnel.
The Wolverines faced a dead stretch on the recruiting front immediately following the regime change, but since June, Moore and his staff have turned things around.
“I think we’re doing a good job with this recruiting class,” Moore said Oct. 14. “But we’ll continue to bring in the pieces needed that we need help immediately to replace and do things and sustain the suc-
cess that we need to get.”
With five-star offensive tackle Andrew Abalola and four fourstar defensive backs committed in the 2025 class, Moore and his staff have addressed two major positions of need. And reportedly in talks with LSU five-star quarterback commit Bryce Underwood, Michigan clearly isn’t afraid to make bold moves to fill positions in dire need of improvement.
Moore and company have one part of the equation down, but that will mean little until they can turn it into on-field results.
The cornerstone of Michigan’s success in the past few years has been development. Recruiting talented players out of high school
like former quarterback J.J. McCarthy and junior cornerback Will Johnson certainly bolstered the Wolverines, but developing unheralded prospects like former defensive back Mike Sainristil and former linebacker Michael Barrett was where they reached the elite level.
This year, Michigan retained Johnson and many other former four-star recruits on the defensive side of the ball. Junior defensive linemen Mason Graham and Kenneth Grant are widely considered the best interior duo in the country, and senior safety Makari Paige, sophomore cornerback Jyaire Hill and junior safety Zeke Berry were expected to prove
their former four-star status in increased roles.
On paper, those players, with their four- and five-star backgrounds, should make up a stellar defense. Yet the Wolverines’ defense ranks 47th in the country in total yardage allowed — a far cry from the top spot that last year’s squad claimed with the same, if not fewer high-end recruits.
On offense, the sheer amount of turnover from last season and the quarterback situation make it hard to determine if Michigan has managed to develop its pieces effectively. But even just the fact that the Wolverines have had such a meltdown at the quar-
terback position doesn’t inspire confidence in the coaching staff’s ability to develop talent. Michigan has the 13th-ranked recruiting class in the nation for 2025. It managed to flip fourstar cornerback Shamari Earls from Georgia on Friday, and the conversation with Underwood speaks volumes about the pull Moore has achieved with recruits. Clearly, recruits are buying into Moore’s system. Now, he needs to prove that he can develop them to maximize their talents — the exact area in which the Wolverines have been struggling as of late.
Sam Novotny: Michigan is out of the national conversation, Dusty May can bring them back in it
The Michigan men’s basketball team is just five years removed from being in a place that felt very familiar to how it is now. Legendary coach John Beilein moved on to greener pastures, and Wolverines’ legendary player Juwan Howard took his place. It was said at the time that ‘only the Wolverines’ jerseys will remind you of yesteryear’. Again, Michigan stands in that same spot, but with different expectations for what comes next. When Beilein left, the program took a noticeable change in direction. Howard was inexperienced at the collegiate coaching level, and turned his focus to higherlevel recruits, wavering from Beilein’s method of building up less desired prospects into veteran, stable teams. While it worked for a period of time, this approach eventually faltered.
Howard’s tactics during his tenure as the head man for the Wolverines eventually took them out of the national men’s college basketball zeitgeist that Beilein had put them in over a period of 10 years. But now, new coach Dusty May can get people talking about Michigan again. Ultimately, of course, Howard had his successes. He led the Wolverines to an Elite Eight and Sweet 16. In 2021, his Michigan team was a No.1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and he won AP Coach of the Year, among other awards. How-
ard initially appeared to be the perfect choice to take Beilein’s torch and carry it forward. But his tenure was later overshadowed by multiple incidents, including being suspended five games in 2022 for striking a Wisconsin assistant coach. These incidents shed a bad light on Howard and his program, but worse yet, his teams stopped winning. The 2022-23 and 2023-24
seasons bore witness to a program in steady decline. Howard’s methodology began to fail, star players transferred out, and other star players struggled to stay on the court.
With every extracurricular incident, painful transfer and winnable game lost, Michigan slipped further and further from the national conversation that Beilein had worked so hard to reinsert
the Wolverines into. And by the time Howard was let go, they were effectively no longer in it.
Here enters May. His hiring signaled a new era in a few ways. May, unlike Howard was at the time of his hiring, is a weathered coach who has lots of wins under his belt at the Divison I level. His teams play a style of basketball that orients itself well within the college game, and furthermore,
he earned the job without any prior connection to the University — a factor in Howard’s hiring in 2019.
Similar to Howard, May won a Coach of the Year in 2023, albeit not the AP’s — and even made a Final Four at Florida Atlantic.
Now, his philosophical similarities as a coach to Beilein make it clear that he can bring the Wolverines back into the national conversation.
“He has high integrity, outstanding character and drive, coupled with an unparalleled understanding of the game,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said at May’s introductory press conference May 26. “… The way he has led his teams speaks volumes about him as a coach. I am thrilled to have a coach who has demonstrated not only a capacity to develop talent and build successful programs, but have the understanding of the importance of the University community and the changing recruiting landscape.”
As was true five years ago, and perhaps even more so now, the jerseys are all that remain. May has reshaped the team with only three returning scholarship players, and the incoming transfers and freshmen have already brought some buzz back. The Wolverines have surged up the KenPom rankings, now sitting at 36 before this season starts in comparison to ending last season at 128. Additionally, Michigan earned 19 votes in the AP preseason poll. May’s reshaping has already brought Michigan some new recognition, but numbers and rankings don’t mean anything to anyone until wins start to pile up. The respect that Beilein’s teams held from other coaches and fanbases was not earned because some writers thought they might be good, or thought highly of their incoming recruits. It was because Beilein won games, and he won them when
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ZACH EDWARDS
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REKHA LEONARD
DUCKED
AROUND
Michigan overwhelmed by No. 1 Oregon’s passing attack in loss
part of the game of football, you’ve just got to adjust, you can’t make excuses.”
Coming into the Michigan football team’s matchup with No. 1 Oregon on Saturday, it was already abundantly clear that the task that lay ahead of the Wolverines was monumental.
With 40 years separating the Wolverines from the last time they beat a top-ranked opponent, the stakes were high and the odds were already not in their favor. And then, just a couple of hours ahead of kickoff, the task got even taller.
With the release of Michigan’s injury report, star junior cornerback Will Johnson was ruled out of the contest. And adding insult to Johnson’s injury, the Wolverines’ other starting cornerback, sophomore Jyaire Hill, was ruled out as well. Against the Ducks’ prolific passing offense, they would be forced to go without the core of their secondary.
And in a disastrous second quarter, Michigan’s (5-4 overall, 3-3 Big Ten) secondary couldn’t contain Oregon’s (9-0, 6-0) electric passing offense piloted by quarterback Dillon Gabriel. With 156 passing yards and three rushing touchdowns in that quarter alone, the Ducks flew past the Wolverines’ defense and built an insurmountable lead that Michigan’s offense never overcame, falling 38-17.
“Not having the best corner in the country is always gonna be different and a challenge,” Michigan coach Sherrone Moore said of Will Johnson. “We always talk about next man up, but when you don’t have your two starting corners that’s part of it. That’s
From the very first two drives of the game, it was readily apparent that Oregon and the Wolverines’ offenses were moving at different speeds. On Michigan’s first drive, it gained 3 yards and was forced to punt. On the Ducks’ first drive, Gabriel marched his squad 63 yards down the field for a short passing touchdown to wide receiver Evan Stewart to open the scoring.
With the help of a fumble forced by senior wide receiver Joe Taylor on an Oregon punt return, the Wolverines managed to tie the game on their next drive.
Senior quarterback Davis Warren found junior wide receiver Tyler Morris in the end zone with an impressive cross-body throw. But after that, Michigan slowed and the Ducks sped up.
In a flash, Oregon scored three touchdowns on four drives in the second quarter alone. With 251 total yards and 170 passing yards on those drives, the Wolverines’ defense was overwhelmed.
Plagued by injury and forced to swap out of their normal positions, Michigan’s secondary left gaping holes for Gabriel to exploit. And with completions of 20, 24, 38 and 44 yards all in those three touchdown drives, Gabriel did just that, breaking off massive chunk plays almost at will.
With the passing game firing on all cylinders and marching the Ducks down the field, Oregon built an impressive 21-10 lead quickly with back-to-back short rushing touchdowns from running back Noah Whittington. But then, just as the Wolverines were forced into respecting the Ducks’ deep threat, Gabriel made Michigan pay on the ground.
Near the end of the first half on the Wolverines’ 23, Gabriel dropped back to pass, waited for the Wolverines’ secondary to bite, and then ran the ball 23 yards for an easy rushing touchdown to make it 28-10 at the half.
“We just got to execute better,” junior defensive lineman Derrick Moore said. “The first half didn’t go the way that we wanted, and we also let them get too many yards on us and things like that.”
In just a quarter, the game went from a close contest to out of reach for Michigan’s slow-paced offense. And by the time that the Wolverines’ defense woke up in the second half, it was already too late.
While Michigan’s offense scratched and clawed its way to a touchdown on its first drive out of the half — with a 6:35 drive that pushed 75 yards for another pretty touchdown pass from Warren to senior wide receiver Peyton O’Leary — that was all it could manage.
“As an offense we’ve got to start faster, keep our defense off of the field,” Warren said. “Just got to start faster. Got to start faster and bring that energy from the jump.”
And while Warren’s remarks were geared towards the offense, that mantra applied to the Wolverines at large. Because by the time that Michigan’s offense could sustain drives, it was already down by 18.
It didn’t matter that the Ducks put up just 10 points in the second half. It didn’t matter that the turnover issues that usually plague the Wolverines’ offense were absent. Michigan started too slow and was too inconsistent to catch up to the lead that had taken Gabriel and Oregon only a quarter to build through the air.
