Ann Arbor, Michigan
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Whitmer delivers 2025 State of the State address
‘In a divisive national moment where America needs a new way forward, Michigan can lead.’
CHRISTINA ZHANG Daily News Editor
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gave the third State of the State address of her second term from the Michigan State Capitol’s House Chamber Wednesday evening.
In the address, Whitmer called attention to accomplishments from her past seven years as governor and her plans to address issues in economic expansion, education and infrastructure.
In her opening remarks, Whitmer focused on political polarization and criticized tech companies for creating algorithms that exacerbate political divides.
“As for politics, there’s no sugar coating it — we seem very divided today,” Whitmer said. “Partisanship has affected every aspect of our lives, driven by opportunistic politicians and media figures who live by a philosophy of ‘I win if you lose.’ Their divisive rhetoric is amplified by algorithms designed to make us angry and keep us scrolling. We’re all being manipulated by the largest and most powerful companies in the world who profit more when we start to believe that we have nothing in common. But that’s just not true.”
Whitmer outlined her plans to benefit Michiganders through three avenues: reducing costs, creating jobs and delivering results. With mortgage rates exceeding 6% and the median homebuyer age reaching 56, Whitmer plans to make homeownership for young people more accessible by building more houses. She cited Texas and
Minnesota, two states combatting housing costs by altering land-use policies and building more housing, as examples for Michigan to follow.
“We must address the core issue of supply,” Whitmer said. “Right now, we are short 140,000 homes statewide, and the way forward is clear: We got to build, baby, build. Both Texas and Minnesota built more housing and drove costs down — we can too. … Let’s invest $2 billion to build, buy or fix nearly 11,000 homes.”
Whitmer highlighted the investments Michigan has made in career and technical education with initiatives such as Michigan Reconnect, the Michigan Achievement Scholarship and Community College Guarantee. However, Whitmer pointed out that women outnumber men in both college enrollment and home ownership rates.
“Just like with housing, there’s a gender gap in education too,” Whitmer said. “Women outnumber men at our community colleges, universities and most of all, in the Michigan Reconnect, where enrollment is two to one, women to men. We’ve built these great programs open to everyone, but we need to do a better job of getting more young men signed up. That’s why soon, I’m signing an executive directive that will make an effort to reach more young men and boost their enrollment in higher education and skills-training programs.”
One of Whitmer’s gubernatorial campaign pledges was to “fix the damn roads.” With her 2020 program Rebuilding Michigan coming to an end, Whitmer called attention to the need for funding to create long-term road solutions.
UMich Department of Astronomy will lead its first satellite launch
The
STarlight Acquisition and Reflection toward Interferometry project could pave the way to new exoplanet discoveries
ABIGAIL VANDERMOLEN Daily Staff Reporter
For the first time in its history, the University of Michigan Department of Astronomy is leading the launch of a satellite into space. The project, known as STarlight Acquisition and Reflection toward Interferometry, will test out a technique which, if successful, will help look for life on faraway planets and lower costs for space research.
The mission, funded by a $10 million grant from NASA, is set to launch in 2029. It will send two CubeSats, satellites approximately the size of a briefcase, into space with the goal of demonstrating that interferometry, a technique in which multiple smaller telescopes act together as one larger telescope, can be done in space. In the STARI mission, the two CubeSats will gather and send starlight between each other — something telescopes within an interferometer need to do. Though the CubeSats themselves will not be doing interferometry or gathering scientific data, the technique they are testing could be used in spacebased interferometers in the future.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, astronomy professor John Monnier, leader of the project, said interferometers in space could allow scientists to study exoplanets in greater detail than they are currently able with existing technology. Space-based interferometers would be less costly to produce than traditional space telescopes with the same level of power.
“In the last 20, 30 years, we’ve discovered so many thousands of exoplanets, and we’re finding
planets that we think are at the right distance from their star that they could have liquid water and could have life, but we’re still blind to go to that next step, like, ‘Is there life there?’” Monnier said. “It’s so tantalizing that … we’re so close to getting to that point. And we know how to do it. It’s just expensive right now to get there.”
Monnier said the purpose of the STARI mission is to open doors for future astronomers and their research.
“We want to do the astronomy,” Monnier said. “If nobody is doing this technology we need, then that’s our job to push, to try to find partners, to get help with the engineering on the aerospace side.
There are currently interferometers on Earth, but the interferometers are limited by factors such as weather and light diffraction from Earth’s atmosphere. Putting interferometers in space would not only overcome these issues but also allow for the telescopes within the interferometer to be further apart, making the interferometer more powerful. However, being in space also brings new engineering challenges.
The CubeSats in the STARI mission will be about a football field apart, but their location relative to each other cannot vary by more than a few millimeters.
According to Prachet Jain, who is collaborating on the project as an aerospace graduate student at Stanford University, making sure the satellites remain the correct distance from each other is one of the greatest challenges with the project.
“First of all, assessing how much (the satellites are) drifting
relative to each other and then controlling that drift is actually, I think, going to be one of the biggest challenges of this mission,” Jain said. “These types of stringent requirements haven’t really been met in space before.”
To help with the engineering side of things, Monnier is working with James Cutler, U-M aerospace engineering professor. In addition to working with Cutler’s lab, the group also teamed up with researchers and engineers at Stanford University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jain, who attended the University as an undergraduate and worked with Monnier to develop the STARI mission, told The Daily each university brings a different area of expertise to the project.
“No university in any of these CubeSat missions is an expert at every single subsystem, and it takes a bunch of subsystems to get a satellite mission off the ground, both literally and figuratively,” Jain said.
A unique aspect of the project is that it will give students an opportunity to participate, according to Monnier. Rackham student Jacob Klinger is working with Cutler’s lab to coordinate efforts between the different universities. Klinger said it was exciting to work on something that could be used in the future.
“Coming from the aerospace background, obviously, to be able to work on designing something and maybe even touching something that eventually gets put into space, is just super cool,” Klinger said. “That’s kind of like, life dream, right there.”
“There is a lot left to do, and with Rebuilding Michigan soon phasing out, we’re facing a serious funding cliff,” Whitmer said. “To get it right, we all have to recognize some hard truths. To my friends in the GOP, a longterm fix means new, fair sources of revenue. We can’t cut our way to better roads without slashing public safety, health or schools. To my fellow Democrats, cuts will need to be a part of the solution.”
Whitmer also said she hopes to combat the rising dependency of youth on cell phones with legislation to restrict phone use in classrooms. As of September 2024, 15 states have passed similar laws or enacted policies that restrict the use of cell phones in schools to mitigate the negative impacts phone use can have on children’s health and education.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Candlelight vigil on third anniversary of Russian attack on Ukraine held on the Diag
‘It is important to express Ann Arbor’s solidarity with Ukraine, to express support for our sister city Lubny.’
criticism of Russia’s actions and Russian President Vladimir Putin were more widespread.
More than 100 University of Michigan students, Ann Arbor residents and visitors gathered to acknowledge the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine with a candlelight vigil on the Diag and a carillon concert at the Burton Memorial Tower Monday evening. Organized by the Ann Arbor branch of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, the vigil featured speeches by public figures and a rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem played on the Baird Carillon.
The war between Russia and Ukraine began in February 2014 and escalated after Russia’s full-scale attack Feb. 24, 2022, with conflict still ongoing. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Ruth Shamraj, Michigan Medicine technical writer and coordinator of the vigil, said she felt it was important to acknowledge the violence faced by Ukrainian people over the past three years.
“I think it’s important to mark the three long years of violence, aggression, the pain, the suffering, the bloodshed, the perseverance of the Ukrainian people and all kinds of people, not just Ukraine,” Shamraj said.
Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor gave a speech to the audience condemning Russian hostility towards Ukraine as well as U.S. citizens’ divided perception of the war. Taylor said he wished
“We condemn violence and aggression in war driven by ego and by greed and sentence thousands to death, injury, dislocation, fear and suffering,” Taylor said. “I’d like to say that our political culture here in America, … our condemnation of Putin’s war is universal, but we all know that it is not.”
The city has close ties to Lubny, Ukraine — Ann Arbor’s sister city since 2024 — and members of the community have previously supported Ukraine in its war effort. In an interview with The Daily, Taylor said he felt Trump’s new administration shifted the U.S. public opinion on the war and stressed the importance of the city’s efforts to aid Ukraine.
President Donald Trump recently falsely called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator after inaccurately claiming Ukraine was at fault for starting the war.
“It is important to express Ann Arbor’s solidarity with Ukraine, to express support for our sister city Lubny and to condemn both the initial aggression and the aggression apologists in Washington,” Taylor said.
Taylor also told the crowd that hostility toward immigrants and refugees, including those from Ukraine, will not be welcome in Ann Arbor.
“Ann Arbor is a welcoming community,” Taylor said. “We regularly welcome immigrants and refugees from all corners of the globe. We deeply welcome
those from Ukraine who have come here to make our little corner of the earth their home. They will always have a home here in Ann Arbor.”
Following Taylor’s speech, Georgia Frost, an aide to Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich, spoke at the event and said she felt trust in the federal government to provide U.S. citizens with accurate information on the RussianUkrainian war has dwindled with the new administration.
“We also aren’t able to trust in our president to give us valid information about what is going on and communicate that to the American people,” Frost said.
“And that is a fact that is also extremely scary for many of the people who rely on our own government to provide active and relevant information about our stance and foreign affairs. But we do not have that trust in our administration anymore.” Frost told attendees to take action and contact their policymakers to share their concerns regarding the RussianUkrainian war.
“The only way we’re able to advocate amongst our colleagues and to the administration and to our senators is if we have a high number of people reaching out to us every day, telling us what’s on their minds,” Frost said. “We can say, ‘This is exactly how many people called us today concerned with the exact same thing they’ve been concerned about for years now, and things have not changed.’”
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
CAMPUS LIFE
VINCENT SIQUIG Daily Staff Reporter
Holly Burkhart/DAILY
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer delivers the State of the State address inside the Michigan House of Representatives chamber at the Michigan State Capitol Wednesday evening.
Holly Burkhart/DAILY House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, talks to reporters after the State of the State address at the Michigan State Capitol Feb. 26.
UMich community reacts to Department of Education’s letter on
in educational institutions
DEI
‘DEI is not a box to check off — it’s an atmosphere that must be intentionally created and actively maintained.’
AANYA PANYADAHUNDI & ABBY HARRIS Daily Staff Reporters
On Feb. 18, University President Santa Ono sent a University-wide email notifying students, faculty and staff of a letter the University of Michigan received from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights regarding the future of race-based programming.
The letter sent to the University reaffirms the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that race-based affirmative action violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The letter goes on to claim diversity, equity and inclusion programs indoctrinate students with false premises of systemic and structural racism.
“DEI programs frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not,” the letter wrote. “Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes.”
The Department of Education has given institutions 14 days from the letter’s release on Feb. 14th to assess their compliance with the new policies or risk losing federal funding. These changes have significant implications for educational institutions across the country, potentially impacting the University’s DEI initiatives and how race-based programming will be navigated moving forward.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA sophomore Alexander Richmond, president of College Republicans at the
University of Michigan, said he believes the new policies will result in a more inclusive campus environment.
“I think the letter is a significant step towards ensuring fairness and equality in how universities such as Michigan operate,” Richmond said. “I think that the Supreme Court in 2023 made it clear that race-based affirmative action admissions was unlawful. This letter rightfully extends that logic to other areas of campus life. Some DEI programs prioritize racial categorization over individual merit, and often that creates resentment and division as opposed to unity.”
Richmond said the letter is not an absolute rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives but rather a challenge to how they are typically approached.
“I understand why some of our community feels that
this is an attack on inclusion,” Richmond said. “But we’re working to support all students and nobody wants to see that mission undermined. The letter isn’t banning diversity efforts. It’s banning using race as a deciding factor.”
In an interview with The Daily, Magdalena Zaborowska, professor and chair of the Department of American culture, said she found the language used to refer to issues of civil rights in the letter upsetting.
“We know what civil rights is all about: that people gave their lives, that people are still fighting against white supremacy and against injustice,” Zaborowska said. “And if someone talks about social justice as a ‘nebulous issue,’ that’s offensive.”
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Ann Arbor businesses adapt to rising egg prices
As egg prices rise due to avian influenza outbreaks, local business owners are finding ways to adapt to increased costs
into this business,” Boyer said.
As egg prices rise nationwide, local business owners are finding ways to adapt to increased costs. The change in egg prices is largely due to an increase in avian influenza outbreaks, and the Michigan Cage-Free Egg Law enacted Dec. 31, 2024.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Georgia Panos, manager of Village Kitchen of Ann Arbor, said she was met with an unexpected response when the carrier could not fill her order.
“There was a shortage on Friday, February 14, where we ordered eggs, and the deliverer dropped three cases,” Panos said. “Then when I asked him, ‘can you bring me three cases back?’ he said, ‘we don’t have any more eggs’.”
LSA sophomore Ivan Dashkevich, vice president of projects for APEX Consulting, told The Daily he predicts general food costs will increase long-term due to the Cage-Free Law.
“(The Cage-Free Law is)
going to be here to stay, and I think that’s going to be a fixed cost,” Dashkevich said. “For businesses within the Ann Arbor space, I think we’d see pastries going up in price, because you need the eggs to actually hold everything together. Some bread is probably going to be more expensive as well, and overall, I don’t think we’ll go back to that low egg price.”
Dashkavich lives in a house with four other roommates and said the recent increase in egg prices have caused him to reconsider his shopping habits.
“(The Cage-Free Law) was a little bit of a hit,” Dashkavich said. “I think we ended up scaling back our purchases from the 36 pack down to a 24 pack for that time. I think last time we went, it was closer to $7 or $8 and the price nearly doubled, so we just didn’t buy eggs.”
In an interview with The Daily, Iggy’s Eggies owner Eli Boyer said he based his business model around eggs as a low-cost staple and worries that a longterm increase in prices could negatively impact his business and increase the cost of living.
“The low and stable price of eggs is one of the reasons I got
“That’s my business case — working with an item that you can count on being a certain price forever, almost. Eggs are something that determine different cost of living metrics in our country, so it’s definitely going to have some impact on that when such a staple item is fluctuating to such a great degree.”
In an interview with The Daily, Panos said increased egg prices have forced her to haggle with food distributors in an effort to save money.
“I have Sysco, Gordon Foods and Miceli that I order food from once a week, and I have to negotiate with them,” Panos said. “There’s bidding wars. Yesterday, I had to wait to order the eggs until 4 p.m. because Sysco was trying to lower the prices, so I got the eggs for $79 per case, whereas Miceli had them for $110 per case.”
Panos also said she is going to raise prices for menu items to compensate for high egg prices. Because she is cautious of upsetting customers, Panos said she is struggling to balance customer satisfaction and the best choice for her business.
“You really can’t do what Waffle House is doing where they’re gonna charge you $0.50 per egg —it doesn’t go here in a small restaurant, people are gonna get angry,” Panos said. “I have a new menu coming out next week. I added $1 to each breakfast item.”
Boyer is currently working with Nexecon Consulting Group, a student-run consulting organization through the Ross School of Business that works with a wide variety of businesses to improve sales and revenue. Boyer said he hopes to create a consistent relationship with an egg producer in the future to ensure a fixed price of eggs.
“There is a certain point where your guest is going to become very price sensitive, and we’re conscious of that,” Boyer said. “We’re trying not to overreact. We’re trying to play the long game. We’re trying to focus on finding a partnership with somebody in the state of Michigan, whether a collective or an egg farm, to be a dedicated partner, so creating more of a relationship there rather than your typical restaurant and vendor.”
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PHOTO OF THE WEEK
THE ANN ARBOR PREMIERE OF 17 BLOCKS
In 1999, filmmaker Davy Rothbart — an Ann Arbor native — gave the Sanford family a video camera to begin filming their lives in Southeast Washington, D.C. Together, Davy and the Sanfords kept filming and collaborating... for 20 years.
“A singular achievement in documentary filmmaking!” — Variety
In this space, we invite our contributors to be vulnerable and authentic about our experiences and the important issues in our world today.
Our work represents our identities in a way that is both unapologetic and creative. We are a community that reclaims our stories on our own terms.
We don’t have BPD back home
I grew up with a loving family: a mother and father still together and two younger brothers. We even had a few birds — parakeets similar to the ones my dad had when he was a boy: blue, yellow and even green. For most of my life, we lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, and yet, I still felt empty, like something was missing. It was easier to distract myself as a child. I could play in the yard until the sun dipped low or lose myself in books where characters always solved all their problems within 300 pages. Books where hidden answers could be retrieved from the corners of old, dusty rooms or withered cabinets, and everything would suddenly be okay again. But there was no magic answer for me. I could hide away in these books alongside these characters for a few hours, but once I was done reading, that fleeting escape was also gone. I clung to those stories as though they were a guide for my own life, that I too would someday find my answer. It was easier, then, to believe that the emptiness would disappear on its own, a shadow cast by the right light. But as I grew older, the problems became more real, more solid — less like floating thoughts and more like weights I carried with me each day. The silence grew louder, the spaces I once found refuge in felt smaller
AMANY SAYED MiC Columnist
I have always been bad at small talk.
Staring down at my phone screen, I wonder if it’s too late for me to change my name and move somewhere no one can find me. My sister and I have just tried to start a conversation with our uncle in our best attempt at Arabic. Against our better judgement, we’ve decided to send a voice note asking “Sho akhbarak? ” in Arabic, or “ What’s new? ” The embarrassment over my awful Arabic doubles with each second that passes.
We share an anxious glance when the response comes in. My uncle’s laughter is what comes through first. My heart squeezes. It’s been almost three years since we last saw him in person and, though we do our best to stay in touch, our conversations have been few and far between.
… Wallashe. … Fe 7arb hon …” my uncle says, before laughing his response off softly. The voice note ends.
“… Nothing much. … There’s a war here …” Like most bilingual children of immigrants, I struggle to keep contact with my family overseas. Unlike most others, my family isn’t just difficult to reach because of our language barrier, but also because of an ongoing war. Although Lebanon is currently under a shaky ceasefire, I find myself unable to stop fearing for my family’s lives. Every time there is a new headline describing one-sided violations of a truce no one ever expected to hold, my breath catches in my throat.
How many more articles before I read about my hometown getting hit? Before one of my family members is counted amongst the casualties? In the West, we find ourselves numbed
and more suffocating. The room I once thought large and expansive started to shrink, like the walls were closing in on me, little by little until even my breathing felt heavy and my thoughts were too loud.
My mom and dad grew up in Iraq and didn’t know much about major mental health disorders. It wasn’t their fault, really — they were just raised to believe such things didn’t exist. In their world, sadness was a passing moment, grief was something to overcome, and anything else? Well, it was a silence to bear. So I bore it. I didn’t blame them. How could I? They loved me, I knew that much, but love alone couldn’t name what I felt, and it certainly couldn’t heal it. That is a strange feeling, knowing the people surrounding you care about you deeply, and yet still feeling deeply alone. My parents didn’t grow up the way I did. They grew up with struggle, and yet I was the one who couldn’t get her mental health in check. It felt as though I was in a room full of people, screaming at the top of my lungs, but no one, not even my mother and father, could hear me. Or maybe they heard me, but they just didn’t respond. Like they couldn’t understand. Like I was speaking a foreign language. So I stopped screaming, stopped even whispering, and just tried existing — quietly, invisibly, without disturbing anyone. Everything fell apart when I was 16. The emptiness, the crashing, the silent desperation
all snowballed until it became unbearable. I really don’t remember what tipped me over the edge, maybe some stupid fight, or a grade that wasn’t good enough, or that growing realization that I didn’t fit into my life the way other people did into theirs. It definitely didn’t feel “stupid” back then. It felt like the culmination of years of invisible cracks finally giving way like the floor had dropped out from under me and I couldn’t stop falling.
My mother noticed and constantly asked me why I was always so sad. I couldn’t explain it to her, so I would just tell her I wasn’t sad, I was just growing up. She didn’t understand what that meant, but she would drop it and leave me alone in the corner of my room. She tried noticing, but she couldn’t decipher the smoke signals I was sending her way. How could she? I couldn’t understand them myself. I had been at war with myself long before anyone else noticed. My mother just questioned me, but it did nothing. I continued to fight that quiet war in moments when the house was empty, in a room that should have felt safe but didn’t. I tried talking to my parents about it, but it felt wrong. I didn’t want to throw such a heavy burden on them. Yes, they’re my parents, and they’ll love me no matter what, but they were never taught the significance of mental health. CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
to the headlines. Months of exposure to the bloodshed that continues to occur in Lebanon, Palestine and even Ukraine have left us helpless and avoidant. As I scroll through my Instagram feed, I can watch one video advertising the latest skincare product right before an innocent child in Gaza begs me through the screen to help her, her skin dried and yellow. It’s all too easy to scroll again, as if as long as the tragedy is not on my phone screen, it doesn’t exist. I wonder why I’ve been given the opportunity to look away, while others are forced to live through these tragedies.
It’s not just a difficult time to simply be alive, but also to be a student at a school like the University of Michigan. Here, we not only work and play hard but also have strong opinions and a desire to express them. Since last October, tensions on campus have been thick as the genocide in Gaza continues on, funded by our school as well as our government. In April 2024, students set up an encampment on the Diag in protest and to attempt to pressure the university towards divestment. Before and since then, groups such as Students Allied for Freedom and Equality and the TAHRIR coalition have hosted protests, die-ins, vigils and educational meetings addressing the conflict. As of this article being written, Michigan’s Attorney General has charged three protestors for their die-in during last festifall. As a freshman, I don’t know anything about a college experience beyond this one — one where the students are simultaneously connected and divided over the same issue. I don’t know if campus would ever feel any different for me. I am an Arab-American Muslim who wears the hijab — already, this identity comes with scrutiny. Coming from a community like
Something to chew on: Boiling down the boba liberal
KARAH POST MiC Columnist
I can’t remember precisely the first time I had boba; I only remember disliking it. I think I was too small to properly chew the tapioca pearls. Choking on them cemented my distaste for them. More than a decade later, I am now a boba fiend and always end up crawling back to my traditional order of classic black milk tea with pearls.
Like me, bubble tea originated from East Asia and was adopted by America. When I was 17 months old, a white family came to the Chinese province of Jiangjin and took me back to sunny California. I viewed my transracial family as normal (it was all I knew!), but as I grew up and moved to Colorado, it was clear I didn’t fit in. I am Chinese and I am American. But somewhere the lines blurred — I became too culturally white to be Asian and was too outwardly Asian to be white. I know I’m not alone in this feeling.
Food is often the first and most important cultural connection immigrants carry to their host land. Most kids with Asian parents are immersed in their native culture at home, whether that is making xiaolongbao with their dad, shopping for kimchi with their mother or wrapping onigiri with their siblings. These seemingly normal activities demonstrate the casual ways cultures comprise the immersive practices of generations. But for many Asian adoptees, there is no template to follow to learn these skills that perhaps all East Asians should know, like how to hold chopsticks properly.
Without an “Asian shaman” to teach basic dumpling recipes or to
Calling home
Dearborn, where my faith and culture are commonly shared, I knew what I would be signing myself up for coming to Ann Arbor. However, when I walk to class with the Palestinian flag pinned to my backpack, I know that the lingering looks I receive are not solely due to the scarf on my head. Despite this, I feel empowered by the Arab community on campus, and hold my head a little higher every time I pass by a student with a kuffiyeh wrapped around their shoulders.
Everyday, I am terrified. I worry that every phone call with my family will be the last. In the fall, before the supposed ceasefire, my family had to flee their homes and take temporary refuge outside their home village. It is difficult to imagine the country I love ravaged by war and destruction. In my mind, Lebanon is preserved as an expanse of rolling hills, cedar trees and beautiful homes. Logically, I know this is not the case anymore.
While I worry about my country and my people, I selfishly worry about my own safety as well. When I walk back to my dorm from evening classes, I clutch my backpack a little tighter and whisper verses of the Quran under my breath. Stories of attacks and killings ring in my ears every time someone looks at me a little too long. You don’t have to participate in a protest, voice your opinions or even be a Palestine supporter at all to be a target; you just have to look like one.
The guilt over thinking about myself or forgetting about what’s going on for even a moment eats at me constantly. I struggle to focus on my coursework while the knowledge that innocent people are being killed and tortured daily lies dormant in the back of my mind. Studying for a test or attending a lecture seem like the least important
answer the internalized question of “how to be Asian?,” adoptees find other means to explore their own cultural identity. The nagging inquirer in me didn’t break through the surface until high school, when I met more adoptees and Asians. In an effort to explore my own sense of self, I turned to discovering new foods. I felt a responsibility to learn more about Asian foods, as I already loved cooking … and eating, of course. My entry point was — oddly enough — thanks to boba.
My discovery of boba occurred before it became an Instagramable, trendy new drink to try. What started in Asian enclaves in major cities quickly spread to chain restaurants across more suburban areas and birthed a new generation of Asian fusion that strayed further away from the traditional Taiwanese bubble tea. This “reinvention” of boba drinks in the United States serves as a good representation of the difficulties of assimilation of modern Asian Americans seeking to keep their Asian roots while also fitting in with American culture.
As Asian American youth consume a newly Americanized bubble tea, they begin to define their
generation as one that is “upwardly mobile,” a term employed by The New Yorker writer, Jiayang Fan. The change in consumption of “Americanized boba,” (with boba flavors deviating from black tea with condensed milk and tapioca pearls to flavors like coffee or creme brulee) reflects how Asian American youth consume and adopt Americanized versions of Asian products, heritage or media as their own. This subculture plows its own path in distinction from their immigrant parents, establishing new means to acculturate. Finding sanctuary in these products of consumption is applicable to the term “boba liberal” — one I personally had not heard of until I read Fan’s article. To boil it down, a boba liberal (a label popularized on X, because where else would such a name arise), is an Asian American who rallies around “acceptable” Asian trends when they are at peak popularity but who often ignores greater systemic, racial issues that are subtext in a broader cultural, political enterprise. In a deleted post, X user @diaspora_red called it “all sugar, no substance.” CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
priorities considering what’s going on. On the outside, I am calm. My parents tell me to make safe decisions — to keep my head down and try not to call attention to myself. On the inside? I am screaming. Humans are supposed to be easily adaptable creatures. Although some of us might be wary of change, our bodies tend to learn to deal with new environments relatively easily upon being introduced to them. Yet, we find ourselves currently living in a situation we are wholly underprepared to handle. What is the proper way to go through daily life not in the midst of, but right on the edge of mass destruction, if it even exists? You can pretend you are unaware of what is going on, but you cannot claim to be educated and then turn a blind eye to the history being made in our generation. During election season, when campus was filled with a sense of hope and responsibility, I found myself watching students enthusiastically sign up to vote. Still 17, I couldn’t participate, but
that didn’t stop volunteers from eagerly thrusting clipboards towards me and asking me to register if I hadn’t already. Part of me couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off — like the fun stickers, photo booths and mariachi bands were taking away from the bigger picture. As U-M students, we have the unique opportunity and platform to let our voices be heard. After the election, I was disappointed — not only by the outcome, but by our failure to use that opportunity wisely and pressuring politicians to take what’s going on overseas seriously.
The last time I spoke with my family overseas, they had just returned to their homes after months of being holed up in another family’s house. My hands shook as I held the phone to my ear, unsure of how to answer their questions. Who cared how I was doing? My exams and assignments were nothing in comparison to everything they were going through. I struggled to convey this to them in clumsy Arabic, relief flooding me upon
hearing their voices.
For the past couple of years, even the most mundane things have felt like enormous blessings. The roof over my head, the food in my fridge and the clean water in my bottle are just some of the luxuries I am grateful for. As students, though it’s impossible to ignore the tragedies that are occurring overseas, we should also remember to be grateful for the lectures we have the privilege to attend or the homework we have the privilege to complete. Rather than drown in the guilt of whether or not we deserve the opportunities we’ve been given, we should instead take full advantage of them and put 100% into everything we do. The only thing we can do is offer each other support and a helping hand when we need it. Against all odds, I hope for a more peaceful tomorrow. At night, I dream of returning to Lebanon and embracing my family.
Despite the rubble and destruction, it will always be home.
Vivien Wang/DAILY
Vivien Wang/DAILY
TIAMO SHAUYA MiC Columnist
Michigan in Color is The Michigan Daily’s section by and for People of Color.
I would rather have no representation than misrepresentation
LEILA KASSEM MiC Columnist
The most immediate source of controversy in any Great Books course is its name, which inevitably prompts the question: What makes a great book? And more importantly, who? This was the first question we were asked to wrestle with in Great Books 191, one of the most popular first-year writing courses at the University of Michigan.
It’s no secret that the literati have bestowed the title of “great book” almost exclusively upon works by white, male authors, from Virgil to Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, and continue to do so despite the relatively recent efforts to include acclaimed works by a more diverse set of authors. Although I signed up for the Great Books class eager to continue immersing myself in the so-called literary canon, even if that only included the works of the tired, dead white authors, I was pleasantly surprised to listen to our professor address the Westerncentric agenda inherent in the course’s title, and to even discuss the controversies sparked by the class in the past.
The title of the course, he told us, points to centuries of debate over which areas of study were worth serious scholarship and which weren’t, and serves as an arena for the wider culture wars between postmodernist, liberal academics and conservative academics who see in the standard literary canon a sacred source of Western civilization.
The purpose of the course, as the syllabus put it, was “both to affirm and to problematize the notion of ‘Great Books’ and to encourage students to think about how and why some books
become ‘Great,’ who gets to decide and how the students themselves relate to these books and this process.” However, as I opened the required reading section of the syllabus, I was greeted by a lineup of authors that the staunchest defender of Western civilization and its “great books” would have been thrilled to see: Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Catullus, Virgil and Petronius. Only for our final paper were we required to choose any modern work that was based upon one of the Greco-Roman works we had read, allowing room for one non-white author.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Nonetheless, I was excited to jump into the works that are foundational to so much of the art, literature and ideas around us. How many references, from subtle inspiration to direct quotations, from these classical works had gone right over my head in the past due to my own ignorance of their contents? I was about to find out. I fell in love with almost every work we read. “The Odyssey,”
and its hero’s intensely human longing for home, nostos, charmed me and melted my heart.
“The Oresteia” and Sappho’s tragically fragmented collection of poetry left me hungry for more, compelling me to reread both works in alternative translations.
Herodotus’ “Histories” granted me a newfound appreciation for historical scholarship and dizzyingly clear insight into the ancient Greeks’ perspective on their place in the world in the context of the civilizations around them.
The delight I was met with throughout the semester with every work we completed, however, made our final assignment dealing with a modern retelling of a classical work we had read that much more disappointing. Among the suggested modern works for us to choose from was Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel “Home Fire,” which is based on Sophocles’ magnum opus, “Antigone.” Intrigued by the option of reading a work by a Muslim woman author, I immediately chose it to be the
To have and to hold: My fear of missing out
Sometimes, I wish that my eyes could function as cameras whose lenses capture every moment, no matter how minuscule or mundane they seem. That way, none of my memories — past, present or future — could slip through the folds of my brain ever again. Even now, when I flash back to certain nights that happened only a few months ago, the memories are all fuzzy and distant, the emotions I felt merely remnants of what I wish I could remember. All I’m left with is a bittersweet sense of regret and fondness. On one hand, my phone stayed tucked away and I was able to truly live in the moment, but on the other, it didn’t occur to me to snap a quick photo to commemorate the good times that encompassed those nights.
As my grandmother’s đám giỗ approached every year, my phone pinged with texts from my mom reminding me to “wear something nice for pictures,” to which I rolled my eyes because it was something I was very used to hearing from her. At first, I never quite understood my mom’s desire for photos of our family at every holiday, birthday, vacation and social event, all of which were inevitably plastered all over her Facebook page.
However, as I grew older and my memory dulled, I came to understand her intentions all along. She wanted not only to share the parts of our lives that our family members in Việt Nam were missing out on, but also to remember what we looked like — what we were wearing, how tall we were and all the people present in that moment of time; she hoped to gather every little detail of the day that she could
garner within the two dimensions of a photograph. After all, that is the only way to truly make memories last forever, albeit not without its flaws. Ideally, life for most spans many decades, which are composed of endless seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years; could you just imagine how many memories you would have made by the end of your life? Perhaps more importantly, could you imagine how many of those memories you would have forgotten?
People say that we are a mosaic of the people in our lives, but for me, I am a mosaic of my memories. I am a stained-glass mural composed of all the experiences in my life that have changed me. I came to this realization as I sat staring at my grandma in her hospital bed, tubes protruding out of every orifice in her body, inevitably waiting for what lay beyond life. She was the personification of strength, someone who persevered through the things that would render any normal person cold and empty, and she did it with a smile. From when I was a doe-eyed 4-year-old toddler with chubby cheeks and pigtails, she had always told me, “Nhớ tự tế nhe Nhi,” and as I stood before her days after I turned 11, I couldn’t help but cry because that was the
only memory of her that remained. Unfortunately, I was too young to remember all the moments my parents recounted to me before we left Việt Nam: our long naps on her straw-laid bed, the endless bowls of rau muống xào tỏi and rice we (I) devoured, our long walks around her garden and offerings I would help her cook to honor our ancestors on important dates. All that remained of her was that one line. Occasionally, I wonder if my dad looks at me and sees his mother, a resemblance long echoed by my aunts and uncles back in Việt Nam. My grandma lived a long and fulfilling life surrounded by the people she loved, and I still wish that I could hear all the stories that made up her time on Earth so I could paint a mosaic not only for her, but also for myself. At some point in our lives, I’m sure that all of us have found ourselves in the midst of a laughter-filled night and thought to ourselves, “Wow, I wish I could preserve this memory for the rest of time like a motion picture,” but it simply is not something the human mind has the capacity to do. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to try defying nature. CONTINUED AT
novel I’d analyze for my final project. “Home Fire” tells the story of Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz Pasha, three British-Pakistani Muslim siblings. The memory of their father, a terrorist who died in prison, haunts their lives. Parvaiz, in the depths of despair and alienation, is manipulated by an old friend of his father into joining a terrorist group in Syria.
Aneeka, who serves as Shamsie’s modern take on Sophocles’ heroine Antigone, tries everything she can to bring her twin brother home, attempting to convince him to return while he’s alive and pressuring the British Home Secretary Karamat Lone to allow his corpse to be brought back to Britain for burial after his death. Meanwhile, Karamat struggles with his identity as a British-Pakistani man; after years of running from his Muslim heritage and shaping his public image as a “pure” and loyal Brit, he must confront his identity when his son Eamonn falls in love with Aneeka.
Besides the outrageously stereotypical plotline of a young Muslim man joining ISIS, the
treatment of the hijab and hijabi women was perhaps the most disturbing aspect of “Home Fire.”
Isma is sure to take off her hijab each time before entering the home of Dr. Shah, an ostensible fellow Muslim woman and Isma’s eccentric mentor and former professor, “out of consideration” for the offense she takes at the sight of a woman in a hijab. The author appears to expect her audience to meet this piece of exposition with amusement.
To recommend such an unapologetically fetishistic work as a modern, culturally diverse take on a Greek tragedy to a class of impressionable 18 year olds is unconscionable. Placing it in this category side by side with Toni Morrison’s brilliant “Song of Solomon,” which cleverly draws upon “The Odyssey” to create an epic in its own right, only added insult to injury. In a way, it appeared to be a novel tagged onto the class to simply check the box of including “the Muslim perspective,” in a Great Books class, though it is hard to imagine any person from a Muslim background reading it without cringing at the careless audacity between its pages. I would rather have no representation in a literature course, or in any setting for that matter, than to have thoughtless insertions of my identity into offensively sloppy narratives. It is baffling that a course which had enchanted me with the ancient stories of people who differ from me in culture, language, and religion across a vast stretch of time and space could commit such a blunder with the only novel I had anticipated connecting with in a way I could not hope to with the others. More than anything, I was dismayed at the likelihood that “Home Fire” would be many of my classmates’ first exposure to Muslim-centric literature, and for the first time, I felt uncomfortable sitting in the lecture hall as I wondered whether it had soured any of my classmates’ perception of me as a Muslim woman.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Aneeka, who also wears the hijab, plays the role of the exotic seductress for Eamonn without a beat, in a scene so crass, one is left to wonder how any female Muslim author could have penned it: “She unpinned the hijab … then pulled off the tightfitting cap beneath it. She shook her head slightly and her hair, long and dark, fell about her shoulders like something out of a shampoo commercial. She looked at him, expectant.” She proceeds to undress herself for Eamonn, and goes so far as to ask him if he would like her to keep only her hijab on, to which he says yes. The extent to which Shamsie molds her female Muslim characters into fetishized objects of consumption for the men around them in the service of orientalist fantasy would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive.
Where I have seen my face before
I. Doctora Fernandez
In the mountains of the Monte Plata province in the Dominican Republic, the sun sets my back ablaze and leaves me warm and sticky, the fabric of my tank top plastered to my skin. My straightened hair curls at the nape of my neck. Heat like I have never felt before — I’m panting as I enter the clinic. I’m not lugging our project team’s vaccine fridge, but I have been tasked with setting all these wires on the dining table, and yes, it was an actual dining table, just sitting right there in the middle of the one-room clinic. As I wrap the cords into neat coils, two things surprise me: the table and the freshly made poster lying on top of it. The table is familiar in the way rice is — comforting and childlike — and I suddenly have this deja-vu moment of sitting at a table just like this at seven years old and swinging my legs underneath to avoid touching the cool, marble floor. The edges of the table are rough and improperly sanded, just like the one we had when I lived in India.
The poster resting on the table clearly says something about dengue fever, even though it’s entirely in Spanish. It’s familiar in a uniquely sickening way, like when my stomach twists after a particularly sharp turn in the car, and the anticipation of motion sickness kills me more than the nausea itself. I remember dengue fever and I simultaneously don’t (I was asleep for most of it).
This clinic, this place, everything at the top of this mountain in a country I have never been to is familiar. Familiar, familiar. The word echoes around my head and I can’t figure out what’s familiar, only that something is. We are looking for the doctor we normally speak to over
grainy WhatsApp calls, where we promise him we are working on a solution to keep vaccines cold up here, in this sweltering, sickeningly familiar heat. Instead, we see an unfamiliar face. She introduces herself as Doctora Fernandez. Her scrubs have cute little dogs all over them. She smiles when she sees me from behind her desk.
“Ya he visto tu cara,” she says. Our teammate-slash-translator laughs, perhaps because she knows that’s impossible. I am not Dominican and have never been here before.
My stomach twists. I don’t know what I’m anticipating now.
“I have one of those faces,” I tell her, as warmly as I can. II. Fatima
I had this student when I was a swim instructor. Let’s call her Fatima. She had this really determined little expression that was hilarious, but also uniquely relatable. My brother told me once that I walk to school with the same face that a pro wrestler entering the ring might have. I can’t help it — I tell everyone it’s RBF because I don’t know what else it could be.
Fatima was eight years old when I taught her as she was trying to learn breaststroke, but she would progressively sink lower and lower the further down the lane she got. Something about her entire head being under the water used to freak her out majorly, which I get — swimming rarely requires total submersion.
Unless you’re learning breaststroke.
After the fifth time she thrashed herself back upright, I decided to have her move on to something she knew and was familiar with already. All of a sudden, she flung herself back into the water and struggled back to the wall in what could have been a proper stroke, if you squinted and stepped back to avoid her splashing. I was a little
surprised and very wet after the wild kicking.
“We can move on, if you want,” I told her. She exhaled through her nose forcefully, shooting out tiny drops of chlorinated water. “No.”
“No?”
She shook her head forcefully. More spray on me. “I’m not scared.”
I tapped the surface of the water. “I get scared sometimes, too. It’s okay to take a break.”
“It’s never okay to take a break!” She shouted, and back in the water she went.
I thought about that as she wiggled down the lane. All the applications I’ve never sent out of fear I wasn’t qualified; all the times I never told someone what I felt about them out of fear of what their answer might be; when I stopped playing soccer because I wasn’t progressing as quickly as my teammates; and when I quit backstroke on the swim team because I was too slow at it a few years prior.
I gripped the kickboard to my chest and let myself fall back into the pool, floating on my back and watching the ceiling pipes hum with pool energy. Fatima shouts at me to get up. We only have twenty minutes left of class and she wants to try again.
III. Amma Amma is 26 years older than me, which is wild to realize at my progressively advancing age of twenty; I’m sure as hell not having kids in six years. When we visit home (India), we flip through photo albums with blackand-white pictures of her and my uncle and grandparents. She snaps a picture of a picture and sends it through Whatsapp to my brother, who is in a phase of his adolescence where he genuinely believes himself to be the greatest comedian on Earth.
AMRITA KONDUR
MiC Columnist
Anjalee Raval/DAILY
NHI VO
MiC Columnist
Lauren Hahn/DAILY
I had the strangest dream last night. I was standing in a darkened room, across from everything I’ve ever wanted. Though the image was foggy, I could just make out its silhouette. I woke up before I could reach it, but the shape of it remained in my mind. I tried to claw it into existence. Every night, I see it a little clearer. Every day, I make it a little more real.
That’s the power of a dream. It’s a fantasy that keeps us going until we learn to embrace our reality. It’s an indulgence in sweet possibilities. It’s the escape we need into our own minds where we can find ourselves. Everything that has ever existed or ever will starts out as a dream. A foggy, intangible dream. Where will they take us? What do they reveal about our innermost fears and desires? Who will they help us become?
The Dreams B-Side
‘Lady Bird’ and the messy, wild ambition of a teenage girl
CAMPBELL JOHNS Digital Culture Beat Editor
In the opening scene of Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” Saoirse Ronan (“Little Women”) delivers the knock-out line:
“I wish I could live through something.” It’s a sidebar to start an argument, an offhand, quiet remark to which her mother (Laurie Metcalf,
“Roseanne”) simply replies:
“Aren’t you?” It’s almost ridiculous. She’s enduring 2002, living through a lot — the aftermath of a national tragedy, the excitement and horror at the new millennium — yet completely blind to it.
But Lady Bird insists “The only exciting thing about 2002 is that it’s a palindrome.” Her pretentious attitude is deadly in its earnestness. She’s 17, living
a privileged Californian life, picking a petty argument with her mother over her trivial business with college. I’m obsessed with it.
The line’s lasting power lies in its slight dreamy confusion. The emphasis on “live” implies Lady Bird doesn’t quite believe she’s living, or at least living correctly. What could be more adolescent than the belief that you’re not living the ruddy, raw
life you’ve been promised? Or, at least living it the way you’re supposed to.
Around the age of 17, Olivia Rodrigo wrote “Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” At 16, Lorde wrote “This dream isn’t feeling sweet.” It’s a symptom of adolescence, I think, to be suffocated by the youth (or at least the dream of it) you’re told to love. Adolescence is sold as this sparkling jewel, the peak of one’s life — never to be redone, and inherently impossible to get right. It’s natural to angrily falter in the face of this teenage fantasy your elementary school self would’ve sworn on.
But then Gerwig punches you with “through something.” It’s not just that Lady Bird wants to live her teenage girlhood with bright burning color, she wants to live it with the payoff of great ambition. She wants to live through something great — something memorable. She wants to be able to look back at her youth with pride in her resilience against something worth noting, something impressive even if that resilience involves centering herself in a global event. But, as her
selfish desires beg, who doesn’t want others to revel in their bravery, to humbly receive great praise? The almost embarrassing bravery here lies in Lady Bird’s ability to say it out loud.
I watched “Lady Bird” for the first time at 18. As quite possibly the biggest Greta Gerwig fan in any room at any given point, I was saving the first viewing of her directorial debut for a time I felt I desperately needed it. And at that point, I needed it. On Winter Break from my freshman year, overwhelmed and rapidly losing motivation, I turned on this movie in search of a saving grace to feel anything other than afraid. And while I wept because of the mother-daughter relationship, because of the poignant love for a hometown, what ruined me the most was Lady Bird’s unflinching ambition.
Plot twists are notoriously difficult to pull off. Successful plot twists require a delicate touch from the writer. They must strike a balance between surprising the viewer and remaining within the rules set by the narrative. New information revealed by the twist should come as a shock, but shouldn’t undermine the previous buildup of the story. If either of these factors are compromised, the twist runs the risk of feeling sloppy or unsatisfying.
Films like “The Sixth Sense” and “Shutter Island” are notorious for their iconic twist endings. The twists are subtly foreshadowed throughout the story and viewers pick up on additional details upon rewatching. Seemingly irrelevant lines are given new weight, and you’re left kicking yourself for not noticing them sooner. They make sense within the context of the story and don’t detract from other narrative elements.
The worst kind of plot twist isn’t the kind you see coming — it’s the kind that doesn’t feel earned. Being unable to predict the twist isn’t always
a sign that it was successful. Sometimes, the twist was just so ridiculous that no reasonable person should see it coming. If a classic whodunit was solved by the reveal that the butler was secretly an alien, viewers might leave with a few questions. This brings us to one of the twists most infamous for its poor execution: the “it was all just a dream” trope.
The idea behind the trope is simple: A character, usually the protagonist, experiences the events of their respective story, only for it to be revealed that their journey was “all just a dream.” Essentially, the whole story happens within the character’s mind.
In many ways, the dream trope has become synonymous with lazy writing. Dreams are known for their nonsensical nature, so a writer can easily (albeit obviously) cover any plot holes in the narrative by explaining them as a byproduct of the dream. This also allows the writer to retcon any poorlyreceived story elements, sometimes as major as a character’s death.
One of the worst offenders of this trope is “Dallas,” an American soap opera surrounding a family and its oil empire. In the season eight finale, fan-favorite character
Was it all just a dream?
Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy, “Step by Step”) was killed off, prompting backlash from fans angry about the death of such a beloved character. To remedy this, the writers retconned the entirety of season nine, revealing that Bobby’s death and any events afterward all took place in Pam’s (Victoria Principal, “Vigilante Force”) dreams. Rather than appease audiences, the twist backfired, leaving viewers frustrated with the sudden switch in the narrative.
My primary issue with the dream trope is that it erases the entire point of a story. Any relationships a character has formed or development they’ve undergone is rendered null because the plot never actually happened. Much of Pam’s storyline in season nine surrounded her grappling with Bobby’s death, and completely scrapping that storyline feels like a disservice to her character. Not only did the writers have to change course completely, they also had to backtrack on an entire season of development.
While working on “Lady Bird,” Gerwig said “I like confidence that’s not totally based on anything.” This is something I could not even dream of feeling around the time of my first viewing. The notion that Lady Bird could dream of greatness simply for the act of dreaming — out of a
belief in her ability rather than some never-ending search for proof of it — struck something deep.
Later in the scene, Lady Bird says “I want to go where culture is, like New York. Or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire. Where writers live in the woods.” It’s such a skewed version of success, such an intentionally oblivious understanding of culture and the world. Yet I’m rooting for her every word. There’s nothing I want more than to believe in something that fervently, and to know I belong right alongside it. No matter how slanted that reality might be, no matter the inevitability of being proven wrong, I want to stand that boldly. To dream so big that I fog over and get it all wrong. One reading of these lines could lean toward Gerwig poking fun at teenage ambition. And maybe she is, at least a little. But I see it as holding a lighter to these desires. When else in your life are you allowed to dream this big? Even if it’s a little off? Do you lose it in your adulthood, this unflinching belief in yourself? Is that one of life’s great tragedies? CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
stakes from the start. The ending of a story is the final impression it leaves on the viewer, and adding a cheap twist at the end to excuse otherwise poor writing leaves a bad taste in the audience’s mouth. It leaves people wondering why they even bothered to watch it in the first place. How can viewers care about what happened when the characters themselves don’t?
can properly foreshadow a storyline occurring entirely in the protagonist’s mind. Maybe a character’s appearance gradually shifts throughout the story, or maybe the lamp starts looking funny halfway through. Whatever the writer does, they need to weave the dream narrative into the fabric of their story. Without the right stitching, the whole thing comes apart.
In the movie, Dorothy (Judy Garland, “A Star Is
Beyond the individual characters, the central messages of the story are often lost because the plot had no
Yet, in spite of its flaws, a story employing the dream trope can still work effectively. When the
Perhaps one of the most famous “it was all a dream” endings comes from the
is knocked unconscious during a tornado that strikes her house before waking up in the magical world of Oz. Aided by Oz’s saturated color palette, the movie has a dreamlike quality to it, and this presentation is highly intentional. The reveal that Dorothy was dreaming makes sense because it doesn’t feel like an afterthought — it’s clear from the very beginning.
Holly Burkhart/DAILY
Courtesy of Holly Burkhart
Born”)
Holly Burkhart/DAILY
MORGAN SIERADSKI TV Beat Editor
MINA TOBYA Senior Arts Editor
Doodles by Cecilia Ledezma
It’s not a situationship — it’s nothing
SARAH PATTERSON Style Beat Editor
“I’m in a situationship.”
If the connection requires a label that isn’t boyfriend, girlfriend or partner, it’s nothing. It’s an avoidance of a bigger issue — words unsaid, weak ties or simple disinterest.
I say this because I see you.
I see the way you sit waiting for their text, all for the long-awaited moment to be a “HAHA” reaction. Deflating after an entire day kept aloft by the sheer possibility of a confession of their love. I did it too. I see the way you stalk their Spotify to see if they’ve made a discreet playlist for you as you have for them. Trust me, I am the queen of the discreet Spotify playlist kingdom. I, too, have put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” to avoid sitting patiently like a dog waiting for a treat, still checking every two minutes for something I knew wasn’t coming.
Last year, I thought about situationships completely differently. I was a chronic Hinge swiper, random makeout enjoyer and, frankly, internet stalker. I had flirting down to a science. I knew what perfume to wear, the best way to style my hair and the exact amount of eyeliner I could get away with to make myself look just edgy enough. I even had a top named after a boy — “The **** Top” because everyone said that the shirt held great flirting power after famously pulling a great guy one night. In some ways, I craved the process. Craving the adrenaline rush of a pregame and the walk to whatever potential mating ground was on the docket that night. Begging the DJ to play “Doses and Mimosas” with an uncomfortably warm drink in my hand. Scanning the crowd for a suitable love interest. Ah, yes, there he is. Subtle eye contact becomes staring and slowly moving my friends toward him. And then I think of something clever, typically a compliment on what he’s wearing. The rest is, well, not history. It’s more of a eulogy. We would probably kiss, and then I would either be obsessed with them for the next two weeks or they would be obsessed with me. Or it would be neither and their Snapchat would sit unanswered for so long it would expire.
I can hear your qualms now. Yes, it can be empowering to go to parties and receive attention from the opposite sex. Yes, women have every right to go after a man in the same strategic way men do to them. But none of these truths are exclusive to what I’m saying here. The lifestyle was only empowering for me when it worked, when the obsession was mutual for a period of time. Short or long, it didn’t matter, as long as it made it past sunrise. Some nights, I would go through all the motions just for a boy to tell me I was “lecturing” him after he opened up to me, my attempts to provide comfort lost on him. Or he would remove me as a follower on Instagram randomly, all for me to find out he was in a situationship with someone else. Or he would tell me he really liked me with a massive smile on his face and two days later tell me he hoped he “didn’t give the impression that he wanted a relationship.”
These boys lived in the fantasy world I created for
them. A choose-your-ownadventure game for the desperate. Want to never recover from the similarities you shared? Go left. Want to wonder why you weren’t enough in the face of a blonde? Go right. It was a never-ending cycle of adrenaline rushes and the inevitable come down. Eventually, the routine became so predictable that I had pre-scheduled Sunday afternoon mental breakdowns. I would leave the newsroom, go to my Mary Markley Hall dorm, pray my roommate wasn’t there and listen to boygenius or Lorde, depending on the type of angst I was going for. The lights were on and I was real. There was no one to wake up beside. There was no one to bring me treats during work; no one to inquire about how I was or what I was thinking; no pennies for my thoughts. Only the searing pain from yet another boy ripping my heart out of my chest.
As my freshman year went on, it became more and more obvious that I couldn’t keep doing this. The obsessions were too great. I couldn’t take only being loved in the dark anymore.
Luckily, I went home for the summer.
And by luckily, I mean I was so miserable that there was no way for me to even think about boys — Alabama was miserable enough for the both of us. But even in the monotonous humid summer, I still had Ann Arbor Hinge. So, what else was I to do except flirt? Wasn’t it the only thing I was good at? Allowing men to objectify me as a mysterious figure who wrote and listened to the music they loved? Pretending to brush off their oddly condescending remarks in search of a raw connection?
It would, of course, lead to nothing. It would lead to more disappointment. Another face to avoid as I walk down State Street. That’s the story of my life — at least, it was before I found him.
The way I searched for love was all wrong. I was never myself. I was only performing for the boy of the night, who didn’t care about my ambition or the fervor with which I defend my friends. They never cried when I talked about stuffed animals or memorized my bagel order. And the fact is: They didn’t want to. They saw me for who I really was — desperate, unsure of myself, so hungry that I resorted to searching for crumbs, not the entire cake. And so, they gave me crumbs.
After the final failure, a situationship of sorts, being across states was finally enough to make me realize I couldn’t keep doing this. I couldn’t keep telling men that I cried watching “Barbie and The Diamond Castle” all for them to just not get it — and, worse, just not care. Even the self-proclaimed “good ones” didn’t care. There was no way, then, that this impossible, amazing character would find me. My dream boy got lost somewhere between the Sigma Nu basement and my carefully curated Hinge profile. It was time to leave this odyssey in the past and look toward the future: one where a more self-assured version of myself existed. It was time to work to find her. CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
In defense of dreamers (and
SIENA BERES Daily Arts Writer
my Chris McCandless tattoo)
Who was Chris McCandless?
A short, bitter answer:
Chris McCandless is a cautionary tale. Chris McCandless was a rich kid who went off and died in the Alaskan wilderness because he was suicidal, spoiled, stupid or some combination of all three. His death is a reminder that lofty ideas are a dangerous thing in the hands of people with the privilege to act upon them.
Another longer, kinder, but still pretty short answer:
Chris McCandless was a smart, wealthy kid who read smart books that told him our world is ill — made sick by industry, money, materialism and our disconnect from nature. He became convinced that society was hollow. His family was a complex mess — his sister later wrote a book about the abuse both she and Chris suffered at
the hands of their parents — and a bonafide product of everything he came to view as wrong with the world. Because of all of this, as noted in his biography, he had a tough time finding meaning in connections with others. He was a bit angry.
The real problem, though, is that Chris McCandless was given a lot.
In most of the books he read — “Walden,” “Call of the Wild,” “War and Peace” — men reached transcendence through struggle, something McCandless didn’t have in his daily life. He had a trust fund, a degree from Emory University and the freedom to do basically anything he wanted to. There were never any stakes for him. In one book found with his remains, “NEED FOR A PURPOSE” is written above a passage. For Chris, struggle would bring purpose.
So, instead of building bombs, Chris McCandless went to the woods to live deliberately. He packed his bags with more books
than tools, burned all his money (except his trust fund, which was given to charity), abandoned his yellow Datsun and hitchhiked to Alaska. He camped out in a field in Fairbanks City Bus 142, living off the land and writing in his journal. This went on for 113 days until McCandless died of starvation, poison or perhaps stupidity.
A year later, in 1993, a journalist named Jon Krakauer wrote an article about McCandless called “Death of an Innocent.” Three years after that, he expanded the article into a novel called “Into the Wild.” And, as the life cycle of capitalism goes, a movie adaptation of the book was released in 2007 starring Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart. His story became a sensation. It’s truly miraculous how perfect a story Chris McCandless’s life and death have been made into. There’s the overarching tragedy of a dead 24-year-old: the mystery of why combined with a sense
of intrigue powerful enough to start a debate at the family dinner table — or in your AP English language and composition class.
I, like many, first read “Into The Wild” during my junior year of high school. My class had pretty average reactions to the book, half the room exclaiming “oh my god he was so stupid” and the other half mourning because “wow that’s so sad.” For the most part, I agreed with both sentiments. The story clearly wasn’t black and white, so I simply stood in the middle. We read articles in response to the novel, including a particularly venomous hit piece by an Alaskan park ranger. The ranger lamented Chris’ naivety, calling him suicidal, ignorant and, worst of all, ordinary. The class had average reactions to that, too. I, however, got so angry that, after class, I went and cried in a bathroom stall.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
MINA TOBYA Senior Arts Editor
Chasing a dream of Ithaka
Every good thing in my life can be traced back to this: I learned how to write. I learned to write well. I learned to write often. And, despite the attitudes of most people I looked up to, I learned that my writing — and writing in general — has value. The only reason any of that got through my thick skull was the gentle guiding hand of the best teacher I’ve ever had.
Ms. S, in the three years I spent in the sacred space of her English classroom, molded me into a real writer. I had the potential for it — the trappings of personality and skill not quite yet honed or explored — but she fanned those embers until they became roaring flames. Without her careful, deliberate winds, the spark would’ve died in my chest before it ever found fuel by feeding on the page.
Freshman year, she let me and my friends sit in her classroom before the first bell. We broke the peaceful silence of her prep time with some animated drivel about the latest YA novel we were reading. Occasionally, when my 14-year-old brain could conjure up a more critical approach to the text than excited fanaticism, she’d chime in to answer my questions. How come these books broke so many of the rules she taught us as foundations of writing?
When could I start to break those rules? How the hell did someone (you know who I’m talking about) manage to include this many ellipses in a single paragraph?
If her patience ever waned — which, remembering myself at 14, it must’ve — she didn’t show it. She’d prompt follow-
up questions and recommend new texts to look into. She never made seeking out these answers seem like work; it was the most lively of amusements. And, for someone too young to trust her own thoughts — let alone follow them down a path toward the unknown — these expansions of thinking came as welcome delights.
It’s not that I was ever timid, shy or without a voice. On the contrary, my voice has always been much louder than it probably should be. But it remained unpolished, directionless, not worth listening to, as it often came without thought. She listened even then, and she placed in my hands the tools I’d need to make stentorian proclamations instead of hollow echoes.
I walked into her class with a lot to say, not sure how or when but knowing that I had to get the words out. She saw this, and she never faulted me for it. If I spoke out of turn during
and Juliet,” she’d find a way to tailor my words into something of substance. If I spent too long on a rant about the commodification of women during a Socratic seminar (there was a lot to say), she’d digest my words and connect them to someone else’s. If I raised my hand too eagerly to answer an obscure question, she’d appreciate having someone in class who cared about the topic as much as she did.
That was, I think, what made her so special to me: the recognition of passion on both sides.
She knew I loved literature — that I loved to write even though I wasn’t good at it yet — and that this love could drive me as it drove her. The fervor with which she taught every play and every novel approached piety. As the years went on, I mirrored the way her eyes lit up through each discussion of Shakespeare and Mary
surety that this meaning could take us somewhere. This was a devotion I count myself lucky to have caught.
Ms. S wanted to take us to Ithaka. Her passion set our sails. She shared the poem “Ithaka” by C. P. Cavafy with us on the first day of her 12th grade AP literature class, and on the last. It was a class I wasn’t sure I could get to just a few years earlier. I didn’t think I was a good enough writer for it, and I told her as much. She laughed, clearly in disagreement, and made me promise to register for the course. So, I did, but only because I knew she’d be my teacher. I followed her advice so I could stay in that sacred, windowless room that somehow still felt like the sun shone through its walls each day. I could hold onto the person I looked up to, the one who laughed when I told her I didn’t feel good enough because she always believed that I was. She believed it so fervently that
Image courtesy of Holly Burkhart
Holly Burkhart/DAILY
Doodles by Cecilia Ledezma
Opinion
Ditch the grind, find your why: The science of intentional living
Everywhere we turn, someone is telling us how to live better. Productivity gurus push morning routines, motivational speakers tell us to “seize the day” and social media drowns us in advice on how to optimize every aspect of our lives. But despite all this guidance, many of us still feel aimless, caught between the pressure to do more and the exhaustion of trying to control everything. The problem isn’t that we lack direction — it’s that we’ve confused purpose with productivity and intentionality with control. Living with purpose isn’t about micromanaging our lives or chasing constant self-improvement; it’s about aligning our actions with what truly matters to us. And as psychology and neuroscience suggest, this alignment isn’t just good for our mental wellbeing — it’s essential for it. We’ve been sold a version of purpose that is exhausting. The modern narrative around living with intention often revolves around rigid control — waking up at 5 a.m., tracking every habit, setting ambitious five-year goals and constantly striving for selfoptimization. But this version of purpose often leads to burnout rather than fulfillment. Many people assume that to live with purpose, they need a grand mission. Legacy-cementing accomplishments like starting a nonprofit, writing a bestselling book or making a major career change, for example. Purpose isn’t always about sweeping transformations; it can also be found in small, everyday choices that bring meaning to our lives. Psychologists that study well-being suggest that a sense of purpose doesn’t have to be
tied to a single, overarching life mission. Instead, it can emerge from consistently engaging in activities that align with our values. Some might find purpose in their career, while others find it in their relationships, creative pursuits or simple acts of kindness. The key is not to manufacture a purpose that sounds impressive but to identify what genuinely fulfills us. When we let go of the pressure to control everything and instead focus on intentional alignment, we create a more sustainable and meaningful way to live.
Living with purpose isn’t just about personal fulfillment — it’s about aligning actions with values, whether that means pursuing a quieter, reflective life or embracing the structure and discipline of the grind. Studies have shown that having a sense of purpose — whether through structured goals, personal reflection or deep relationships — is linked to lower stress levels, greater resilience and even a longer lifespan. Neuroscientists have identified how purposeseeking activities interact with our brain chemistry, particularly in relation to dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation and reward. When we engage in activities that align with our values, our brain reinforces those behaviors with a steady release of dopamine, creating a sense of fulfillment. This is different from the quick, fleeting dopamine hits we get from social media likes or instant gratification; purposedriven dopamine is more sustainable, helping us build long-term satisfaction rather than short-term pleasure.
In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl argued that human beings don’t just seek happiness —
they seek meaning. His work, alongside modern psychological research, suggests that people with a strong sense of purpose are more resilient in the face of adversity. This is because purpose provides a framework for how we interpret challenges. Instead of seeing setbacks as failures, those who live intentionally view them as part of a larger journey. The key, then, isn’t just to find purpose — it’s to cultivate it through daily habits and intentional decisions. If living with purpose is about aligning our actions with what truly matters, then the question becomes: how do we actually do that? The good news is that living intentionally doesn’t require a radical lifestyle overhaul. Instead, it starts with small, conscious choices that create momentum over time. One approach, backed by behavioral psychology, is to focus on valuedriven decision-making. Rather than setting arbitrary goals, we can ask ourselves: Does this action align with what I care about? For example, if someone values creativity, they might commit to writing or playing music regularly — not for external validation, but because it deepens their sense of self.
Another practical tool is habit stacking, a concept popularized by James Clear in “Atomic Habits.” This involves linking a meaningful habit to an existing routine, making it easier to maintain. For example, if someone wants to be more intentional about gratitude, they might decide to write down one thing they appreciate every morning while they drink their coffee. Small, repeatable actions like these shift our brain’s focus from seeking quick rewards to cultivating deeper fulfillment.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
At the beginning of each semester, the temptation to use artificial intelligence to reduce time spent on assignments becomes stronger. Students can get an answer to their questions within seconds — regardless of whether it is the most correct answer, platforms generate responses to satisfy users’ requests. AI has grown at an unprecedented rate; chatbots such as ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that responds to prompts using data to create new content, has more than 400 million weekly users, more than double the number of users from the previous year.
As the technology continues to develop, it becomes easier to ask a chatbot for solutions instead of spending time working through a problem alone. Students, including myself, jump to AI to summarize readings, generate essay topics and solve problem sets. Just two years ago, this solution would have never come across my mind, but now, AI is infiltrating most aspects of our lives. Even so, the solution to the problems AI creates is to stop using it as much as possible.
The use of ChatGPT among American teenagers doubled from 2023 to 2024. As a result, younger generations have more than likely formed a dependence on the extremely accessible program.
A reliance on technology can prove to be unhealthy and harmful. AI diminishes an individual’s growth and cannot replicate interactions
and experiences with other humans. When students go to ChatGPT instead of working through and breaking down questions, they deny themselves an opportunity to struggle through and the satisfaction of solving a problem. Without this crucial cognitive process, individuals are at a disadvantage because generative AI does the work for them. Students must be proactive with the rise of AI by finding the balance between using the resource for academic growth and academic dependence.
Ultimately, students attend college to earn an education. Using shortcuts, such as ChatGPT, to summarize readings and answer problem sets effectively hinders any progress and learning made in the classroom while paying thousands of dollars for a degree. Students should spend their undergraduate experience earning a degree, not using ChatGPT to cut corners.
AI is unreliable as well. The program generates summaries of many researched topics, passing them off as completely truthful, but misleading stories and unchecked facts remain possible. Without conducting the proper research, individuals may use the information and facts obtained from AI as fact.
If we take a break from the use of AI — assuming it is possible — we may find ourselves more prepared for the job market and world ahead of us. Developing skills that AI cannot replace will be essential for the future, as any tasks that AI can complete will most likely become automated.
Students should be aware of the rise of AI in the job market and account for it. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments does not prepare students for the real world, which is arguably the purpose of college. Students must focus on developing skills that AI cannot replicate. Instead of using ChatGPT to answer icebreakers or brainstorm essay topics, individuals should come up with answers on their own. Regularly using ChatGPT forms muscle memory, and over time, individuals lose their creativity, can experience burnout and harm their career. Students who focus on learning and strengthening skills AI cannot replace are stronger candidates in the workforce. The future of AI is unknown, but we are in control of our responses and use of technology. Take time to solve the complex problem, or use your personality to answer an icebreaker. It is important to balance the benefits of AI while staying aware of the risk of overreliance. Get to know the details of the program and how to ask the right questions. It’s unrealistic to expect individuals to completely halt their AI use; instead, they should focus on growing the skills that AI cannot replicate. Students — use AI to become a more competitive job applicant, but be wary of overusing the program. AI and other generative technologies are not disappearing but becoming a competitor in the job market. As such, students should limit their use of AI to develop their irreplaceable characteristics and avoid dependence on the technology.
ANNA SPERRY Opinion Analyst
Selena Zou/DAILY
Emily Quinteros/DAILY
SETH GABRIELSON Opinion Analyst
AYA FAYAD Statement Correspondent
Part 1: The Mother Mother, Mother, Mother. What can one even possibly say about the Mother?
The Mother is everything. She is life itself. Heaven lies beneath her feet. Born out of her soft, pillowy flesh is what moves the world, what is kind, what is holy, what is good. But this is not what is needed from her. The Mother is robbed over and over. By whom? — by the world. There is a discrepancy festering in the Mother’s generosity, just as there always will be, just as is to be expected. There is always a palm open wider, always expecting more. She forgives, she foregoes, she is forgotten.
The Mother leaves, too; she leaves the only place that she will ever call home. She leaves to provide opportunity, prosperity and then she becomes a mother. The Mother may have had lofty dreams, but she must come to understand that they were just that — dreams. Motherhood is defined as sacrifice. Look it up and you will see. To be a mother is to give. Always, it is to give. My mother would carve out her heart and hand it to me on a platter if she could.
Long ago, too long ago for anyone to remember or care, the Mother was a girl. The Mother would wake up every morning with pink cheeks and bright eyes, like a kitten in the catnip field that is the world. She had dreams upon dreams upon dreams, all stacked on top of one another on her bookshelf, and she wondered what her future would entail. She had thoughts of fluffy white wedding dresses, of travel and language-learning and a rosecolored world. She may have even thought about becoming a mother, may have considered it once or twice. The thought of a small, pink baby may have enticed her. She may have thought it would be like the dolls she once played house with.
My own mother used to like the color pink.
But nonetheless, the Mother was born to be a mother, wasn’t she? Pretending otherwise is naivety, childhood play. Like playing house. The Mother comes second to everything in her life, always: to her children, her husband, maybe to anyone that walks through her life. Sacrifice — that repulsive word — becomes her second nature.
STATEMENT
Familial duties
There is no glory in suffering, but there is in sacrifice. To be a mother, is it to suffer?
Did you know that my mother never wanted to leave home? For 30 years, she has clung to the hope of returning, to one day be home again. She did not want to leave her mother’s bedside, her father’s gravestone — not really. Anyone could understand this. Yet she still left. It was sacrifice — that of parental obligation, of being a mother.
My mother prays to the skies, puts her hands together in earnest and lists every child by name. She prays for forgiveness, for respite, for salvation on behalf of all her children. She sees their sins as her own and she feels their pain as if it were her own. Each one of their burdens, she will carry with her to the ends of the earth, I know this, she has told me. I have always been too afraid to ask my mother if she is tired. My mother wants to go home. Mother, Mother, Mother. The Mother blurs into the background of every room she will ever occupy, of every space she will ever pass through. She becomes everything, spread across, blended, blurred, because to be her is to move the world in silence. There is no
discrepancy in being a mother.
The Mother وسعت
, she encompasses all things.
Is motherhood all that a woman can ever achieve, all that she is fit for? Is it inevitable that every woman becomes a mother?
From girlhood, born to carry, to nurture, to waste away as her flesh becomes and becomes and becomes, right before her eyes, and she watches, quietly. Did you know that a woman is born with every egg that she will ever carry?
There was never any question over whether or not she would become a mother. Isn’t that funny?
Part 2: The Arab Father:
The Arab Father is صامد. He is steadfast.
The Arab Father carries himself to work every day, and though he is 70, he works standing on his feet all day long. All day long.
The Arab Father may forget to eat during his 10-hour work day, may accidentally cut his hand trying to chop parsley a little bit faster, may walk himself out the front door of his home even when he feels that he does not want to go and still, he toils away, like a younger man who can afford to expend all his energy on working in the back of a restaurant. The Arab
Father is steadfast in all that he does not want to do — my father is steadfast in being the sole provider for a family of seven.
Did you know that my father has a degree in mechanical engineering? My father used to want to be an engineer. He has always liked math, he tells me.
The Arab Father sacrifices too, and so he sees no room for error. He expects there to be none. He was 17 when he left home, when he left his mother who cried and begged on her knees for him to stay. But the Arab Father left anyway. He needed to make money to raise a family, after all, and so that is what the Arab Father continues to do: He raises life to the skies, he works until he is far too tired, he makes money to support others. That is his life.
The Arab Father, like the Mother, is always leaving. Especially when he does not want to.
Did you know that my father used to be a child, too? He once had a mother who cared for him, a father who was at times too hard on him. He cried over scraped knees and broken arms. He had dreams, too.
The Arab Father does not like his daughter to say she is tired, that
Caroline Xi/DAILY
she is تعبانة. For he is tired too, and yet he still does not say it. To him, to be tired is to admit defeat. It signifies an end of some sort. He has walked through underworlds, through eternities, through mountains vast and seas wide in his lifetime, all while he was far too tired, and never once did he utter it. My father’s hands are calloused and rough, scabbed and scarred, and still, he will not wear gloves while he works. He tells me he is not tired.
The Arab Father, above all, misses home. He misses his mother and his father, who have been gone for too many years to count. The Arab Father misses when all he used to be was a son, when to live was not just to sacrifice. At times, the Arab Father even remembers when his mother cried for him to stay. Did you know that my father has not been a son for years?
When was it decided that the Arab Father would no longer be a boy? Tell me, at what age did my father learn to stop crying? At what age, far too early, I know, did he become tired?
Part 3: The Daughter
Imagine this: the Daughter, with shining eyes, a slight smile, watches, receives, with hands
extended out, palms wide open, all that her mother and father give her. To her, to exist is to receive, to be given — to be bled out, strung out, sacrificed for, over and over. She does not yet know to say sorry. Guilt begins here for the Daughter.
It begins in realizing that mothers nor fathers are immortal — in realizing that to receive must also mean to give. The world, at this point, was to play house, to merely dream of the small pink baby. But the walls fall away at some point, just as they are meant to — for there is always expectation there, too, lingering in the back somewhere, festering for some future day. Soon, the expectation, like one of those hundred-legged pests, or like an explosion, maybe, will make itself known, will crash down on the house of her dreams, all at once, all at once. And who is she to forgo it?
The weight of expectation is meant to crush down on her rib cage, in the upper middle of the abdomen, to make sure that it is felt. It crushed down on the Mother, just as it did the Father, and tired parents must be cared for, nurtured in their own right, after all.
The Mother left dreams for her daughter and parents and home and childhood dolls behind. And the Arab Father, he let go of all that he knew, all that he cared to become, let go of all of it and never once looked back, as far as anyone knows. Loss is all that the Daughter can think to call it.
Is to be a daughter to be stuck?
To be stuck between the worlds of daughterhood and personhood, between being a mother or not, between making her own show of sacrifice? Is it to be capable of motherhood to be afraid? Or is it just to feel guilt?
Motherhood, fatherhood, is everything a type of stuckness?
The roles, can they ever fade, can either ever just exist as a human being? Away from the duty it is to birth, away from the parts that motherhood and fatherhood require, pry, away from you, can you ever just be?
What does one do with tired parents? The Daughter wonders how she can ever make up for that, how to keep the walls of the house up in the midst of all of it, the dolls untarnished, the pests out, the small, pink baby every-healthy and ever-well.
On parasocial relationships: Expectations, reality and Daniela Meyler
I don’t consider myself the “fangirl” type. I’ve never handmade a sign to bring to a concert, lined up to meet a movie star or even watched my favorite celebrities’ interviews. I generally consider myself an average content consumer, meaning I observe it when it’s in front of me and discuss it with others when relevant, but always end up moving on. Occasionally, though, I do fall in love with a certain piece of media, but always with the art itself rather than the person behind it. Because of this, I was understandably caught off guard when, out of the hundreds of influencers I follow and interact with only mildly, one became an addiction.
Daniela Meyler first appeared on my For You page near the beginning of my senior year of high school. What first caught my attention is something Dani is known for — her idiolect. Dani has a unique vocabulary and pattern of speech alongside generally introspective and entertaining thoughts in addition to her impeccable sense of style. Almost immediately, I began watching Dani’s content religiously. I regularly checked her page for new posts, saved hundreds of them to various folders, stalked her and her friends’ Instagram, followed them on every platform available and binge-read every post on her blog.
Dani’s life appears to be fabulous — living in the West Village with an incredible and close-knit group of artistic friends and the closet of my dreams. But
she simultaneously keeps it real by not glamorizing her struggles with mental health, her weed and nicotine addictions, the various relationships in her life, her struggles with body image and politics. I was initially drawn to Dani because I see a lot of parts of myself reflected in her: her passion for impractical careers, complicated relationship with coming of age, general mindsets about life, mental health struggles, complicated feelings about the place she lives, frustration with the world, feelings about education and so on. But, despite how relatable she feels, I also think she is above me on the general scale of coolness, which leaves me wishing I could emulate elements of her life and personality or even try to be her. This combination of relatability and desire means her content is constantly engaging and valuable to me in a way that I can’t get enough of.
It’s addicting. I think what it comes down to is Dani’s multifaceted nature. I don’t see a lot of people on social media who are capable of accurately capturing all the elements of their life, personality and emotion — being intelligent and mundane and messy and opinionated and sexy and depressed and full of love and a desire to grow and be better and live. So when I find those who do, I stick around. The influencers who lead seemingly flawless lives, those who get up at 5 every morning, who always appear polished, produce carefully curated voiceovers or begin every video with an aesthetic stretch in a bed covered in crisp white sheets — they don’t speak to me. Honestly, I don’t like them.
I don’t think that they accurately capture the human experience. If anything, I find it robotic. People who get angry on the internet and are constantly trying to do their best and sometimes don’t do everything correctly but learn their way through it, those are people. Those are the people I look up to because no part of me wants to lose the messiness that makes me who I am or be encouraged to lose it every time I go on my phone. Dani embraces her humanity, even when it’s hard or imperfect or chaotic, and that’s aspirational to me.
However, I don’t know her, not really. I don’t know if she’s any of the things I so strongly believe her to be. I could meet her and be completely let down, my reality and perception of her entirely incorrect for the past year and a half. And even if she’s exactly what I expect, I know that her everyday life isn’t as glamorous or fun or exciting as I believe it to be. While I consciously know this, I can’t help but feel that neither of these things are the case. That’s the catch with parasocial relationships — we think our parasocial relationship of choice is different from the rest.
Throughout my life, I’ve had friends who developed parasocial relationships with celebrities and, honestly, I judged them for it. It felt incredibly ridiculous and even ignorant for someone to attach themselves to and defend the character of someone they didn’t know. I didn’t understand how someone could feel close to another person if they had such limited knowledge of their lives and reality. There’s an undeniable veil of actuality with
parasocial relationships and, until I developed my own, I couldn’t comprehend seeing past the cold, hard fact that these people are complete strangers at the end of the day.
This new experience of unwavering support for a complete stranger — in my case, Dani — led me to further curiosity. Why do we feel this way about certain influencers? Is it new to recent technological advances? Or is it rooted in human nature to idolize others? Are these relationships good or do they hurt us more than we realize? In order to unpack this, I turned to Yanna Krupnikov, professor in the Communication and Media Department at the University of Michigan.
“If we look at the research on parasocial relationships … the idea that we connect to celebrities, people who we’ve never met, is something that’s been with us for a really, really long time.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Krupnikov explains that “If we look at the research on parasocial relationships … the idea that we connect to celebrities, people who we’ve never met, is something that’s been with us for a really, really long time.”
In fact, she explains that what is often used as the first citation of parasocial relationships is a study from 1956. So, this idea is not unique to modern influencers.
This doesn’t surprise me — before I was a frequent consumer of social media, there were always
people I idolized. The character from the book series I grew up loving, the girl in my third grade class I thought was the coolest person alive, my fourth grade teacher, my brother’s friend and so on. Admiration is seemingly innate and, when our worlds get expanded through media, digital or otherwise, it makes sense that we continue to form these attachments. When asked what about human nature causes us to form these parasocial relationships, Krupnikov explained that there are several theories and potential causes, pointing to surveys conducted by Morning Consult as a source of information. These surveys identified four frequently listed reasons that young Americans follow influencers: learning about new trends, voyeurism, that is, intrigue into a stranger’s life, interesting and fun content and inspiration and aspiration. Krupnikov expands on the point of aspiration, explaining that influencers who are aspirational tend to appeal to content consumers because they are “much more accessible than, let’s say, a celebrity.”
She insists that “you’re still kind of getting this exciting thing but, unlike a celebrity, it feels like it’s actually somebody you could hang out with and talk to.”
Interestingly, when Morning Consult asked survey recipients about the factors that go into deciding to follow an influencer, a feeling of authenticity was the most essential trait.
Krupnikov insists that “There’s work pointing to the idea that people are looking for influencers who seem really authentic. But on the other hand … we never actually know if somebody is authentic in any way.”
This circles back to my own hesitations about parasocial relationships: People can curate essentially any version of themselves online through what they choose to post versus what they keep private. As content consumers, we have no grasp on their actual reality. I don’t mean to say that influencers are a facade, not intentionally at least. But I feel it’s a little bit inevitable that they become one. CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Influencers definitely feel more accessible than celebrities to me; they occasionally talk about their struggles and show unaesthetic parts of themselves. For this reason, I think that, at least for myself, it’s easier to feel connected to them. Celebrities are entirely unattainable. That’s their appeal: the mystery of their everyday lives, the rumors circulating Hollywood media and the unreachable level of wealth, beauty and power. In my mind, influencers are only a step above the rest of us and that’s the reason I’m attracted to them. They are better than average (if they have a following, they must be valuable in some way) yet still within reach. We know how they got to where they are, can trace their journey by scrolling through old posts and are significantly more informed about the intricate and mundane parts of their lives that celebrities choose to keep private. This combination of factors allows us — or at least me — to feel as if we could achieve their life or adopt some of their appeal and make it our own.
LISKA TOROK Statement Correspondent
Where did you learn to think about other people’s emotions? When did you decide to factor them into your view of the world? Your interactions with others? Personally, I’m not sure I remember a specific instance, but rather an accumulation of many lessons linked together like chainmail. Whether it was seeing another kid cry after skinning their knee and bringing a Band-Aid, rubbing a friend’s shoulder after a devastating middle school break-up, hearing the lyrics of a particularly emotional song or reading about characters immobilized by loss, all these instances led me to take others’ emotions into account, though not always as thoroughly as I perhaps should. With the confidence only a teenager feels when they believe they know every answer in life, I once passionately debated with my ninth-grade science teacher about the importance of choosing renewable energy sources. I remember pulling at my hair as I struggled to understand how he could value cheaper prices over all the beautiful things in the world — over nature itself. He explained that while the longterm environmentally friendly option was more ideal, some people just can’t afford it. He claimed that if someone is truly living paycheck to paycheck, like many Americans do, they can’t afford to care about the environment. I realized that I had just assumed everyone had the luxury of considering the long-term. I had never actually bothered to listen to the other side of the story and had just
assumed with a self-righteous, elitist enthusiasm that everyone was simply choosing to ignore all the evidence we had for climate change. It was then that I decided I should spend a hell of a lot more time actually listening to others instead of just listening to an echo chamber of the opinions in my head.
Our inability to listen to others is often an education issue. A lot of people, even here at the University of Michigan, have trouble recognizing how incredibly privileged we are to have access to higher education. In most cases, we break down areas of study from top to bottom, addressing the nuances of each subject through history, social justice and how to initiate change in even the most STEMfocused of classes. No matter the discipline, our education provides several perspectives to view issues from. There’s a lot of privilege in approaching a subject from a more humanistic perspective. Looking back on conversations with friends and family, I sometimes feel regret. I wasted a lot of time trying to be passionate enough to change someone’s mind, rather than empathetic enough to really listen. I think there can be a lot more power in coming to an agreement through choice rather than wearing someone down enough, making them feel guilty enough that they might agree.
Empathy is easy to extend from a personal scale. It’s significantly more difficult, however, to cultivate empathy for a mass of people who you’ve never met. It is most definitely possible and undeniably important, but empathy has to come from a place of understanding. It doesn’t
necessarily have to be taught, but I think it has to be encouraged. Who we understand, who we connect with and who we are encouraged to have empathy for changes based on what we’re taught. I had to be taught the other side of the story to empathize with those different from me.
In school, learning about these different perspectives is essential in understanding. I feel, like most people, afraid of being an uninformed person, but I think that’s a condition of learning.
Education opens the door to empathy. Those children’s books with little graphic characters that reflect people of different backgrounds may seem a little silly in the larger scheme of things, but they honestly make a big impact. I still remember the first time I read “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank in fifth grade. It completely changed my view of the world. I got attached to her thoughts, her friends and her family, only to realize there was a finite and unavoidable end. It’s not just historical non-fiction novels, but fiction as well. “The Outsiders” by S. E. Hinton taught me about the pervasiveness of violence and that some kids have no one to take care of them. Characters feel real to us. It’s why we watch so many different movies, why songs can make us cry and why books are so incredibly essential in education. Reading provides an avenue to meet someone, to go through an experience with them and learn with them without even realizing it. To learn from someone is to know a part of them, and that can change ideologies — truly, it can change everything.
I think education is the one of the most vital proponents of long-term change and, especially right now, a holistic education is a privilege. The most frustrating part of moving to Ann Arbor for college was realizing the gaps in my previous education. My school district tried to implement more elective courses and create incentives to take more honors classes, but didn’t always succeed. When I arrived at the University, I found out that some schools had dozens of AP classes or Model United Nation clubs or classes that covered liberal arts. Some high schools that my peers attended even taught ancient Greek! Especially during the COVID19 pandemic, I realized that many other districts purchased whatever equipment and technology they needed to keep learning, using funds my district never had. I don’t mean to whine, because my school still had more resources than many others, but it can be disappointing to know that your peers received more help just because they live in a different part of the state or country. Even now, I find myself learning about parts of history that somehow my school never ended up covering. Any nonWestern history, or even any non-U.S. history, was glossed over and I find those gaps make it difficult to catch up with the world today. Coming from a school that didn’t offer a varied education, I had a lot to learn from the people around me. More so, coming from a small, Midwestern, majority-white high school taught me that I needed to shut up and listen.
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
Evolving, not ending
In high school, I dated a boy.
This is one of my favorite fun facts because, since arriving at college, I’ve only ever shown interest in girls. My friends cringe at the idea of me being with a man and, looking back, so do I.
We had a classic high school relationship. We sat next to each other in 10th-grade chemistry and flirted in the painfully awkward way 16-year-olds do. After growing up in the same church, our parents were glad we found each other as young adults. Within just a few months of dating, wedding bells were ringing in our families’ ears.
To be fair, he was quite perfect. His course load was all honors and AP classes as he strived to go to medical school — which he is now on track to do.
He was athletic and hysterical and absolutely benevolent. Our sisters were friends and to everyone around us, it seemed like the two youngest children from picture-perfect families were making a picture-perfect couple. Our dates were so high school, consisting of trips to the movie theater, ice skating and cooking together, until the pandemic forced us outside. Then, our dates were exclusively going on hikes. It was at the peak of one of those hikes that we took in the view, danced to Billy Joel and he told me he loved me for the first time. I forced out those three words in response, knowing all I felt in our relationship was platonic.
My earliest memory of being interested in girls was in sixth
grade. While my sisters and mom watched reruns of “Grey’s Anatomy” and obsessed over McDreamy and McSteamy, my eyes were fixed on Chyler Leigh and Katherine Heigl. Even at 12 years old, I knew being straight would be easier, so much so that I almost convinced myself I was. Junior year of high school is when I started dating the nice boy from church. But after half a decade of fighting to convince myself I was normal, I could no longer suppress my sexuality. I had a foolproof plan heading into senior year: hide behind my boyfriend to curb anyone’s suspicion about my sexuality until I could escape to college the following year. However, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. Stringing along this perfect boy while hoping I’d have some effortless revelation about my sexuality was tormenting I tried to initiate a breakup, which somehow transpired impeccably. While I was gearing up to have this serious conversation, my boyfriend said he wanted to say something first:
“I think I’m gay.” The breakup essentially consisted of a mutual coming out and a high five, followed by an awkward “so we’re not together anymore, right?” I was relieved, albeit equally excited and terrified, to begin living more authentically, rather than keep up the heterosexual facade. Given that our breakup made for a scene that couldn’t have been dreamt up by sitcom writers, we had no problem staying friends. A few months later we were voted cutest couple in the yearbook as a gag, but it was better than using each other to further our lie. Plus, my confidant revealed that he understood exactly how I had been feeling. Knowing he had also planned to string me along while grappling with his sexuality bonded us more than any movie date or hike ever could. Of course he knows how much I love him. It’s been five years since we broke up and even if we go months without speaking, I’d never question our friendship. We always make it a priority to reunite when we are both in our hometown. I’ll take a jab at his latest experimental haircut while he prods me for information about my love life. Despite the fact that I live in Michigan now, he frequents my parents’ New Jersey home for dinner. I can’t act surprised when I get a selfie of the three of them from my dad or a text from my mom about how good of a guy my ex-boyfriend is. If I get married he’ll be at the altar with me — but certainly not as the groom. He’ll stand behind me as the “mate of honor.” Maybe my parents have a glimmer of hope we will end up together, but I like to believe they just love my friend as much as I do. So what about when romance is real? Of course we thought being boyfriend-girlfriend was real at the time — at least until it wasn’t. Technically, we did date and do things couples do, but for God’s sake, we went to Pride together. Transitioning from partners to friends was amicable because our love was never more than platonic. So what about when the love is romantic?
Any Queer woman will joke about how destructive her first relationship — and eventual breakup — with a woman is. Maybe I risk sounding like a walking stereotype for agreeing with this sentiment, but after the tumultuous experience of coming to terms with my sexuality, my emotions were at an all-time high. I was fully vulnerable to whatever came next. My first love as my authentic self, the first partner I could truly see myself marrying, was doomed to be emotionally charged.
MEGHAN DWAN Statement Columnist
MIKAELA LEWIS Statement Columnist
Always a ‘go-to guy,’ Kurt Barr blossoms for Michigan
ways, with Barr scoring the winning run in extra innings in a 2023 earlyseason weekend tournament in Georgia.
In just his 13th game with the Michigan baseball team, righthander Kurt Barr found himself on third base, pinch running in an extra-inning contest with the game on the line.
A few days prior, Barr had pitched in a midweek game, so he traveled down south with no expectation to see any playing time. In the first matchup of the weekend, the Wolverines took on UAB and battled in a back-and-forth affair that was pushed to extra innings. But after Michigan needed to respond to a ninth-inning comeback from the Dragons, Wolverines coach Tracy Smith looked for a way to secure the victory.
With runners on second and third base, Smith knew he needed a reliable presence on third to bring home the winning run. So he asked his coaching staff, “Who’s our fastest pitcher?”
So, Kurt Barr’s first win wasn’t secured on the mound. Instead, it happened in the most unlikely of
“He’s just one of those guys who leads by example,” Smith told The Michigan Daily. “So (we) knew right away (we’re) getting a quality person. … He’s a doer, he’s not a talker, which I love about him.”
A single up the middle from former infielder Cody Jeffries provided just enough time for Barr to run home and score the winning run. All Barr had to do was bound 90 feet down the third-base line, nothing overly complicated for any experienced baseball player.
But that doesn’t change the fact that in a crucial moment, it was Barr who Smith called upon. Despite being a freshman and a pitcher, Barr was still the best option. Because from the beginning, Barr’s always been that go-to guy.
***
When asked about Barr’s first time playing baseball, Barr’s father, also named Kurt, chuckled.
“I think Kurt started playing baseball the day he was born,” he told The Daily. Kurt grew up in Grosse Pointe and lived just a few blocks from his local ballpark. With two younger brothers close in age, there was never a lack of activity in the Barr house. First with a wiffle ball in their backyard, and later running the bases on a makeshift diamond in their grandfather’s garden, the
three boys were constantly finding a way to play their favorite game. If they weren’t playing together, Kurt, Preston and Degan were camped out in the stands of the ballpark, watching every game possible. Whether it was little league games that they were too young to play in themselves, or their dad’s men’s league games, the Barr brothers were enamored with baseball.
“As the three boys grew up, they obviously played with each other,” his dad said. “So they had almost a baseball team built in the backyard. Whether it was playing wiffle ball or just throwing a ball around, it always involved baseball.”
From then on, baseball has been a driving factor in Kurt’s life. As soon as he was old enough, Kurt joined his local little league team and was finally a part of the games he had intently observed for many years. Kurt found joy from baseball from a young age, but it wasn’t until high school that Kurt himself fully realized his natural talent and began to see hints of the success that could come with it. ***
In 2020, the Barr family packed up their home in Grosse Pointe and moved to Ontario, Canada due to academic and athletic restrictions in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world shut down, the Barr brothers made the best of the situation and dove deeper into baseball.
Transforming their basement into a gym and creating training plans together, Kurt and his brothers took the pandemicinduced free time to fall further in love with baseball. With less pressure and much more intentional focus, Kurt began to develop into the well-rounded baseball player he would eventually become.
“At that point we moved to Canada and I was just like, ‘Okay I’ll try out for a team over there,’ ” Kurt said. “It was kind of at that point where I realized my arm talent was a little bit ahead of everybody else’s, and I was like, ‘Oh, this might be sweet.’ ” After two years of high school in Canada, Kurt and Preston made the transition back to the US so that they could attend University Liggett High School, a school with a long history of baseball success. Up to this point, Kurt had mainly worked as an infielder, but during his early high school seasons Kurt began his position transition.
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Nate Schreck: In order to play to its ceiling, Michigan needs to command the zone
Touting several preseason award-winning players, the Michigan baseball team has no shortage of talent. But if it can’t consistently throw strikes, there is a ceiling on the team’s success.
“Just throw strikes” is a mantra echoed by baseball coaches from dugouts across the country at all levels. Because if you throw strikes, trust your defense behind you and command the zone, then you’re probably due for a good outing.
So far this season, the Wolverines have reaped the benefits of successfully pounding the zone, but they’ve also seen the consequences of what happens when they don’t. If they fail to quell this pattern, the volatility
that they’ve seen so far will burn them.
Showcasing its successes when commanding the zone in Michigan’s best win to date, knocking off then-No. 2 Virginia, sophomore right-hander Dylan Vigue spun a 5.1-inning gem in which he allowed only one free pass. And the rest of the staff finished off the 11-inning game only surrendering one more walk. Eventually capping off a 4-0 weekend, the Wolverines’ pitching staff allowed just 11 walks the entire series. As a result, Michigan surrendered only seven runs in the series.
However when they failed to throw strikes in their very next series, the Wolverines dished out a bonkers 22 free passes in a winless series against highlevel competition. These selfimposed mistakes were especially backbreaking in Michigan’s 8-6 loss against then-No. 5 Arkansas,
as the two Razorbacks’ runs, that were the difference, were put on base via walks.
The dichotomy of these two series show the impact of pitching on the Wolverines’ record. Both their ceiling and floor is contingent upon how the arms fare on the mound.
Facing Division I competition, pitchers are bound to give up extra-base hits and encounter difficult situations. However, limiting self-imposed errors — in this case walks — means that difficult situations are less likely to compound on one another. And as Michigan’s defense has faltered at times, its pitchers need to execute within the strike zone so that opposing runners can’t put pressure on the defense to cause mistakes.
In what was undoubtedly the Wolverines’ worst loss of the year, a 22-5 seven-inning mercy-rule loss to conference foe UCLA, walks
bookended junior right-hander
Kurt Barr’s .2 innings of work as he gave up three runs and failed to get out of the first inning. A leadoff walk came around to score and later on in the inning, back-to-back walks loaded the bases before Barr subsequently walked in another run.
Barr’s three walks in the first inning weren’t the only reason Michigan gave up 22 runs, but his command struggles set the Wolverines up for the flood of runs that came later and also taxed the their bullpen. The seven pitchers they used in seven innings went on to give up nine more walks and hit four batters.
Michigan’s five runs scored in seven innings was, and has been enough to win them games but only when the pitching staff keeps them competitive. And throughout the season when pitch counts climb and walks put opposing runners on base, the offense has
to kick into overdrive in order to overcome the deficit — an unsustainable strategy.
But perhaps the most frustrating part of the command issues is that they haven’t been omnipresent.
Beyond the aforementioned season-opening sweep, the Wolverines mitigated free passes in their series win against Long Beach State. As Michigan took games two and three, it allowed just five walks in each game — a marked improvement over the double-digit numbers that often plague them.
Michigan clearly isn’t lacking in talent, nor have the Wolverines had a bad season so far. Their record speaks to this. After rounding out their non conference schedule at a respectable 6-5, they went on to win their opening conference series against Illinois. But the walks are backbreaking and Smith knows it.
“When you track the early
points in our 11 games so far this season, it’s pretty clear that when we don’t throw strikes, we don’t win.” Smith said Feb. 23 after the loss to UCLA. With conference play on the horizon, Michigan’s pitchers will need to find consistency in order to compete in the Big Ten. They’ve seen stellar outings from their four projected starting pitchers: sophomore right-handers Gavin Devooght and Vigue, as well as junior right-handers David Lally Jr. and Kurt Barr. However, as high as the highs have been, the lows have been brutal as well. As it stands, the fate of the Wolverines’ season is held in the hands, or arms, of their pitching staff. If they can execute pitches and command the zone, Michigan has a chance to compete at the top of their conference. If not, the Wolverines could end up just a another talented team that couldn’t put the pieces together.
EAST LANSING — Less than a minute into the No. 17 Michigan men’s basketball team’s seasonending clash with rival No. 8 Michigan State, it felt like the Wolverines were losing a tied ball game. Both teams knotted at zero, the Spartans forced a missed layup on Michigan’s opening possession, and when the Wolverines got the ball back a possession later, Michigan State stole the outlet pass before it even crossed half-court.
Spartan guard Jeremy Fears Jr. awaited the ensuing inbound at half-court, grinning and clapping in the face of Michigan junior guard Tre Donaldson while the crowd’s volume continued to rise. Michigan State hadn’t scored any points yet, but with the force of momentum looming, it felt as though the Spartans might as well have been up by double digits. And 19 minutes later, at the end of the first half, the Spartans (26-5 overall, 17-3 Big Ten) turned that first-minute feeling into a reality. Michigan State dominated the Wolverines (229, 14-6) from the start and ran away with the second edition of this rivalry, winning 79-62. The Spartans’ 3-point shooting and strong defense led the way early, and Michigan wasn’t able to respond after Michigan State’s brazen start.
“We’re going to learn from this, but we’re not going to look back,” Wolverines coach Dusty May said. “And, well, it’s the same issues that have plagued us all season. So are we going to find solutions and fix them? Or (we are) not.”
Following Fears’ opening statement, the Spartans got on the board in a hurry. Not known for its outside shooting, Michigan State took to dismantling the Wolverines with its weakness, scoring 12 of its first 18 points from deep. The Spartans’ offense wasn’t flashy, but its consistency killed Michigan over and over again.
The Wolverines looked to answer, but their offense was flat outside of graduate center Vlad Goldin, who was the only consistent threat and scored half of their 28 first-half points. Where Michigan State was smooth in the first 20 minutes, Michigan was choppy and without rhythm.
“It’s just when you factor in (that) the turnovers have continued and then we’re not making shots,” May said of his offense’s consistency. “Then you get exposed for what you were doing this entire time.”
CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
INDIANAPOLIS — The Michigan women’s basketball team had a game-defining decision to make on Saturday. It wasn’t an easy one, but the manner in which the Wolverines chose to counter Southern California star guard JuJu Watkins was crucial in how the Big Ten Tournament semifinal unfolded.
As the game went on, that question quickly shifted from how Michigan could contain Watkins to what the Wolverines sacrificed in return — and the answer eventually became clear.
No. 5 seed Michigan (22-10 overall, 11-7 Big Ten) limiting Watkins meant that the Trojans ran their offense through their bigger, more imposing forwards, a strategy that eventually proved successful over the course of No. 1 seed USC’s (28-2, 16-1) comefrom-behind 82-70 win.
After five minutes, both teams had mustered just six points each, a product of Michigan’s difficulty scoring under USC bigs and the Trojans’ troubles finding the net despite some good looks. It wasn’t the offensive shootout that one would’ve expected between two squads capable of lighting up the
scoreboard, but nerves turned into turnovers for both.
Despite tallying just eight points in the first half, Watkins’ impact was clearer on the court than it was on the stat-sheet, as she continuously drew two and at times three defenders to collapse the Wolverines’ defense.
“We say ‘not her best day’ because she’s got three and four bodies on her all the time,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said. “… She was getting trapped and doubled when she’s with the ball in her hands. … She was all there the entire time today and found ways to impact the game in so many ways.”
The result of her gravity was a slew of shots for the Trojans’ bigs, many of which they were
unable to convert on until the second quarter came and USC strung together several small runs to keep the contest close. But when halftime arrived, the 31-29 score marked the second time all season the Trojans trailed after 20 minutes. The Trojans adjusted in the third quarter, feeding the ball to the paint in several possessions and scoring over the undersized Wolverines. But for each banked layup USC had, Michigan had a response. Whether it was draining a three or slicing through the Trojans’ defense, the Wolverines’ offense continued to whir, stretching their lead to 46-39 before the media timeout. CONTINUED AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM
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SAM GIBSON Daily Sports Writer
SAM NOVOTNY Daily Sports Editor
NATE SCHRECK
Riley Nieboer/DAILY
Josh Sinha/DAILY
TGAME ONE
PSU 6, MICH 5
GAME TWO PSU 5, MICH 2
But Moldenhauer and the Wolverines’ celebrations were short lived as Penn State forward Nic Degraves received the puck in the corner and put a shot away just 15 seconds later. In under two minutes into the game, both teams had two goals and three shots collectively — setting the scene for a postseason barn burner.
Though Michigan attempted to mitigate the Nittany Lions’ chaos at the net, Penn State exploited a power-play chance. With an open net for forward Ben Schoen, he sunk the punk with ease past graduate goaltender Logan Stein taking the 2-1 lead at the end of the first period. While most of the second period remained quiet as neither team skated away with the momentum, the Wolverines began to connect in the offensive zone catching up on shots. But as they found their chemistry, the Nittany Lions did what they do best — create havoc. After quick passes across the slot, a flick of the wrist from forward Carson Dyck put away the puck.
“We definitely tried to shoot the puck as much as we could today,” Moldenhauer said. “No shot was a bad shot, but we just couldn’t get enough through. They blocked too many and it just didn’t work out for us.”
Now facing a two-goal deficit, Michigan earned its first power-play opportunity of the night. Junior forward T.J. Hughes accepted the puck in the slot before a quick pass to sophomore forward William Whitelaw on the left side as he closed Michigan’s gap to one. Nevertheless, the Nittany Lions took little time to reassert their dominance. Through the first two periods, when the Wolverines started a spark, Penn State swiftly put it out. Only a minute after Whitelaw’s goal, forward J.J. Wiebusch found Stein’s open gap to score, pushing to a two-goal lead entering the third period. Each corner Michigan turned, the Nittany Lions were waiting to muffle the Wolverines scoring attempts.
side, sinking it above goaltender Arsenii Sergeev’s shoulder.
MACKENZIE MIELKE Daily Sports Writer