2018-03-22

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Ann Arbor, Michigan

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CAMPUS LIFE

Music panel shares scoop on entering the industry Maize Collective’s Industry Insight talks promotion and booking with students NATASHA PIETRUSCHKA Daily Staff Reporter

RUCHITA IYER/Daily

Vice president of student life E. Royster Harper speaks to The Daily about Greek Life, improving the first year experience and building diverse communities in the Fleming Administration Building early Wednesday afternoon.

Vice president for student life talks campus climate, national issues E. Royster Harper discusses Greek Life, racist Snapchat incident and gun violence JORDYN BAKER & AMARA SHAIKH Daily News Reporter

The Michigan Daily sat down with E. Royster Harper, the University of Michigan’s vice president for student life, for a conversation Wednesday afternoon on current issues affecting both campus and national climate. Harper spoke on national issues, such as campus sexual assault, recent Michigan legislationto improve resources

for survivors; gun violence and the University preparedness. Royster also touched on campus news, specifically, the University’s decision to move to a winter rush process for Greek life and the racist Snapchat featuring two students in blackface with the caption “#blacklivesmatter” that was circulated this past weekend. Sexual assault To begin, Harper spoke on issues of sexual assault and misconduct, highlighting actions the University has taken to hold perpetrators accountable.

Recently, the Michigan state Senatepassed legislation to improve resources and support for survivors, specifically by expanding the statute of limitations on reporting sexual assault, increasing the number of mandatory reporters at universities and placing more emphasis on holding institutions accountable for failing to report cases of assault and harassment. Before the vote on this legislation occured, however, the Michigan Association of State Universities, of which the University is a

member, attempted to delay voting on the bills in a move state Sen. Margaret O’Brien, R-Kalamazoo, claimed would “delay justice, or maybe the hope is to stop it entirely.” In response to O’Brien’s claim, Harper stated these allegations are wrong, arguing that by asking for more time to consider possible legislation, universities are seeking the ability to consider options before jumping into conclusions that may not be as effective. See VP, Page 2A

The Maize Collective hosted their second “Industry Insight” panel series Wednesday night, inviting guests in the music industry to talk on their experiences in booking and promoting. University of Michigan students and local music enthusiasts gathered at the University of Michigan Museum of Art to hear about the challenges of entering the music industry. Moderator Augusta Morrison invited the diverse group of panelists to share how their personal endeavors led them to the positions they have now in booking, outreach and promotion. Working in the industry for over 25 years, Christine Kitora currently works as the talent buyer and event coordinator for Ann Arbor’s Necto Nightclub. “My path was definitely not a straight line,” Kitora said. “For many people in the industry,

it’s never been a straight line.” Kitora and many other panelists shared similar experiences of working at small clubs and venues, eventually working their way to new positions and facing different challenges at every new place. Kitora emphasized the importance of the collaborative work behind each show, from those who mop venue floors to those who prepare the wardrobe. “Any organization, any venue, any show is only as good as the sum of its parts. It takes everybody,” she said. Mark Jacobson, senior programming manager of the University Musical Society, curates jazz, international and contemporary art-rock presentations for UMS. He offered his perspective on what drives him through long hours and hectic timelines. “The industry is hard,” Jacobson said. “You have to somehow fan the fire and keep the passion. At the end of the See KITORA, Page 3A

Women in Public Service panel speaks Reggie the Academics on challenges of entering government advising Corgi no

CAMPUS LIFE

ACADEMICS

longer CSG candidate

Hosted by the Ginsberg Center, event honors National Women’s History Month

Popular write-in candidate encourages students to vote for human president

In honor of National Women’s History Month, panelists as part of the “Women in Public Service” panel spoke about their career paths as female leaders working in the political sphere, pivotal changes in their lives and career advice. Erin Byrnes, lead for democratic engagement at the Ginsberg Center, spoke about the intended event impact and the importance of conversations of this nature. “Our democratic engagement work is focused on multiple different facets, one of which is really encouraging our students to see themselves in a body of elected officials – people who are doing important work behind the scenes,” Byrnes said. “We are in the midst of a national conversation about what women are doing, how they’re treated and how they deserve to be treated. The more we can bring unique voices and experiences to the table and highlight them, that’s better for all of us as a community.” Panelists discussed challenges they faced while trying to break into the industry. Ghida Dagher, director of Government Partnerships and Community Affairs at United Way for Southeastern Michigan, discussed how she had to make a distinct effort to be heard in political spaces.

ZOE BAXTER

Daily Staff Reporter

For many students, meeting Reggie the Campus Corgi, also known as Reggie Bee, is the highlight of their day or even their week. So, it comes as no surprise that when a campaign was started on March 16 to elect Reggie Bee for Central Student Government president, students showed their support. Three days after the creation of the Reggie Bee for CSG Facebook page, Reggie accepted the nomination. Engineering junior Brett Swiecicki voted for Reggie as CSG president. “Honestly, with the content I’m exposed to on a daily basis, personal, interpersonal, on social media or in print advertising, Reggie was the only person that I knew that was ‘officially running’ for Central Student Government,” Swiecicki said. “I was aware of other platforms, but I wasn’t aware of any of the other people that were running or what they stood for. The main reason I wanted him to win is because I feel as though he should be more See REGGIE, Page 3A

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“I had a realization that I had to be twice as loud, twice as vocal as everyone else in the room,” Dagher said. “Quite often I’m the youngest person in the room … and because of the nature of our work, I’m usually the only woman in the room. I have to think about everything – kind of absorb, seek out the players and understand what’s happening, and then vocalize.” She continued by speaking on

how she felt women were held to a different standard than most men in politics, responding to a comment another panelist made about how female politicians should “never stand by the bar, and be seen with a drink in hand.” “I think there are a lot of social norms, I would call them, that are acceptable for men and are not acceptable for women in this space,” she said. “Particularly in this space, I feel like the women

are under a microscope, every movement, if you’re a candidate, what you wear is open for criticism.” University Regent Andrea Fischer Newman, R, agreed with the statement, adding she felt the #MeToo movement was pivotal in giving women an opportunity to speak up about the pervasive issue of sexual assault and harassment. See WOMEN, Page 3A

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Panel member Rep. Donna Lasinski speaks about her career path and challenges she has faced at the Women in Public Service panel in the Blau Colloquium Wednesday.

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Vol. CXXVII, No. 96 ©2018 The Michigan Daily

sees mixed feedback

Some students express frustration with advisory apathy, others supportive SAYALI AMIN

Daily Staff Reporter

When LSA sophomore Izzy Nakisher entered the University of Michigan, she didn’t know her major. She visited her adviser, who was assigned to her at orientation, once every few weeks her freshman year, trying to figure out a direction. Four major changes later, Nakisher is now ready to declare. Her adviser, she said, was key in making this happen. An academic adviser is assigned to students at the University during their orientation before starting school in the fall. According to the Newnan LSA Academic Advising Center’s website, general advising is meant to help students plan out their college as well as future careers. Newnan Director Tim Dodd wrote, in an email interview, many students seek help from advisers for issues regarding course selection, advice on their major or minor, or even personal issues. “We often say that our job is to help students construct See ADVISING, Page 3A

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VP From Page 1A “We want to have integrity in holding people accountable, and we need a time frame that allows for that,” Harper said. “Sometimes in reactions to horrific experiences, people are much more interested in doing something rather than being effective … I think we sometimes see that in the legislative process … really what it does is compromise institutions’ real ability to be effective.” At the University, Harper said decision-making has revolved around considerations that would support survivors and keep resources confidential to allow for maximum choice for survivors. Harper also emphasized the importance of clarifying who the mandatory reporters include. According to Harper, the University has hired a consultant to observe reporting mechanisms and provide

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feedback to administrators on what might be done differently. University President Mark Schlissel has also brought together a team, which includes senior leaders, to look at current training objectives and work to make improvements. “This is not an environment that is going to hide or condone or not hold people accountable for their behavior,” Harper said. “We are using the expertise here, and there’s tons of it, being clear about expectations, providing the training, making sure that people who are mandatory reporters know that, encouraging others to report, and making sure that there are some confidential sources like SAPAC, like CAPS, for the rest of our community.” Gun safety Harper then moved on to discuss issues of gun safety and the University’s measures to ensure the safety of everyone on campus in the case of an attack. Last week, students across the country participated in walkouts

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in response to the deadly school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. On campus and in Washtenaw County, various students havevoiced their concern for the preparedness and prevention of mass shootings at their respective schools. Harper emphasized guns are not allowed on the University’s campus and explained the administration has completed many trainings in collaboration with the Department of Public Safety and Security to prepare themselves for a variety of dangerous situations. “The leadership team has done active shooter planning, planning for bombs, so we do a pre-planning,” Harper said. “We have gone down to, what I call Central Control, but a place called Emergency Operation Center, again to figure out who would be calling, what would you be saying, to make sure the people you ought to be calling you actually have their phone numbers — prior preparation really to prevent a tragedy.” She also praised DPSS Executive Director Eddie L. Washington Jr. for his preventative mindset in regard to campus safety. “We have a phenomenal director of the Department of Public Safety and he has a mantra that has been enormously helpful: ‘Prevent the preventable.’” Harper mentioned the University’s collaboration with other schools to ensure DPSS is up to date with trainings. Additionally, she feels the University has prepared itself in the best possible ways it can if an attack were to happen. “Our department of public safety talks to other schools, gets training from other schools. We’ve gone to training around this,” Harper said. “I feel in the ways you can be prepared, or the things you can do to be prepared, we’ve been doing a lot.” Though she said she feels the University is well-

prepared, Harper acknowledged the severity of the situation and explained the security systems implemented in various campus buildings. She also pointed out complete prevention is unlikely, but the administration and DPSS continue to ensure the likelihood is lessened. “It is a constant issue that we’re thinking about, I know the department has gone out to classes, and has gone out to departments. I know they look at buildings to secure them. We certainly have a system where we can lock buildings down pretty quickly. All of those kinds of things are designed to help us reduce the likelihood that someone would be harmed. You and I know you can’t prevent it, there is not enough preparation to prevent it, but you can reduce the likelihood.” Greek life winter rush process Wednesday, the University announced recruitment for Greek life would be moved to the winter term starting in January 2020, rather than the current fall rush process. Despite the previous Interfraternity Council social ban, Harper stated this decision is not related to current work to improve risk management issues. “This is not about hazing. This is not about alcohol. This is not about sexual misconduct. This is about making sure that the students that are in the 11th grade now, when they come, that they have a really good experience, a fabulous first-year experience, and the research tells us that winter recruitment has a positive impact on academic success,” Harper said. With specific emphasis on the first-year experience, Harper explained the goals of this decision are to allow for students to establish a pattern of academic success, develop strong and healthy relationships and give students a chance to participate in a diverse community with others who are different from themselves. She also hopes first-year students will have the opportunity to explore Greek life, which she considers a See VP, Page 3A

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VP From Page 2A lifelong commitment, before making the decision to rush. Harper explained the expansions of learning communities and theme communities will help to compliment this improvement of the first-year experience. She hopes more students will have opportunities to take part in more extracurriculars and community service to feel more engaged and connected to the University. “When students have a chance to pause and to think about it and to think about their interests and to test out some possibilities, they discover they have a passion for something else and that they want to make their contribution in a different way,” Harper said. “This is really designed to have us pause.” Harper stated the University had winter recruitment processes in place during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in 2015 a subcommittee was gathered to investigate options on delaying recruitment. By implementing the new recruitment stage in 2020, Harper said, the Greek community will be given time for training and understanding of the new process. Harper reiterated her argument against conversations that this change in the recruitment timeframe serves as a punishment to the Greek community. “There has been some sort of framing that this is about punishing the Greek community. So we’re going to punish them by doing something 20 months from now? That’s a little dumb,” Harper said. “It is really about how do we ensure that the students we’re inviting to our community can do well.” Racist Snapchat Harper also discussed the University’s actions and

WOMEN From Page 1A “I wish it was happening when I was younger, 10 years ago,” Newman said. “Because you must call it out, you can do it nicely, but you must call it out. The #MeToo campaign has given women everywhere the wake-up they needed to say something. When you get out there, most of you aren’t out there yet, there’s definitely a difference in how women are treated by an older generation. This campaign really brought a whole new level to this issue and we can’t let it go away, it’s too important.” Public Policy student Erica Muñoz-Rumsey, who is also in the School of Public Health, spoke of how she loved the diversity of the panel and hearing about these women’s experiences. “I was excited to see a panel where we hear some different

REGGIE From Page 1A officially integrated into the University. I know a lot of other people wanted to vote for Reggie because they wanted to prove to the other students running that they didn’t really believe in their ideas as much as a dog, essentially.” However, on Wednesday afternoon, midway through the two-day election, Reggie Bee announced his resignation on Facebook. By that time, the page created in order to elect him had already received nearly 600 likes. “Because some of my good human friends are ‘truly’ running for Student Government President, I’ve decided to ask all my friends to get out and Vote

KITORA From Page 1A day, I’m certainly a fan. A lot of us are fans, that’s why we’re here. You have to love the music, and you have to love the art.” Students and local residents from all backgrounds said they came to the event in hopes of gaining valuable advice from experts who were once in their shoes. LSA senior Dyshon Toxey

responses after LSA sophomore Lauren Fokken released a racist Snapchat with herself and a friend in blackface with the caption “#blacklivesmatter.” Harper explained the Snapchat was inappropriate and against the University values. However, she was grateful for the number of students who reported the incident to the Bias Response Team on campus. The next step for the individuals involved is to see what consequences they would face at the Office of Student Conflict Resolution. “We were of course concerned, so we were clear about our values that is not welcome here,” Harper said. “Lots of students sent it to the Bias Response Team, which we enormously appreciate so we knew what was going on. There was an outreach to the students that were involved and they were in several conversations trying to understand why this behavior isn’t okay — it also happened to be a student employee — so of course it has different implications. Students were talked to. It is a case then that will make it to OSCR, our coding office, to look at what are the implications, how do we hold students accountable?” The Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs also held open office hours Saturday and Sunday for students who were impacted by the Snapchat to discuss how they were feeling. Harper touched on the widespread effect of ignorance and how the University needs to deny its place on campus as an entire community. “Those are the kinds of things that we do when this kind of ignorance and racism shows up on our campus,” Harper said. “It’s very painful, for the students are subject to it, it’s very painful for all of us as a community that doesn’t condone that kind of behavior, and it is painful I believe for the students who engage in it.” She furthered this sentiment

perspectives from people in different kinds of public service,” Muñoz-Rumsey said. “I thought they brought a lot of stories that I hadn’t heard before to the table. They had different experiences and weren’t afraid to disagree with each other.” Saskia DeVries, a graduate student in the School of Information and Ford School of Public Policy, agreed, emphasizing the honest approach panelists embodied. “It was really cool to hear a candid conversation between a bunch of women who made the decision to enter public service at different points in their lives,” DeVries said. “I appreciated the candor and the stories that people shared. I think it’s important that when we have these conversations that inspire women to enter public service that we are honest about the challenges too … I want to go in knowing what to expect and how to prepare for that.”

for Them. They deserve your support in their sincere desire to become leaders of the student body.” the post said. In a follow-up post, Reggie once again encouraged students to go online and vote for the human candidates in the election, adding he “ran out of steam.” While some students were excited about the prospect of Reggie becoming president, others, such as LSA senior Zach Xu, feel that a dog could not serve as the student body president. “I legit think the whole Reggie thing is a joke,” Xu said. “Reggie is not a human being. And if he won by popular vote, it would be ridiculous for a dog to serve as a president of a major public university in the United States.”

Jr. is a local artist who said he attended the event to learn more about the industry he’s passionate about. He said it was helpful hearing the panelists speak about the challenges they once faced and learned they all took non-linear paths. “I’m trying to meet up with them, network and build more connections, just so that I can grow and potentially be in their position, and next year be the one speaking,” he said. Jacobson also had some advice

and explained the importance of not only condemning racism but, in her opinion also allowing an opportunity for individuals to learn. “Once this happens on our campus, then we have to decide as a community what kind of campus do we want to be,” Harper said. “We have to condemn it absolutely, then we have to leave space for people to change, to grow, to understand what is inappropriate about it, and to make restoration, and that’s what we try to do in the OSCR process. Bring students in who engage in this behavior, have a dialogue about it, try to help them understand its impact, sometimes have them talk with the folks to whom it impacted.” She also addressed the dilemma she faced in her own role as vice president for student life and balancing accountability with room for restoration. “That’s the challenge in my role. It is both about holding people accountable and creating space for them to change and grow.” Harper said, “Sometimes when you’re hurt, when I’m hurt, I’m not interested in anybody changing or growing, I’m interested in them being punished, but we don’t want to be only that kind of community.” While allowing an opportunity for growth is important to Harper, she acknowledged the importance of calling the Snapchat out for what it really was. “I think we have to talk about that (the Snapchat), and name it for what it is: It was racist, it was inappropriate, it does do harm,” she said. “We have to name it before we can do something about it, and when we do something about it we have to create space for the person to still be in the community.” Harper said she understands the impact racist incidents have on minority communities and

ADVISING From Page 1A their own unique, authentic and powerful narratives that inform their decisions and create alignment, confidence and coherence in their lives,” Dodd wrote. Nashiker said her adviser’s interest in getting to know her was one of the reasons she had a positive experience with advising. “He’s made an effort to talk to me about my hobbies and my life,” Nashiker said. “So he’s said that this major may suit your hobbies or might suit the classes you’ve been taking and have been liking. I think if you have the time to get to talk to a student then you’re better off when suggesting classes or majors or minors.” Newnan adviser Tim Webb said he looks at his students holistically, not just in terms of their academic goals. “I like to talk to students how that will work with their professional goals, clubs and social life: how to be a successful student, but also maximize their time on Michigan’s campus,” Webb said. “I’m also an advocate for health on campus, making sure you have the time and space to take care of yourself.” Part of Webb’s job is helping students navigate the resources on campus, which include the Opportunity Hub and departmental advising, among others. For LSA senior Jenny Luo, specific departmental advising was more useful to her than general Honors advising. “I always felt like when I talked to (my general adviser) it was always about what he wanted rather than my own

for artists like Toxey. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. If you make good music and you’re passionate about it, people are going to follow you and come to your shows,” he said. The music industry requires experience, and many students at the University, including LSA senior Jessie Baren, feel as though their classes aren’t preparing them properly. “Coming into Michigan, there’s not a music business

emphasized the importance of speaking up to ensure those groups are not negatively impacted. She also said actions of violence, whether they be sexual, ethnic or racial, all come from the same place of disrespecting another individual or group’s humanity. “It does mean there are some students who are carrying a bigger burden around, and that’s why all of us have to say something so that the people that are targeted are not harmed,” Harper said. “I believe it’s the same kind of disregard for other people’s humanity and for their bodies and their minds and their intellect that causes a person to do sexual violence – (it) comes from the same place of, ‘I get to decide who ought to be in the community.’ Who put you in charge? Who put you in charge of deciding who is the ‘other’ in the community?” La Casa In February, the Latinx Alliance for Community Action, Support and Advocacy released a list of demands to the administration with steps they felt needed to be taken to better support the Latinx community. The demands arose after several racial incidents and a boycott against the lack of Latinx representation across different University levels. It has been about a month and a half after the initial demands were released, and Harper commented on the University’s efforts toward implementing La Casa’s requests. “We have been meeting with La Casa members and faculty members of the Latinx community, I would say for maybe at least a month, and sometimes twice a day,” Harper said. “Going through what the concerns are, and in some cases bringing people in to help us understand what we’re currently doing.” She also said the administration was looking over the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Campus

direction and ideas for my education,” Luo said. “There was something that he wanted to push.” Luo went to see her general adviser the end of her freshman year before selecting classes and has not returned to general advising since. “There was one instance where I went to see him before I chose my classes second semester of my freshman year and he was very condescending towards me regarding the Honors core classes,” Luo said. Apart from general advising, Luo has also gone to see departmental advisers in chemistry and computer science for more major-oriented information. Luo said the departmental advisers have been helpful before selecting classes and in providing more information about potential post-graduation plans. “Most of the departmental advisers that I’ve worked with have always been more about what do you want accomplished and how we can help you with that,” Luo said. With there being many advisers on campus, Dodd wrote students should find advisers that work well for them. “I want students to find that advisor who makes them feel comfortable and confident in their exploration and decision making,” Dodd wrote. “No advisor gets upset if a student meets with a different advisor. A coordinator for the undergraduate program in the Sociology department, Tammy Kennedy is also an adviser for students pursuing a major or minor in Sociology. Kennedy works with current as well as prospective students to help them get a feel for the department. Kennedy said students

or entertainment industry classes,” he said. “So I think it’s really cool Maize Collective and organizations like that are putting on these kinds of events for us, because they are beneficial.” Maize Collective founder James Roeser, an Information senior, said he also felt this frustration during his time at the University. Between his sophomore and junior year, he crafted the Maize Collective, a hands-on organization to help

Thursday, March 22, 2018 — 3A

Climate survey released last fall to better understand the experience of Latinx students at the University. “Last Friday, we looked at the climate data, what does our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion student data tell us about the experience of Latinx students, and what they are experiencing in relation to other students,” Harper said. Harper explained the administration is also working to consolidate the different demands and come to an understanding of how they will proceed with actionable steps. She praised the members of La Casa for calling attention to issues their community is facing and acknowledged the administration’s willingness to work with them on creating solutions. “It would be premature for me to say this is where we are because we are in the process of figuring out together where we are,” Harper said. “I think that the Latinx community has raised some important issues. That is one of the things really I admire about our students here that they will see a concern and raise the issue, and what I love about the administration is that we are responsive. So we are engaged in that discussion dialogue process right now to better understand and then to figure out given what the needs are what it is that we are able to do.” Commuting and accessibility In terms of accessibility for students, Harper spoke on current resources available to students, as well as the University’s push to make these resources more widely known and available. In response to students on campus calling for more accessibility, including commuter students and those who face financial strain in paying for on-campus and finding off-campus housing,

Harper stated administration has been working more closely with individual schools and colleges to provide resources. “We have many more resources than students know about,” Harper said. “With our communications department and each of our units, we’re trying to get better at making sure students understand the resources that are available. Right now, we’ve asked the schools and colleges and others who are providing resources to tell us what is the resource, who is it for, how many people does it involve, and trying to get a catalog of what’s available so we can figure out how we make this more apparent and transparent to students.” Harper also discussed providing resources to firstyear students, explaining while administration is working to make the depth and breadth of resources more transparent for students, freshman orientation can often be too busy of a time to highlight all of these resources. Harper said the problem is often caused because of the immense quantities of options. In addition, Harper spoke on the importance of listening to students and explained that, while it may not always be possible to resolve the issue in the ways students are asking for, there is always room for progress and improvement. “As the vice president, when I hear from students of color or students with disabilities or underrepresented minority students or low-income students or high-income students for whom this place isn’t working, I take it seriously,” Harper said. “I first try to listen then I try to understand, I take the concern seriously, because sometimes it affects a small population, sometimes it’s a large population, but to me all of those students are important.”

majoring or minoring in sociology are required to come to her for two reasons: to declare their major and get a release for graduation. Other than that, students mostly go if they have any questions about the department, classes and future career paths after sociology. “I want to make the University as small as possible for them,” Kennedy said. “It’s a really big university that’s often siloed and we sit in our own departments. I want to connect students as easily as possible to other departments and resources that I know of and would be helpful to them.” If a student is unsure about committing to the major, Kennedy usually arranges for the student to meet with a faculty member, speak to another student or attend social events within the department to give them a better idea. “I think students are pressured earlier and earlier in their academic career to pick a major and make a decision,” Kennedy said. “My line is that I don’t get paid any more if you major in sociology. I’m not trying to convince you for my own personal gain.” Before applying to the School of Kinesiology and the School of Public Health, Nakisher said her general adviser also helped her create a back-up plan in case it didn’t work out. “I talked to a lot of students who applied to these programs and didn’t have a backup for when they didn’t get in,” Nakisher said. “I was ready to go right after I got notice that I didn’t get in.” Webb is also co-president of the Advising Council at the University, which connects advisers from the various schools across campus.

Compared to other schools, Webb said LSA offers more freedom in their majors in terms of electives. “There is so much more space and time to figure out their major,” Webb said. “My colleagues at Newnan really have a great understanding of the curriculum and the courses that LSA offers and help students navigate their major.” In reference to issues Newnan advising faces, Dodd wrote adviser turnover is an issue both the center and students are forced to navigate. “I sympathize with the student who really likes his or her advisor only to learn a year or two later that the advisor has left to take a bigger job or moved away from Ann Arbor for family reasons,” Dodd wrote. For LSA sophomore Lorraine Furtado, her original adviser assigned to her at orientation left in the fall. “(My original adviser) sent me a lovely email that she was no longer advising,” Furtado said. “She said I would be assigned to a new adviser, but she didn’t say who that adviser was.” Furtado found out who her new adviser was just a few days ago, months after orientation, when she had scheduled an appointment with a different adviser, who then checked and told her. As a first-generation student, Furtado said navigating the course selection process and selecting a major was difficult at first. “The advice I received was along the lines of follow your heart’s desire, which is hard to hear knowing that what I do in my undergrad has to potentially be a career option,” Furtado said. “I ended up taking her advice, which I’m really grateful for now.”

interested University students get the real-life experiences they need for starting careers in the music industry. “There’s a lot of disperse music communities on campus, but no central place to learn what’s going on, or how you can get involved and meet other people, especially if you’re not in the music school,” he said. The Maize Collective isn’t just for musicians. The club offers opportunities for growth in areas like art and design

and marketing. Events like “Industry Insight” are meant to give students interested in all creative industries the chance to meet professionals who were once students like them. “The stuff people are talking about is all applicable to other industries and areas,” Roeser said. “Most people have a central interest in music and creating, even if you’re not 100 percent going into the music industry, it’s also a great learning opportunity.”

Opinion

4A — Thursday, March 22, 2018

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

HANNAH HARSHE | COLUMN

Gender equity starts on the rugby field

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DAYTON HARE

ANU ROY-CHAUDHURY AND ASHLEY ZHANG

Editor in Chief

Managing Editor

Editorial Page Editors

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

Jeremy Kaplan Sarah Khan Lucas Maiman Magdalena Mihaylova Ellery Rosenzweig

Jason Rowland Anu Roy-Chaudhury Alex Satola Ali Safawi Ashley Zhang

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

FROM THE DAILY

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Support LEO

he University of Michigan’s Lecturers’ Employee Organization is continuing to bargain with the University, as their current contract is set to expire on April 20. The organization, which includes over 1,500 lecturers from the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses, has a specific bargaining platform focused on improving the wages, job security and benefits of the University’s non-tenure track educators. Lecturers vary from part to full time, teaching one to three or even more courses per semester. These educators teach in nearly every department and program across all three campuses and have worked closely with fellow University educators and students, contributing to both the academic and greater University community. As an Editorial Board, we believe it is imperative the University takes the demands and propositions of LEO seriously and invest in our educators, giving them the support that they need and deserve. A g reat number of Un iversit y underg raduate st udent s have been taught by lect urers, a nd t hese qua lif ied Un iversit y employees a re being under pa id a nd lef t w it hout t he benef icia r y suppor t t hey need. The cur rent m in imum sa la r y for Un iversit y lect urers is $34, 500 at A n n A rbor, $28, 300 at Dea rbor n a nd $27, 300 at Flint . A s repor ted in t he Universit y ’s 2016 a nd 2017 audited f ina ncia l statement s, t hese lect urers brought in $462 m illion in revenue, wh ile t he cost of employ ment for t hese educators wa s on ly $85 m illion. Their cont ribut ions a nd work cont ribute sig n if ica nt ly to t he econom ics of t he Un iversit y, a nd yet t hey a re not receiv ing wages a nd benef it s t hat ref lect t his. When compa red, ma ny lect urers a re being pa id less t ha n t heir sur rounding colleag ues at va rious inst it ut ions, including Wa shtenaw Com munit y College a nd a va riet y of public h igh schools, a nd def init ively less t ha n

tenure-t rack professors at t he Universit y, where t he average sa la r y is $148,800 at t he A n n A rbor ca mpus. This cont ra st becomes even sta rker when considering t hat t he average sa la r y for fema le lect urers is $13,154 less t ha n t heir ma le counter pa r t s. The lect urers of t he Universit y a re not being pa id fa irly, a nd when considering what t hey bring to a ll t h ree ca mpuses in ter ms of academ ics, econom ics a nd com munit y-engagement , t he LEO request to ra ise t he m inimum sa la r y to $60,000 in A n n A rbor a nd $56,000 in Dea rbor n a nd Flint does not seem unwa r ra nted. LEO ha s been ver y voca l about t heir ba rga in ing plat for ms a nd have a st rong on line presence t hat t hey use to document t heir successes a nd prog ress a s negot iat ions cont inue. This plat for m, when rev iewed, focuses not on ly on t he issue of sa la r y but a lso on benef it s. A spect s such a s a n increa se in child subsidy a re cr ucia l to t he LEO plat for m, a s t hese t y pes of benef it s a re necessa r y to suppor t lect urers in t heir work a nd w it h t heir fa m ilies. Consistent hea lt h ca re a nd job securit y a lso a id t h is st r ug gle, g iv ing lect urers more stabilit y in t heir fa m ily lives. Refer ring specif ica lly to t he A n n A rbor ca mpus, lect urers a re of ten not even able to live w it hin t he cit y t hey work in a nd cont ribute to due to t he high cost of liv ing a nd t heir ow n st r ug gles w it h wages a nd benef it s. The lack of direct suppor t f rom t he Universit y to lect urers a nd t heir fa m ilies could lead to t hem potent ia lly leav ing for ot her

inst it ut ions, where t hey a re more consistent ly suppor ted a nd pa id, w it h our campus losing critical members of the University community. Lecturers are qualified and impactful educators who enrich the University experience for countless students, and their partnership and support helps the cause and impact of LEO. Students can get involved with LEO by showing up in solidarity to grade-ins and bargaining sessions (the next grade-in is March 29, with a regents meeting to follow). These events are often publicized on the LEO Facebook page, and outline how students can make an impact on the LEO negotiations. Lecturers are able to build strong relationships with a wide range of students on campus, often working in small classrooms and contributing to campus culture. By having not only members but also other faculty and students show their support and partnership with LEO, this could put pressure on the University to concede and meet the needs of University lecturers. The Un iversit y ha s ta ken steps to reach fa ir a nd necessa r y comprom ises w it h LEO, but t heir stag na nt cha nges to sa la r y increa ses hur t not on ly t he lect urers a nd academ ic excellence of t he school, but t he people who work consistent ly a nd closely w it h st udent s. Bot h t he Un iversit y a nd st udent s need to do t heir pa r t by suppor t ing t hose who dedicate their time and effort to our Michigan experience.

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orporate America has a lot of work to do if it wants to achieve any form of gender equity. According to a 2014 fact sheet from the Center for American Progress, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and 60 percent of master’s degrees. Yet, somehow, they make up only 14.6 percent of executive officers, 8.1 percent of top earners and 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. They hold only 16.9 percent of Fortune 500 board seats. Here we face a dilemma. We want the girls and young women to grow up and earn these upperlevel business positions, therefore increasing gender equality in the business world. But we also know, based on these statistics alone, corporate America isn’t always the most welcoming place for a woman. How can we ensure the women who enter the business world feel empowered to believe they are capable of earning a highly-paid leadership position? According to Quinnipiac University’s Women’s Rugby Head Coach Becky Carlson, the first D1 women’s NCAA coach for a full-contact sport, the first step to achieving gender equity in the workplace is working toward gender equity in sports, she said in a phone interview with The Daily. More than 3.2 million girls in the United States played high school sports in 2010, and about 200,000 young women played college sports in 2012. This is often their first experience working as part of a team to achieve a greater goal, and one of their first experiences taking on a major leadership role, such as team captain. The skills student athletes obtain through their sport translate directly to the business world. Unfortunately, for female athletes, playing a sport is often also their first experience facing blatant sexual discrimination. Carlson often notices major gender inequity in college athletics, even when it means schools are noncompliant with Title IX, the law that requires federally-funded institutions (such as public schools) do not discriminate based on sex. At athletic events and seminars, she often explains her position to athletic directors and administrators by saying, “Women’s Varsity Rugby, the only full contact sport of women in the NCAA.” “I get this response from people, and it ranges from insulting, to, ‘Oh, sweetie, our gender equity is fine, we don’t need you’ or, ‘You don’t look like a rugby player,’” she explained in a phone interview. “I often got

the, ‘We’re in compliance (with Title IX), we’re fine,’ and I would always take notes on these universities that would say this, and they were not fine or in compliance.” Even though Title IX was implemented almost half a century ago, the glaring gender inequity in today’s sports world is no secret. According to Athletic Business, girls’ sports lack not only recognition, but uniforms and equipment. Take a trip to any high school athletic facilities and this will be made abundantly clear. Or look at the ESPN or Sports Illustrated website to see that the sports world values the accomplishments of its male athletes much more highly than those of female athletes. Would it be much of a surprise if after female athletes graduate and enter the workplace, they subconsciously internalize the idea that their accomplishments are not as valuable as those of their male counterparts? “If we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing in athletics — and it doesn’t have anything to do with dribbling, kicking, running, passing — it has everything to do with preparing them for what lies ahead,” Carlson said. “And what lies ahead is a system that is not going to ask you if you’d like a raise, it is a system that is not going to ask you to speak louder, it’s just going to pass you over.” Carlson believes her primary role as a coach is to empower her athletes to succeed beyond the playing field. “The first pitch that I make when I’m with recruits isn’t, ‘Hey, this is the scholarship opportunity and this is how great it is to play on the field and this is the amenities we have,’” she said. “No, the first pitch is, ‘I want you to leave here with the understanding that you can speak in the boardroom.’” Her goal is for her athletes to graduate feeling comfortable asking questions, speaking up and negotiating their salaries. She doesn’t want them to graduate with the belief that no matter how hard they worked, they would still be second class compared to their male counterparts. Achieving this goal begins on the rugby field. “I coach a full contact sport and we’ve been three-time national champions,” she said. “And I still see that when an athlete tackles and goes down for a second and needs a moment to shake it off and get up, our male trainers are up, off the bench, running out there. I’m like, give them a second. Give them a second … That never happens when a male athlete needs a second. They’re not running out there.

We rush; we see (women) as weaker. That’s something in our athletes that I would like to see change. I would like for us to be able to say, ‘I would push this athlete the same way I would push a male athlete.’” In other instances, she has seen women coaches criticized for being too “harsh” on their athletes, when male coaches are respected for the very same coaching tactics. “It’s always, ‘She’s tough on them and he’s a great leader,’” she lamented. “They show Coach K and they’ll show Geno and in every photo those guys are coaching and they look serious and they look badass, right? It’s revered: It’s strength, it’s impressive, it is a champion’s face. And then you take the pictures that DNT has been using of Shannon (Miller) and she’s greedy, stubborn, unwilling to work.” Carlson noted that this mindset translates directly to the business world. “That male CEO that you work under goes in and tells everyone how it is and everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, he’s a boss, he’s badass,’” she said. “And you go into the boardroom and the woman tells you what to do and she’s considered bitchy, or considered moody.” Several times, Carlson has seen her athletes reap the benefits of her female empowering coaching tactics. One of her athletes had been interning for a company for two years and wanted to be hired there after graduation, but believed she deserved more than the entry level salary that employees who had never worked there would earn. “She went in,” Carlson recalled. “She directly said, ‘This is the value I bring to the company and if you want to hire me, this is my requirement.’ They said no initially, but she kept her head up after that, and she was still interning with them. Two weeks later, they turned around and were like, ‘You know, we really don’t want to lose you, we’ll take that salary bump and we want to hire you.’” Why was this athlete so confident? Carlson explained: “A recognition and appreciation and a reverence for strength in athletics moves over to this life after college.” The answer is simple. If we treat women as second-class citizens when they’re on the rugby field, we can’t expect them to understand that they’re equal as soon as they enter the boardroom.

Hannah Harshe can be reached at hhharshe@umich.edu.

BRETT GRAHAM | COLUMN

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Confirm Pompeo, Deny Haspel

ast week, in the latest round of “Survivor: West Wing Edition,” President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and nominated Mike Pompeo, current CIA director and former Tea Party congressman, to take his place. To fill Pompeo’s post, Trump nominated Pompeo’s deputy, Gina Haspel. Each of these people would be a disaster in their post and potentially irreparably harmful to both U.S. foreign policy and what little moral standing this country has left. Senate Democrats, however, in the current political climate, should consider biting the bullet and confirming Pompeo, while remaining firmly opposed to Haspel. First of all, it is important to establish why both are so odious. Pompeo is your standard order, run-of-the-mill Republican hawk; his career has been financed almost entirely thanks to the Koch brothers, he puts forward a “hard line” on terrorism that often bleeds into Islamophobia, he thinks the National Security Agency’s surveillance program does “good and important work” and he wants Edward Snowden extradited and sentenced to death. He resembles, in more ways than one, an external-facing, slightly younger Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff known for his controversial stance on immigration law. Compared to his deputy and potential successor, he’s also the more palatable of the two. Haspel ran a CIA torture site in Thailand in the early 2000s, where prisoners were waterboarded, slammed against walls and confined within coffinlike boxes. For those not already sold on her, she later oversaw the destruction of the video evidence that would have almost certainly damned her as a war criminal in

violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. So, torture and a cover-up. Double trouble. There are, though, a few fundamental situational factors to take into account. First of all, consider the current state of the agencies that each of these would-be Kubrick characters have been nominated to run. The State Department has been understaffed to the point that, by many accounts, it is struggling to function properly. As recently as February, no fewer than 45 ambassadorships were left vacant, many of which are to important world powers and allies. South Korea, Australia, Germany, Turkey and Saudi Arabia all belong to this group. Though the thought of staffing these positions with conservative, reactionary ideologues is not the most appealing eventuality, there is foreign policy merit to having warm bodies in those chairs. Pompeo has been, according to reports, decently effective and well-liked at the CIA. A lukewarm performance like that would be a major step up from what State looked like under Tillerson. Secondly, after he staffs the place up and gets it in working order, there’s a good chance that most foreign policy will still be run out of the White House. More than temperament, what impeded Rex Tillerson’s ability to get things done was the fact that any diplomatic conversation or stance could and would be thrown out the window in 140 characters or fewer. Twitter is Trump’s State Department and he is his own ambassador to the world. That is not likely to change depending on whom is serving in that post. For those news sources that seem to suggest Pompeo

is different in any way to the sycophants that came before him — that Trump listens, trusts or respects him more than anyone else who has come through the White House to this point — please stop. There was a time that he listened to Steve Bannon, too. At other times, it was going to be Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s cooler heads prevailing. Remember when we were supposed to collectively breathe a sigh of relief when John Kelly entered the picture because he was a moderating force to who Trump listened? How’s that working out? Pompeo is not a game changer and, at this point in time, we should treat that as a victory. Republicans face a tough road between now and the midterm elections. Now is not the time to pick a confirmation fight over a nominee as qualified as Pompeo, just to give them a bit of slack and make people think that this is partisanship business as usual. Senate Democrats should nonetheless make a distinction; Pompeo, though abhorrent, is qualified to do the job and the State Department needs a secretary. The CIA, on the other hand, is not in any state of crisis whatsoever (that we know of ). It does not necessarily need this modern-day Torquemada to keep the lights on and the trains on time, so to speak. Pompeo is just about on par when it comes to what we expected from a Trump nominee. Confirm him. The State Department needs a secretary. Haspel is almost undeniably a war criminal. The CIA can wait for someone much better.

Brett Graham can be reached at btgraham@umich.edu.

Sports

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Thursday, March 22, 2018 — 5A

Jordan Poole’s next challenge The freshman guard has cemented himself in Michigan lore. Now, he and the Wolverines will look to take down Texas A&M MARK CALCAGNO Daily Sports Editor

It doesn’t matter if Jordan Poole never makes another basket. He’s already cemented himself into Michigan basketball lore. You’ve probably seen the shot a thousand times. Awkwardly released, fully covered, a heave in desperation. Yet it still found nylon, of course. On Tuesday, Poole told reporters he was poked in the eye during the game, making it feel like he had a film over his pupil. It’s even more reason why the play is one of the most — if not the most — improbable shots of the NCAA Tournament. Naturally, attention has swarmed Poole. Standing in a water-soaked locker room amidst a blinding artillery of camera lights, he opened his phone to 532 texts a half-anhour after the buzzer. They came from close friends to middle school teachers to pastors in his hometown Milwaukee. Poole said his Instagram account has nearly doubled in followers up to roughly 51,000, which makes for the most on the team — something the freshman wasn’t hesitant to point out. Enough people on Twitter even mistook him for Jordan Peele, prompting the Oscar-winning “Get Out” director to fire off an ironic tweet about his jump-shot practice paying off. Oh, and Poole graced our Sports Monday cover — clearly the most exciting of all. As of Tuesday, Poole said he has watched the video of the shot at least 500 times. Even at that number, he said it doesn’t get old. “Every time I watch it,” Poole said, “I keep getting goosebumps and butterflies because it’s just amazing that I hit the shot.

EVAN AARON/Daily

Freshman guard Jordan Poole entered school lore when he hit a last second, game-winning 3-pointer to give Michigan a 64-63 win over Houston.

“I just can’t not smile every time I look at it, like, ‘Yo, I actually hit that.’ ” There’s probably no other Wolverine who would enjoy these circumstances more than Poole. Guys like sophomores Jon Teske and Zavier Simpson, along with even captains Duncan Robinson and Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman are relatively reserved when swarms of media gather around after big-time performances. But that’s not Poole. He was born for the spotlight, relishing almost all the focus that’s come his way. “I mean, he’s got a lot of confidence, and he’ll tell you about it, too,” Michigan coach

John Beilein told reporters on Saturday. It’s that confidence, or “overdose of swagger” as Beilein said in a TV interview directly after the buzzer-beater, that allowed Poole to drill the shot and create memories for Michigan players and fans that will carry on for years. But there’s still basketball left to be played. After all, just two wins separate the Wolverines from the Final Four. And that’s where Poole’s

quandary comes. His “overdose of swagger” can be exactly that sometimes: an overdose. Early in Big Ten Play, heatcheck 3-pointers, lapses on defense and the occasional failed highlight would irk Beilein, making an already short leash even shorter. As such, Poole played just 10.5 minutes through the season’s first 16 games. But Poole soon began executing the simpler maneuvers — “winning plays”

“Every time I watch it, I keep getting goosebumps ...”

as Beilein describes them — and was rewarded with more agency and playing time. And after a sturdy drought, Poole began to take off in late January. Fifteen points against Ohio State. A trio of 3-pointers against Maryland. A posterizing, SportsCenter-top-play dunk against Penn State. Poole was so effective that he began cutting into Charles Matthews’ minutes — the redshirt sophomore guard who led Michigan in scoring during non-conference play. “(Poole) wasn’t in the rotation because he was learning so much about basketball that he wasn’t helping us,” Beilein said Feb. 20. “He was going to help us win games, but he matured.

He got better.” But then the Big Ten Tournament hit, and Poole’s shot was off. After a 1-for9 effort in the quarterfinals, freshman forward Isaiah Livers was asked about his roommate’s struggles. “He’ll pop out of his slump sometime,” Livers said. “He’s a natural scorer.” “Slump?” Poole interjected from the locker over. “You’re in a slump right now, bro,” Livers responded. “Watch tomorrow. I’ll pop out of it.” But under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden, Poole’s attempts simply wouldn’t fall, finishing with just 13 total points over four games. Last Saturday, however, he still hit the shot. All the pressure and all the talk of a slump has become a distant thought. But now, the Wolverines need a strong Poole to beat Texas A&M on Thursday. The Aggies thwarted No. 2 seed North Carolina’s interior on Sunday. The Tar Heels failed to open up lanes for slashers and opportunties on the block, shooting an abysmal 6-for31 from beyond the arc and allowing Texas A&M to advance in emphatic fashion. To avoid the same fate, Poole and Michigan need to knock down 3-pointers — and efficiently so. That means making those winning plays and avoiding heat checks — despite the greatness of Poole’s last shot. And to his credit, even through all the hype, new Instagram followers and celebrity shootouts, Poole seems to understand just that. “(Coach) definitely told me to live in the moment, and take it all in,” Poole said. “But it’s only so long you can do it before you move on to the next game.”

Abdur-Rahkman, Michigan look to solve shooting struggles against Aggies MIKE PERSAK

Managing Sports Editor

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — There are two lines of thinking when a good team plays badly. One is that it’s a problem to be taken seriously, because any sort of slump in the postseason can easily spell doom for a team. The Michigan men’s basketball team, after shooting under 40 percent from the floor and 28 percent from deep in two games last weekend, has taken the second train of thought. The Wolverines believe their play, and their shooting in particular, will regress to the mean eventually. “We didn’t make them last week, but we’ve got to stay encouraged and still have that confidence to take and make open shots,” said senior guard Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman. “That’s what we’ve been doing, we haven’t really changed anything.” “We’ve been winning,” added sophomore guard Zavier Simpson. “We’re on a good winning streak. We want to continue what we’ve been doing, and hopefully the shots fall. We want to make sure everybody stays confident, and when (the shots) fall, that’s when it’s a whole different ballgame.” For Michigan, that’s the

positive side of things. Even with lackluster shooting numbers, it’s still playing basketball because of freshman guard Jordan Poole’s game-winning shot against Houston. And to a man, it seems the Wolverines are thinking positively about their next opportunity to break out of their slump against Texas A&M on Thursday. “Zavier takes pride in that,” said freshman forward Isaiah Livers. “He was like, ‘Dang, we’re up two and we’re not even playing our best right now,’ at halftime. And I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right, X. We’ve just gotta come out and play better.’ And that’s why I said I was really looking forward to this game to see what happened over the week and if we’re gonna hit that shot or not.” The concerning side to Michigan’s shooting struggles last week is that there isn’t a strategic change that can be made to fix it. The Wolverines got good shots against Houston and Montana, but they weren’t falling. Shooting is variable, and it’s contagious. When a good shot doesn’t go in, there isn’t much more to do but shrug your shoulders and shoot it again the next time. Michigan coach John Beilein said as much Wednesday.

“I see us just going to play on,” Beilein said. “We were fortunate to be here, and we played the best basketball we could play. It wasn’t as good as some of our other games, but that just happens. Everybody is always asking for reasons why. There is no reason why. It just happens. They’re 19-year-old kids. It just happens.” So what do you do in practice the next week to improve you shooting? You shoot. At least with that, according to Beilein, there is a silver lining. “Yesterday, we did our shooting drills, and it was the highest numbers we’ve ever gotten as a team as far as our shooting drill,” Beilein said at his press conference Tuesday. “It was just a five-minute shooting drill, but the lowest guy had 55 threes in five minutes, and that was the lowest guy. And the standard used to be 50 until we became good at it, and now it’s 60. Of our 12 players, 10 got 60.” And there is the confidence again. Every Michigan player and coach says that the shooting woes won’t continue. After all, this is the same team whose offense lit up Madison Square Garden to win the Big Ten Tournament. But they’d better be right. The margin for error is much less

this time of year. The Wolverines snuck into the Sweet Sixteen

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FOR RENT RELEASE DATE– Thursday, March 22, 2018

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SUMMER EMPLOYMENT

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this weekend, they might not be so fortunate.

Classifieds

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Michigan shot under 40 percent from the floor and 28 percent from deep in the first two games of the NCAA Tournament.

despite struggling to score. If that performance is repeated

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

ACROSS 1 Fall face first while skiing, say 6 Mighty silly 11 Part of ROM: Abbr. 14 Longest-serving prime minister of India 15 Austrian actress Berger 16 Kanye West’s “I __ God” 17 Soda fountain come-on? 19 Monarch catcher 20 Brooklyn Dodgers legend Campanella 21 In questionable taste 22 All excited 24 Radiant glow 25 Italian cheese 26 Earthquake coverage? 31 Aids in illegal activity 32 Roberts of “That ’70s Show” 33 Comic Martha 34 One-named singer with 15 Grammys 36 Neeson of “Love Actually” 40 Continue gabbing 42 Ship’s seepage 43 List in a quiz program recap? 47 Latin ballroom dances 48 Berlin octet 49 One of a Dumas trio 50 Civil rights leader Chavez 52 __-tip steak 55 Barnyard sound 56 Lower hulls fortified? 59 Directional suffix 60 Missouri tribe 61 Not-giving-up phrase 62 Completed 63 Fishing boot 64 Taboos, and a hint to the four longest puzzle answers DOWN 1 Career for a sci. major 2 Flight-related prefix

3 Unspecified folks 4 Sportswriter Berkow 5 Clucks of disapproval 6 __ School: art movement featuring NYC scenes 7 Top out 8 Very dark 9 Abbr. in some Québec addresses 10 Contributes 11 Oscar-nominated “Flashdance” song 12 Arise 13 San __, California 18 Asian dress 23 Contender for the crown 24 Steve Rogers, for Captain America 25 Composer of the opera “Alfred” 26 At a distance 27 Chicago-based law org. 28 Illegal fwy. maneuver 29 Court worker 30 Co. that merged with Continental

34 Queen’s subjects 35 “And how!” 37 Sort 38 Sit in a cellar, maybe 39 Club __ 41 Base entertainment 42 Persian Gulf monarchy 43 Persian Gulf native 44 Release

45 Egyptian leader for whom a lake is named 46 Union foe 47 Gained control of 50 Dressed 51 Advantage 52 1982 sci-fi film 53 Defaulter’s risk 54 Time to beware 57 Spanish she-bear 58 Frat letter

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

By Robert and Marlea Ellis ©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

03/22/18

03/22/18

Sports

6A — Thursday, March 22, 2018

Walk-ons take in March Madness ETHAN WOLFE Daily Sports Editor

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — C.J. Baird was enamored with his surroundings. The walk-on freshman continually scanned his locker up and down, jimmied his feet through his white Jordans and sent Snapchats of the covered nameplate beside his own name at the top — it belonged to Los Angeles Clippers forward Danilo Gallinari. The scene was an image custom-fit to a childhood dream. While reporters swarmed the typical starters, Baird and his fellow walk-on freshmen teammates — Luke Wilson, Rico Ozuna-Harrison and Naji Ozeir — stood up from their quiet corner and surveyed the room to find the lockers of Lou Williams and Tobias Harris, two of their numerous NBA inspirations. The wide-eyed walk-ons weren’t surrounded by cameras and voice recorders. The meager foot traffic by their lockers wasn’t a surprise, though — they aren’t going to see the floor for Thursday’s Sweet Sixteen matchup against Texas A&M. Even for their first road trip of the season last weekend in Wichita, the NCAA Tournament aura of InTrust Bank Arena wasn’t the most jaw-dropping spot to be — Ozeir justified it as having a role in “the bigger picture.” But now in Los Angeles, practicing for a Tournament game under the storied Staples Center rafters, the newly-travelled walkons are understanding what it feels like to hit the road and get star treatment as members of one of the highest ranked teams in the country. You can’t blame them for having trouble taking it in stride. “We’re all in awe and taking everything in and they’re just like ‘Yeah, this is what you do when you travel,’ ” Baird said. “It makes us feel more welcome and more accepted.” Accepted is the operative word here. The freshmen admit

not travelling with the team throughout the season can lead to an isolated nature. They didn’t even know until just after the Big Ten Tournament that they would get to come with the team for March Madness. Ozuna-Harrison even said some of his teammates had to calm his nerves before the first flight. Their dedication, of course, doesn’t go unnoticed on the team. Coach John Beilein lightheartedly labels them and junior forward Brent Hibbitts the “Fab Five” that compose the scout team. With an upcoming date against a lengthy, athletic Aggies team that boasts three starters 6-foot-9 or taller, it is up to the scout team — none of which are taller than 6-foot-8 — to do what they’ve done all season and emulate their opponent. “It’s definitely a bigger role, mimicking the other person,” Ozeir said. “Just trying to do what they do. They’re a much bigger team so the emphasis is guarding post players.” Added Ozuna-Harrison: “You always know exactly what the other team does. Being a guard, and we’re not playing a team that has guards that take a whole lot of shots, we know to just give it to the post. Stuff like that, we know our personnel.” With a difficult opponent for the

most high-stakes challenge of the season, they do the dirty work no one else wants to do. It’s a position vital to the team’s success, and another reason to celebrate their presence at the tournament. “Everybody was excited (they were coming),” said senior guard Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman. “They put so much into it, as much as we do. They don’t get any credit for it and you don’t see what they do. They definitely deserve to come on the trips and definitely deserve everything that we get.” Off the court, Michigan hardly gives itself time for other activities. In “the spirit of staying focused,” according to Baird, their time is spent playing Xbox or eating meals together. Time for yourself isn’t really an option on a trip like this, which is why at least two players volunteer every trip to bring a game console. The walk-ons were always familiar with this ritual — another small gesture that makes the trip that much more special for them. Unlike Wilson and Ozeir, Baird and Ozuna-Harrison were added to the roster after the beginning of the University’s fall semester. But needless to say, it didn’t matter how long they had been with the team. Baird’s disbelief in getting this far echoed the group’s mentality. “Never could’ve dreamed,” he said, “of anything this good.”

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Naji Ozeir (right) doesn’t usually travel to Michigan’s away games.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Michigan beats CMU, 5-0, in home opener ARIA GERSON

Daily Sports Writer

First it was a trickle. Then it was a flood. For the No. 17 Michigan softball team (23-6 overall), the first five innings of Wednesday’s home opener against Central Michigan — an eventual 5-0 win — seemed to be the same story ad nauseam. A hard-hit ball that found a glove. An infield single erased on a double play. A shot that looked destined for the seats, only to die on the warning track. Rinse. Repeat. Until the floodgates opened. At first, the game was a pitcher’s duel between senior right-hander Tera Blanco and the Chippewas’ Taylor Weaver. Both pitchers faced the minimum through three innings. The lone baserunner for either team — a swinging-bunt single by sophomore outfielder Haley Hoogenraad — was promptly erased when junior catcher Katie Alexander lined into a double play. “They’re just extra pumped, they’re extra excited to be at home, and I worry about the distraction,” said Michigan coach Carol Hutchins. “ … I thought we were anxious a little bit at the plate, trying too hard and we weren’t very relaxed.” The fourth inning provided some hope for the Wolverines. Junior second baseman Faith Canfield led off with a walk and junior centerfielder Natalie Peters followed with an infield single. Blanco stepped up to the plate and launched a long, arcing fly ball. The crowd held their collective breaths, but the wind — a cold, gusty breeze that blew straight in for the majority of the game — had other plans. What could have been a game-defining home run was instead a routine flyout. And in the fifth, Michigan’s pitching — which had kept it in the game up to that point — sprung a leak. Hutchins, wanting to get all her pitchers a look in front of the home crowd, removed a dealing

MATT VAILLIENCOURT/Daily

Tera Blanco pitched well in Michigan’s 5-0 win over Central Michigan.

Blanco for freshman left-hander Meghan Beaubien. But Beaubien wasn’t herself. First she gave up a leadoff double. Then she stopped throwing strikes. Though Beaubien got a quick out on a popped-up bunt, she got to a 3-0 count on the next hitter before forcing a groundout. With the following two batters, she wasn’t as lucky. Both drew walks. Hutchins had enough. She called Blanco back into the circle. “I think Beaubien just kind of felt off,” Hutchins said. “And I think she let that affect her a little bit. … She never really got a chance to get going.” But Blanco came in pumped up. She had been lights-out all game and this time was no different. The next batter hit a chopper right to Canfield. Inning over. And just as Blanco had flipped the switch off for the Chippewas, she flipped it on for the Wolverines. With runners on first and second in the bottom of the sixth, Blanco launched a ball deep to center. This time, there was no leather in sight as the ball dropped

for a double that made the score 1-0. “All the game we just needed that one hit that started everything,” Canfield said. “It gave everyone confidence and I mean … one leads to another and another and another.” Indeed, one hit led to another (a two-RBI double by sophomore third baseman Madison Uden) and another (a single from freshman designated player Lou Allan that brought Uden home) and another (a double down the left-field line to move runners to second and third with only one out). By the time the parade had ended, the Wolverines had scored five runs, and suddenly a tense duel was anything but. “It was just a matter of time,” Blanco said. “ … We came through at the end.” Ten pitches from freshman right-hander Sarah Schaefer later, the side was retired. The game was over. And the struggles that had seemed so potent until the sixth had been washed away.

“It was just a matter of time. We came through at the end.”

In women’s athletics, Rosen has seen transformative changes PAIGE VOEFFRAY Daily Sports Editor

In observance of Women’s History Month, The Daily launches a series aimed at telling the stories of female athletes, coaches and teams at the University from the perspective of the female sports writers on staff. Daily sports editor Paige Voeffray continues the series with this story. Mark Rosen is a man living in a woman’s world. When he started his career, he was faced with a choice: stick to what was familiar and coach men’s sports, or venture to the women’s game. Choosing the latter, he has seen first-hand the struggles female college athletes face: Lack of crowds, lack of funding and lack of respect. Many others would have stuck with the men. But Rosen grew fond of coaching women. He’s been the Michigan women’s volleyball coach for 19 seasons now. “I think they’re way more coachable,” said Rosen. “They’re way more willing to listen. There are some personality differences that I think are really unique that I really like the side of women’s personalities. They really take to heart wanting feedback and wanting to get better. “I think you spend more time with women trying to convince them that they’re better than they think they are, and guys you spend more time convincing them they’re not as good as they think they are.” Before his tenure as a coach, Rosen never would have dreamed of being a women’s volleyball coach, let alone a volleyball coach at all. After growing up an avid hockey player in Anchorage, Alaska, Rosen knew that he wanted to coach when his playing days were over. Throughout high school and the beginning of college, Rosen realized that his hobby of playing volleyball was something much more than that. So, he took his talents to California State University at Northridge to try his hand as a Division I varsity men’s volleyball player. Combining his desire to be a coach and natural volleyball IQ, Rosen became a student of the game and, after 26 years of

FILE PHOTO

Michigan coach Mark Rosen (second from right) has coached the Wolverines for 19 seasons in a long and illustrious career.

coaching, it has surely paid off. *** Rosen’s first coaching experience was back where it all began — his former high school. He never worried that he wouldn’t understand the different playing styles or how to coach women, because he was too busy simply trying to learn how to coach, period. As Rosen eventually left high school volleyball to pursue a coaching career at a more competitive level, he never ventured to the men’s game. In part, it has to do with the number of programs — there are over 1,000 NCAA women’s volleyball teams, while the men have yet to break 100. But even though Rosen was a player himself, there’s something about the women’s game that speaks to him. “I like the women’s game more because it’s more rally oriented and more defensively oriented, whereas the men’s is more just raw power,” Rosen said. “I don’t even like watching the guys’ games. …

It’s entertaining, but to me it’s not as tactically intriguing because it’s just more physical — set the best player, he gets up and gets a kill, rally over. “In the women’s game, I think there’s way more tactics and way more adjustments you can make and things you can do to tactically be involved in the game.” The style of play is truly the only difference Rosen sees between the men’s and women’s games. In fact, he believes thinking of them differently is a problem of its own. At the end of the day, his athletes want to compete and win. He disregards the characterization that there will be more drama, and social lives are more important than the sport just because they’re women. Rosen was a player himself, and he can recall plenty of drama and “guys that

wanted to beat the heck out of each other” on his team. It’s not specific to women’s sports. It’s specific to being an athlete. *** Just because Rosen views men’s and women’s sports the same, doesn’t mean everyone does. Rosen has had a front row seat to the struggles women’s sports have been through, but he credits those that came before him for why his volleyball team is at the level it is today. He recalls softball coach Carol Hutchins, before she was the winningest coach in NCAA softball history, when she held a second job as the athletic director’s assistant. Sure, she was the head softball coach at a huge public school, but she would spend her evenings raking her own fields while she

“In the women’s game, I think there’s way more tactics ...”

watched an entire grounds crew take care of the baseball field. But the dues she paid paved the way for the next generation. He recalls Bev Plocki applied for three gymnastics coaching jobs. One for a Division III school, one for a Division II school and the other at Michigan. She didn’t get the other jobs and has been the Wolverines’ coach for 29 seasons. It is suspected she was offered the job because they thought she wouldn’t make waves, but instead they got a coach who hasn’t been afraid to speak her mind and has been a champion for women athletes. With the introduction of Title IX, women’s programs began establishing themselves across the country. Progress was slow, but it was happening. As each new generation sees powerful women athletes, the stigma surrounding them will disappear. Rosen still has friends that are shocked to hear how much time his athletes spend in the weight room, on the track and with a dietician.

His athletes are all in and are committed to being the best, and it’s time people started seeing that. “My mom is a super competitive person, but she couldn’t be an athlete because there was no opportunity for her. I didn’t look at her when I was a kid as, ‘Hey there’s my mom, the athlete and competitive person,’ ” Rosen said. “Well then there’s my wife (associate head volleyball coach Leisa Rosen), who was an AllAmerican, she was a scholarship athlete, she was a Big Ten Player of the Year, she was the Ohio State Athlete of the Year, she’s in the Hall of Fame. “My kids are so much more in tune with and proud of her athletic career than mine. … They’ll brag about Leisa, and think about how cool that is that we have two guys that see their mom as an athlete.” Women’s sports have come so far in such a short amount of time, and Rosen only sees their success increasing in the future. “The men’s sports have had a 75-year head start. Michigan really didn’t take women’s athletics seriously really until the mid-80s, maybe the late-80s. They’ve only been really committed to it for 30-40 years versus the men side’s been (committed for) 150 years,” Rosen said. “Are we catching up and are we making moves? I absolutely think so. “It’s so exciting to see where volleyball’s going and I try to project ahead and think, ‘What about 25 years from now? What will it be like?’ I honestly believe there will be pro leagues, I honestly believe there will be more and more sold-out venues and we will be making revenue. That’s totally conceivable to me. (Men’s athletics) just had a head start.” The future of volleyball is still unknown, just as the future of women’s sports is unknown. But if Rosen has any control of the future, change is coming. He sees dedicated fans that are hooked on volleyball, he sees packed arenas for games and he sees an increase in quality female coaches. But most importantly, he sees a future without stigma surrounding women’s athletics.

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2B —Thursday, March 22, 2018

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DARBY STRIPE / DAILY

Johanna Bauman discusses the PAT program.

Performance Arts Technology and the limitless potential of tech & art LAURA DZUBAY Daily Arts Writer

& MIKE WATKINS Daily Arts Writer

Moore’s law postulates the capabilities of technology double every two years and will continue to do so indefinitely. The logical base of this projection into the future has been disputed, but regardless its central idea is true: Technology does not stop. This characteristic is what makes the School of Music, Theatre & Dance’s Performance Arts Technology department so interesting, as the challenge for students is to chase this technological trend through art. The Daily spoke with PAT students about the unique characteristics of the University’s program that facilitate the marriage between art and technology as well as the intrinsic innovation within the major. Fee Christoph, an interarts performance and computer science major, took both PAT 201 and PAT 498. In PAT 201, Christoph was exposed to the processes behind the creation of electronic music and some history about the genre. “In the class itself, what I really enjoyed was that it wasn’t just a focus on learning (PAT) skills, but a lot of it was also about thinking about electronic music and the debates it presents and understanding philosophically what it means for these different music movements to be happening,” Christoph said. Her PAT 498 experience was slightly different: “PAT 201 was a studio class where we were making more music, and then in PAT 498 we were learning all about this awesome electronic music.” In PAT 498, Christoph learned the scope of electronic music in a social context, as her professor revealed to the students many artists working at the fringe of technology-driven music, especially women and minorities innovating in a genre historically dominated by white men. “The easiest gate into the history of electronic music is through a lot of white male composers, so it was really cool to have a class that was like, ‘Hey, there are also a ton of women composers and minority composers who are doing amazing work currently,’” Christoph said. Classes in PAT often examine artistic innovation in the context of history, a focus which has offered its students a broader perspective on the possibilities that technology offers. In another interview, PAT major and independent singersongwriter Johanna Baumann expanded on the importance of this innovation. “If we’re talking about history,

going back to, let’s say, the 1900s … people were going back to the classical stuff, but there were also other people who were like, ‘No, we’re not going to go there. We’re going to do new things. We’re going to mess around with records and later tape, and cut stuff up, and make crazy stuff that doesn’t sound like music to anyone.’ Yet. But now it sounds like music to us,” Baumann said. According to Baumann, this pattern has continued throughout many of the major technological advancements of the last century, all the way up to the present day. “People were making music with computers as soon as computers started to become a thing,” she said. “Even before that, people were using technology in music in creative ways … Technology and art develop alongside each other and enhance each other, because technology without art would be super boring. And then art without technology would be more limited.” As a PAT student, Baumann is often seeking out creative ways to explore this intersection. She interned last year at Moogfest, a festival focused on music and technology, and just released an original album in Feb. The album, Peach, consists of eight tracks, some of which were recorded as projects in PAT recording classes. Last year, Baumann received the Hedy Lamarr Achievement Award for Emerging Leaders in Entertainment Technology, presented by the Digital Entertainment Group. As she pointed out in our conversation, she is only one example: “PAT majors are doing big things.” “If you just know the technical basics, you’re not going to be able to solve problems as well as if you know the creative aspects,” Baumann said. “Say you’re helping a musician, and they have some kind of problem … You know the technology of what’s going to work, and then you also know, aesthetically and musically, what’s going to sound good. So I think having the creative experience really enhances being an engineer. Because you’re an artist, too, so you can help the artist.” Baumann’s newest project is her senior thesis, a sound installation to be put up in the Chip Davis Technology Studio of the Earl V. Moore Building. The student showcase day for all senior theses will take place April 13. Baumann’s own installation, Mood Room, will be a curtained-off section of the room with stations that generate music algorithmically using participants’ heart rate, temperature and conductance. “I’m trying to estimate people’s moods and play music that reflects the mood of the room, and then also have colored lights and stuff. It’s like a mood ring, but a room,” Baumann said. Ryan Cox, a Daily Arts Writer and former saxophone performance major, explained

his initial draw to PAT was the program’s diversity of interests and lack of rigidity that mirrored the limitlessness of technology. “One of the things that I really liked about the PAT program here especially was how diverse is actually was,” Cox said. “They didn’t have a specific focus, but it was kind of what you made of it. I’ve had friends graduate here who are now recording engineers in L.A. I’ve had friends graduate here who are now working for digital audio workstations and coding for them. It’s really as technical or as creative as you want it to be.” For example, Cox mentioned that for his PAT application, he was asked to rearrange a Bach fugue with the objective to “be as weird and creative as you can be.” He merged the fugue with “Back to the Future” themes, titling his piece, “Bach to the Future,” checking both the weird and creative boxes. Cox also spoke on the controversy regarding the combination of music and technology in general. While there is certainly merit to the claim technology’s influence in music has the potential to transform warm, analog sounds into digital, inauthentic computations, Cox sided with the computers. To him, the influx of technology in art opens up many more doors than it closes, especially when the proper balance between natural and artificial is struck. “I’m all for the incorporation of technology in music,” Cox said. “I think it’s really important because of how many boundaries it alleviates. It’s really cool to have a combination of analog sounds and more digital, abstract sounds that you wouldn’t be able to actually create. I think that’s stimulating for the listener because they’ll hear these things that are manmade, and then they’ll hear these things that aren’t natural.” Cox posited this stimulating blend of electronic and organic sounds is what drives pop and hip-hop music today, as electronically engineered beats are often paired with a natural, familiar voice. Sticking with the topic of the benefits technology brings to art, our conversation shifted toward the music industry. Today, with the advent of label-less streaming services like SoundCloud and Bandcamp, amateur musicians can independently make the leap into the professional world with simply a microphone, a digital audio workstation and a computer. This progression not only makes the creation and promotion of music infinitely easier for the artist, but it also exposes so much art to the listener that would go either uncreated or undiscovered without technology. When asked about his focus and future in PAT, Cox gave a response in line with the information he’d already provided about the ever-changing landscape of

technology and music. “It’s really hard to say, because every time I get exposed to something new in PAT, I gravitate towards it,” Cox said. “Every day, what I see myself doing in the future is different. It’s really hard to decide what you want to do, because every day music technology and performance arts technology is growing and its exponential. It’s not going to stop.” This year’s student showcase will be a single example of the expansive work that PAT students are doing, which could be viewed as the most recent culmination of several years of art and technology developing alongside one another. According to Department Chair Michael Gurevich, these developments can be boiled down to two major factors, the first being an immense growth in computing power. “When I was starting out, you could barely kind of process and manipulate sound on a computer live, in real time,” Gurevich said. “Now, your watch or your phone

can do that. So just the sheer computing power has created the possibility that anyone’s phone, computer (and) lots of mobile computing devices are basically powerful recording studios of powerful simple processes. So that means that anyone can do it, and anyone has the access to really sophisticated tools.” Gurevich has been active in the field of performance arts technology for about 20 years. Another factor that has led to an increase in innovation in this field, he said, is the Internet. “The second thing is the possibility that using the internet as a medium for music-making has made so the possibility of now not just recording, producing one’s own music, but distributing it online,” Gurevich said. “But then also the possibility of collaborating with people in distant locations who you’ve never met — and we can do that live now, too. So one of our interests in our department at Michigan is what we call telematics, so the possibility of playing live with people in distant locations.” The PAT program at the University specifically has risen to meet the occasion. One of the things that makes the department here stand out is that the program is highly undergraduate-focused; By Gurevich’s estimate, as many as 98 percent of PAT students are undergraduates. “Music technology, which is really what our department is primarily about, tends to be a field that really, in most schools, exists primarily at the graduate level,” Gurevich said. “And that’s because in order to work in this field, you need to know a lot about music, you need to know a lot about technology and you need to also have put some thought into how those two things go together … So we’re pretty unique in that respect, in that we start out in a really challenging field, from day one, with undergraduate students.” The department is also unique because of its sheer breadth: There are nine full-time faculty members, with focuses encompassing composition, film music, visual media, recording, sound engineering and more. All of the faculty and their classes share a commitment to prioritizing creativity through a technological lens. “What we try to do, always, is to keep the aesthetic and the creative aspects of what we’re

doing front and center in all of our classes … What we try to do is not focus on technology for its

The Daily spoke with PAT students about the unique characteristics of the University’s program that facilitate the marriage between art and technology as well as the intrinsic innovation within the major

own sake, but instead to try to always be asking what are the creative consequences and the creative or artistic possibilities of a particular technique or a particular technology,” Gurevich said. The classes accomplish this often through assigning projectbased work, and assignments where “as soon as students learn something, they’re starting to make music with it.” The world of performance arts technology is rapidly evolving, and judging by the pace of the department and the wide variety of projects being undertaken by its students, the University’s PAT program is more than prepared to keep up. “Historically, a lot of new technologies have actually emerged from artistic motivations. At the same time, artists have always been kind of voracious consumers of technologies, and as soon as a new technology emerges, artists are using it to try to push art forward. And I think that exists in music, it exists in visual art, in architecture, in almost any creative field,” Gurevich said. “So I think they’ve always been intertwined, and that’ll probably always be the case.”

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT

Groundworks at the Dude: art intersects with 3D tech NITYA GUPTA Daily Arts Writer

From developing car parts to making sculptures, 3D printing and scanning technologies are changing the way we create. The Groundworks Fabrication Studio, located in the Duderstadt Center, offers students the chance to work with 3D printing and scanning technologies. Staff at Groundworks assist students with the printing of their projects, giving advice on which specific printer to use and helping create the file. Stephanie O’Malley, Interactive Imaging and Production Specialist at Groundworks, creates content for a variety of grant funded projects across the schools associated with the University. “These grants can involve 3D content for augmented or virtual reality platforms, animation or illustrations and span very diverse fields, from medical or engineering to art and architecture,” O’Malley wrote in an email interview with The Daily. “Because Groundworks at the Duderstadt Center is an open resource to all of the University of Michigan, we see a lot of cross-pollination between students from different fields which can lead to some very interesting projects.”

O’Malley has seen many student projects, and some of the most interesting to her have been when students 3D scan themselves to print miniatures or to paper craft armatures. Others use the data to CNC route (a computer controlled cutter) to cut large foam statues. “I think the most intriguing art projects that utilize 3D printing are those that make smart use of the technology to do things that haven’t been done before or can’t be done with traditional means of fabricating,” O’Malley wrote. “I am also always excited to see other technologies feed into the 3D printing process.” However, O’Malley has noticed some restrictions with the 3D printers, especially because they require that the artist have the technical knowledge that goes into making the CAD (computer aided design program) model of the project they want to print. “I would like to see these technologies become more artist-friendly,” O’Malley wrote. “3D printers are restricted in many ways that artists have to design around. A lot of people have the expectation that a 3D printer should work as seamlessly as a paper printer, and I see a lot of companies trying to progress toward achieving

that experience.” O’Malley herself started out in the video game industry, working on cross-platform game development for XBox, Playstation and Wii. She now finds working at the University to be a way to blend her background with her interest in cutting edge technologies and virtual reality platforms. When O’Malley looks to the future of 3D technologies and art, she hopes for improvement from both the artistic side as well as the technical side, because while 3D technology is used to create art, art skills are used to transform science and engineering projects from an idea to reality. “In 3D visualization we see a lot of rough diagrams and other visuals that are constructed by scientists or engineers, and they often lack the aesthetic to make them look professional but also the visual cues that tell the viewer what is important or how to travel coherently through the data,” O’Malley wrote. “It takes a very skilled artist to reinterpret this kind of complicated data in a more coherent way. I would like to see artists that are more adaptive to this visual language, but also more people seeking visualizations who realize the importance of a strong aesthetic when communicating their ideas.”

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SECONDARY

Technology, ebooks and new frontiers of narrative MIRIAM FRANCISCO Daily Arts Writer

There’s no doubt we are living in an age of screens, and books have not been spared in the relentless transfer of text to electronic devices. Is this a bad thing? How have writers grappled with the impacts of technology on human connection, communication and interaction? Sweetland lecturer Simone Sessolo studies how technology shapes the way we write and think. His take on digital media is refreshingly nuanced. “Let’s not start by being evaluative,” said Sessolo. “Let’s start by observing and describing.” The software of e-reading is perhaps more important to consider than the hardware. E-readers have become less popular in recent years; apps that users can download on their phones and computers are more convenient and usually free, even when the content itself is not. “There’s an enhanced attention to multimodality,” Sessolo explained. Technology means there is no longer an inexorable connection between object and content. Sessolo held up a book and demonstrated, explaining he could read that book on his laptop, his phone or an e-reader. The physical book, once central to obtaining knowledge, is now one of many means through which readers and writers can communicate. The relocation of print books to digital mediums does mean something is lost, however. The Daily chatted with English Professor Joshua Miller, and he described an experience that, for him, reinforced the possibility for connection and coincidence that physical books allow. “I had this very strange experience in college that I think probably can’t be reproduced anymore,” Miller said. “I was in the library, browsing through the stacks. I just randomly picked up a novel, and I decided to take it to the checkout desk. I was on the way there and the old call slip card fell out of the book so I reached down to pick it up — and there was my father’s name, in his handwriting, from when he was a graduate student 20 years earlier. That’s the kind of thing that won’t happen once we’re fully digital.” Miller, though enthusiastic about the possibilities for creativity that technology allows, still has some reservations. “One thing that I think gets lost a little bit is the book as a curated object,” Miller said. “The publisher and the editors — and the author, if they’re lucky — get to make decisions about how the book comes together — in terms of a unique font, hardcover or softcover, creative typography, whether or not to include drawings or images, the texture of the paper, how raised or how smooth and matte or glossy. That doesn’t always happen with digital material.” Miller is also a margin-note enthusiast. “All of the books I have on my bookshelves I keep in part because they have my notes in them. As a piece of technology, the paper book is very good at storing information,” Miller said. “That data doesn’t get lost unless I lose the book, and no digital format has fully succeeded in convincing me I can reproduce that.” Miller continued to clarify his use of reading technology. “I think we’re all still figuring out what (e-readers) can and can’t do,” Miller explained. “I do have some concerns about the shift from analog to digital and what it means. We lose a lot when we give up the material book.” Still, Miller isn’t by any

means opposed to new technologies. “I use screen reading apps, and I love them. It allows me to buy a book and read it quickly, so that’s really helpful … there’s a lot of benefits to it,” Miller said. “I’m excited about the opportunities and possibilities of new technologies, and I’m trying to distinguish between the changes that feel profound to me and the changes that feel incremental — and determine what I think about each of those different kinds of changes, because both are there.” Another important aspect of reading technology is the issues it raises regarding accessibility. Sessolo noted in many ways, technology has broken down barriers between writers and readers and thus democratized access to books. Those who don’t live near bookstores or libraries and people with various disabilities clearly benefit from the ability to read using a screen; however, while technology has the potential to radically improve access to written material, it’s also important to consider the price of technology, which can exclude those who cannot afford to buy e-books, e-readers or other devices. “Technology in and of itself is not enough,” Sessolo said. While technology is promising in many ways, working toward economic and social equality in all aspects of life is still necessary in order to fulfill the potential of alternative reading mediums. “The thing I’d like people to consider is that democracy only exists in action,” Sessolo explained. “To democratize the experience of new technology, get involved with whatever you can.” Miller emphasized the importance of accessibility when considering multimedia works. “Publishers are understandably concerned about losing readers who require accessibility or are sympathetic to the politics of accessibility,” Miller said. “There’s class issues too — writers are often writing about the precarity of everyday life and scenes of crisis, so they want to reach the widest audience possible and engage the issues that they’re describing. They don’t want to write a novel that can’t be checked out of the library.” How have writers addressed and used technology in their work? “I think authors are adjusting slowly,” Miller said. “There are some writers who have found digital platforms and e-books to be a natural fit or work really well with pre-existing forms. Now there’s Twitter fiction and things like that, but the divide in technology between turning books into digital forms and digitally-born books is still pretty firm. My guess is that more and more writers will figure out how to use these technologies digitally.” Associate English Professor Madhumita Lahiri noted in an interview with The Daily that short-form writing lends itself to incorporating slang, emojis and abbreviations. The long publishing process for novels often means quick cultural changes render words and phrases obsolete, even if the author was innovative a few years earlier. “I think it’s easier if you know it’s going to be published in the next week,” Lahiri said. “The thing that’s tricky about emojis in particular is that their meanings are extremely unstable.” Miller talked about the rise of short-form writing and reading apps. “The number four app in the book section of the iOS app store is Hooked,” Miller said. “It’s a storytelling platform that allows authors to tell captivating stories in a really short form as a series of text messages.”

Still, there’s a cultural pushback against shorter forms of narrative. “The micro of culture has been maligned by people who have said attention spans have gone down, which I think is exaggerating a true fact too much,” Miller explained. “The shift from a book to a machine to apps on other devices does increase the likelihood of distraction and I think makes it much harder to stay focused. On the other hand, I think the emphasis on short-form storytelling isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” While there are many longform novels that interrogate the role of technology in modern life, there are fewer that actually incorporate technology as part of the reading experience. “There are a lot of works describing technology in relatively analog formats, so I don’t know when the tipping point is going to happen and people are going to figure out how exactly to make that work,” Miller said. “There are definitely people who are using text language or acronyms — people are thinking and writing about speech and language issues.” The ways technology has changed language is a source of cultural anxiety. Is technology disintegrating the very foundations of language? Sessolo doesn’t think so, particularly because slang isn’t a 21st century creation. “We’re talking about these abbreviations with the feeling that they’re new,” Sessolo said. “But if we look into stenography, that’s what stenographers have been doing for a long time.” Combining text with other media such as photographs or paintings is also not new. In fact, the practice goes back hundreds of years. “Some pages (of medieval books) look like the homepage of a website. People have always experimented with design,” Sessolo said. Similarly, the popularity of serialized narratives harkens back to earlier trends. “There’s a 19th century version of serialized fiction that was published in newspapers or magazine in chapters and then only put together as a book later,” Miller said. Lahiri echoed this sentiment. “When the Dickens novel was a serial, it would come out on the weekend. You could send in some comments, and then the next one came out — whether or not it was true, people felt that they had some input,” Lahiri said. “People have always felt a certain interactivity with the fastest media of their day.” Lahiri also stressed writers have been integrating technology into literature for a long time. “If you back to 18th and 19th century novels, there’s all this stuff that we don’t understand that is often about specific technical devices — a kind of shoe or a kind of lamp.” Lahiri said. “When we look at technological references, there’s a lot more novel-length fiction about technology than there is actually incorporating it. I think that the kinds of expressions used in texting would have to work the way dialect and slang work in literature in general — it would have to show us something particular about that moment. I wonder if part of it is that people don’t know what it is that we would gain from seeing that on the page.” Given the fast pace of technological innovation in the 21st century, this is certainly an exciting time to be a reader and a writer. Here are a few recommendations for narratives and novels that incorporate or discuss technology in unusual and meaningful ways. Lauren Beukes’s “Broken Monsters” (Harper, 2014) is a Detroit-set thriller that

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skillfully incorporates text messages and texting lingo into the narrative structure. Alena Graedon’s “The Word Exchange” (Doubleday, 2014) introduces us to a not-sodistant future when humans rely on a device to look up the meanings of almost every word. Xu Bing’s graphic novel “Book from the Ground” (MIT Press, 2014) is pictographic text written entirely in emojis and symbols. Diary of a Zulu Girl is a blog by Mike Maphoto composed of a fictional young woman’s diary entries about her journey from a rural area of South Africa to Johannesburg. The blog entries have been compiled into two books and the series is ongoing.

Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” (Random House, 2010), written in both letters and emails, is a new take on the epistolary novel genre. Spent is a game-based narrative in which players are given a fictional $1000 per month and confronted with a series of choices on housing, health care, employment and bills. The game, which was created by the advertising agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham, incorporates aspects of computer games with a strong narrative structure. Spent is intended to educate players about the precarious situation of people living below the poverty line.

Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” (Knopf, 2010) includes both discussions of technology and a chapter written entirely in PowerPoint slides. Though technology is shaping both written content and the reading experience in thought-provoking ways, it’s hard to predict where technological innovation will take us next —and what that will mean for readers and writers. “Technology is allowing storytelling as an art to happen in all sorts of places in really interesting ways,” Lahiri said. “How that relates to print is still something we’re figuring out.”

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

J Dilla & the computergenerated beat revolution CLARA SCOTT Daily Arts Writer

You may know him as Jay Dee, J Dilla or even his given name, James Dewitt Yancey, but there’s no denying that the man with many monikers was an undeniable genius. Taking part in the mid-’90s hip hop and neo-soul boom that crafted some of the best music of all time, the Detroit producer is responsible for bringing funk to a new playing field with other legends like Q-Tip and Dr. Dre. J Dilla revolutionized the genre with his incredible take on the art of sampling, bringing a human touch to the computergenerated beats of his era. His hand in the great music of the ’90s and early 2000s is unmistakable; the laid-back groove of Erykah Badu, De La Soul, The Roots, Slum Village, A Tribe Called Quest, Common and many more owe their unique sound to the collaboration of Yancey and his singular use of sampling and drum machines. Dilla’s influence is found in almost all of current hip hop, living on in the remixes and beats of music mainstays from Flying Lotus to Kanye West and the headphones of millions. Yancey was born in Detroit in 1974, growing up with his family’s appreciation for music and the deep-rooted traditions of his city. According to his mother Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey, her son was musical from a young age, playing with a Fisher-Price record player for hours on end and accumulating his first 45s given to him by family. This laid the foundation for an illustrious career as a producer who changed the hip hop game, starting with the formation of his first group, Slum Village, in the final years of high school with fellow Detroit rappers T3 and Baatin. Their first album Fantastic, Vol. 1 came out in 1996 to critical and local acclaim. This was a stepping stone toward the greater Detroit hip hop scene, of which he became a lasting fixture. His friendship with producer Joseph “Amp” Fiddler created a fruitful mentorship from which Dilla mastered digital production and created his signature sampling style. From there, his talent could be seen on albums like The Pharcyde’s 1995 Labcabincalifornia, which

are still revered today. That style is what sets him apart from other producers of his era — Dilla threw convention to the wind with everything he did, learning techniques from Amp and building off of them towards an incomparable sound of his own. Amp’s influence on a young Yancey contributed to his

Dilla humanized the buttons and knobs of his machines beyond recognition

affinity and skill for sampling and drum machines like the MPC (MIDI Production Center) in its earliest 60 and 3000 models, a collaboration between Roger Linn and Akai which revolutionized digital music production by giving artists the opportunity to use their own samples in lieu of preloaded drum sounds like those of the Linn Drum. In Dilla’s last interview with Scratch Magazine before his untimely death in 2006, the producer claimed that Amp encouraged him to learn by use and not the manual, saying that “(Amp) was like, ‘I’m not going to show you to work it. You gotta learn on your own.’ He was like, ‘Don’t use a book.’ Ever since this day I never read the books to samplers and all of that, I just try to learn them.” This on-the-fly education gave Dilla a creative edge to sampling, one of the most prominent signatures of his work being his disregard for a function called quantization, which snaps beats to a more uniform grid. Instead of using quantization to polish his production, J Dilla embraced the humanity of music-making and let the beat take him where it wanted to go. Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says Dilla’s beat on The Pharcyde’s song “Bullshit” produced the most “lifechanging moment he’d ever had,” which inspired him to rethink everything he’d been

taught as a drummer. In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Questlove said that at first listen, Dilla’s beats “sounded like the kick drum was played by like a drunk three-year-old. And I was like, ‘Are you allowed to do that?’” This stunned response was one of many to Dilla’s unique approach to drums and bass, as he created a signature low-end sound that grooves and flows throughout each of his songs. His work with production groups like The Ummah, in which he worked with A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad and hiphop supergroup Soulquarians. Dilla’s command of sampling did not only present in his technical skill with machines like the MPC, but also an incredible knack for sourcing jazz and soul records and bringing them to new heights. This skill for creating incredibly original music out of already existing samples is what put Dilla on the map in the first place, but also what carries his legacy into the present. His last album, Donuts, was released three days before his death from a rare blood disease in 2006, and mostly recorded and mixed from his hospital room. Despite the conditions in which it was produced, Donuts is arguably J Dilla’s most acclaimed and celebrated solo album, a stark example of his skill for creating instrumental hip hop from unique sources and influences. Some have argued Dilla may have been the last great jazz innovator, as his command and creative affinity for imperfection lifted his music to a level beyond his contemporaries. Whatever one may think J Dilla stands for in the history of hip hop and soul, it’s clear that he was a revolutionary figure who truly shifted how people thought about production. Dilla’s use of technology to further his art is proof of hip hop’s reliance on and celebration of digital production, but also of what it is capable of. Dilla humanized the buttons and knobs of his machines beyond recognition, disregarding norms left and right to create a lasting legacy which lives on in every track he touched. Whatever name you know him by, one thing is true — that James Dewitt Yancey changed the face of hip hop forever.

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FILM NOTEBOOK

The Uncanny Valley effect & the future of animation MEGHAN CHOU Daily Arts Writer

A few years ago, Charlie Kaufman (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and Duke Johnson (“Community”) made the stop-motion animation film “Anomalisa” with eerily realistic puppets. I watched the first 15 minutes with my mom last summer before a rather explicit sex scene started and I quickly changed the channel. “That’s why I recognized it!” my mom yelled and shuddered. When the film was first released, she and a friend went to the theater to see it under the impression of watching a funny animated movie — more along the lines of Disney’s “Big Hero 6” than Seth Rogen’s “Sausage Party.” I remember her friend laughing and telling the story at a Christmas party, acting out how my mom covered her face with her jacket and eventually ran out of the theater. Sure, it’s weird watching puppets having sex, but her reaction had more to do with the phenomenon called “Uncanny Valley.” Kaufman and Johnson were warned “Anomalisa” would creep out audiences since the puppets were 3D printed and highly photorealistic, the equivalent of a painting by Richard Estes. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Johnson explained their reasoning for this hyperrealistic style: “The challenge we felt with so much animated stuff is that you’re always conscious of the animation, and we kept asking, ‘What if we could escape that? What would it be like?’” In other words, these filmmakers

steered into the skid, embracing the disturbing nature of Uncanny Valley, a theory that Stamps Associate Professor Heidi Kumao describes as “the aesthetics of a human lookalike.” As Kumao wrote in an email interview with The Daily, “We are fine with (and have empathy for) objects that have human features, but are recognizably different from us. When the look-alike appears

We are naturally repulsed by objects that are so realistic that we almost mistake them for a real person

to resemble a human being too closely, however, we become uneasy. An eerie sensation is triggered. We are naturally repulsed by objects that are so realistic that we almost mistake them for a real person.” Technological advancements in the medium of animation drive the competition between large companies like Pixar, Disney and video game corporations to achieve ultimate realism. According to Professor Kumao, “realism is their currency. It is how these types of movies sell themselves: They try to outdo each other

with technical wizardry. As they strive to reach this technical goal, the goalposts keep moving.” In addition, the fervor around virtual reality and augmented reality has turned animators into cowboys in the Wild West as they discover how to make animation interactive and visualize 360 degree environments. As a result, cutting-edge technology has forever altered the process of animation. Take “Anomalisa,” for instance, which used 18 different 3D-printed versions of the main character, Michael Stone, so the animators could change expressions and physical gestures with extreme precision. However, as Kumao wrote, this scramble for realism is a “technical task that leaves nothing to the viewer’s imagination.” Although brand new technology like VR and 3D printing are incredibly expensive, access to basic, affordable equipment has also altered the independent animation scene. Since the creation of YouTube in 2005, several animation artists have established themselves as popular channels. “How it Should Have Ended,” “Happy Tree Friends,” “Cyanide and Happiness” and many more all benefited from the affordability and easy access to animation technology as well as the rise of social media. No longer do studios have a monopoly on the art form, as individual artists and anyone with a computer can create their own material. For these low-budget YouTube channels, there is no race for realism. The same goes for many animated television series that

VIDEO GAME NOTEBOOK

NINTENDO

Video games, storytelling & the growth of a meduim MAX MICHALSKY Daily Arts Writer

I love video games. For me, they are almost inextricably tied up in childhood nostalgia. I think of countless hours spent with my brothers huddled around a GameCube, Wii or PlayStation. I think of collecting Pokemon on my GameBoy Advance during long car trips. These probably sound like familiar stories, and that’s because they’re the kind of experiences shared by many kids who grew up during video games’ “golden age” through the late ’90s and early 2000s. As millennials grew up, video games seemed to change with them — just look how far graphics have come from the clunky, polygonal look of the N64. This change expands far beyond how video games look, however, and has greater implications for how they tell stories. The last 15 years have seen video games come into their own as a unique form of

expression. I’ve always held that many of the best pieces of art — your “Casablanca”s, your “Les Misérables”s, your “Catcher in the Rye”s — are told via their respective mediums because

A great film, for example, should be able to do and show things that only a film can do that medium is the only way to most effectively tell the story. A great film, for example, should be able to do and show things that only a film can do. Today, we’re in the midst of video gaming’s renaissance; inspired, motivated content creators are continuously

finding new ways to push the boundaries of storytelling within the interactive medium of video games at both the indie and mainstream level. This prolific explosion of artful storytelling didn’t just happen spontaneously, however. Rather, it was a slow build over nearly two decades of progress and experimentation. Through much of the ’80s, video games existed mostly as novelties; games like “Tetris” or “Galaga,” which told no stories, but were just intended to be, well, games. Throughout the early to mid ’90s, this began to change. Games like “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past” began incorporating f leshed out stories with dialogue. The beauty of these early storybased single player games was the ability of the player to step into the world of the game. For example, Link, the protagonist of “The Legend of Zelda,” has no lines of dialogue; he’s just a stand-in for the player. These roleplaying games had

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produce over a dozen episodes each season. While the old “Tom and Jerry” cartoons and the new episodes from the reboot noticeably differ in style, the series has stuck to 2D animation and less-realistic avatars as have other cartoon staples like “The Simpsons.” However, Hollywood productions and some independent films have larger staffs, more money, more time and a desire for realism, which can lead to some ethical problems. After the tragic death of actor Paul Walker during the shooting of “Furious 7,” the studio used his brother as a body double and computer-generated images of the deceased Walker to finish the film. Some people congratulated Weta Digital for preserving Walker’s legacy, while others felt queasy watching this digital rendering of the actor. The latter not only questioned the ethical legitimacy of the quasi-real CGI, but also felt the images fell irretrievably deep into the Uncanny Valley. Since “Furious 7,” other big franchise films have used computer-generated clips of actors. For example, in “Rogue One,” audiences did a double take at the animation of

Grand Moff Tarkin portrayed by Peter Cushing (“Dracula”), a beloved actor who died 20 years prior to the release of this particular “Star Wars” installment. Besides bringing actors back to life, studios have also started to animate younger versions of stars like Robert Downey Jr. (“Iron Man”) in “Captain America: Civil War.” While the script did call for a brief appearance by a younger Tony Stark, Marvel’s experiment inspired Martin Scorsese to “de-age” Robert De Niro to fit a younger role in the much-anticipated film “The Irishman.” So where’s the line? Should older stars skilled in their craft be able to take opportunities away from up-and-coming actors? Is de-aging as morally tricky as profiting off of digitally reincarnated actors without their permission? There remains plenty of grey area to cringe at and debate. However, the biggest concerns arise when this technology, once contained to the most powerful and wealthy companies that must obey legal restrictions, becomes available to that creep commenting anonymously

online or irresponsible internet users. The invention of FakeApp, and other similar programs, has made this a reality. Almost anyone can paste a random face on another person’s body with this software that leaves minimal differences between a real video and a “deepfake.” Like many worrisome communities on the web, deepfakes have a faithful following on Reddit where users post videos ranging from innocent re-imaginings of superheroes with different actors to modified pornography featuring celebrities, politicians or exes. These are the consequences of animation’s quest for realism — a quest that the Uncanny Valley can keep in check. The discomfort that forms when an animation looks too realistic is an ethical defense mechanism. When a de-aged or computer-generated version of a deceased actor appears on screen, listen to the urge to squirm and feel a little sick in the stomach. Someone or something is trying to warn us about the future of animation: We are on a dangerous path and our only guide is the phenomenon of the Uncanny Valley.

begun to dabble in one of video game storytelling’s most unique aspects: The ability to give players a sense that their actions matter to the world of the story. The advent of modern video games, however, wouldn’t truly begin until the release of Hideo Kojima’s “Metal Gear Solid” in 1998. “Metal Gear” tells the story of Snake, a work that was so unmistakably different from other games being put out at the time because of its sweeping, cinematic nature. The game’s many cutscenes offered dynamic, interesting “camerawork,” alongside dramatic voice acting, that lent the game a sense of gravity and importance that had thus far been absent from the medium. This would lay the groundwork for games like Sony’s “Uncharted” series, which has been described as playing a movie. This signaled one of the first times that mainstream video gaming had embraced its role as a medium capable of telling intense, deeply felt stories. The late 2000s and beyond would see the beginning of the storytelling explosion. Here, studios began to experiment with the concept of player choice. Games like “Metal Gear Solid” did important work in terms of establishing video games as a legitimate medium of storytelling, but it still seemed as if there was little that video games could do which other storytelling mediums couldn’t. “Metal Gear Solid” could just as easily have been a movie; in fact, you can watch all of the cutscenes spliced together on YouTube as a serviceable substitute for actually playing the game. Unsatisfied with this being the benchmark for storytelling in games, developers such as Telltale Games began to create games with alternate endings and storylines based on choices given to the player. These games seemed to emulate the choose-your-ownadventure novels sold to kids in elementary school, albeit with more adult subject matter. Cut to the modern day.

The last couple of years have, in my opinion, seen video games truly come into their own as a medium that can tell unique, powerful stories which could only be told as video games. Games like Toby Fox’s “Undertale” and Davey Wreden’s “The Stanley Parable” come to mind as members of a developing

artist in which the audience is placed inside of their art. One of the most unique offerings I’ve seen has been Giant Sparrow’s 2017 release, “What Remains of Edith Finch.” The game follows the titular Edith Finch as she explores her now-abandoned childhood home and unearths generations-old secrets about the Finch family. “Edith Finch” is the first video game I’ve encountered that I can say tells a story that could only ever work as a video game; it makes such creative use of all facets of the medium, from its interactivity to its non-linear narrative to how effortlessly it manages to tell a story through its environment. The player is left to wander aimlessly through this massive house and, through discovery of old family heirlooms, step into the memories of Finch ancestors, experiencing the world uniquely as each family member did. In one such sequence, the character plays as a baby sitting in a bathtub, able to control the bath toys f loating and swirling around in the water as Mozart plays alongside the player’s movements. The game’s emotional journey is ingrained in its interactivity. This isn’t to say that all modern video games are art. On the contrary, truly artful games make up only a small portion of the medium. However, this is the case with all artistic mediums. For every masterfully constructed art-film, there’s a mindless blockbuster, and for every “What Remains of Edith Finch,” there’s a “Call of Duty.” There’s nothing wrong with the latter — it’s in fact beloved by many — but for the first time in the history of the young medium, video games are beginning to consistently offer an upper echelon of wellcrafted games that tell deeply felt and uniquely experienced stories. Today, some of the most moving, profound stories being told anywhere are being told in video games — we’ve come a long, long way from “Pong.”

For every masterfully constructed art-film, there’s a mindless blockbuster, and for every “What Remains of Edith Finch,” there’s a “Call of Duty” medium that almost feels reminiscent of the 1920’s literary postmodernism; these games dissect what it means to be a game. Players can exploit glitches, mess with game files and more. “The Stanley Parable,” for example, is a game meant to be restarted dozens of times. It has almost 20 achievable endings, some of them entirely random, including some in which Stanley, the game’s voiceless protagonist can either choose to comply with or rebel against the game’s whimsical British narrator. Games like this make me think that if Samuel Beckett were alive today, he’d be a game developer. Wreden’s follow-up game, “The Beginner’s Guide,” tells the story of his friendship with a reclusive game designer by walking the player through the games his friend made. It’s an entirely unique narrative structure, a story about an

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ARTIST PROFILE

NETFLIX

‘Game Over, Man!’ stars talk on set hijinks, hilarity ALLIE TAYLOR Daily Arts Writer

On Friday, Mar. 23, Netf lix is releasing an original movie, “Game Over, Man!” starring Adam DeVine, Blake Anderson and Anders Holm, of Comedy Central’s “Workaholics.” The film, which was created, written and produced by the three stars, follows the antics and adventures of three hotel employees who, in the midst of making a pivotal deal with a young, reckless, millionaire party-boy (Utkarsh Ambudkar, “White Famous”) to fund the making of an original video game, find themselves combating terrorists and fighting for their lives. In a sense, the movie is reminiscent of “Die Hard” — a “Die Hard” for stoners, if you will — filled with suspense, shock, stunts and, of course, humor. Between scenes involving capers, such as the building of a rig in an attempt to defeat the terrorists through Salvia asphyxiation and full frontal nudity, DeVine, Anderson and Holm are in their element, proving their writing, production and acting chops. In an interview with The Daily, DeVine, Anderson and Holm discussed the process of writing and creating “Game Over, Man!,” how it differs from their work on “Workaholics” and their favorite production moments. “We wrote the movie about six years ago, and we’ve been working it, and re-working it and changing different stuff,” DeVine said. “We finally shot it last year at about this time, and then we did post-production. We’re excited to actually have it come out for everyone to see. “ The movie’s original release date was Apr. 20 but got moved up to Mar. 23. “Netflix saw it and was so excited, and wanted to release it sooner,” DeVine said. “We’ve been sitting on the movie for a while, so they were like, let’s just put it out. Also, we like to think it’s a 4/20 gift for all the people who are celebrating 4/20 every day in their lifestyle. It’s a 4/20 miracle.” The personalities and energies of the three are electric, with their sense of humor just as present and sharp in real life as it is on screen. While each has his own distinct charms and characteristics, they seem to speak and think in harmony, in a way that is only possible if you have written, produced and acted together on a TV show for over seven years. “The story (of “Game Over, Man!”) was something we were all throwing around,” said Holm, who is credited as the principal writer of the film. “I’m the guy that goes and takes our dreams and our ideas and turns it into what I like to refer to as ‘The Quilt of Comedy.’” “And you keep them warm at night. Thank you for that,” Anderson chimed in. “That’s right,” Holm agreed. “I bundle the ideas up, and

keep them warm. But this is our movie — the group’s movie. It’s a labor of love for me to be able to go off and write for these goddamn comedy geniuses.” “God, I love you,” said Anderson. “I love you Anders Holm and Adam DeVine.” “Okay. Now we’re hugging, and kissing. We’re currently kissing,” Holm said, feeding kissing noises into the phone. “Workaholics,” which wrapped up its final season in 2017, features characters Blake, Ders and Adam who, as college dropout druggies working in a telemarketing office, may seem quite similar to Joel, Darren and Alexxx of “Game Over, Man!” But, when asked if character confusion was a concern, Holm seemed optimistic. “When you start from the ground up, and you go, OK: Who are these people, and why are they in this movie? Then, you start to find out why they’re different,” Holm said. “And then, when you start writing for actors, because you know their strong suits are in certain places and not in others, you can still play to their performing strengths. By putting a different point of view and perspective in the story, all of a sudden you have a new man.” Though the film was originally written six years ago, it is quite hip to the times, including a number of jabs at current societal trends, such as the obsession with vaping and the purchasing of social media followers. But the heart of the movie stays true to the original script. “Everything else was added later on. But we were like, ‘The world needs to see Adam’s penis. Everything else, we’ll come up with at a later date,’” said Anderson and Holm. “You know, we’re like anyone else,” Anderson added. “We’re walking around seeing idiots vaping, and we’re lucky enough to be able to create a movie and put those freakin’ Bozo the Clowns in a movie.” DeVine, Anderson and Holm have been working on the film with Seth Rogen and Scott Rudin’s company for five to six years. “We had a few studios that were pretty interested, and then Netf lix came in, in a real way, and gave us the budget that we wanted to make the movie as big and as fun as we needed it to feel,” DeVine said. “We wanted to come from ‘Workaholics,’ which is this small, basic cable television show, and make the movie feel much larger than anything you’ve seen from us. And Netf lix was able to give us a proper budget to do that.” The movie features a number of cameos, including Shaggy, Steve-O and Flying Lotus, as well as people who have appeared in episodes of “Workaholics,” such as Jillian Bell (“SuperMansion”). “We filmed the whole movie up in Vancouver, and a lot of people we were calling just for one day of work. So, you gotta kind of pull the ‘Homie Pass’ for something like that. You know, the ‘Homie Pass,’”

Anderson said. At the risk of giving away any spoilers (apart from DeVine’s nakedness), it is safe to say that the film has its fair share of unexpected plot lines that drive the exciting and unpredictable nature of the movie. “Anything that comes off as shocking ties into the story. There’s not nudity for nudity’s sake — it is pushing the story forward,” Anderson said. “Though, I have been dying to see Adam’s nude penis,” Holm said. “It served my story, I’ll tell you that.” “Yeah,” DeVine agreed. “Ders has a life story, and at the end of it, he gets to see my penis.” Not only is “Game Over, Man!” the three’s first major motion picture together, but it is the first production of this caliber that they have approached as a single entity. “Weirdly, for me, it was kind of seamless,” Holm said, of the transition from “Workaholics” to “Game Over, Man!” “We walked onto our giant set where we literally built an entire f loor of a hotel, with hotel rooms, stairwells... it was a trip. But then I was like, let’s do this. We shoot tomorrow.” “Yeah, I think if we would have done this movie during season one or two or three (of ‘Workaholics’), we might have been overwhelmed,” DeVine said. “I think we got to this movie at the perfect place in our lives and careers. Because it is a lot, to be given millions and millions of dollars to go off and make a movie. But since we were able to do ‘Workaholics’ for so long, and feel so comfortable, and be the bosses for seven years, by the end of it — we got pretty comfortable steering the ship.” While there is no disputing their experience with “Workaholics” greatly prepared them for their work on “Game Over, Man!,” there is a stark difference between working on a TV show and a high budget film. “When you’re making TV — and we were involved in every aspect of the show — you’re reading scripts for episodes, you’re acting, you’re casting episodes, you’re watching cuts of episodes. So stuff can really back up on you,” Anderson said. “But in the movie biz, you really get to focus on each thing individually, and you have a lot more time to live in the scenes and the comedy, so that was refreshing.” “Also, TV shows move so quickly. We would have to shoot, sometimes, eight to 10 pages in a day, which is a ton,” DeVine said. “In a movie, you only need to shoot two to four pages for the whole day, so you really have time to make sure you get it right. So when you see a bad movie, just know that they really, really blew it.” “Also,” Anderson added, “we were coming off of seven seasons of a show on TV, so it was kind of refreshing to have all those freedoms that a movie allows you to have.” “And especially at Netf lix, where you don’t have to worry

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about popcorn or candy sales — they allow you to be as creative as you want to be,” DeVine said. “They also don’t have “R” ratings, so... anything goes.” “Anything goes,” agreed Anderson. When asked about the ideal way to view “Game Over, Man!,” Anderson sung, in a teasing tone: “With your pants off.” DeVine and Holm scoffed and laughed at Anderson, as if they suddenly disapproved of a joking, insincere response. “I would say,” DeVine started, “get the biggest TV you can find. Watch it with your friends. Watch it on a gigantic TV — the biggest TV that you can get your hands on. Because it’s a cool, big movie, and it’s kind of a shame to watch it on your phones. This is a movie that I think will play better on a larger screen.” “Take all the bedsheets in the dorm and you tie them

together, and hang them out the window to make a giant screen, and project it,” Holm said in a booming, affected tone. “I know you’re doing, like, a fake voice, but that’s a really good idea,” DeVine said. As the creators and stars, picking a favorite moment of the film proved to be difficult for the bunch. “They’re all our babies,” DeVine confessed. “A fan favorite is probably the fist fight when we first encountered the terrorists, and I am fully nude from the waist down. That was also pretty difficult to film, because Blake wouldn’t stop staring at me.” “Knock it off!” Anderson refuted. “One of my favorites was the big stunt with us hanging between the two buildings, because we had never really gotten to do a stunt of that scale. It almost felt like we were Marvel heroes for a

second.” “I like watching all the bad guy stuff,” Holm said. “I’ve acted with these guys for so long, which is fun, but to sit back and watch characters that I’ve never seen come to life, and do what was in my brain in my basement, was a lot of fun. Watching the scene where Jillian (Bell), who’s just credited as somebody who shits her pants... that was funny.” “Also, Blake shit his pants one time,” DeVine stated. “No I didn’t!” “I wish that were a joke — ” “I did not do that,” Anderson said. “Well,” explained DeVine, “something happened that one day. We’ll never know, but he definitely left the room and changed his pants, so...” “It was a wardrobe malfunction,” Anderson said. “Yeah. A wardrobe malfunction,” DeVine repeated. “Sure.”

COMMUNITY PROFILE

The Rogue Initiative and cross-medium storytelling BECKY PORTMAN Senior Arts Editor

With feats in entertainment, technology and production, The Rogue Initiative is a true triple threat. The Rogue Initiative builds worlds with the aid of technology and immersive storytelling in a way that goes beyond the mediums they explore. Through film, television and video games, the tech-fueled, entertainmentdriven and collaboration-based start-up is making waves in Hollywood and beyond. The Daily had a phone interview with University alum Brad Etheridge, The Rogue Initiative’s Creative Executive, about the power of a story and the future of immersive content. The Rogue Initiative builds the medium around the story, making the company a “crossmedium” production studio. “That looks like the user would want to be that character, make it a video game,” Etheridge

explained. Tailoring the stories to the medium creates a unique perspective and a changing role for production studios. But then again, Rogue is not a regular production studio. Etheridge wants to tell stories, because it’s about “finding those stories and partnering with Hollywood creatives with those new and unique ideas.” How does technology influence the stories they tell at Rogue? Etheridge explains that the intersection is incredibly relevant to what they do. After all, they are both an entertainment studio and tech company. The Rogue Initiative is a story-focused studio that sees entertainment as a vehicle to tell stories and build worlds. Working in video games, Rogue understands the immersive power of media. So what do they think about the direction of virtual and augmented reality? Etheridge explained that at Rogue, they want to be on the cutting

edge as a “forward-thinking” company and take part in the “community” involved with new tech. “It’s really about the idea of being part of those first movers,” Etheridge said, following up with the fact that it needs to make “financial sense.” Keeping up with the hottest and newest tech is a risk — a very expensive risk — so for a rising start-up like Rogue, they want to ensure the choices they make in terms of innovative entertainment experiences are wise and rational. As of now, the company is working on a top secret creative partnership project with “Transformers” director Michael Bay. By associating with creatives and Hollywood big shots like Bay, The Rogue Initiative and their focus on stories is sure be recognized. The intersection of mediums, technologies and worlds collide at The Rogue Initiative, and we can’t wait to see what’s to come.

SINGLE & VIDEO REVIEW: FREAKY FRIDAY Last week, comedic rapper Lil Dicky released his first single in three years. “Freaky Friday,” a spin-off of the iconic motherdaughter comedy popularized by Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, recruited Chris Brown, Ed Sheeran and Kendall Jenner to help compose a song in which Dicky and Brown switch bodies. As Lil Dicky’s brand is selfdeprecation based on his admittedly white and lame style — an oddity in a genre mostly dominated by Black men with swagger — switching bodies with Chris Brown opened the floodgates for funny lyrics that play on artist stereotypes. The song begins with Lil Dicky’s realization that he’s woken up in Chris Brown’s body. The lyrics (actually voiced by Chris Brown), “I’m so fly and I can dance / There’s tattoos on my neck,” hilariously expose the stark contrast between Dicky and Brown. The lyrics go a step further, as Lil Dicky (again, actually Chris Brown) takes advantage of his ability to say the N-word and rejoices at the size of his member. Controversial and uncomfortable? Maybe, but Lil Dicky has never shied away from pushing the envelope or discussing penises. The track gets even funnier when Chris Brown wakes up as Lil Dicky and realizes the perks of being white and barely recognizable as a celebrity: “Ain’t nobody judging ‘cause I’m Black or my controversial past / I’ma go and see a movie and relax.” Eventually, though, Brown (Dicky’s voice) grows tired of being someone else, and after he realizes he

truly likes being himself (can I get a cliché?) the rappers are reunited with their own bodies. The outro provides some extra comedy, as Lil Dicky is thrown into the body of Ed Sheeran and then Kendall Jenner, after which he realizes Chris Brown is much cooler than Ed Sheeran and having private access to the female anatomy for a day might be interesting. Sonically, “Freaky Friday” is extremely basic, with a thin chord progression and beat akin

“Freaky Friday” Lil Dickey ft. Chris Brown School Boy Records

to last year’s hackneyed hit, “I’m The One.” The track is much more entertaining when paired with the elaborate and extended music video, the driving force behind the growing popularity of the new single. - Mike Watkins, Daily Arts Writer

With a Chinese red paper lantern as the first shot of the video, I didn’t exactly have high hopes for this music video. What was to follow? Subtle racism? Cultural appropriation? Goody, goody. Couldn’t wait. My bad feeling turned out to be spot on. I shouldn’t have to spell out why implying that the Asian server can’t understand English is racist and tokenizing as heck (Reminder: General Tsao’s Chicken is in no way actually Chinese.

Nobody in China knows what that shit is). Of course, the server also turns out to be a mystical wizard and suddenly gains English comprehension skills when it serves to forward the sloppily constructed plot of the video. And all of this perfectly dropped right before Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May. Follow with a brief scene where Lil Dicky commiserates about his own un-coolness whilst watching some clips of Chris Brown doing his thing. Brown may be “so good at dancing” and have the “sickest tattoos,” but did Dicky forget his idol also nearly beat Rihanna to death? Brown even references his “controversial past” a bit later on in the video. Assault isn’t funny. In comparison to the rest of Lil Dicky’s music videos, “Freaky Friday” isn’t all that unique; it has the same cringey mid-2000s bad meme humor, objectification and downright stupidity that many of Lil Dicky’s creations share. There were times when I did laugh. Who doesn’t enjoy watching someone poke fun at themselves for three minutes straight? Maybe if Dicky hadn’t gone out of his way to include every single problematic thing that’s common in movie media — objectification, emphasizing the “otherness” of non-Western people and cultures, rampant sexism, tone-deaf racist undertones and tossing the N-word around as if it was some sort of joke — I would have even enjoyed it. Try harder, Lil Dicky. Being intentionally offensive is not a good look. -Sam Lu, Daily Arts Writer

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT

A PAT major’s reflections on the program RYAN COX

Daily Arts Writer

Courtesy of the DIA

‘Don’t touch the art,’ unless it’s on your phone: Augmented reality and the future of art education ROBERT MANSUETTI Daily Arts Writer

The tranquil, introspective air of the Detroit Institute of Arts was suddenly violated by the phone I was clutching in my hand and its unsolicited decision to blare a tribal drum beat. At lightspeed, I pressed down on the volume controls all while fellow museum-goers cast disapproving looks in my direction. To all the people I secretly giggled at when your phone went off in class, I’m sorry. I now understand your pain. The room couldn’t clear out slower as I sat on a cushy bench inspecting my shoelaces. When the last person left carrying my eternal embarrassment, I could finally freely use the reason I came all the way downtown. The main attraction of my latest DIA visit is what the museum calls Lumin, a mobile tour that uses Google’s Tango augmented reality (AR) platform to supply visitors with a modern way to innovatively engage with the museum’s collection. However, it is less a tour than it is a personal learning tool. The entirety of Lumin is loaded onto a single Android smartphone that the DIA rents out to visitors; you become the tour guide and decide what you want to experience in this strange new digital world. The seven exhibits currently integrated with Lumin each implement the technology in distinct ways. A variety of AR experiences are available at one’s fingertips, from a Persian cylinder seal rolling out an impression on virtual wet clay to a tree stump gradually being carved out to match the Yoruba royal presentation bowl sitting behind a glass

case. Sight is not the only sense Lumin manipulates — my aforementioned brush with societal ostracism turned out to incorporate sound effectively ( just when I was the only person listening). In front of me hung multiple war drums with depictions of thunderbirds embellishing them. Tapping on one of them via Lumin added a musical layer that combined to beautifully produce traditional Native American piece. Due to the inanimate nature of most visual art, what one sees is what one gets. There may be written descriptions next to a painting, or knowledgeable museum staffers present to enrich one’s understanding of the art, but they are accessory. The central relationship between art and audience is defined by the latter; only the viewer can decide how they personally interpret the art and what emotions it evokes. With Lumin, however, the smartphone becomes a living lens, a third party that connects the other two through a whole new dimension. The presentation of Lumin lends itself to education. While I was circling an Egyptian sarcophagus to reveal an X-ray view of the skeleton inside, the device also revealed information. Touching key points on the mummy brought up slides and images that described the process of mummification and how the curators cared for the artifact. The whole experience connects visitors with art in global contexts beyond the physical walls of the museum. In a press release about the technology, current DIA director Salvador Salort-Pons praised these educative values, saying “augmented reality allows the user to see the unseen, imagine art in its original setting

and understand how objects were used and experienced in people’s everyday lives.” There is no denying that today’s youth is acutely accustomed to technology all across the board. While this has created separate problems in and of themselves, this connection can be positively exploited to trick kids into learning without them even realizing. Although I loved going to museums when I was young, I dreaded having to sit through guided tours and being overwhelmed with waves of information. I wanted to explore at my own pace and learn in my own way, but unfortunately, to a child’s mind, most art is surfacelevel, and trying to explain it to them usually leaves them more confused than they were before. Yet after my latest adventure at the DIA, I am convinced that technology like Lumin is prime for education; it sits perfectly at the crossroads of explanation and exploration. The problem, however, lies in the fact that Lumin has a bit of an identity crisis. It is only in the prototype phase, but there are minor issues with the experience. I had to go back and get a second device after my first one froze, and only select artifacts on the first floor are given stops, rather than centerpieces of the collection like Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals — the DIA does assure though that similarly requested stops will be added in the coming months. Silly enough, I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I was some vapid YouTube personality vlogging due to the mounted grip that was used to hold up the phone. Despite these, the real issue is that Lumin is more geared towards a sophisticated adult

mind rather than a child’s. Kids would definitely be able to use the technology with the help of an adult, but the whole experience is not very kidfriendly; the UI is sleek and modern, but caters to the techsavvy. It asks a lot of the user and almost requires them to have a previous understanding of similar technology to truly get the most out of it. While I’m not trying to say only children should be getting educated in the arts, the most important factor in cultivating an appreciation for the arts is starting at an early age. Kids possess a genuine sense of wonder and awe when experiencing art, but they don’t know how to make the most out of it. Giving them an innovative avenue like Lumin, which not only excites and entices them but also teaches them in a method suited towards their sensibilities, can help them understand art on a fundamental level and tap into their own creative potential. During my excursion, I came across a local troop of Brownie Scouts about to embark on a guided tour of the museum. I overheard their troop leader telling them that the point of today’s journey was to see the pretty pictures as more than pretty pictures. And as the bright sun shone upon them through the windows of the atrium, I realized they were about to encounter that amazing moment of artistic illumination, the same mysterious and magical illumination that Lumin is named after and attempts to recreate. Although Lumin and other AR technology like it still require retooling before it can become a truly intuitive and educational tool, holding the phone in my hand, I couldn’t help but feel like a kid again.

Courtesy of the DIA

When people ask me what Performing Arts Technology is, I sometimes struggle to find the precise definition. For such a specific department, the vastness of its contents is pretty overwhelming, even for someone in the major. Everyone in the program has a different passion and a different area of the field that they’re pursuing, some of which may not even exist yet. The PAT Showcase this past Saturday gave audiences a glimpse into the expansive cross-section of technology and art. The showcase took place over two separate sections, one in the Chip Davis Technology Studio and one in Macintosh Theatre. Each event had its own unique performances and presentations that felt original and creative. In the Davis Studio, live performances constituted many of the performances, however, many acts were pre-

A lot of times in a conservatory environment, electronically produced music is seen as inferior to traditionally composed music

recorded and produced pieces that students composed. The Davis Studio boasts a unique listening environment, complete with a plethora of state-of-the-art speakers to create an immersive listening environment for audiences. The presentation of these electronic compositions was really interesting, and although it seemed like something you wouldn’t typically see at an SMTD concert, they still seemed to be treated as such, with light dimming before they were performed and audiences applauding after. A lot of times in a conservatory environment, electronically produced music is seen as inferior to traditionally composed music. At the showcase, this notion seemed to be completely abandoned: Each unique piece was given attention and respect. The differences in each piece were celebrated by the audience and the students alike. These strictly electronic pieces brought nuance to a musical climate that often feels void of emotion and creativity. Many are against the implementation of more electronics in music, but how could you be against a movement that encourages creativity? As a PAT student within SMTD, I have constantly been encouraged to engage in collaborative projects with other members of the school in both conventional and experimental ways. This desire to collaborate, with other PAT majors and with other artists, was made abundantly apparent at the showcase. Many works involved students playing a variety of instruments in a variety of genres, and using technology to alter their timbre or to accompany them. One of my favorite pieces from the night was “War Machines Dance to Piano Music” by Matias Vilaplana

and Joey Panlertkitsakul. The piece involved Matias, a graduate student in the program, using electronics to alter Joey’s piano playing. By miking the piano, Matias was able to alter the sounds with delays, filters and reverberation in live performance, as well as alter videos of machines being projected on screen. The music felt very minimalistic, however, in conjunction with live signal processing. The piece evolved into something completely different and more expansive over time. Some other performances included saxophonists from the jazz department and a solo double bass piece by Spencer Haney from their upcoming senior thesis. There was no shortage of variety at the showcase. Things also took a turn towards a more commercial direction. Artists like Clem Turneri and Aliyah Marie Smith shared songs off of their upcoming and recently released albums. Borrowing from R&B, pop and even experimental influences, the artists sang their own songs in addition to performing live looping, mixing and projecting. The performances showed a completely different side to PAT than many other performances in the department. Although many had modern influences, these two specifically felt more independent and void of a need to be groundbreaking. These performances showcased the songwriting talents PAT majors are capable of. The one thing that cannot be emphasized enough here is just how diverse this showcase, and the PAT department itself, actually is. While students generally take the same classes during their first year of study, they eventually break out and start to take classes that interest them and the areas they want to focus on, and this was especially apparent by just how many different types of performances there were. Another detail to note is just how involved the department is. Not only are PAT majors involved in all

This year’s PAT showcase was one of the best the department has ever had

sorts of different productions across campus, but younger members of the community are just as involved as the seniors. Seeing a large representation of the newer members of the department was really inspiring to me. Technology in art is moving at a rapid pace, and it’s nice to know that the new generation of PAT majors is just as motivated to advance this world as the past. This year’s PAT showcase was one of the best the department has ever had. Not only were members of the community able to showcase the bridge between art and technology in a variety of different ways, but students were able to express themselves through technology. Many may argue that music and art, in general, feel more artificial with the increased implementation of new technology. But with the passion that the performers displayed on Saturday night, I’m not sure if I can give this argument much credibility.