Now and then, I stumble upon a new 

hobby. I have a track record of dropping 
commitments soon after I decide I want to 
pursue them, which usually makes me doubt 
the next will stick for long. Growing up, I was 
a ballerina, a tap dancer and a cheerleader. I 
quit all of them adamant that there were 
other things that needed my time. These 
“hobbies” are just distractions, I would tell 
myself. I was partially right, though. I never 
truly looked forward to doing these things 
and I never regretted quitting. This was all 
until I began writing and playing the ukulele. 
This time around, I think these hobbies will 
stick.

I started writing again a few years 

ago after I finally rebuilt my shattered 
confidence. All throughout my childhood, 
adults in my life told me to focus on 
something other than writing — something 
I was better at. I willingly listened and 
searched for a new passion, but in the 
process, I unwillingly let go of my youthful 
love for storytelling. In March 2020, I picked 
up the pen out of boredom and wrote out 
everything that had been pressing on my 
mind. I then began writing poems, personal 
stories, and whatever else came to my mind. 
Once I fell back into the practice, I couldn’t 
believe how I had ever stopped. Writing 
brought me peace of mind at a time in my 
life when I didn’t know that it was possible 
to find peace and it continues to provide this 
for me.

Over the summer, I wrote just for myself. 

One day, I felt satisfied with what I had 

written, and when I glanced at the time I 
realized there was still so much of the day 
left to fill. I grabbed my phone and did a quick 
Google search on the easiest instrument to 
learn. A list of instruments popped up and 
the first instrument listed was a ukulele. 
Without a second thought, I opened up 
Amazon on a new tab and looked up 
ukuleles. The screen was filled with varieties 
of the small, four-string instrument. Each 
one was covered in mahogany wood and 
had thin white strings that glowed against 
the wood. I endlessly scrolled, filled with 
excitement at the possibility of being able 
to play an instrument. Eventually one in 
particular caught my eye. The engraved 
body was meant to honor Hawaiian body 
ornamentation. Throughout the summer, I 
taught myself to play with the help of videos 
on the internet. Once I was confident in my 
ability to play, I started to sing along with 
the music I was making. Day would fade into 
night as I sat in my room learning strumming 
patterns and chords for new songs. 

I reflect back on what I’ve been doing over 

the past year and I wonder whether or not 
I’m wasting my time with these hobbies. I 
think to myself, you’re just writing incomplete 
thoughts in a Notes app and calling them 
poems. There’s no one explicitly telling me 
I’m wasting my time, but a voice in the back 
of my head tells me that I could be doing 
something more productive with my time. 
I could be volunteering, or working or doing 
homework, but instead, I let my entire day 
slip away as my pinky reaches for the first 
string of the ukulele to play an E chord. 

6 — Wednesday, October 6, 2021 
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By Winston Emmons
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/06/21

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/06/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2021

ACROSS

1 Composer 

Bartók

5 Word with ship or 

school

9 Restoration 

locations

13 Beasts that work 

in pairs

14 Largely phased-

out ersatz fat 
brand

16 Org. for fur foes
17 Envelope-

directing abbr.

18 “Out of Africa” 

setting

19 Starting on
20 Three at the start
21 Ring result
23 1993 coming-of-

age baseball film, 
with “The”

25 Hen or sow
26 Really long time
27 Surround sound 

components

32 Unlicensed 

rainbow catcher

36 Floral accessory
37 Urges
38 Backing
39 Place for a 

catcher’s guard

40 Portuguese king
41 Camporee, for 

instance

45 Former California 

speedway that 
was the site of 
a 1969 rock 
concert

47 Genetics lab 

material

48 Director Jean-__ 

Godard

49 Evening parties
53 Tap water
58 Pre-A.D.
59 Injure
60 Willow twig
61 Dire prophecy
62 Nobelist Pavlov
63 Evans’ news 

partner

64 __ sci
65 Elizabeth of 

“La Bamba”

66 Torso muscles, 

collectively

67 Watersports gear

DOWN

1 Lakeside rentals
2 Additional
3 Allowed to enter
4 Cleeves who 

wrote Shetland 
Island mysteries

5 Bed-ins for 

Peace participant

6 Native Alaskan
7 Monthly expense
8 Belafonte classic
9 Lynn portrayer 

in “Coal Miner’s 
Daughter”

10 Mexican money
11 Minuscule amount
12 Ump’s call
15 Queasiness
21 Reputation stain
22 Winter warm spell
24 __ ex machina
27 Peacock’s gait
28 Scheme
29 K-12, in brief
30 Bit attachment
31 Do a number, say
32 Supermodel 

Banks

33 Line holder
34 Handling the 

matter

35 Familiar with

39 Sirius, e.g.
41 Lewd stuff
42 Pupa protector
43 2020 candidate 

Beto

44 Inch or mile
46 Wellesley 

graduate

49 Asparagus piece
50 Fodder for a Fire, 

say

51 Food recall 

cause

52 Truck stop array
53 Send using 

52-Down

54 Finish, as a road
55 Algerian seaport
56 Colorado-based 

sports org.

57 Digital recorder
61 MLB rally killers, 

briefly, and a 
hint to what’s in 
the four longest 
puzzle answers

SUDOKU

9
1
5

4

1

3

1

4
2
6

5

7

9

8

8

4

6
5
9

3

1

4

8

3
9
7


“HI MOM AND 
DAD I MADE IT 
IN THE PAPER 
-J”

“I know I’m not 
allowed to say 
it; I miss you so 
much.”

WHISPER

09/29/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

14 Postgame griper
19 It may be pitched

32 Come clean, with 

injured ligament 

On Sept. 22, students and faculty eagerly 

gathered in the Rackham Graduate School 
Auditorium and tuned in from home to hear 
New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-
Jones speak about The 1619 Project 
and its profound impact on our current 
educational, social and political landscape.

Arriving at the auditorium an hour before 

the event, attendees began lining up to 
attend her talk. As they waited for the event 
to start, they introduced themselves to each 
other and began initiating relationships, 
brought here by a mutual passion for 
initiatives like those of Hannah-Jones. The 
auditorium was abuzz, and the air was that 
of unrestrained excitement. This collective 
anticipation, palpable in the large gathering 
space, was warranted; getting to listen to 
Nikole Hannah-Jones speak was no small 
event, after all.

Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for The 

New York Times and has spent her storied 
career pursuing a firm commitment to 
discussing racial inequalities and injustice 
in America. More recently, she became a 
Pulitzer Prize winner for the body of work 
of which she would be discussing with 
us: The 1619 Project, a long-form project 
through The New York Times that was 
created with the intent to examine the 
pervasive legacy of slavery in America. 
While her plethora of accolades speak to 
her excellence — she bolsters a Peabody 
Award, MacArthur Genius Grant, two 
George Polk Awards, amongst other 
impressive accomplishments — she stands 
as a revolutionary journalist, activist and 
storyteller who has boldly redefined what it 
means to confront history in America. 

Upon her introduction, the crowd burst 

into thunderous applause, only to fall into a 
reverential, entranced silence as she began 
to speak. From the start of the presentation, 
Hannah-Jones 
was 
unflinching, 
an 

unapologetic force of nature as she provided 
her honest accounts of the backlash she 
received upon The 1619 Project’s release. 
In an eloquent and unwavering recap of 
the past year, she acknowledged former 
president Donald Trump’s efforts to create 
an entire commission against the project 
while prominent senators worked tirelessly 
to pass bills prohibiting its teaching 
in schools. She continued to detail the 
frenzied response that followed The 1619 
Project, explaining its rapid progression 
into an “intense disinformation campaign” 

executed 
through 
social 
media 
and 

mainstream conservative news platforms 
who actively worked to pervert the project 
into some heinous threat to the very 
integrity of our nation. Almost in tandem, 
a new phenomenon emerged in which the 
teaching of Critical Race Theory became 
synonymous with the goals of The 1619 
Project, stoking a “faux-hysteria” that 
resulted in concentrated legislative efforts 
to ban CRT from being taught in classrooms. 
The arguments and discontent stoked by 
The 1619 Project were relentless, spawning 
adamant accusations that the initiative 
was divisive, revisionist by nature or an 
attempt to exploit racial grievances and 
further exacerbate existing polarization in 
America.

In the face of such attacks, Nikole 

Hannah-Jones 
remained 
resolute, 

identifying the claims as exactly what 
they were: efforts to preserve the ideas of 
American exceptionalism that have been 
sustained within our education system 
for generations, favoring the teaching of a 
propagandistic history as opposed to one 
that forces individuals to confront the cruel 
realities of our nation’s genesis. With the 
motivation behind the mass hysteria and 
concentrated legislative efforts illuminated 
before us, the question then remains: 
“Why?” Why, in a nation that prides itself on 
free speech and the preservation of a rich 
marketplace of ideas, had a project with this 
very same intention become the target of 
such intense opposition and disallowance?

In order to contextualize the ardent 

disapproval of The 1619 Project, Nikole 
Hannah-Jones recounts the past year: 
notably, the murder of George Floyd and the 
widespread Black Lives Matter protests that 
arose as a response. The protests garnered 
an unprecedented level of engagement, 
with 69% of Americans claiming to have 
had a discussion about race between June 4, 
2020 and June 10, 2020. This mobilization 
marked a paramount moment in American 
history: non-Black Americans were not only 
beginning to acknowledge the prominence 
of police brutality in our nation, but 
recognizing the systemic implications that 
perpetuate it.

“You’re seeing a change in the national 

lexicon in how majorities of Americans are 
understanding the racial inequality that we 
see today, and connecting the inequalities 
that we see today to the legacy of slavery 
that dates back 400 years,” Hannah-Jones 
stated.

This new shift in the collective 

understanding of systemic racism gave 
rise to the possibility that our institutions 

would be forced to confront the ways that 
their power was founded on and amassed 
through the subjugation of Black and 
Brown individuals: to understand the 
events of 2020, the collective would have 
to understand the events of 1619. Hannah-
Jones cites this daunting combination as 
the catalyst for the public’s fear. It was not 
incidental that January 2021 marked the 
incessant vilification of The 1619 Project, 
and a bizarre obsession with Critical Race 
Theory that spurred substantive legislative 
efforts to limit its presence in public schools.

Upon 
acknowledging 
this 
pattern, 

Hannah-Jones poses a question to the 
audience: “Why is it that when you feel like 
your party is losing power, history is the 
thing you go to? When I start excavating 
the past … then it becomes something that is 
dangerous and has to be legislated against?”

The answer lies in the significance of 

history: how it is managed and manipulated 
to shape our collective understanding of 
the world, and how, when threatened, 
institutions seek to preserve the version of it 
that demands the least reconciliation.

Hannah-Jones’ description of history 

is two-pronged, illustrating our nation’s 
deliberate tendency to construct and 
maintain a favorable version of the past: 
“There’s history that’s what happened, on 
what date, and who did it, and then there’s 
history that is what we are taught about 
what happened, on what date, and who did 
it, and why, and what do we collectively … 
think our history is?”

With this understanding of history’s 

profundity and its immense power to 
guide collective memory, it becomes clear 
that The 1619 Project was never a direct 
threat to America’s integrity. What is truly 
threatened by initiatives like Hannah-Jones’ 
is the sanitized, delicately curated version of 
American history that has long been upheld 
by those in power. Unfortunately, the two 
have become intimately interwoven, as the 
preservation of our “American integrity” 
has become seemingly contingent on an 
active denial of our honest history. 

Any attempt to shed light on alternative 

narratives that have been selectively 
omitted from our collective memories 
thus threatens the institutions and power 
holders that have utilized their retellings 
of history to preserve their purported 
superiority. Those individuals will call 
these efforts blasphemous, “un-American,” 
anti-patriotic — they will call it anything, 
really, but the truth.

Nikole Hannah-Jones presents on history, 

collective memory and the impact of journalism

LEEN SHARBA &

YASMINE SLIMANI

MiC Columnists

Read more at MichiganDaily.

Why I Won’t Choose 

Between Passion and Productivity

MEGHAN DODABALLAPUR

MiC Columnist

One-time conversations

I’m sitting in a booth in the East Quad 

dining hall, hunched over a small bowl of 
beans and rice, when a voice coming from 
my right asks me a question. It takes me 
a few seconds to comprehend what this 
person is asking because of the music 
blasting through my headphones and the 
empty, almost meditative state that my 
mind takes when I’m eating. 

I pull an earbud out. “I’m sorry, what 

did you say?”

“Can I sit here?”
I nod and say yes to be polite, gesturing 

towards the empty seat in front of me. 
In reality, I am a little annoyed. For me, 
lunch in the dining hall is an opportunity 
to zone out completely and take a break 
in between a long day of classes. The 
last thing I want to do is have to talk to 
a stranger while doing so. Still, I try to 
be an agreeable person, so I offer up the 
cushioned seat of the booth across from 
me. There really isn’t anywhere else to sit 
during the peak lunch hour.

The boy introduces himself to me 

and I do the same. I don’t remember his 
name. We talk about something, mostly 
small talk with nothing of substance — 
hometowns, majors, classes — and then I 
finish my lunch and go about the rest of 
my day. 

I’ve always been a pretty quiet person. 

I don’t like drawing attention to myself, 
whether that be in class or in social 
settings. Not shy exactly, because I’ll 
speak up if I absolutely have to, but in new 
situations, I prefer to keep my speaking 
with strangers to a minimum. It was 
something that was easy to accomplish 
in my small high school, where I spoke 
to only a handful of people each day and 
during freshman year of college last 
year when most social contacts were 
nonexistent. This past month has been 
the first time I’ve talked to strangers I 
never intend to meet again. 

Last year, I tried to force myself to 

talk to many strangers. The intent of 
these freshman year interactions was to 
make friends. I talked to people with the 
desire to talk to them again later, and then 
again until we had exchanged enough 
words and spent enough time together 
to call each other friends. The results of 
this were often tiring (and sometimes 
disappointing). I remember listening to 
advice from upperclassmen who said that 
the people they talked to during the first 
few weeks of college were people that 
they never spoke to again. At the time, I 
knew these words were meant to calm 

the nerves of people who hadn’t made 
friends, but they also undermined the 
value of talking to people you will never 
see again — an amazing activity that I 
only started appreciating recently. 

One-time 
conversations 
tend 
to 

be memorable for me. Even if I don’t 
remember the names of the people that 
I’ve spoken to, I do remember their 
faces and random facts about them — 
a language class they’ve taken or the 
dorm they live in or where they’re from. 
Because I’ll never see them again, there 
is less pressure to remember their names 
and we can instead have a very brief 
moment of connection before continuing 
on our separate paths. After spending 
so much time cooped up at home, alone 
with no one but my family, these little 
conversations have become so much 
more meaningful to me. They’re also 
helping me acclimate to campus, adding 
stories to the hundreds of faces I see each 
day. Even though some might find these 
conversations dry because of how routine 
the conversations are — they rarely ever 
scratch the surface of who someone is as 
a person — I like seeing and hearing the 
different responses that others have to 
the same topics, like their favorite parts 
of the University of Michigan (Alice 
loves Nichols Arboretum Arb and Aisha 
likes to study in the Michigan League) 
or their favorite bubble tea spot in Ann 
Arbor (Will likes ChaTime but Katie 
thinks it’s overpriced). I might be a little 
tired of repeating those things myself, 
but it’s worth it to hear what the other 
person has to say. The knowledge that 
I’m probably never going to meet them 
again is nice, too. It takes the pressure 
off of the conversation and I feel more 
relaxed than I do when I talk to a stranger 
in class when I know I’ll see them the 
next day. Any slip-up or awkwardness in 
these moments will probably be quickly 
forgotten and if it isn’t, at least that person 
isn’t around every day to remind you of it. 

SAFURA SYED
MiC Columnist

Design by Mellisa Lee

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Design by Madison Grosvenor

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

