The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
6 — Wednesday, December 1, 2021

I can’t in good faith say that I’m a Swiftie. 
I’m a Swiftie in the sense that we all are Swifties 
— because you can’t avoid her. Her music has 
defined a generation, whether you like it or not. 
Even if I don’t buy tickets to Taylor’s shows, it’s 
still a Swift-dominated world, and I still reap 
the benefits of breakup songs. Everybody loves 
her femcel anthem, and I literally go crazy any 
time any of her singles play at a party. Part of 
the reason people joke about her being a crazy 
girlfriend with a self-described long list of 
ex-lovers is that she’s so lovable that we wish we 
could hate her, like our ex-boyfriend’s newest 
lover. She, like her Cool Girl contemporaries 
Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway (who 
supposedly has her own connection to “All Too 
Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) 
(From the Vault)”), is just a beautiful, talented 
woman who seems a little too good to be true, 
and we tend to be distrustful of that. Maybe 
my lowered expectation of her is why I actually 
kind of love this short film.

If you haven’t heard yet, Taylor Swift and 
Jake Gyllenhaal (“Nightcrawler”) dated for 
three months when she was 20 and he was 29. 
While nine years might not be as egregious as 
the infamous age gaps in Bradley Cooper and 
Leonardo Dicaprio’s relationships, there was 
a massive gap in experience. She had only just 
released her first album a few years before, and 
Gyllenhaal been in the public eye since he was 
a child. Looking back at those paparazzi shots 
of the two of them, you can’t help but see how 
different Swift looks.
The greatest directorial choice Swift made 
for “All Too Well: The Short Film” was in her 
casting. Dylan O’Brien (“Teen Wolf”) plays 
Him and Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things”) plays 
Her; the actors are the roughly same ages that 
Gyllenhaal and Swift were when they were 
together. I can’t say definitively if nine years is 
too much of an age difference if both parties are 
consenting adults, but when I first saw O’Brien 
and Sink lock lips, it was a bit jarring. I couldn’t 
help the queasy feeling in my stomach. I’m 
sure Swift knew what she was doing when she 
chose Sink; her role as a child actor is still fresh 
in the world’s mind, and we can’t help but feel 

that she’s still too young, that she’s still 13 in our 
minds. It makes me think that this is how Swift 
must have felt during this relationship: frozen in 
time, feeling like a little girl trying desperately to 
grow up.
The highlight of the short film is the acting. 
It has been way too long since O’Brien has had 
the chance to do dramatic acting on such a large 
stage. Swift said that much of the “electric” 
dialogue in one particular scene was improvised, 
giving a really natural feel to the atmosphere. 
O’Brien puts dirty dishes away and half-laughs 
as Sink explains her hurt feelings, calling her 
selfish only to backtrack by saying, “You’re acting 
selfish.” He repeats a half-hearted, weightless 
apology like in an early 2000s rom-com where 
men never know what they’re apologizing for 
but want to get out of the doghouse.
Worse still, O’Brien’s performance is still so 
romantic and charming. If it were me, I could 
never convince myself that he was anything 
else but a handsome guy who makes me laugh. 
I’m tempted to believe him a bit when he says 
he didn’t mean to brush off his girlfriend’s 
hand at dinner, that he really was just having 
fun with his friends and maybe she is making it 

about herself. But, just as magnetic as he is, this 
nameless man turns on a dime and slams a car 
door in his girlfriend’s face, throwing the keys 
at her. A Twitter user writes, “Jake Gyllenhaal 
having a ‘fuck the patriarchy’ keychain while 

dating women 10 years younger than him does 
track.” Men always seem to find a reason to 
make us hate them, don’t they?

Anonymity is the internet’s most sacred 
asset. The freedom to say anything, to ignore the 
draconian social rules of everyday life, is what 
made the anonymous messaging application 
Yik Yak popular after its initial launch in 2013. 
The app shut down in 2017 after cyberbullying 
concerns, but in August of this year, Yik Yak 
re-appeared in app stores. This Yik Yak is 
a buggy yet functional reincarnation of its 
previous self — the app centers around “yaks,” 
text posts with a 200-character limit shown 
to anyone within a five-mile radius. Users can 
upvote or downvote posts, and enough upvotes 
can earn yaks a spot on the “Local Top Yaks”; 
yaks that receive more than five downvotes are 
hidden from the feed. Each poster is nameless; 
the only way to tell users apart is from their 
representative emoji randomly chosen by the 
app — this can be changed at any time. 
Whether it’s from the nostalgia of the 
2010s, the excitement of returning to campus 

after a year and a half or the innate desire to 
connect with people, the Ann Arbor Yik Yak 
bubble has been populated with hundreds, 
possibly thousands, of University of Michigan 
students. From South Quad to the UGLi 
to North Campus to the Blue Leprechaun, 
Ann Arbor’s pandemic-weary student body 

has yikked every yak, putting every fleeting 
thought on blast no matter how obscene. It’s 
unclear exactly how many people actively 
use Yik Yak, but the archive of “Local Top 
Yaks” gives an idea — the most popular yak in 
the area exceeds 450 upvotes, which doesn’t 
account for the additional downvotes the post 

may have received or the users who simply 
didn’t interact.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve happily 
shoved aside impending midterms and 
assignments to pursue the more stimulating 
task of researching the University’s Yik Yak 
scene. At first, I tried to reach out to the Yik Yak 
community and ask them what they would like 
to say to The Daily. The responses included, 
but were not limited to: “Don’t go to class, eat 
ass,” “Fuck MSU,” “No one in the daily knows 
how big my dick is” and “balls.” With this, I 
determined that the best move forward would 
be to leave the yakkers up to their own devices 
and simply observe. So, I did — from morning to 
evening, I took in every new yak, scrolling with 
abandon during any and all spare moments. 
With a paralyzing amount of confessionals, 
complaints, jokes and drunken rambles, I was 
able to interpret Yik Yak as a microcosm of local 
youth culture. 
Yik Yak is a place for speaking your mind — 
evidently, the minds of U-M students are fraught 
with dysfunctional group projects, midterms, 
Math 116 assignments on “WeBWorK” and the 

hassle of finding an unoccupied study space in 
any campus building. On a fundamental level, 
all students can relate to personal experiences 
with stress and exhaustion. After all, suffering 
is easier when it’s shared.
When the dining halls are open, you might 
see complaints about the long lines at South 
Quad or the quality of the food from that day. 
One user posts detailed dining hall reviews, 
ranking their experience with the culinary 
competence of Gordon Ramsay. Other notable 
yak topics include the resounding shrieks of 6 
a.m. Amtrak trains, midnight fire alarms at the 
residence halls, offensive B.O. on the Bursley-
Baits Loop and scathing fraternity slander.
The lighthearted innocence of Yik Yak 
stops there. Sometimes, actually most of the 
time, yaks lean towards the cruder side — on 
a mid-October evening, an influx of yaks 
revolved around an alleged poop-related 
incident in the Stockwell showers. With 62 
upvotes, the sentiments of many residents 
were memorialized in the following yak, 
“Trying to go to sleep but I cannot knowing 
the stockwell shitter walks free.” As much 

as there was disgust, the jokes ran rampant 
too: one yak reads, “Just went to take a shit 
in Stockwell and there was a shower in the 
way??!” and another “McCarthyism, but it’s 
the poop in the shower.” 
On the other end of the “out-of-pocket” 
spectrum, hormones rage with reckless 
abandon. After the sun goes down, roughly 
one out of every three yaks is a cry for help, an 
S.O.S. from the throes of loneliness. I couldn’t 
forget them if I tried: “I’m so down bad I might 
just try finding love with the next snapchat 
sex bot that adds me” and “what are boobs? 
I’m a visual learner btw” are the tamest of 
the tame. The efforts of Yik Yak’s community 
guardrails are of no avail of even the most 
vulgar expressions of biological needs.
The “Leaders and Best” of Ann Arbor share a 
propensity for all things toilet-related, whether 
it’s debates of the best bathroom on campus 
or anecdotes of traumatizing experiences — I 
wouldn’t address the fixation on potty humor if 
it wasn’t for its alarming frequency. 

‘All Too Well: The Short Film’ rekindles age gap discourse

Ann Arbor’s Yik Yak scene

‘Always Jane’ falls 
short of its potential

Design by Michelle Kim

MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON
Daily Arts Writer

LAINE BROTHERTON
Daily Arts Writer

MOLLY HIRSCH
Daily Arts Writer

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By Joe Deeney
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
12/01/21

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

12/01/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2021

ACROSS
1 Surpasses 21, in 
blackjack
6 Top-level 
performance
11 NBA legend, 
familiarly
14 Company that’s 
proud of its 
quacks?
15 Chopper topper
16 Like the top half 
of Monaco’s flag
17 Craven endeavor
19 In the style of
20 Solar panel spot
21 Blockhead
22 Like energy-
efficient buildings, 
e.g.
29 Together, in 
music
30 Acid found in 
olive oil
31 34-Across has 
one of them
34 Historic ship
35 QB’s try
38 Territorial 
complex 
dissolved during 
the Napoleonic 
Wars
41 Senator Klobuchar
42 Orator’s art: Abbr.
43 WWI president
44 Dough
45 Resistance units
46 Acclaimed 
2016 Broadway 
soundtrack, with 
“The”
52 “By Jove!”
53 Ticket datum
54 __-country
55 Final leg ... and a 
hint to each set of 
circles
62 Cartoonist Chast
63 Precipice
64 Like an egg
65 Table for __
66 Passing words?
67 Tranquilizing 
brand

DOWN
1 “Harrumph!”
2 Eerie sky sight
3 Canon letters
4 Pitch
5 Org. whose 
income taxes are 
passed through 
to shareholders

6 Tanks and such
7 Digress
8 Dune buggy, 
briefly
9 L’état, à Louis 
XIV
10 Bard’s before
11 Outlined, 
maybe
12 Museum piece
13 Website for 
Jewish singles
18 Sushi topper
21 Half a 
Northwest 
airport
22 Yoga term 
meaning “force”
23 “Under the 
weather,” say
24 Water-formed 
ditch
25 Actress Lamarr
26 Director of many 
“This Is Us” 
episodes
27 What people who 
need People 
might do?
28 Coconut Grove 
city
32 Swashbuckling 
Flynn
33 Très chic
35 Tyler of “Archer”

36 Tread heavily
37 Future, e.g.
39 Ten-time NBA 
All-Star Anthony, 
to fans
40 Story arc
44 Prefix with day
46 Symbol of 
affection
47 Lit up
48 Passover staple
49 Hides
50 Wednesday kin
51 Copy, in a way

55 “Industry” 
network
56 Celestial 
sphere
57 Customizable 
Nintendo 
avatar
58 Green of 
“Casino Royale”
59 Shade on the 
beach
60 Windy City 
train letters
61 Curse

SUDOKU

WHISPER

“Did you hear?”
“Yeah. Go Blue. 
First time in 10 
years!”

WHISPER

By Dave Taber and Laura Moll
(c)2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/24/21

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

11/24/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, November 24, 2021

ACROSS
1 Little __ Muffet
5 Roger Bannister, 
famously
10 Speaker in 
Cooperstown
14 Elvis or Coca-
Cola
15 “The L Word” 
co-creator 
Chaiken
16 Whisper
17 Interstate hauler
18 Ad prizes
19 Dramatic opener
20 Adagio and 
allegro
22 Leave the city to 
evade arrest
24 Like some tanks
27 Where the old 
woman lived
28 Permits to enter
30 Title of respect
31 Exec, slangily
33 Schoolmarmish
35 List to-dos
39 Intense anger
40 It has just one 
64-Down
42 Shapiro of NPR
43 Delivery, as of a 
baby
45 Inter __
46 Recipe word
47 Relieved (of)
49 Comes to light
51 Secret fraternity 
member
55 Party or wild 
follower
57 Bit of 
encouragement
59 Vinyl-covered, as 
a floor
61 Worldwide: Abbr.
62 Absinthe flavor
65 Half a round on 
the links
66 Ohio’s lake
67 R&B family name
68 Budget sister 
company
69 Runs out of juice
70 “It’s true!”
71 Guido of Baroque 
art fame

DOWN
1 Light fog
2 Relatives of 
Slurpees
3 Server with a 
blush?

4 Piece of prose
5 A hot one can be 
problematic
6 Laid up
7 Island necklaces
8 Long, thin soup 
mushroom
9 Viscous plant 
substances
10 “Bingo!”
11 Japanese 
electronics 
company
12 Cut down the 
middle
13 “Goosebumps” 
series author
21 Gomez’s furry 
cousin
23 French capital
25 Road trip game
26 Approximately
29 Nabisco brand 
name
31 Jem, to Scout 
Finch
32 Psychic Geller
34 Ballerina Shearer
36 Completely 
dominates
37 Med. injury 
detector
38 Title for two 
Beatles

40 The good dishes
41 Discomfort cause
44 Makes four into 
twelve, say
46 Advanced course 
offering
48 Hold for questions
50 Take care of a 
kitty
51 Went down a 
slippery slope
52 Matisse of the art 
world

53 Knot again
54 Old-time laundry 
soap brand
56 Red Square figure
58 Place for singles
60 He loved Lucille
63 Cinque e uno
64 Watcher ... and 
homophone of a 
letter that appears 
exactly once in 
every clue and all 
but two answers

Reality television has monopolized the TV screen for 
years. From “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” to “The 
Bachelor,” audiences around the world are immersed in the 
overwhelmingly ridiculous lives of celebrities or those who 
want to be celebrities. Nevertheless, the genre is expanding 
to encompass people of different backgrounds, with different 
stories. This includes Amazon Prime’s new docuseries 
“Always Jane.”
This four-part series focuses on Jane Noury, a transgender 
teenager, and the Noury family throughout her transitioning 
period. The audience is given a glimpse into their world at a 
time that precedes much change: Jane prepares for college, 
awaits her gender-affirming surgery and takes a chance on 
modeling. Fortunately for her, she is supported by her parents, 
two sisters and grandfather throughout it all.
While “Always Jane” takes on a sensitive and highly 
relevant topic, the first episode falls short of its potential. 
Undoubtedly, the show is engaging and the audience can’t help 
but fall in love with the Nourys: They are the quintessential 
boisterous and overprotective family. In fact, throughout the 
pilot, Jane reiterates how grateful she is for her parents and 
their unwavering love during what is an extremely pivotal 
time in her life.
And so, as we watch the show, we can’t help but feel relief 
and pure happiness for Jane, who is a lively, passionate and 
silly teenage girl. However, while the series aims to present 
the difficulties that a trans teen like Jane faces in the political 
and social climate of today’s world, it doesn’t entirely live up 
to this goal. 
The way the story is presented is too simplified and 
superficial. Through videos Jane takes of herself and clips 
of her day-to-day life, the only thing the show reveals is 
how strong she is as an individual and how understanding 
her family has been throughout her transition. However, 
it doesn’t touch on the fact that a support system and the 
acceptance of friends and family is not a luxury that every 
person in the LGBTQ+ community is lucky enough to have. 
So while Jane discusses her past issues of bullying and 
self-acceptance, the series only barely scratches the surface of 
what is a much larger issue. And inevitably, this undermines 
the main intention of the show: to address the larger struggles 
transgender people endure on a daily basis. 
“Always Jane” doesn’t necessarily devalue Jane’s journey 
and the many obstacles that came with her decision to 
transition. Yet, it doesn’t dive into those obstacles nearly as 
much as it otherwise could have. Simply put, the tribulations 
Jane has experienced and will continue to experience as 
a trans woman are only briefly mentioned but not further 
developed within the episode. For instance, her mother Laura 
explains that there was a process the family had to go through 
in order for Jane to play on the girls’ soccer team at school; 
however, nothing else like this is addressed. The audience isn’t 
explicitly told what that process was like, how long it took or 
how it affected Jane personally. Instead, it is mentioned and 
never talked about again.
So, while “Always Jane” attempts to show viewers the 
implications of being a young trans person in the 21st century, 
it does so in a very surface-level way. Rather than being privy 
to the adversity Jane faces, we are just onlookers into the life of 
a teenager as she gets into college, hangs out with her friends 
and spends time with her family.

Design by Jessica Chiu

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

