top 40 here we come

A new survey, by the Princeton Review, puts my home law school (Rutgers-Camden) in the top 40 nationwide. The survey is admittedly less than scientific--I think it placed Cardozo over Yale--and it requires an amalgamation of individual categories to reach an overall score. On the other hand, unlike the prevailing US News Survey, it appears to have emphasized results rather than money spent chasing them. For example, the survey asked reasonable questions like "how often do you see your professors" and "what do you learn from them;" when students at ranking law schools predictably answered "never" and "not much," the rankings fell accordingly. As readers know, I don't think much of the whole survey business: but it's nice to have at least one on your side.

phillies head back to world series

It's Fall and the Phillies are back in the World Series, against the New York Yankees no less, the first game (barring a snowstorm) this Wednesday evening. The Phils and Yankees haven't played in a World Series since 1950, when the stadiums were different, the players were all (or nearly all) white, and the Yankees won in four straight but difficult games, which probably won't happen again. Then again, they didn't play in November back then, either.

Ben Shpigel of the NY Times put it best, when he said that the Phillies have changed the paradigm. A city which is used to losing has become so confident of winning that facing two good closers (Huston Street and Jonathan Braxton) in the ninth inning seemed merely a speed bump. Whether this will be enough to overcome the freespending Yankees--or whether the Yankees will buy the Phillies team, or city, should they lose--remains to be seen. For now, it is simply something to look forward to, a moment when the historic rival cities get ready to clash on what, for once, looks to be a more or less equal playing field.

facetime on facebook

I'm usually about ten years behind technologically--we got our first color TV around 1975, our first CD player around 1990, and I don't have the coordination to text and drive even where it is legal. So it was some trepidation that I opened a Facebook page a couple of months ago. So far, as the expression goes, so good.

I have to be honest about the limits of Facebook. You don't suddenly have any more friends just because you "friend" them at the site. (My sons have 526 and 318 "friends" respectively; I have 40, including two who have never responded.) Nor do people who were annoying, or that you annoyed, in real life suddenly become less so. If you track down your old girl friends, you'll quickly remember why they became that way.

Still, there is a value to the site, potentially a big one. Most of us have a few very good friends and a universe of people we are basically indifferent to. In between there is a middle category: colleagues at other law schools, people we went to college or on overseas trips with, friends whom we teetered on the edge of romance with but never quite went over. (This is different from old girl friends, although it is obviously a fuzzy line.) They are the kind of people, in short, who enriched our lives at one point but with whom we gradually lost touch over the years.

Facebook helps one to keep in touch with just this sort of person, and to rediscover something that is often missing in modern life: the art of light conversation, a sort of banter that is less than intellectual exchange but more than mere indifference. The presence of photographs, and the fact that most postings are open to third party viewers, enforces a sort of cheerfulness that is sometimes cloying but also vaguely reassuring in our polarized, put-down world. On blogs or e-mail, I think nothing of trashing the previous post, although my wife has taught me the value of the "send later" key. On Facebook, I find myself saying "How ya doin' Nancy" to an old friend who had been ill, or "Great photos!" to someone who posted the nth montage of their children and dogs. It's the kind of conversation people used to have with their neighbors, until TV and air conditioning drove everyone inside and your saw your neighbors only on Election Day.

There's something reassuring about all this, even if it frequently tends toward the trivial. We are told that technology has made us lonely and atomized: we connect only with people who are just like us, or only to attack those that we disagree with. Facebook represents a good faith if limited effort to correct the balance. Technology taketh away, but technology also giveth; even the socially challenged can feel part of a larger community once a day. In the 21st century, that isn't so bad.