Brendon Olson did some intriguing things before coming to the University of Michigan Law School this year. The only thing is, he can't tell you about most of them.

For the past two years Olson worked for the National Security Agency evaluating information gained from intercepting wire and radio signals. For five years before that he worked in Operations.

"I can't talk much about that," Olson said.

Hey y'all,

Goodness but we're old. And no, I'm not talking about the Law School itself, though the RG will be featuring news items from the Susquetennial events in our upcoming issue, 60.2. No, I'm not even talking about the age, wisdom, and questionable sagacity of the 3L class (holla!). Nope, folks, this time it's the Res Gestae itself, the august (and the rest of the year) publication I have the joy of heading during this, its Diamond Anniversary. Yep, you read that correctly - sixty years of all the news that beat the publication deadline.

Dear Editor,

Like many upperclassmen, I was surprised to return this year to find that one of the best peer-to-peer support services available to 1Ls has been so radically retooled as to make it almost useless. Like the majority of 1Ls, last fall I took advantage of the tutoring service that has, for years, provided 1Ls with a proactive way to quell their anxiety over classes, manage course loads, and keep study groups on track.

Each year our incoming 1L and LLM classes participate in a law school-sponsored Service Day as part of the orientation program. At its best, some students have fun for a couple of hours. More often than not, though, memories of previous Service Days elicit eyerolls and a few cheap shots. ("Oh yeah...Service Day...that's where the school puts you on a bus with 80 people, gets you lost in Detroit, tells you to tear down a house of asbestos, and the only equipment they give you is a box of latex gloves. Then after a couple of hours of standing around and getting stung by bees you come back and pretend like you did something meaningful and somehow bonded with all 79 other people, right?")

Chapter I

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a second year law student in possession of a good transcript must be in want of a job at a big city firm. However little known the feelings or views of such a student may be on her first entering the job market, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of American Lawyer Top 100 firms that she--and her billable hours--are considered the rightful property of some one or other of their practice areas.

Welcome and welcome back, as appropriate, to another year at Michigan Law. For those of you who aren't already familiar with "Save Yourself," it's basically a reminder that life is bigger than law school and you shouldn't ignore all the things you loved to do before you were a law student. Your time here will pass quickly, and though I know well the pressures of grades, resume building and job hunting, especially in this economy, I highly recommend that you spend some time outside Hutchins exploring the Ann Arbor area and living a well-rounded life.

As your 1L year gets under way, increasing numbers of adults in your life will describe the main difficulty of the first year of law school as "learning to think like a lawyer." Not only do they make it sound exhausting and terrible, but loads of them have packaged this observation along with a general admonition against becoming a lawyer at all. This is information that might have been helpful a year or so ago but now seems more like hostility cloaked as advice. They'll come brandishing out-of-context Shakespeare quotes and bemoaning the state of tort reform in two-sentence talking points and will aggressively accuse you of mortgaging your future only to be turned into a bigger and more useless jerk than you already are. There may be something to that last bit, actually, but now's not the time to sort all that out.

For those of you new to the column, When You Were Cooler is a window into the way the cool kids lived. Note that I said lived - here at WYWC we focus exclusively on what your classmates did prior to losing their coolness by coming here. To start the year off right, we have a double feature, paying tribute to what was hopefully a summer full of live music (or at least Pandora), eargasms, and crowd surfing. Saying that, I'm fully aware that very few of you have crowd surfed. But I digress.

LawOpen is a strange and awkward beast, like walking into a shopping mall where one of the stores sells something that's really, incredibly sexist. It is, however, our strange and awkward beast, and so we must tend to it lovingly and with care, lest it turn on us in our sleep.

Law school is trying to kill my love for HBO On Demand. I'm sure of it. I can't see Six Feet Under without contemplating trusts and estates, Cathouse without thinking about feminist jurisprudence, Deadwood without hiding from the FCC, True Blood without the 14th amendment, or Carnivale without contemplating the religious, historical, and yet strangely post-apocalyptic mysticism of we, we happy few, we band of schmoes who willing decided to put ourselves through law school in the hope for something, anything better.

And now, Real Sex.

We at the RG are essentially convinced you don't read this, and just skip straight down to The Curves without paying us any nevermind. Well guess what folks - the curve is still 3.14, the drop/add period is over, and you already have your grades, so hang with us for a sec. We promise The Curves will still be there when we're done.