A Neat Obama *Artifact*

Here's a story the Boston Globe ran back in 1990 about Barack Obama, a 2L who had just been elected President of the Harvard Law Review: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/1990/02/15/a_law_review_breakthrough/

There's no biographical or other information in here that you're probably not already familiar with if you've been following the campaign, but it's neat to be able to get a snapshot like this of someone who already seemed destined to do big things from a relatively young age.

Items like this are a reminder of how the Internet creates a running historical log of events that anyone can quickly access -- it's easy to forget, but even within the lifetime of anyone reading this, there was certainly a time where a *reprint* like this would've had to be picked up in a hard-copy daily edition of a newspaper, which anyone could have reasonably missed had they been otherwise tied-up that day.

That is, unless they knew what they were looking for, and felt like searching via microfiche at the local library.

I guess the next step in the evolution here is that when those who came of age entirely in the Facebook/MySpace era become the Masters of the Universe. Just think, someday viewers all the world over will be able to see images of the Secretary of State stumbling to victory in the Beer Pong championships at his alma mater, no doubt captured for posterity. Or maybe a Fortune 500 CEO holding a Senator's head over the toilet in their Eating Club's bathroom.

My prediction for when that happens? We'll just redefine normalcy and we won't bat an eye when we see people's coming-of-age years captured on photo or video (within a flexible standard of 'reasonableness,' that is).