They are still delivering the US Mail today, but here at Advanced
Studies, we're going to take a short break. Thanks so very much to
all our readers and wishing you a very happy 2011.

Gail Collins with her usual excellent NY Times column here. In the meantime, there are some very interesting new initiatives coming out of Mason that I hope soon to report to you on that have the potential to be transformative. Stay tuned.

It’s become a tradition at the Institute–we welcome back faculty, staff and students with a picnic barbecue. Today, the weather is picture perfect–the torrid heat of the Washington summer is in transition to the much more temperate norms of Fall–the University’s dormitories are being refilled as I write these words with new incoming freshman and a huge crane is pouring the concrete for the slab on the second floor of the new Krasnow expansion building.

I’m looking very much forward to today’s events and for a productive semester.

For the readers of this blog, I’ll be posting from around the globe this semester as my travels take me overseas.

Former dean Stanley Fish writes about a subject near and dear to me  here. What is it about conspiracy theories that attract the human mind? Is there a neuroscience of conspiracy theories? Here’s my previous blogpost on the matter.

It was a great time in New England this past week. My niece got married in Watertown. We attended the MBL gala to support Woods Hole’s scientific gem, spent some time on the cupola roof of the Mansion House in Vineyardhaven (that’s the image), and came back to the MBL to attend the annual Corporation meeting.

Yesterday, I woke up early–around 4:30 and enjoyed a walk through town that was virtually quiet except for the stirrings of folks getting their boats ready for fishing. Otherwise, nothing but the ducks on Eel Pond and me. But by 5, the Pie In The Sky bakery was humming with activity, the coffee was brewed and I was on my way to Boston by 5:15.

Sarah Maslin Nir has a fascinating piece in today’s NY Times on-line about men who seek nearly complete social isolation (think Robinson Crusoe) here. Money quote from the University of Chicago’s John Cacioppo:

I had the pleasure to visit Amherst College on a delightful Spring Day last week. As you can see, in this picture of Johnson Chapel taken from Stearns Hall, the leaves aren’t yet out on the trees of the Freshman Quad. Yet the College on the Hill continues to thrive. The students that took me to lunch before my talk asked difficult questions, but they are clearly serious and give me great hope.

Well, I’ve had a very enjoyable sabbatical from blogging at Advanced Studies after five years of more or less constant posting. During the break, we had two amazing blizzards here in Washington and there’s still a whole lot more snow on the ground than we ever get during a “normal” winter–that even though it’s nearly 50 degrees outside and this would be the typical time we’d be seeing daffodils. Also, I’ve been teaching a very enjoyable course on the function of the hippocampus–cross listed to both advanced undergraduates and doctoral students here at Mason. I forget sometimes how satisfying teaching can be.

We saw a pretty entertaining movie the other night, Tenure, which made me laugh, but also reminded me of the very frightening events from Alabama over the past week.

In any case, we’re rested, relaxed and ready to blog.

TTYS

We had an excellent editorial board meeting of The Biological Bulletin yesterday evening. I have to say it was also delightful to enjoy the “tropical” weather relative to what we’ve been getting in the Nation’s capital.

My university made the news today with the announcement of the gift of a large and strategically located piece of land out near Dulles International Airport–we do keep growing here at Mason, in spite of these interesting times.