As I’ve mentioned, one of the great pleasures of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me. By grace of academic tradition, the College at Brockport, and the delete button on my email server, I now have more time for thinking. I can pick up an enticing novel or book […]

Lately I have been thinking about the opening stanza from a poem by Emily Dickinson: ​Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all. . . Dickinson was right. “Hope is the thing with feathers”—for who hasn’t been stirred out of darkness by a bright pulse […]

Recently, I had a week of fieldwork that illustrates the highs, lows, and in-betweens that comprise most scientific projects. Research proceeds in fits and starts, whether we’re talking high-energy particle physics, molecular genetics, or (most critically) Inyo Mountains salamanders, as during my week of contrasts: Day 1—My goal was to investigate a possible salamander locality […]

Recently, my son and I discovered a “new” population of Inyo Mountains salamanders, perhaps the twenty-first documented locality. It was in an unexpected situation—a seep just eighty yards long, which we reached after a long walk up an otherwise waterless drainage. A thin trickle of water slipped through a rank growth of grass and goldenrod, […]

At most colleges and universities, as at Brockport, tenured faculty are eligible for a sabbatical every seven years. It’s a wonderful privilege, with few analogs for most working Americans.  For me, a sabbatical offers the time to put aside my normal duties—which run mostly to administration, teaching, service, and supervision of other people’s research—and immerse […]