## Cambridge Days

Dinner at the Helmand: Zagat rating 27 (Food) and 20 (Service). After I was seated, it was fifteen minutes until I was brought a menu. Sixty seconds later, the waitress asked what I wanted to order, and then pouted when I said I needed a little extra time. References to the owner being a brother of Hamid Karzai were far less conspicuous then on my last visit. The bread is great!

Voltage coffee and art with Sug Woo Shin: pretentious in a hipster kind of way, elegant design, a payment system that involves an ipad, and a serious attitude towards coffee; in otherwords, my kind of place. I ordered a cortado, which was everything one could ask it to be. Who would have thought even five years ago that Kendall square would have a place like this!

Poonen can give a beautiful exposition of Coleman-Chabauty in 10 minutes. And he knows how to wield it too; see the recent beautiful result of Poonen-Stoll.

Seminars by Calegari & Calegari at MIT and Harvard. This off-broadway show will come to Chicago soon, book your tickets now!

Suppose that $X$ is a PEL Shimura variety. Can one classify all $X$ for which the image in $A_g$ lands in the Torelli locus? In Rachel Pries’ talk at MIT, a result of Moonen was mentioned which classified the $A/X$ which satisfied certain exceptional isomorphisms with families of Jacobians of curves which are cyclic covers of the projective line, but I wasn’t sure whether this was supposed to give the complete answer to this question.

Sitting next to me in Rachel’s talk: David Treumann, who has a nice paper with Venkatesh on the way (I’ll update the link when it becomes available.)

Unconfirmed Rumor: Mark Kisin’s student Thanos Papaïoannou will be the next president of Cyprus.

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### One Response to Cambridge Days

1. It was pretty funny to unexpectedly run into you in the Harvard common room at lunch . . .