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2 months ago | 
smithsonianmag.com | Andrew Lawler
How a disagreement with a Scottish lord over westward expansion, a cache of gunpowder, and the future of enslaved labor helped kick-start the southern colonies’ embrace of the radical cause Everyone knows how the redcoats clashed with patriots at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, sparking the American Revolution.
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Feb 25, 2025 | 
lithub.com | Andrew Lawler
A college-educated liberal friend sitting at my kitchen table recently let me in on a secret: the fossil fuel industry is suppressing alien technology that could eliminate our need to burn oil and gas. The revelation is just one of any number of strange tales circulating on social media. From Jewish space lasers to microchips in vaccines, conspiracy theories seem to have gone full mainstream.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
archaeology.org | Andrew Lawler
Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Andrew Lawler
Andrew Lawler’s A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis that Spurred the American Revolution focuses on Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia from 1771 through 1775. The “Black allies” referenced in the title are the escaped slaves whom Dunmore recruited into his army by promising freedom to those who fought with him against the rebels. “Perfect frenzy” is how Thomas Jefferson described the reaction of his fellow Virginians to Dunmore’s military actions.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
msn.com | Andrew Lawler
Continue reading More for You Continue reading More for You
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
smithsonianmag.com | Andrew Lawler |Nicola Muirhead
A sudden roar broke the muggy stillness, making me jump. A young woman squatting in a shallow trench reassured me. “No worries,” she said, gesturing with a trowel into a nearby thicket. “Our tools here are chainsaws and leaf blowers.” Whisk brooms, dental picks and spoons are also part of the arsenal. A few dozen yards away, in a dirty T-shirt, faded camo shorts and black work boots, Michael Jarvis hacked away at thick brush with a gas-powered saw.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
science.org | Andrew Lawler
More than 1000 years ago along the fabled Silk Road, caravans funneled silk and cotton west to Europe while wool, glass, gold, and silver traveled east to China. Oasis cities in Central Asia formed important nodes along these routes, which were actually a network of trading paths. Now, the surprising discovery of traces of a major medieval city at an altitude of more than 2000 meters in Uzbekistan shows the network extended far into rugged mountainous areas it was assumed to bypass.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
science.org | Paul Voosen |Andrew Lawler
NASA’s announcement yesterday that it would kill its $600 million VIPER lunar rover, even after it had been fully assembled, shows how the agency’s budget for planetary science has been strained to the breaking point. And some are questioning the decision, suggesting there are other ways NASA could have saved money.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
nationalgeographic.com | Andrew Lawler
The reef-fringed shores of Fiji’s largest island of Vitu Levu draw tourists eager to snorkel in its tropical waters. Just a few miles inland, however, local villagers recently uncovered a rare mass grave that could shed light on a turbulent and grisly period in the history of this South Pacific archipelago. The human remains were found February 29 at the summit of a massive hill fort overlooking the muddy Sigatoka River that snakes out of Vitu Levu’s rugged highlands.
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Apr 11, 2024 | 
science.org | David Malakoff |Andrew Lawler
ASTRONOMYScientists flock to the eclipseTens of millions in North America turned their specially protected eyes to the skies on 8 April for several minutes of darkness when the Moon blocked the disk of the Sun, casting a shadow across Mexico, 15 U.S. states, and Canada. Researchers and citizen scientists seized the opportunity to study the corona—the wispy, outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere—from the ground and in eclipse-chasing aircraft.
