Live Talk: Secrets, Science and Symbols of the Freemasons at SASS

Last month, I gave a talk at the monthly history lecture series produced by the Society for the Appreciation of Social Studies (SASS) in Brooklyn. The subject: the symbols and science of the Freemasons, a secret society founded in England during the Enlightenment to encourage is members’ intellectual edification. Despite its hush-hush nature, the Masons …

Oh, Rats: Rodents Too Smart for Exterminators on Island visited by ‘Essex’ Castaways

A study published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science described everyone’s worst nightmare: rats that appeared to be too smart to eat poison put out by exterminators on Henderson Island, a Pacific islet where survivors from the whaleship Essex landed in 1820. Researchers described a case report in which a project to eradicate invasive rats …