The recent financial crisis has exposed serious flaws in the relationship between corporate America and the larger society, but it has also provided an extraordinary opportunity to reexamine and rebuild that relationship for the new century. On November 30, 2009, Rajat K. Gupta and Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. discussed these issues at an American Academy of Arts & Sciences event in New York City entitled “Challenges to Business and Society in the 21st Century: The Way Forward.”

What do Americans think about the arts and artists? A recent national survey by the American Academy offers a few answers.

For centuries, humans have sought to enhance their natural appearance and abilities through medicine, surgery, exercise, and education. Today, performance enhancement is most often associated with drugs taken by athletes and college students to improve physical and mental performance.

The Summer 2013 issue of Dædalus examines the origins and characteristics of new immigrants and considers their reception in the United States, with regard to both public policies and private behavior.

Will Receive Amory Prize and Deliver Remarks at April Event

In a Young Voices opinion piece, Alexandra Hudson cites recommendations in the Academy's report and calls for a “fourth founding” to help Americans renew love of country and one another.

In August 2020, the Public Face of Science initiative published its final report, The Public Face of Science in America: Priorities for the Future, which outlines recommendations for strengthening the relationship between science and society. The first two reports released by the project, Perceptions of Science in America (2018) and Encountering Science in America (2019), show the heterogeneity of current attitudes toward science and the great breadth of experiences that can influence those attitudes. The final report takes a multifaceted approach and identifies three high-level areas for change that can, over the long term, shape attitudes toward science and people’s experiences with it.

Arthur Bienenstock, co-chair of American Academy project on the Challenges of International Scientific Partnerships, argues new legislation may endanger the U.S. science and technology workforce and limit the effectiveness of U.S. academic research.

Linguist William Labov will receive the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for his distinguished and original contributions to the social sciences.

President Jimmy Carter and Republican former Senators Olympia Snowe (ME) and Alan Simpson (WY) joined a majority of Americans across the political spectrum to support a Constitutional Amendment - as proposed in the Academy's Our Common Purpose report - addressing the explosive rise in election spending and the civic distrust and division it generates. 

How the English department at Washington University at St. Louis reversed its enrollment slide and reinvigorated graduate training.

As I reflect on my first few months as president of the Academy, one of the great joys has been getting to know our extraordinary fellowship of members. As of this writing, I have had the opportunity to visit our vibrant member communities in North Carolina, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, New York, Southern California, Chicago, and, of course, the Academy’s home in the Boston-Cambridge area. In each location, I have been awed by our fellow members: their achievements, their passions, their hopes for the future. The articles in this issue also represent the power of the local–with deliberations in San Diego, New York City, and Los Angeles.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences celebrated the launch of the new report from the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action, Forging Climate Solutions: How to Accelerate Action Across America. The report calls for a coordinated, cross-sector effort to combat climate change with strategies and recommendations rooted in justice, pragmatism, and accountability. The event featured Commission co-chairs Mustafa Santiago Ali, Christopher Field, David G. Victor, and Patricia Vincent-Collawn in conversation with Scientific American's Laura Helmuth.

The Humanities Indicators released updates on recent trends in humanities degrees today, demonstrating continued declines in humanities bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in the years before the pandemic. The notable exception was found at two-year colleges.

The American Academy’s “Heart of the Matter” Report Continues To Inspire Action

On October 7, 2020, over two hundred members of the class of 2020 gathered on Zoom to celebrate their recent election to the Academy. This virtual convening was not designed to replace Induction, but rather to capture some of the camaraderie, joy, and ceremony of the traditional weekend in Cambridge.

Learning to cope with the transitory nature of information storage and transmission will eventually become a normal feature of
twenty-first-century scholarship. In the worst cases, one wrong click of a mouse button and weeks of research, years of written text, and decades of preservation can be undermined, effectively making the written word as transitory as the spoken one.

A Forbes article about "The Case for Supreme Court Term Limits" - a publication issued by the Academy's bipartisan working group - cites U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Wood and Professor Charles Fried who are members of the working group and the Academy.

While COVID-19 cases and mortality surged in spring and summer 2020, the U.S. government seemed to lack the capacity to respond. Mixed messaging and insufficient testing, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and contact tracing raised disturbing questions about the will of the executive and the health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But were these challenges particular to the pandemic? Or, as one author asks in the newest issue of Dædalus, “is the failed pandemic response a symptom of a diseased administrative state?”