James O. Freedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa, took office as the forty-second President of the Academy. He succeeds Daniel C. Tosteson, dean emeritus of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University.

In September, Fellows and guests gathered at the House of the Academy to dedicate the Leo L. Beranek Library, named in recognition of Beranek’s generous gift of $550,000 to the Academy’s endowment. The gift is the first in response to naming opportunities for rooms in the House, instituted as part of the Academy’s commitment to increase its resources to fully realize its mission in the years ahead.

James Carroll states the case for American support of the International Criminal Court. This editorial was initially published in The Boston Globe.

Historian Bernard Bailyn opened the celebration of the 220th annual meeting of the Academy with a commentary on the personal characteristics of John Adams as revealed in his diary and his autobiography.

The first Stated Meeting in the 220-year history of the Academy to be held outside the United States took place at the residence of the US Ambassador to France on June 6, 2000.

The twenty-first-century information sciences will allow us to communicate information and compute at unprecedented speeds. By 2029, for example, we should be able to build computers, in quantity, that are a million times more powerful than the personal computers of today.

Immigration is not only where the people come from, and why they come, and whether they are forced to come; it's also how and, in the long run, whether they are received.