In November 2003 the people of the former Soviet state of Georgia forced a revolutionary change in leadership to establish a new government under President Mikhail Saakashvili. “Statehood and Security: Georgia after the Rose Revolution,” a new book from the American Academy, analyzes the security problems that confront this new government and the greater Caucasus region.

PBS NewsHour reports on the Academy's bipartisan commission on the state of American democracy and its report detailing 31 recommendations for how to strengthen it. Judy Woodruff introduces the report and discusses it with Danielle Allen and Stephen Heintz.

The report, Forging Climate Solutions: How to Accelerate Action Across America, was developed over a two-year period by a diverse commission of leaders sharing their expertise and priorities. Their report recommends how corporations, frontline communities, government, and environmental groups can work together to mobilize investments, build infrastructure, reduce emissions, and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

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?”

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today presented the Talcott Parsons Prize to Daniel Kahneman, considered one of the world’s most influential living psychologists. The prize is awarded for outstanding contributions to the social sciences.

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and inform innovative and more substantial policies to address crucial issues affecting the global community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic development and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice.

The American Academy has a long-standing interest in arms control and international security studies, dating back to the late 1950s with the formation of the US Committee on the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs and the establishment in 1982 of the Academy's Committee on International Security Studies.

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, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is a nationally recognized source of nonpartisan information about the humanities. The Indicators are available to the public. The information provided is used by journalists and decision-makers to understand and convey the state of the humanities for a range of audiences and purposes—including an array of examples compiled here.

There was a time before strong leaders, social inequality, and class systems. Coming of age in the 1960s, my motivation was to understand and hopefully help alter the world of unjust and unstable societies. This personal essay summarizes my career as an archaeologist studying the emergence of complex political systems.

Erica Kimmerling, former Hellman Fellow for Science and Technology Policy at the American Academy, explores how to break down silos between science engagement professionals, citing the Academy report on Encountering Science in America.

David Victor, who cochaired the Academy's Commission on Climate Action, released a study of climate change coverage in "elite" and "heartland" news sources between 2011 to 2022 . His analysis of the disparity (far greater likelihood of coverage in the "elite" sources) explores the effect of coverage on developing an engaged and supportive public and highlights that "a politically durable climate policy" must be more attuned to national sentiments.

Much of the attention about the humanities in higher education tends to focus on four-year colleges and universities (and more specifically, on the declining number of students who major in the humanities). In recent years, the American Academy’s Humanities Indicators (HI) have been exploring the growing presence of the humanities in the community college sector.

Microsoft Research Corporate VP Wing calls for implementation of Academy recommendations for long-term sustainability of U.S. science & engineering research enterprise

Climate change, soil erosion, human rights, Indigenous peoples, and “fixing” our democracy — the class speakers at the 2019 Induction Ceremony addressed major issues facing the world today, with calls to action and calls for change. Following a reading from the letters of John and Abigail Adams by humanitarian Jane Olson and attorney Ronald Olson, newly elected members spoke passionately about their life’s work. The ceremony featured presentations from paleoclimatologists Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Lonnie G. Thompson; microbiologist Jo Handelsman; former United Nations diplomat Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein; historian Margaret Jacobs; and lawyer and advocate Sherrilyn Ifill. An edited version of their presentations follows.
2083rd Stated Meeting | October 12, 2019 | Cambridge, MA