Building consensus across the higher education sector was the focus of the Academy’s annual convening of The Higher Education Forum in June 2024. The convening was an opportunity for leaders to discuss how to emerge from a year marked by new challenges, while colleges and universities were recovering from the impact of the pandemic.

Nuclear intelligence isn’t just for government agencies anymore. A motley crew of outside watchdogs has found creative ways to deter proliferation. Amy Zegart addresses the rise of "nuclear sleuths" in this preview of her essay that will appear in the first publication of Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Deterrence and New Nuclear States.

In October 2023, Academy President David Oxtoby announced his decision to step down as president of the Academy in June 2024, after more than five years of service.

It is simple to hope for an end to the world’s civil wars–nearly thirty of which are underway right now–but it is not at all simple to bring these conflicts to an end when the causes are wide-ranging, the effects are extensive, the international response is uncertain, and the solutions are elusive. The Winter 2018 issue of Dædalus, “Ending Civil Wars: Constraints & Possibilities,” identifies impediments to ending civil wars and offers policy prescriptions for states and for the international community facing the spread of instability and humanitarian crises, including pandemic diseases and transnational terrorism.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences hosted in May Integrating Environmental Justice and Philanthropy: Lessons and Opportunities as part of ongoing outreach for the recommendations in Forging Climate Solutions: How to Accelerate Action Across America.

An Archives feature published in the Winter 2022 Bulletin recounted the accidental discovery of a broadside advertising the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824–1825 U.S. tour. Previously unknown to Academy staff, the broadside had been found hidden behind another framed engraving and was accessioned into the Academy’s collections in recognition of Lafayette’s status as a Foreign Honorary Member, elected in 1785.

In "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" Michael J. Sandel argues that the divide between winners and losers has poisoned our politics and pulled us apart. The problem, he contends, is not only that we have failed to live up to the meritocratic ideals we profess, but that a meritocratic society is a flawed aspiration. It produces hubris among the successful and humiliation among those left behind. In the first virtual Stated Meeting in the history of the Academy, Michael J. Sandel joined T. J. Jackson Lears and Anna Deavere Smith in a conversation about his new book and the destructive consequences of linking socioeconomic status with personal worth.

The Summer 2019 issue of Daedalus, “Inequality as a Multidimensional Process,” guest edited by Michèle Lamont and Paul Pierson, draws on a wide range of expertise to better understand and examine how economic conditions are linked to other social, psychological, political, and cultural processes that can either counteract or reinforce durable inequalities.

The House has passed one bill, and is likely to pass another, that would provide funding for people to enroll in certificate programs, apprenticeships, bootcamps and other technical education programs. But a new study from the American Academy questions the quality of these programs, as well as the evidence that demonstrates their efficacy.

The 2015 class includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Holland Cotter, singer-songwriter Judy Collins, Nike co-founder Philip Knight, Nobel Prize-winner Brian Kobilka, Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and novelist Tom Wolfe.

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. 

National commission from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences delivers key takeaways from its data-driven examination of opportunities and challenges for U.S. higher education students.

Building on America’s 250-year-old commitment to knowledge, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences announces the leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research, and science elected in 2026.

The Spring 2020 issue of Dædalus, “Meeting the Challenges of a New Nuclear Age,” guest-edited by Robert Legvold and Christopher F. Chyba, examines some of the possible escalation pathways that could lead one or more states to use nuclear weapons.

On October 7, 2017, the American Academy inducted its 237th class of Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony included presentations by five new Members: Ursula Burns, James P. Allison, Heather K. Gerken, Jane Mayer, and Gerald Chan.

While congressional leaders and policymakers explore the possible expansion of space-based military operations, a technical understanding of what is possible and at what cost remains unclear to many in the debate.

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.

A United States correspondent for Le Monde provides readers in France with some context for the Academy's proposals for reinventing American democracy and finds Our Common Purpose noteworthy.