Saving democracy might require mandatory voting — and Massachusetts can lead the way. Miles Rapoport, of the Academy's Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, and Alex Keyssar make the case for universal voting.

Google Senior Fellow Jeffrey Dean; Installation artist Theaster Gates; Irish author Eavan Boland; philanthropist Edythe Broad; Aspen Institute's Walter Isaacson among new members

On April 13, 2023, the Academy presented its Talcott Parsons Prize for distinguished and original contributions to the social sciences to Robert D. Putnam. First awarded in 1974, the Talcott Parsons Prize was established to honor the noted sociologist and former president of the Academy. Previous recipients of the prize include William David Labov (linguistics), Joan Wallach Scott (history), Daniel Kahneman (psychology), and William Julius Wilson (sociology).

On October 25, 2011, the Academy convened a panel of global experts at Stanford University. Scott D. Sagan, Harald Müller, Noramly bin Muslim, Olli Heinonen, and Jayantha Dhanapala considered the global nuclear future in light of the accident at Fukushima.

On April 18, 2024, Kwame Anthony Appiah received the Academy’s Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies. Established in 1975 as the Award for Humanistic Studies and renamed in 2017 in honor of musicologist Don M. Randel, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to humanistic scholarship. The award ceremony included opening remarks from Academy President David W. Oxtoby, a reading of the prize citation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., acceptance remarks from Professor Appiah, and a conversation between Professor Appiah and journalist Margaret Sullivan. An edited transcript of the program follows.

The Academy typically holds events around the country and the world that bring members and others in their communities together. Although the COVID-19 pandemic suspended in-person events, the Academy continued to explore topics of national and global concern through a series of virtual activities. Academy President David W. Oxtoby provided opening remarks and moderated most of the virtual meetings and events.

"Science & the Legal System," the Fall 2018 issue of Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, features thirteen essays on topics including the state of the forensic sciences, expert testimony in court, the role of science in abortion law, neuroscience and law, and reforms to the U.S. adversarial system.

On September 30, 2023, the Academy inducted members elected in 2022 and 2023. The class speakers at the Induction Ceremony addressed major issues facing the world today. The ceremony featured presentations from computer scientist Maja Matarić, author and physician Abraham Verghese, economist Kerwin Charles, artistic director Oskar Eustis, and atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe. An edited version of their presentations follows.

Drawing largely on original research using federal data sets and the Gallup-Purdue Index survey of college alumni, the new report from the Humanities Indicators finds that college graduates with degrees from fields with below-average earnings are quite similar to graduates from other fields with respect to their perceived well-being.

On June 15, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a 6-to-3 majority that “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” This ruling is a historic victory for gay and transgender rights, extending employment protections to millions of LGBT+ workers, and will force many employers to revisit and change discriminatory policies and practices. But what this means for faith-based employers, including religious schools and religious health care providers, will be decided in future cases. Are faith-based employers legally entitled to religious exemptions to the law? Should they be?

Does locking up more people reduce crime? More Americans are serving time in prison or jail than at any point in the nation’s history, reflecting an incarceration rate that greatly exceeds those found in other advanced democracies.

On March 31, 1999, Jared Diamond presented a condensed version of his talk on "How to Get Rich."

Over the past year, the Humanities Indicators of the American Academy (http://humanitiesindicators.org) have been offering evidence for many of the urgent questions facing the humanities field.

Few need to be told that the academic humanities have been beset by challenges over the past fifteen years, but the evidence tends to be scattered. To provide a clearer picture of the state of the field, the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project recently released the results from a new national survey of humanities departments in fourteen humanities and humanities-adjacent disciplines, the fourth such survey since 2008. Drawing on responses from more than two thousand department chairs, the report demonstrates both the challenges the field experiences today and the resilience of many departments in the face of those difficulties.

Corruption can be ruinous, destroying nations, institutions, communities, individuals, the environment, and the very notion of public trust. Corruption self-reinforces, respects no law or border, and reproduces like disease. The Summer 2018 issue of Dædalus features fifteen essays exploring the nature of modern global corruption—and how to defeat it.

Noteworthy

John L. Hennessy, Ann M. Arvin, Carla J. Shatz, and Peter S. Kim participated in a discussion at Stanford University about the role of university research in the innovation pipeline.

Laurie L. Patton, the President of Middlebury College, has been named the next president of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Elected to the Academy in 2018, she is a distinguished scholar of religion, an author or editor of ten books, a published poet, and a highly accomplished college and university leader.

New data from the American Academy’s Humanities Indicators reveal a recent substantial shift toward bachelor’s and graduate degrees in the science, technology, engineering, and medical (STEM) fields; the data also highlight some of the underlying complexities in this shift.

We have entered a new nuclear era. The Cold War world dominated by only two nuclear superpowers no longer exists (even if Russia and the United States still possess the lion’s share of nuclear weapons); it has grown into a multipolar nuclear environment.