Ahead of the White House’s December 2021 Summit for Democracy and as part of its ongoing efforts to advance the recommendations in Our Common Purpose, the Academy organized two initiatives last fall aimed at young people: a national polling project and a summit of young leaders, who were brought together for their expertise, vision, and commitment to making progress on critical issues in their communities.

The Academy’s project on the Alternative Energy Future is working to identify societal barriers to the widespread adoption of new energy technologies and to assess how these barriers might be better understood and managed.

Grants will support the Academy’s Humanities Indicators (www.HumanitiesIndicators.org), the first comprehensive collection of statistical data about the humanities in the United States.

A new interagency partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will support the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project to assess the size and health of the nonprofit humanities, arts, and cultural sectors.

A growing numbers of parents are either delaying or selectively administering immunizations – or choosing not to vaccinate their children at all. A new Academy report makes clear that reversing this trend requires dedicated research on how vaccine decisions are made and the best ways to communicate factual information to vaccine-hesitant parents.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences and Washington University in St. Louis convened more than 50 community leaders, social entrepreneurs, and professionals - between 18 and 29 years old - from across the political spectrum. The participants were united by a commitment to developing a youth agenda for American democracy.

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?”

Geoffrey R. Stone moderated a conversation with journalist Judith Miller, Judge Richard A. Posner, and author Gabriel Schoenfeld about the balance between freedom of the press and national security. Each panelist offered his or her perspective on bridging legal and ethical issues.

“Anticorruption: How to Beat Back Political & Corporate Graft” explores the nature of modern global corruption – and how to defeat it. Highlighting examples from the United States, Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Singapore, the authors in this issue – including both academics and law-makers – offer innovative, strategic, and practical recommendations to target public and private corruption.

Over five decades, the Clean Air Act has become a venerable, living institution that has been highly successful in improving the environment around the country. Its success results from its durability and flexibility, two concepts that often seem to be in opposition yet may be essential to establishing successful climate and energy policy.

Weather and climate disasters – along with natural hazards, such as earthquakes, public health crises, and human-caused contaminant spills – threaten human lives and pose challenges to relief efforts, to the restoration of ecosystems, and to the rebuilding of communities. Science plays an important role in response and recovery and can contribute immensely to disaster prevention.

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.

A new book from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, examines the impact of providing high-quality education to every child in the world between the ages of 6 and 16.

The Academy hosted a meeting at the University of Chicago on the benefits and risks of nuclear, biological, and information technologies. The speakers included Robert Rosner, James M. Acton, Elisa D. Harris, and Herbert Lin.

Arms trafficking has a long and influential history. At an Academy event held in Berkeley, California, historian Brian DeLay described how U.S. arms trafficking intervened at critical moments to destabilize Mexican governance. The program included commentary from historians Priya Satia and Daniel Sargent, as well as from political scientist Ron Hassner. The presentations explored how the history of arms trading may help to better understand the history of state-making and the power relations between the United States and the rest of the world.

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.

Academy Staff