North Korea has made steady progress on nuclear and missile technologies, but there has been little public awareness or policy-making attention due to other pressing global issues. To highlight the significance of North Korea's continued actions, the Academy convened a Congressional briefing with expert panelists analyzing the situation with regard to rhetoric, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and tense diplomatic relations.

Frank Wilczek discussed the modern concept of substance and the nature of the Higgs particle following an introduction given by Jerome Friedman.

On October 1, 2011, the American Academy inducted its 231st class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony included presentations by five new members: Frances Hamilton Arnold, David Conrad Page, Sir Adam Roberts, Annette Gordon-Reed, and William I. Miller.

George Packer, in The Atlantic, considers whether America might now repair our broken democracy by entering an era of major reform - including the Academy's recommendations in Our Common Purpose.

On January 28, 2013, the Academy honored Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, at a special symposium on the benefit of public investment in higher education. Chancellor Birgeneau, Mary Sue Coleman, and Henry E. Brady participated in a conversation on the future of America’s system of public higher education, focusing on the California model and beyond.

American Institutions, Society & the Public Good

April showers may bring May flowers, but May flowers among archival materials can bring a host of problems.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780, during the American Revolution, to provide guidance to a young nation. Throughout its 241-year history, the Academy’s leadership has seldom issued organizational statements, preferring to have its projects, studies, publications, and convenings present the best available thinking about the topics in question. However, when a situation arises – like climate change – that profoundly threatens the world, a call to action from the Academy’s Board of Directors is appropriate.

"Access to Justice," the Fall 2019 issue of Daedalus, is only the first of several efforts sponsored by the Academy to gather information about the national need for improved legal access, study innovations piloted around the country to fill this need, and advance a set of clear, national recommendations for closing the justice gap.

One of the recurring questions the Humanities Indicators receives concerns the extent to which students are engaging with the humanities as undergraduates—a subject for which there is precious little data. The best available information comes from an occasional survey of college graduates, which includes a painstaking review of the college transcripts of a nationally representative sample of college graduates.

Peter Grant and B. Rosemary Grant present their research studying evolutionary processes in the Galápagos finches, followed by a conversation with Zackory Burns (Hellman Fellow in Science and Technology Policy).

The American Academy’s Board of Directors issued a statement about climate change to stand explicitly with the scientific community and others to recognize the urgent need for a long-term commitment by every segment of our society to address this global issue.

While the world’s economy is increasingly global, fewer American students are studying how to speak a language other than English. That’s a backward slide that hurts the nation’s ability to compete economically and diminishes the overall quality of a typical American education. Citing Academy report on "America's Languages," the editorial board of the News & Observer makes the case for improving foreign language instruction.

SELECT PRIZES AND AWARDS TO MEMBERS

Subra Suresh, President of Carnegie Mellon University, on the report of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences

On January 25, 2013,Thomas Levy described “cyber-archaeology” and the important role it plays in helping to promote excellence in the humanities and social sciences.