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.

An article by Martha Nussbaum

Stephanie Sy interviewed Daedalus contributor Joseph Felter about his article "Limiting Civilian Casualties as Part of a Winning Strategy: The Case for Courageous Restraint," co-authored with Jacob N. Shapiro.

Ronald Ehrenberg assesses the merits of the society job advertisements as data for measuring trends in academic employment for the humanities and offers some guidance on how they should be read.

A dinner discussion on DNA and Art: In Search of the Genome of Leonardo da Vinci, featuring Jesse H. Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University and introductory remarks from Kenneth Wallach (Central National Gottesman Inc.) who cochairs the New York Program Committee.

A national survey of the public from June 2024 offers insights into how often the public engages with various aspects of the arts and humanities.

"Much of the biological variability I encountered in my childhood stays vividly with me now and very much forms part of my ongoing research drive."

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.

The American Academy’s “Heart of the Matter” Report Continues To Inspire Action

On October 24, 2024, the Academy’s San Diego Committee hosted a program on “Health and Our Oceans,” which featured atmospheric chemist and Academy member Kimberly A. Prather. Professor Prather discussed newly identified critical connections between rising pollution levels in coastal oceans and rivers and their far-reaching impacts on air quality and human health. She also described a recent study on local air and water quality issues in southern San Diego. The program included introductory remarks from Susan Taylor, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, Chemistry & Biochemistry at UC San Diego School of Medicine, and Margaret S. Leinen, Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences, and Dean of the School of Marine Sciences at UC San Diego. An edited version of Professor Prather’s presentation follows.

The Academy’s Berkeley Committee hosted a panel discussion on generative AI (GenAI) that offered a technical overview of the technology and explored the legal and economic issues raised by the growing number of lawsuits challenging the legality of GenAI. The panel included Jennifer Chayes, Dean of the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society; Pamela Samuelson, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law; and Abhishek Nagaraj, economist and Associate Professor at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Goodwin Liu, Chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors, delivered welcome remarks. An edited transcript of the panelists’ presentations and discussion follows.

On October 17, 2023, Dava Newman (Director of the MIT Media Lab and former NASA Deputy Administrator) spoke about the MIT Media Lab’s work and the use of vast amounts of data collected by satellites to inform and motivate the public for the fight against climate change. The program included welcoming remarks by Academy President David W. Oxtoby. An edited and condensed version of Dr. Newman’s presentation follows.

As both a scholar and former administrator, Hope Shannon has been immersed in the world of local history organizations, and speaks in her essay to the ways in which such groups can use NIHO to leverage their limited resources.

Research funding is not unlike food production; it is not the amount, but the distribution of research funds that matters.

Giving by private foundations to the humanities more than doubled during the past decade, according to a new study conducted and published by the Foundation Center in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Noteworthy

As of January, less than half of Americans made intentional use of artificial intelligence tools (AI) to perform a variety of common tasks, but a substantial minority used AI for humanities-related tasks.

"In this essay, I review some of my work that attempts to understand the changes in human memory that take place from young adulthood to old age."

At a meeting sponsored by the American Academy, the Royal Society, and the Carnegie Institution for Science, Wendy Freedman (Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of Carnegie Observatories at the Carnegie Institution for Science) and Martin Rees (Fellow of Trinity College; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge; Astronomer Royal; and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University) discussed what we know and do not know about the universe.