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.

In the early 1800s, the Academy received reports of a sea serpent, described as 60 to 100 feet long, in what is now Maine’s Penobscot Bay. In 1810, upon hearing that the reports had been lost, minister and politician Alden Bradford, with the assistance of Lemuel Weeks, collected and presented to the Academy sworn statements of witnesses. In doing so, Bradford acknowledged, “Accounts of this sort, I am aware, should be received with caution.”

At a Brown University event co-hosted with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, panelists discussed the importance of partnering with community members and first responders and reducing stigma around addiction.

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.

“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.

The Academy recently launched a new informational resource: the National Inventory of Humanities Organizations (NIHO).

One of the recommendations for strengthening American democracy proposed in Our Common Purpose - the report of a bipartisan Academy commission - is to move to a system of proportional representation where elected seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are based on the share of votes each party or candidate receives. This article examines legislative progress at the federal and state levels concerning proportional representation.

The Academy’s larger projects, like the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education and The Public Face of Science, are designed to help influence the intellectual life of the country – by providing new ideas, recommending new ways to address challenges, and calling attention to new knowledge.

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.

Francis Amory Prize Symposium: Advances in Reproductive Biology and Medicine

Following an introduction from Robert C. Post, Linda K. Kerber discusses her work as part of a new generation of historians who have begun to study law as a cultural formation that both reflects and forms the discursive construction of collective identity in society.

William G. Thomas III, Anne Cong-Huyen, Angel David Nieves, and Jessica Marie Johnson engaged in a panel discussion on pedagogy in undergraduate digital humanities classrooms. The discussion, which was presented in collaboration with Emory University, was moderated by Erika Farr. Stephen G. Nichols and G. Wayne Clough provided national perspectives as respondents to the panel.

On April 30, 2024, the Academy hosted a virtual event that featured four contributors to the Dædalus volume on “Understanding Implicit Bias: Insights & Innovations”—guest editors Goodwin Liu (California Supreme Court) and Camara Phyllis Jones (King’s College London) and authors Jennifer Eberhardt (Stanford University) and Frank Dobbin (Harvard University)—who discussed some of the strategies and solutions to understand and combat implicit bias. The program included welcoming remarks from Academy President David W. Oxtoby. An edited transcript of the event follows.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

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.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, and prominent physicist and arms control expert Sidney D. Drell, will be honored with one of the nation’s oldest awards.