When the Federal Reserve celebrated its centennial in December 2013, it bore only passing resemblance to the institution created by Democrats, Progressives, and Populists just a century before.

On October 7, 2020, over two hundred members of the class of 2020 gathered on Zoom to celebrate their recent election to the Academy. This virtual convening was not designed to replace Induction, but rather to capture some of the camaraderie, joy, and ceremony of the traditional weekend in Cambridge.

The humanities are anomalous in their focus on academe as being “the one true career path” for students, Robert Townsend said, which is why he feels he has to defend the importance of career diversity.

Since 2013, when the American Academy’s Humanities Commission issued The Heart of the Matter report, there has been considerable media discussion about declining humanities majors, an anemic academic job market, and general perceptions of a field in crisis. A new study by the Humanities Indicators, completed on the eve of the COVID-19 crisis, provides a fresh look at these questions.

Looking Back at Law's Century, recently published by Cornell University Press, describes the complex interaction of democracy, capitalism, and legal change in the twentieth century. "The last hundred years – what we might in retrospect characterize as 'law's century' – took us from the Progessive Era's optimism about law and social engineering to current concerns about our hyper-legalistic society, from Wilsonian idealism to the worldwide spread of democracy, the rule of law, and the idea of human rights," according to the volume's editors, Austin Sarat, Bryant Garth, and American Academy Fellow Robert A. Kagan.

Scott D. Sagan published an op-ed later developed into his Daedalus essay "The Face of Battle without the Rules of War: Lessons from Red Horse & the Battle of the Little Bighorn."

Policy Perspectives on Police Use of Lethal Force

Helen Hardacre describes Shinto festivals and a return to darkness.

Linguist William Labov will receive the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for his distinguished and original contributions to the social sciences.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

The House has passed one bill, and is likely to pass another, that would provide funding for people to enroll in certificate programs, apprenticeships, bootcamps and other technical education programs. But a new study from the American Academy questions the quality of these programs, as well as the evidence that demonstrates their efficacy.

From its founding, the American Academy was engaged in one of the earliest efforts to collect and analyze medical data as it pertained mainly to births and deaths, as a means of promoting public health.

The events of the last decade, including the business failures of 2001-2002 and the economic crisis of 2008-2009, have called into question fundamental assumptions regarding the role of business and its relationship to global financial markets, governments, and society as a whole. The American Academy of Arts & Sciences will convene a working conference, cosponsored by the New York University Pollack Center for Law and Business, at the NYU Law School.

Citing Academy report, Harry Brighouse shares instructional practices that undergraduates say they have rarely encountered and think should be more widely shared.

Academy Convenes Educators, Donors, and Evaluation Specialists