Scott Sagan discusses the nuclear necessity principle and Academy project on ethics, technology, and war with Randall Pinkston of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Arthur Bienenstock, co-chair of American Academy project on the Challenges of International Scientific Partnerships, argues new legislation may endanger the U.S. science and technology workforce and limit the effectiveness of U.S. academic research.

From the Archives

As part of the Academy’s 2018 Induction weekend, Sonia Sotomayor (Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) participated in a conversation with David M. Rubenstein. The program, which served as the Academy’s 2072nd Stated Meeting, was the second Annual David M. Rubenstein Lecture.

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.

This summer, the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences held panel discussions on Public Governance and Civic Engagement. From these conversations emerged clear recommendations for policymakers to build a stronger civic culture and increase trust in government.

On January 7, 2019, the Academy published the first open-access issue of Dædalus in the journal’s sixty-four-year history. “Access to Justice,” the Winter 2019 issue, is a multidisciplinary examination of the national crisis in legal services, from the challenges of providing quality legal assistance to more people, to the social and economic costs of an of- ten unresponsive legal system, to the opportunities for improvement offered by new technologies, professional innovations, and fresh ways of thinking about the crisis.

A new photojournal produced by the Academy’s Commission on Reimagining Our Economy is part of their work to put the American people and their well-being at the center of discussions about the nation’s economy.

The 2015 class includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Holland Cotter, singer-songwriter Judy Collins, Nike co-founder Philip Knight, Nobel Prize-winner Brian Kobilka, Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and novelist Tom Wolfe.

In September 1786, John Gardiner (1737–1793) of Boston sent Academy President James Bowdoin a drawing and description of a ferry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, designed by Nicholas Garrison, a member of the Moravian Brethren. The ferry used a rope or cable and the river’s current to move the boat back and forth, and the design could be upscaled for larger crossings through a series of blocks and pulleys.

On March 31, 1999, Jared Diamond presented a condensed version of his talk on "How to Get Rich."

Essays offer insight about the Internet of the (near) future- and its implications

New Volume of Essays from the American Academy Examines the Teaching of Evidence-Based Decision Making

Authors from Diverse Perspectives Try to Define Universal Education Goals in New Academy Publication

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.

It is simple to hope for an end to the world’s civil wars–nearly thirty of which are underway right now–but it is not at all simple to bring these conflicts to an end when the causes are wide-ranging, the effects are extensive, the international response is uncertain, and the solutions are elusive. The Winter 2018 issue of Dædalus, “Ending Civil Wars: Constraints & Possibilities,” identifies impediments to ending civil wars and offers policy prescriptions for states and for the international community facing the spread of instability and humanitarian crises, including pandemic diseases and transnational terrorism.

Key recommendations in the fall 2011 issue of the Academy’s journal, Daedalus, “Protecting the Internet as a Public Commons,” are reflected in the White House’s newly released “Privacy Bill of Rights,” for online consumers.