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.

In my first months as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I have been thinking a lot about the future–particularly “How can the Academy’s mission and members strengthen democracy?”

Rolena Adorno offers an abbreviated version of the remarks she made at the 130th Modern Language Association Annual Convention on January 10, 2015.

This fall the Academy Archives embarks on a new project to clean, repair, rehouse, and digitize many important documents from the Academy's early years, as well as a unique collection of records to related to the family of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

From visual arts to jazz, theater to poetry, the opening program of the Academy’s 2019 Induction weekend celebrated the arts and humanities. The event included a video featuring artist Mark Bradford; a performance by composer, pianist, and singer/songwriter Patricia Barber; remarks about the power and importance of the performing arts from theater director and scholar Harry J. Elam, Jr.; a reading by playwright Donald Margulies from his play Sight Unseen; and remarks and readings by poet, writer, and foundation leader Elizabeth Alexander.

Bert Emerson, a participant in a listening session in Spokane, wrote a guest column about the nation's greatest challenges and what gives him hope that Americans have the will to fix our democracy.

A transcript from an interdisciplinary panel discussion on the importance of creativity in science, with participants highlighting how creativity and imagination fuel scientific discovery and how science inspires artistic expression. The conversation followed the presentation of the Rumford Prize to Andrea Ghez by Laurie Patton.

While U.S. colleges struggle against broad disinvestment, institutions of higher education in many parts of the world have imagined ambitious new models of twenty-first-century education. From world-class public research universities to online and binational start-ups, the landscape of global higher education is shaped by ongoing experimentation and change. What have these approaches taught us? And what lessons can we apply to institutions in the United States?

Communities with strong civic infrastructure engender greater civic engagement and a sense of belonging. Stephen Heintz, cochair of the American Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, argues that philanthropy should lead in funding projects across the country that would connect people to their neighbors, communities, and government institutions.

Despite evidence that points unmistakably to the workplace advantages of a well-rounded education, disciplines in the arts and humanities still lose ground in the national battle for curricular relevance.

On December 12, 2016, at the Century Association in New York, the Academy hosted the Morton L. Mandel Public Lecture on “Communicating Science through Art” with Diane Ackerman and Alan Alda. This program served as the Academy’s 2048th Stated Meeting and included an introduction by Geneva Overholser.

Essays explore how technological innovations and political shifts are changing the nature of warfare.

Many people fought to expand the Declaration of Independence, which originally aimed to protect land-owning white men, into a big tent that covers every American. Now pursuing liberty and pushing for a life free from government overreach is, in theory, anybody’s game. Including Donal Gooch's.

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir made history in October 2019 when she participated in the first all-female spacewalk. After 205 days in the isolation of space, she returned to a planet experiencing its own form of isolation: the global COVID-19 pandemic. As an astronaut and a marine biologist, Dr. Meir’s research into the impact of extreme environments has brought her to the depths of the Antarctic and the heights of space. At a virtual program, hosted by the Academy’s San Diego Program Committee, Dr. Meir described her research and her experiences in space and participated in a conversation with Brian Keating (University of California San Diego) about the perspectives that her work provides about our world.

An exploratory meeting at the Academy brought together more than 20 participants - spanning the fields of science, technology, journalism, museum education, and law - to discuss how to bridge the gap between science and the public. They discussed changes in the science engagement landscape and the challenge of not only reaching people but also cutting through the noise and making them care.

Ellen T. Harris spoke at the Academy about Handel’s life and his inner circle of friends.

Recent Dædalus Issues Explore Mental Health as well as Language & Social Justice in the United States

National commission to undertake data-driven examination of opportunities and challenges in U.S. higher education. Initiative receives $2.2 million in funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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.

On November 15, 2016, the Academy’s San Diego Program Committee hosted Veerabhadran Ramanathan and David G. Victor for a discussion on the state of scientific understanding of climate change and the implications of this knowledge for the development of future policy.