On a gray London morning in January, I walked past familiar markers of institutional gravity on my way to the Royal Society. Stone facades. Heavy doors. Plaques engraved with names that have outlived the controversies of their eras. It is easy, in places like this, to slip into a kind of historical reverence that feels comforting, even anesthetizing.

A new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences highlights the national civil justice gap by examining the causes of the problem and recommending innovative ways to address it.

As I reflect on my first year as president of the Academy, I am struck by how our members came together in so many different ways to address such a broad range of challenges, including unprecedented threats to academic freedom, the research enterprise, and the rule of law. And while it was a year of great challenges, there were also moments of great hope. For me, top among those moments was the Induction of our 2025 class of new members here in Cambridge in October.

Academy report includes a roadmap for storing spent nuclear fuel

From the President

Dysfunctional immigration policies implemented in recent decades have accelerated growth of the Latino population and racialized its members around the trope of illegality. Until 2016, the cultivation of White resentment relied on a dog-whistle politics of racially coded symbolic language, but with the election of Donald Trump, White nationalist sentiments became explicit.

Historian Bernard Bailyn opened the celebration of the 220th annual meeting of the Academy with a commentary on the personal characteristics of John Adams as revealed in his diary and his autobiography.

The new issue of Dædalus features 18 “emerging voices” – essays on a variety of topics as well as poems by five winners of the Academy’s Poetry Prize in Honor of May Sarton. The essays draw from anthropology, philosophy, political science, and history, and take up both theoretical and practical issues.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

Alexei V. Filippenko discusses supernovae and the accelerating expansion of the universe.

When looking at American politics at the national level, it is easy to become cynical about the future of our democracy. High levels of polarization persist, and the headlines all too often are dominated by stories of government dysfunction.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has launched the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy, an interdisciplinary and nonpartisan multiyear effort to rethink the principles that drive economic decision making and to recommend policies that enable opportunity for all.

On November 11, 2015, Diane P. Wood, Goodwin Liu, and David S. Tatel discussed issues of access to the justice system. The program, which served as the 2027th Stated Meeting and the Inaugural Distinguished Morton L. Mandel Annual Public Lecture, was streamed to gatherings of members in four cities around the country: New York, Washington, Chicago, and Berkeley. The program concluded the first day of a two-day Academy symposium on the state of legal services for low-income Americans, which brought together federal and state judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and legal aid providers concerned about the state of legal services for Americans.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Sponsors International Conference to Examine Security, Safety, and Nonproliferation Issues

On October 1, 2011, the American Academy inducted its 231st class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony included presentations by five new members: Frances Hamilton Arnold, David Conrad Page, Sir Adam Roberts, Annette Gordon-Reed, and William I. Miller.

Learn more about individuals and organizations working to support language instruction in America.

How did music in the twentieth century both influence and reflect American culture? The Fall 2013 issue of Dædalus examines how music—in Hollywood films, in concert halls, in private homes and public spaces—helped shape our modern selves.