Dædalus

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary this year, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is not far behind. The Academy was founded in 1780, before the end of the Revolutionary War, by many of the same people who launched and prosecuted that war: John Hancock, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and others. John Adams was the first president of the Academy.

When considering ways to strengthen democracy, reformers—perhaps especially political scientists—often turn to institutional change. Our Common Purpose, published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is no exception, as the report features a number of recommendations that involve reforming how elections are run and government bodies work. I fully endorse both the spirit and specifics of those institutional reforms.

The shifts in the civic information environment have been seismic. We’ve gone from a time when almost no one could broadly disseminate their views to one in which almost anyone can. From a time when misinformation could sometimes spread despite resistance from the big media systems to one in which it spreads at warp speed with the assistance of media systems. From a time when capturing moving images was the province of specialists to one when it’s easier than reading or writing.

In the center of an idyllic college town surrounded by lentil fields sits a red brick building where anyone can enjoy a free community meal one Monday night a month. Anyone joining the three-course dinner, which is cooked and served by a rotating group of volunteers, should expect to sit across the table from someone outside their usual social circle.

Continued progress in artificial intelligence, its expanding usefulness in science, and its contributions to landmark advances suggest that we may have entered a new era of AI for science. The breakthroughs so far—such as predicting the structure of practically every known protein, with profound implications for our understanding of biology, health, and the treatment of disease—are notable not only for what was achieved but also how it was achieved and what that suggests for scientific progress.

In its opening months, the second Trump administration designated cartels and criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport hundreds of men to a notorious prison in El Salvador, detained foreign students for pro-Palestine speech on college campuses, blew up boats in the Caribbean allegedly transporting drugs, and promised to target a large swath of groups on the left as “domestic terrorists.” These policies radically expanded a “global war...

In the post-9/11 wars on terror, popular culture worked figuratively and literally to conscript Americans into supporting military intervention in a forever and everywhere war, in which violence can erupt unexpectedly in the most mundane spaces. In this essay, I point to iconic media productions that exemplify synergistic meaning-making across popular culture and U.S. foreign policy.

In the twenty-first century, American democracy has fostered a disturbing state of forever war. Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been at war for nearly a quarter of a century: a decade-and-a-half longer than the Revolutionary War, and nearly two decades longer than the Civil War or World War II. The historic rise of executive power and initiative—especially in warmaking—has surely spurred this state of affairs. The federal budget now stands at $6.7 trillion annually.

I. Onstage there is a seed. It cracks open, and from it, a world is formed. Vast and complicated and interconnected. As the world grows, 1, a human being, emerges from the world. Time streams around them, and as it does, they transition from inhabiting the world, physically connected to it, to trying to organize everything filling the stage. Make the world tidy. And separate. Eventually, they pull from the world a piece of paper, and begin to write. 1.

If we survive this calamitous century, the time will come when technology lifts Adam’s burden. We will no longer require the labor of most of humanity to create abundance for all. Indeed, we are already far down that road. But when productivity is no longer our primary measure of human worth, how will we measure the value of human lives? There are two wildly divergent answers to this question.