Gallery
Science and the American Experiment: 250 Years of Innovation
A new exhibit highlights moments when new knowledge changed how Americans understood their world—and how they acted within it.
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Editor’s Journal
Tapping the Revolutionary Potential of “Useful Knowledge”
The science practiced by the founders and other early Americans was sociable rather than professional, with “useful knowledge” seen as a path to building better people and citizens. Can this approach help today’s scientific enterprise?
The Latest
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Counting the Benefits of Clean Air Regulations
By abandoning its longstanding practice of estimating the financial value of health benefits from pollution reduction, the Environmental Protection Agency is raising the question of how durable evidence-based policy will be built in the future.
Book Review
Incriminating Ourselves
If you’ve ever felt uneasy sharing something sensitive online, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson’s Your Data Will Be Used Against You is “the book that may finally explain why your unease is justified and why our world increasingly feels like an episode of Black Mirror,” writes J. B. Branch.
Democratic Accountability
Who Should Decide How to Use Taxpayer Dollars to Fund Scientific Research?
After the firing of the National Science Board, legislators have an opportunity to establish a new balance between democratic accountability and protection from partisan meddling.
Applied AI Workforce
Community Colleges Are Training the Applied AI Workforce
As artificial intelligence reshapes the labor market, community colleges are a practical engine for training workers at scale to develop the skills and fluency they need to get jobs.
The Issues Interview
“I Am an Unabashed Optimist About the Long-Term Future of Science.”
Neil Shubin, the new president of the National Academy of Sciences, talks about learning to see as a scientist, leading the Academy during a challenging time, and communicating science in a noisy information landscape.
Poem
Our Gilled Forebear
Brandon Kilbourne’s poem reflects on uncovering a specimen of Tiktaalik roseae, a species that marked the transition between fish and four-limbed land animals: “Moments like this, I imagine, / should be akin to setting foot inside / a queen’s hoard-filled sepulchre …”
STEMM Education
When Sixth Graders Study Neuroscience
Baylor College of Medicine is partnering with Texas school districts to create K–12 health science programs that prepare students for careers, meet workforce needs, and increase health literacy.
Science Diplomacy
A New Science Diplomacy in Latin America Embeds Knowledge in Public Institutions
A distinct regional conception of science diplomacy as the political craft of embedding diverse expertise into the design and architecture of public institutions has emerged in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Scientific Norms
Merton Redux: Re-Confronting the Norms of Science in Democracy
Although public attention is focused on the federal government’s efforts to slash funding for scientific research, the decimation of the democratic institutional processes that undergird state-sponsored scientific research is far more consequential.
Real Numbers
Who Will Keep Research Data Infrastructure Open and Running?
The scientific community urgently needs to consider the longevity and resilience of open research infrastructure—when and why it might fail, what risks failures represent for the broader community, and how to prevent them.
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Rules for Robots
Vol. XLII, No. 4, Summer 2026
As robots increasingly become part of the urban landscape, local officials must ensure that they are integrated safely and efficiently. There are a lot of existing rules governing vehicles and devices in cities, but which ones should apply to robots and when should new rules be considered? The essays in the Summer 2026 Issues explore this and many other topics, including how community colleges are training the AI workforce, the future of the National Science Board, assessing the costs and benefits of clean air regulations, and how communities are learning to bargain with big tech companies over data centers.
Browse the Issue
For faster access to our full journal and to see the beautiful artwork that accompanies our feature essays, subscribe to the print edition today.
Subscribe to the Print EditionForum
In response to essays published in Issues, our readers weigh in on critical topics in policy related to science, technology, and society.
Summer 2026
Restoring Public Trust in Universities
A Discussion of
Building Pluralistic Intelligence Into the American Research University
Response By
Summer 2026
How to Navigate Challenges to the University
A Discussion of
How the American Research University Survives
Responses By
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Mirror, Mirror
What happens when you hold someone’s gaze—really hold it? An artist and an inventor try to recreate that experience in Sofia Samatar’s Future Tense Fiction story. Absorbed in detail and technicalities, they neglect a more fundamental question: Will they be ready to see what their technology reflects back to them?
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In the Blink of an Eye
How does emotion travel through our eyes? In his response to Sofia Samatar’s story, video game designer Will Hellwarth shares his quest to create a narrative world that responds to a player’s blink.
Response
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Golden Rule
In an alternative legal system built on the concept of “an eye for an eye,” if you commit a crime, your punishment is that someday a network of state agents will perpetrate the same crime against you. These ministers, themselves survivors of violence, follow the principle of “commensurate severity.” When one such minister is assigned to a kidnapping case, she’s forced to determine what justice really looks like.
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The Purpose of Punishment
What does it mean for a punishment to truly fit a crime? A post-conviction attorney explores the limits of a criminal legal system built on retribution.
Response
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The Pocket Box™
What happens when a technology moves from groundbreaking scientific discovery to mass consumer product? Gunnar Anderson’s story explores a mysterious new discovery that breaks the bounds of physics as we once understood them. But quickly, scientific awe morphs into commercial prospecting—with little regulation and horrifying consequences.
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What Happens When a Groundbreaking Invention Falls Victim to Human Impulse?
Even inventions with the loftiest of goals can be commandeered for unscrupulous—or nefarious—ends. Where does that leave the inventors?
Response
Over four decades, Issues has hosted many articles discussing science’s “social contract”—the idea, as physicist Harvey Brooks articulated it in 1988, that the scientific enterprise would provide “social benefits in exchange for an unusual degree of self-governance and financial support free of strings.” Today, this contract is clearly defunct: The federal government has cut funding for science, cast doubt on scientific findings, and prioritized investment in research outside the university system. Whatever the future of federally funded science is, it’s no longer “free of strings.” As the scientific enterprise tries to decide how to respond, it first needs to figure out what happened.
This collection is part of an exploration of science’s social contract that is generously supported by The Kavli Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, and Dana Foundation.
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A Science Funding System Beyond the Linear Model
To improve the relationship between science and the public, funders should embrace a new ontology of scientific work that aligns incentives with society’s goals.
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How the American Research University Survives
University leadership needs to shift attention from chasing prestige to crafting strategies for long-term success.
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Discussing Science’s “Social Contract”
If the public funds science and gives it autonomy to govern itself, then benefits such as economic growth, innovation, and national security will follow. This unwritten social contract was long thought to underpin policymakers’ relationship to the scientific enterprise, but recent events suggest those days are over.
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No Longer Free of Strings
Why has the idea of an implicit social contract between society and science had a hold on scientists’ imaginations for so long? And what does it mean now that the relationship has frayed?
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