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• Summer 2024

  “This Is Also a Time of Great Possibility and Great Capability.”

  Saul Perlmutter, Molly Galvin

  Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter is best known for his groundbreaking discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—for which he shares the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. But Perlmutter, a professor of… Read More

• November 3, 2022

  Episode 20: How to Fix the Bus

  Brian Sherlock, Lisa Margonelli

  Buses are an inexpensive and easy-to-deploy form of mass transit that could help reduce traffic congestion and curb air pollution. But in the United States, no one wants to ride them—and for… Read More

• June 18, 2024

  Brent Blevins Makes Mars Policy in Congress

  Brent Blevins, Lisa Margonelli

  In this installment of Science Policy IRL, Lisa Margonelli goes behind the scenes of congressional policymaking with Brent Blevins. Blevins is a senior congressional staffer and staff director of the… Read More

• Summer 2021

  Unmasking Scientific Expertise

  M. Anthony Mills

  In early February 1976, two cases of swine flu were discovered at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The Center for Disease Control identified the virus as Hsw1N1, similar to the one that… Read More

• Summer 2021

  “We Really Should Be Talking About an Ethics of Policymaking, Not Just the Bare-Knuckle Politics of Policymaking.”

  R. Alta Charo, William Kearney

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae From stem cells and cloning, to CRISPR and chimeras, lawyer and bioethicist R. Alta Charo has been a key player in informing policymakers and the public on the… Read More

• Winter 2025

  The Heart Is Not Neutral

  Adam Briggle

  In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice is harmony and that injustice is faction—the disharmonies that tear society apart. The question, then, is how to hold a political community together. In… Read More

• September 10, 2024

  Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer: Indigenous Sustainability

  Melissa K. Nelson, Kimberly Quach

  In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate… Read More

• Spring 2021

  COVID-19 Through Time

  Joseph J. Fins

  The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.  —Lewis Thomas In the spring 2020 pandemic surge in New York,… Read More

• August 20, 2024

  Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer: Environmental Justice

  Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Kimberly Quach

  This has been a record-breaking summer all over the world. Many cities have recorded their hottest days ever, and June 2024 was Earth’s hottest month on record. Mitigating and adapting to the… Read More

• Spring 2021

  Reimagining Nuclear Engineering

  Aditi Verma, Denia Djokić

  Since the first power reactors—Shippingport in the United States, Calder Hall in the United Kingdom, and Obninsk in the Soviet Union—were connected to electricity grids in the 1950s, nuclear energy has, in… Read More

• Winter 2026

  “There Are Two Possible Futures for American Science.”

  David Spergel, Molly Galvin

  Simons Foundation president David Spergel talks about the evolving landscape for science philanthropy, his outlook for the research enterprise, and remaining hopeful in an uncertain time.

• February 7, 2023

  Episode 25: What’s Driving the Electric Car Revival?

  Matthew N. Eisler, Jason Lloyd

  In 2022, there were more than 2 million electric vehicles, or EVs, on the road in the United States. In 2005, there were only about 1,000. The conventional wisdom credits better batteries… Read More

• Fall 2021

  “Science and Technology Now Sit in the Center of Every Policy and Social Issue”

  Alondra Nelson, William Kearney

  Alondra Nelson, the first deputy director for science and society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, talks about “a new social compact for science and technology policy” that would make innovation more inclusive and equitable, reckon with the nation’s past, and use social science to improve policymaking.

• August 27, 2024

  Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer: Solar-Powered Canoes

  David Manuel-Navarrete, Kimberly Quach

  In our new miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to… Read More

• Fall 2025

  How “Archive” Became a Verb

  Amelia Acker

  Debates over a proposed national data center in the 1960s reveal how anxieties around privacy and digitization led to the shift toward corporate control of personal data.

• Fall 2023

  New Voices on the Hill

  Yadira Caraveo, Jen Kiggans, Eric Sorensen, Brandon Williams

  Yadira Caraveo Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo. Illustration by Shonagh Rae. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo, MD (D-CO) is a pediatrician and previously served in the Colorado state legislature. She represents Colorado’s Eighth (and newest) Congressional… Read More

• Fall 2023

  “How Does This Country Do Big Things?”

  Arati Prabhakar, Lisa Margonelli

  Engineer and applied physicist Arati Prabhakar is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and—as assistant to the president for science and technology—is part of President… Read More

• Winter 2024

  The Limits of Data

  C. Thi Nguyen

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae I once sat in a room with a bunch of machine learning folks who were developing creative artificial intelligence to make “good art.” I asked one researcher about… Read More

• Fall 2022

  Collaboration on the Mudflats

  David D. Hart, Bridie McGreavy, Anthony Sutton, Gabrielle V. Hillyer, Darren J. Ranco

  We began in 2006 as a group of researchers at the University of Maine who were trying to align our work with the needs of communities. Motivated in part by frustration with the… Read More

• Spring 2024

  Embracing the Social in Social Science

  Rayvon Fouché

  To begin thinking about why all the sciences should embrace the social in social science, I would like to start with cupcakes. In my research, context is a recurring theme, so let… Read More

• December 21, 2021

  Episode 4: Art of a COVID Year

  In the early days of the pandemic, communities began singing together over balconies, banging pans, and engaging in other forms of collective support, release, and creativity. Artists have also been creatively responding… Read More

• Winter 2023

  The Complicated Legacy of Terry Wallis and His Brain Injury

  Joseph J. Fins

  illustration by Shonagh Rae In the eight years that I have been teaching a seminar on disability rights and brain injury at Yale Law School, I have never come close to tears. But last… Read More

• Summer 2020

  Public Value Science

  Barry Bozeman

  STEF at 75 Why should the United States government support science? That question was apparently settled 75 years ago by Vannevar Bush in Science, the Endless Frontier: “Since health, well-being, and… Read More

• April 7, 2026

  The Future of Making Babies

  Emily Packard Dawson, Jason Lloyd

  Assisted reproductive technologies have helped many people have children, but the egg donors behind this process are often overlooked. Emily Packard Dawson discusses donors and the donation process, along with the ethical and policy challenges raised by advances in reproductive technologies.

• Spring 2023

  Viral Suppression

  Jack Stilgoe

  In November 2021, an investigative story in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) with the headline “Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial” received more… Read More

• Spring 2025

  Let Unfunded Grant Applications See the Light of Day

  Stuart Buck, Christopher Steven Marcum

  Showing which proposals do and don’t receive federal funding can improve research and advance open science.

• June 24, 2024

  Preparing Researchers for an Era of Freer Information

  Peter W. B. Phillips

  If you Google my name along with “Monsanto,” you will find a series of allegations from 2013 that my scholarly work at the University of Saskatchewan, focused on technological change in the… Read More

• Fall 2020

  Debating Fish Pain

  Aaron Van Neste, Anne Berit Skiftesvik, Ben Diggles, Brian Key, Culum Brown, Deborah Brown, Howard I. Browman, Ila France Porcher, Ivan Darío Vargas Roncancio, J. Roger Jacobs, James D. Rose, John Sanbonmatsu, Lynne U. Sneddon, Monica Gagliano, Robert Arlinghaus, Steven J. Cooke, Stuart W. G. Derbyshire, Thomas Klefoth

  In “The Great Fish Pain Debate” (Issues, Summer 2010), Troy Vettese, Becca Franks, and Jennifer Jacquet rightly state that in Germany the assumption that fish feel pain resulted in court… Read More

• March 25, 2020

  Pandemic Science and Politics

  Daniel Sarewitz

  For the past 30 years, I have tried to make sense of the interactions between science and politics, especially the challenge of making decisions under conditions of uncertainty and disagreement. Why—despite huge… Read More

• Spring 2024

  Taking Aristotle to the Moon and Beyond

  G. Ryan Faith

  In 2009, journalist Tom Wolfe, author of the space-age classic The Right Stuff, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “One Giant Leap to Nowhere.” Commenting on the… Read More