Editor’s Journal
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?
Cost-Benefit Analysis
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
Real Numbers
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.
Public Data
As the federal government withdraws from public data collection, states cannot step into the breach without addressing common challenges and disparities.
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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
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Subscribe to the Print EditionIn response to essays published in Issues, our readers weigh in on critical topics in policy related to science, technology, and society.
Summer 2026
A Discussion of
Response By
Summer 2026
A Discussion of
Responses By
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?
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
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.
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
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.
Even inventions with the loftiest of goals can be commandeered for unscrupulous—or nefarious—ends. Where does that leave the inventors?
Response
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.
University leadership needs to shift attention from chasing prestige to crafting strategies for long-term success.
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.
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?
