From The Archives:

My science policy friends seem convinced that invoking Vannevar Bush and showcasing a bipartisan parade of former presidents’ support for science will restore public consensus. I doubt it. Last Friday night, June 12th, I attended the Washington premiere of The…

RCP8.5 and the Politics of Plausible Catastrophe I have been thinking about the recent RCP8.5-related conversation not as a climate denial story or an argument against climate action, but as a case study in how science can sometimes get lost.…

They were not the headliners. I expected the familiar: arrive, deliver remarks, affirm institutional commitments, depart. They did all the familiar, but then they stayed. Three times, in three different settings, I found university presidents not just staying but listening.…

For nearly eighty years, American science policy has lived under the shadow of a single idea: that scientific progress depends on insulating scientists from politics. In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s report Science, the Endless Frontier argued that if government funded basic…

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions. —Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1974) OSTP’s RFI on ways to “Accelerate the American Scientific Enterprise”…