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”…

On November 14, 1955, the U.S. Secretary of the Army held a lunch meeting with Robert Cutler, President Eisenhower’s former National Security Advisor. While a Department of Defense official meeting with a former NSA would not ordinarily raise eyebrows, the…

One year in, I still can’t shake off this WSJ headline: “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data.” Back then, many Americans believed that the economy and their finances were worse than they really were. Now that…

Fake news and disinformation in the digital sphere have been trending topics for years, but what do we really know about the public’s relationship to these issues? In partnership with the French organization, Missions Publiques, the Consortium for Science, Policy,…

After watching the cinematic masterpiece Deep Blue Sea, a movie about genetically engineered sharks that go on a rampage, I spent nights terrified of traversing my room’s navy blue carpet in the dark to make it to the bathroom. Many…

Summer reading is wonderful: the perfect time to find a comfy beach chair, sip a cold iced tea, and settle in with a well-plotted novel that makes the hours skip by in pleasurable escapism…. Who are we kidding? It’s impossible…