I'm surprised there are no other reviews of this important journal. As the main journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, it can be said that no other periodical quite fills its niche. Bringing together articles on a vast array of topics by the best minds in their fields it has been a journal that has not only been a forum for discussing current trends and issues in the arts and sciences but also forecasting and predicting them too. I refer to one of my favorite issues, which was devoted to The Report of the Committee on the Year 2000, which came out in the late 60s, and brought together a panel of distinguished scholars and scientists who attempted to extrapolate current trends forty years into the future. It was a great issue and may have been the genesis of Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post Industrial Society (Bell was chosen as the sociologist of the group), published many years later in 1976. Bell correctly predicted the information age, the service economy, a de-emphasizing of industrialism, the expansion of knowledge workers (especially in biology and the hard sciences), the increasing role of women in the work force, and other trends in this seminal work. But it may have all started in an issue of Daedalus. Overall, a journal that showcases the best and brightest minds of our civilization, often particularly with regard to those developments in the arts and sciences that are currently of interest to both the layman and the academic alike.
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