Bright Minds: from the John Adams Institute

Teju Cole is rapidly becoming a new literary sensation in America. His novel Open City – which won the 2012 Pen/Hemingway Award and the New York City Book Award – is unlike anything you’ve ever read. The narrator, Julius, is a Nigerian psychiatry student who lives in Manhattan and likes to walk in the city. As he does, he has encounters. Most are small. He watches children playing in a park. He di...

Rickey Jackson was sentenced to 39 years in prison for crimes he didn’t commit. Innocent, and unjustly convicted of murder and robbery, his is the longest wrongful imprisonment in US history. The John Adams Institute was honored to host Rickey, who shared the lessons he learned about freedom and forgiveness. The sole evidence against Rickey was the false, coerced eyewitness testimony of a 12-year-...

Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore came to the John Adams in April of 2023 to talk about her keenly crafted and sourced historical book “New York Burning”.  It’s New York City, 1741: fires break out throughout the city. Fueled by the paranoia that accompanies hearsay, the authorities find a convenient scapegoat on which to pin the crimes: enslaved Black people and poor white...

The latest massacres in Bucha and Mariupol have shown that Vladimir Putin has no regard for human life – he only cares about power and money. In Putin’s eyes, money is power, and vice versa. That’s why freezing the assets of Russians tied to Putin’s regime is so important. Between 1996 and 2005, American investor Bill Browder ran the largest foreign investment firm in Russia, until he was declared...

For years, fringe ideologues were able to use Facebook undisturbed to promote their extreme ideologies and conspiracies. In An Ugly Truth , New York Times tech reporters Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel reveal how Facebook’s algorithms sacrificed everything for user engagement and profit, while creating a misinformation epicenter and violating the privacy of its users. Through deep investigatory wo...

On paper, every American has the right to vote and – thanks to the Second Amendment – to bear arms. But in reality, says Carol Anderson, both these rights are undermined by the racism which is so deeply rooted in American society. And that, in turn, undermines democracy. Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and an influential voice on civil a...

In December of 2010, The John Adams Institute hosted an evening with the great film director, Spike Lee. Among many things, Spike talked about how New York City’s historically hot and dangerous summer of ‘77 got him started in filmmaking. Mr. Lee’s talk also encapsulates America at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The US and Europe were still digging themselves out of the worst rec...

On September 23, 2008, The John Adams Institute hosted an evening with David Sedaris. The humorist and author of 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' and 'Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim' brought his entourage to Amsterdam for the Dutch publication of his latest collection of wisdom, 'When You Are Engulfed in Flames'. Sedaris instructed the John Adams audience on how to b...

For 20 years, the John Adams Institute has organized a lecture program called The Quincy Club at schools all through the Netherlands to help young audiences better understand American culture. In 2020, the Quincy Club took a closer look at California and Silicon Valley. You know the names: Facebook, Apple, Google, Netflix, Tesla, Ebay, Intel and more dominate the tech industry worldwide. How did t...

On February 04, 1999, in celebration of 150 years of Dutch constitutional law, the John Adams Institute welcomed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. RBG sat down for an interview and waxed legal about things like how unimportant the Supreme Court used to be, why it’s good justices serve for life and what a nice place the Supreme Court is to work. Born...

If you don’t know Ruby Wax’s name, that’s because, even though she’s American, her career has been largely in the UK. But you may be aware of a little show called Absolutely Fabulous in which she both acted and served as the script editor. Despite her success, she’s been open about her struggles with depression. She even dropped comedy for a while to get a degree from Oxford on mindfulness through...

People are passionate about Anthony Doerr. And why not, he’s one of America’s great novelists and storytellers.   He was in Amsterdam 2015 on the back of his book, All the Light We Cannot See , a masterful and moving novel about two young people during World War II, which rapidly became a New York Times #1 bestseller. Support the show

David Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator who is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor' and author, of Trumpocalypse . In Trumpocalypse , Frum digs deep into the causes of America’s tragic national fragmentation. And he urges the GOP to rethink its future, saying that “no two-party system can remain a democracy unless both parties adhere to de...

If we can just get through the 21st century, humanity might have a chance, says Elizabeth Kolbert. We have already intervened in the earth’s system to the extent that we are now living in the ‘Anthropocene’. Maybe we can buy time by intervening even more, with so-called geo-engineering: turning carbon emissions to stone, for example, genetically modifying trees or even dimming the sun by shooting...

Gore Vidal was an American writer known for his essays, novels, screenplays, and Broadway plays. A lifelong Democrat, Gore ran for political office twice and was a seasoned political commentator. As well known for his essays as his novels, Vidal wrote for The Nation, New Statesman, The New York Review of Books and Esquire. Vidal’s major subject was America, and through his essays and media appeara...

On March 11, 2022, Hanya Yanagihara returned to the John Adams for a conversation about 'To Paradise', her three-part story across three centuries, centered around New York City. To Paradise is a revisionist American history – not identical to the America as we know it but a ‘what if’ narrative, invested in raising concerns about America as a nation: what it has been, what it might have...

The late, great Christopher Hitchens came to Amsterdam in 2008 touring his book: God is Not Great .  Hitchens excelled at polemics. He considered himself to be politically liberal and yet expressed his full-throated support for the war in Iraq and called Hillary Clinton “an aging and resentful female”.  And then there were the blistering attacks on religion and religious belief. He also details: h...

A gem from our archive! Way back on March 14, 1993, the then fresh new Southern author, Donna Tartt , visited the John Adams hot on the heels of her massive bestseller 'The Secret History', currently translated into 24 languages and counting.   'The Secret History' takes place at a fictional college where a close-knit group of six students embark upon a secretive plan to stage...

How do democracies die? Not at the hands of generals, but of elected leaders – presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. That is the unsettling conclusion of Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt’s highly praised book How Democracies Die . Ziblatt and his co-author Steven Levitsky have analyzed the collapse of various democracies in recent history, and compa...

The John Adams Institute, in co-operation with Prometheus Publishing House, proudly presented an evening with Jonathan Franzen, winner of the National Book Award 2001. Franzen discussed his novel The Corrections , which has been translated into Dutch under the title De Correcties . Michaël Zeeman, renowned literary critic for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant , introduced Franzen and moderated que...

The great American author and investigative journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe, knows irony when he hears it. Such as when the patriarch of what would become an infamous family, imparted these words to his sons: “I leave you my good name”. And that name is...Sackler: frequent visitors to some of the world’s great museums and educational institutions know that name.  The Sackler family name adorns th...

Forbes magazine called Christiane Amanpour of the “100 Most Powerful Women.” On January 25th 2019, CNN’s chief international anchor and host of ‘Amanpour’, joined the Dutch journalist Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal, for what turned out to be a witty, revealing and slightly flirty conversation. Amanpour’s career began in 1990 as a correspondent for CNN, where she reported on international crises in Iraq...

From Amsterdam...this is the John Adams Podcast, a treasure trove of the best and the brightest of American thinking.  This week’s guest is indeed one of the brightest:  Francis Fukuyama, the writer, thinker and teacher.  You may remember him from his book: "The End of History", where he proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy as something of a societal finish line. Well, he does NOT...

This week’s guest is Megan Twohey, whose book about Harvey Weinstein’s  sexual abuse of women in Hollywood was also, as she put it, “an X-ray into the abuse of power”.  The #metoo movement really got going after New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor published their investigative articles about Harvey Weinstein.  They followed with  their  book, “She Said”, which dives deep, not j...

Seven years ago, Garry Kasparov came to Amsterdam and predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He also described Vladimir Putin’s psychology and motivations in a way that you hear in every current affairs program nowadays.  Back in 2015, Obama was president, Russia was actively bombing targets in Syria, Syrian refugees were literally washing up on the shores of the Mediterannean and Garry Kaspar...