A gem rescued from the archives! We are re-releasing the Toni Morrison episode after cleaning up the audio. Toni Morrison writes about history, slavery, racism, resilience and survival with an unflinching voice. Her novels, once a staple of every American school bookshelf, are now the targets of politically motivated reviews and book bannings. Despite this, there is no getting around the fact that she was one of America’s greatest writers. Before her death in 2019, her oeuvre stretched out over ...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Ivo Daalder is a Dutch born American citizen, who became the U.S. representative to NATO from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama and was a foreign policy advisor for his 2008 presidential campaign. He also served in the United States Security Council during the Clinton administration. He’s now the CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The John Adams Institute and the Netherlands Atlantic Association welcomed Ivo Daalder back to the land of his birth in celebration of the 75th anni...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Super Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020. Professor of law, a constitutional scholar, commentator and author Kim Wehle joined the John Adams to lay out exactly what was at stake in the election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The constitutional issues were, and still are, enormous. In her book How to Read the Constitution – and Why Kim Wehle describes in clear language what is actually in the Constitution, and most importantly, what it means today. She also describes how the Constitution’s protections...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 3 min
It’s April 14th, 1865. The actor John Wilkes Booth pulls a gun and assassinates President Lincoln who is sitting in a balcony of the Ford Theatre in Washington DC. Booth becomes one of the most infamous men in American history. But what about his family? Who were they? What did they believe? Did they have any role in the killing? These are questions author and Man Booker finalist Karen Joy Fowler discusses in her epic book, Booth . Booth is a sweeping American saga that charts the rising fame of...
Jan 15, 2025•55 min•Season 4Ep. 7
History is entering a new phase, where old forms and ideas clash with present realities. The John Adams Institute was excited to welcome Francis Fukuyama back to Amsterdam to discuss his findings in his book, Liberalism and Its Discontents . In this rigorous and trim volume, Fukuyama returns to liberalism, arguing that it cannot grow complacent. Liberalism—despite its flaws—appears to be the only system adaptable enough to accommodate the myriad challenges the future holds. Today, caught up in t...
Dec 11, 2024•54 min
Bret Easton Ellis took 13 years to write The Shards . It’s a horror novel. Or maybe it’s an autobiography. In fact, it’s both. The Shards is a fictionalized retelling of Mr. Ellis’s 18th year. It tells the story of a group of superficially sophisticated teens have their lives shattered by a series of terrible events. It’s 1981 Los Angeles and a local serial killer known only as The Trawler draws ever closer to Bret and his friends. He taunts them with grotesque threats and acts of violence. As B...
Nov 13, 2024•1 hr 4 min
In the third and final episode of the election specials of our podcast Bright Minds , America expert and podcaster Laila Frank talks to law professor, constitutional scholar, commentator and author Kim Wehle . She is an expert on constitutional law and the separation of powers, with particular emphasis on presidential power and administrative agencies. Her latest book Pardon Power - How the Pardon System works – and Why , just dropped. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, she jo...
Oct 16, 2024•31 min
The current episodes of our podcast Bright Minds are all about the U.S. presidential elections. America journalist Laila Frank , specialized in politics and change in the U.S., will bring you conversations with remarkable American political thinkers about their hopes, fears and expectations for this election cycle. In the second episode of our election specials , Laila Frank talks to author, journalist and political insider Mark Leibovich . What are his hopes, fears and expectations for this ele...
Oct 02, 2024•28 min
The next three episodes of Bright Minds are all about the U.S. presidential elections. America journalist Laila Frank , specialized in politics and change in the U.S., will bring you conversations with remarkable American political thinkers about their hopes, fears and expectations for this election cycle. First up is professor of African-American studies and author Carol Anderson . She is a renowned speaker and has written several books on race, systemic inequality and power structures. All are...
Sep 18, 2024•35 min
This fourth episode of the Future 400 podcast is all about theater and dance. Battery Dance, New York City's longest running public dance festival, is hosting the Dutch-Turkish choreographer Rutkay Özpinar from Korzo Theater as part of the Future 400 exchange. And the Dutch theater director Ira Kip is working on her new play, Kings… Come Home, a reflection the impact of being uprooted, which will go to the National Black Theater and the Apollo Theater in New York. Both Kip and Özpinar are s...
Jul 03, 2024•22 min
Design your look, design your life. Rambler Studios is a creative platform for raw talent. It offers young people a safe space where they can discover what they’re good at and find a sense of belonging – and maybe a career in street fashion. Started by Carmen van der Vecht in Amsterdam in 2010, it has branched out to New York’s Lower East Side. It operates there under the wings of the Henry Street Settlement, a philanthropic institution dating back to the late 1800’s. In the same basement in a s...
Jun 19, 2024•20 min
This second episode of the Future 400 podcast looks at work by Dutch and American photographers who are part of the annual international photo festival Photoville in Lower Manhattan. Dutch photographer Ernst Coppejans delves deep into the lives of LGBTQIA+ people living on the streets in New York. Kennedi Carter, a young Black photographer from the South, dresses people of color in a combination of garb from colonial times and contemporary streetwear. Photoville’s founder Sam Barzilay says: “Eve...
Jun 05, 2024•19 min
Future 400 is a bi-weekly four-part podcast series from the Dutch Consulate in New York. It is part of the two-year cultural program of the same name, marking the 400th anniversary of the founding of New Amsterdam, the city that became New York. Each episode highlights a selection of the creative collaborations between artists, communities and institutions in both the Netherlands and the United States. Want to learn more about Future 400? The Dutch Consulate in New York City made a site for that...
May 22, 2024•26 min
Andrea Elliot ’s 2022 Pulitzer winning book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City , follows eight dramatic years in the life of a young woman named Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As she grows up, moving with her tight-knit f...
Apr 10, 2024•51 min•Season 4Ep. 5
2024 is an election year. And in his book Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal', George Packer makes the case for why this may be the most important election since the civil war. Packer accepts that America may be “a failed state”. A state that is in a “cold civil war” between four incompatible versions of the US: the Free America of libertarian Reagan, the Smart America of Clinton-era technocrats, the quote Real America quote of the bottom-feeding demagogue Donald Trump, and the J...
Mar 13, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones ’s 1619 project has inspired both throngs of like-minded people as well as a severe backlash. This hasn’t stopped her from devoting her career to exposing systemic and institutional racism in the United States. The 1619 Project WAS published in New York Times Magazine—and is now a successful podcast and television series. So, why 1619? That was the year an English ship carrying enslaved Africans and flying the Dutch flag appeared on the horiz...
Feb 14, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 4Ep. 2
2024 is an election year and Donald Trump is running again. This makes journalist and political commentator Mark Leibovich’s second nonfiction blockbuster T hank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission , particularly timely. Mr. Leibovich sketches the political landscape of Washington during the Trump presidency. We all know how Mr. Trump bent the Republican party to his will. But instead of focusing on the former President, Leibovich centers his narrative o...
Jan 17, 2024•54 min•Season 4Ep. 1
From Hollywood to Hanoi, Jane Fonda has endeared and enraged Americans for decades with her sparkling performances and outspoken views. Following an eclectic career as an actress, activist and fitness guru plus a string of high-profile husbands, the acclaimed Fonda tells all in her autobiography My Life So Far. In this episode of Bright Minds , Jane Fonda reveals intimate details and universal truths that she hopes ‘can provide a lens through which others can see their lives and how they can liv...
Dec 06, 2023•57 min
From Hemingway to Dickens, from Nabokov to Twain, from Isak Dinesen to Graham Greene, many of the world’s great writers were also great travel writers. Paul Theroux, arguably the most renowned living travel writer, has capped a fifty-year writing career with The Tao of Travel , a collection of travel stories – by himself and others. Join us for a trip around the world with the man who gave us The Great Railway Bazaar , The Old Patagonian Express , To the Ends of the Earth, and other classics of ...
Nov 08, 2023•46 min•Season 3Ep. 9
President Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor argues in his important book that in the last thirty years capitalism has flourished at the expense of democracy. Robert Reich – one of America’s most renowned economists – says people now see themselves as buyers and sellers first and citizens only later, if at all. The rise of supercapitalism has meant fantastically increased choices for consumer goods but also decimated public services, an end to job security and looming environmental catastr...
Oct 11, 2023•43 min•Season 3Ep. 8
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 discovers that the woman next door died recently, and is quietly devastated, though he hardly knew her...
Sep 13, 2023•27 min•Season 3Ep. 7
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-old boy. The boy later tried to back out of the lie, but the police told him it was too late to chan...
Jul 05, 2023•34 min•Season 3Ep. 6
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 settlers. But after a witch-hunt-like series of trials and vigilante justice, no specific plot was e...
Jun 07, 2023•37 min
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 ‘a threat to Russian national security’ and got kicked out of the country. Browder has spent the la...
May 10, 2023•48 min
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 work, Kang and Frenkel came to a shocking conclusion: the missteps of the social media platform were n...
Apr 12, 2023•39 min
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 and voting rights in the U.S. She joined us in May 2022 to talk about her two most recent books, &apo...
Mar 15, 2023•48 min
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 recession since the crash of ‘29. Obama was still in his first term and, in response, the Tea Party mov...
Feb 15, 2023•27 min•Season 3Ep. 26
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 buy drugs in a North Carolina trailer and how to pretend you attended Princeton University before the...
Jan 18, 2023•51 min•Season 3Ep. 25
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 this come to be? Support the show...
Dec 28, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 24
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 in Brooklyn in 1933, Ms. Ginsburg became the second woman to join the law faculty of Rutgers Univers...
Dec 14, 2022•32 min•Season 1Ep. 7
