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John Adams, the first American ambassador to the Netherlands, once said “Let us tenderly and kindly cherish...the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.” The John Adams Institute has brought the best and the brightest of American thinking to Amsterdam for three decades. We have amassed a unique archive of great thinkers, speakers and writers, from Spike Lee to Francis Fukuyama to Al Gore. Now we’re sharing this treasure trove of thought and word with you. We believe John Adams would have wanted it that way. And so, from Amsterdam, this is: Bright Minds: the podcast from the John Adams Institute!
56 Episodes
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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 fa...
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 ...
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 t...
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 ho...
2024 is an election year and Donald Trump is running again. This makes journalist and political commentator Mark Leibovich’s second nonfiction blockbuster Thank 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 ...
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 ...
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 cata...
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 ...
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 c...
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 ...
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 birth of Jesus Christ. Sed...
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
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 cognitive behavioral therapy. Her book, Sane New World, based on personal experience, achieves...
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 democratic values, not just one”. His talk at the John Adams is also a testament to how quickly circumstan...
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 tiny diamonds into the stratosphere. After having done so much damage, can we change nature again...
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 appearances he was a longtime critic of American foreign policy. He died in 2012 from pneumonia. In his ...
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 been and what it could be. An epic tale told across multiple timelines and characters, separate from each o...
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: how religion is a worse than any totalitarian regime, why science and religion are fundam...
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 a bacchanal, a plan that ultimately leads to a death. Tartt has subsequently written 'The Little Friend' and 'The...
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