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 the genre.

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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 catastrophe. The U.S. leads in this dark trend, Reich argues, but Europe is right behind, and the only solution is to renew civic participation: to turn consumers back into citizens.

The evening – produced in cooperation with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Business Contact Publishers – was moderated by Alexander Rinnooy Kan, Chairman of the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands, and included Maria van der Hoeven, Minister of Economic Affairs.

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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.

The novel’s blended texture reminds you of something: real life. You get a sense of this man and this city, but also of how we construct ourselves. The Seattle Times called it “Magnificent and shattering. A remarkably resonant feat of prose.”

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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 change his story. In 2011, attorneys with the Ohio Innocence Project filed a petition for a new trial, and three years later the charges against Rickey were dismissed.

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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 ever uncovered. Jill Lepore revisits the spring and summer of 1741 to confront a sticky contradiction at the heart of American history and society: the dual relationship between slavery and liberty. 

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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 last 14 years trying to understand the dark money flowing out of Russia.

In his book Freezing Order Browder tells the story of his quest to establish a global regime for imposing sanctions on Russians involved in corruption and criminality. 

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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 not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform.

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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, 'The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America' and 'One Person, No Vote'. The Second Amendment, she contends, is not about guns, but about anti-Blackness. And the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave every American the right to vote no matter their “race, color or previous condition of servitude”, is under assault.

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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 movement was just getting going. Despite this, or maybe because of this, Spike talked about how young people can still make their voices heard and follow their dreams.

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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. Sedaris, the best selling author of all time, was soon after accused by The New Republic magazine of making up some of his autobiographical reminiscences.

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