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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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?

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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 University in 1963 and the first tenured female law professor at Columbia Law School in 1972. She was appointed to the Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton.

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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 the rare feat of addressing mental illness while being readable and funny at the same time.

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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.

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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 circumstances can change that would rewrite the political landscape in America and abroad. There was, for example, no way to know about the January 6th insurrection or about the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the time of this talk. 

This is also a testament to how things stay the same. Like the fact that, even though we know that Trump lost the 2020 election, Trump’s voters, and the forces that made him politically viable, are still with us today. 

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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, this time in order to save it?

Writer and staff journalist at The New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert joined the John Adams in June, 2021 to talk about her book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future . She is renowned for her authoritative voice and her poetic prose. The combination won her the Pulitzer Prize for her previous book The Sixth Extinction.

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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 obituary, The New York Times wrote, “Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent” and The Washington Post remembered him as a “major writer of the modern era” and an “astonishingly versatile man of letters”.

In 1992 he visited the John Adams to discuss his life, work and views.

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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 other, but providing major themes and takeaways for the reader. “A masterpiece of our time,” according to The Guardian.

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