Avsnitt
-
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.
Support the show -
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.
Support the show -
Saknas det avsnitt?
-
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.
Support the show -
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.
Support the show -
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.
Support the show -
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.
Support the show -
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.
Support the show -
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 -
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.
Support the show
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. -
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.
Support the show
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. -
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 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.
Support the show -
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.
Support the show -
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”.
Support the show
In 1992 he visited the John Adams to discuss his life, work and views. -
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.
Support the show -
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 fundamentally incompatible, and why it’s a bad time for secularism in politics.
Support the show
Somehow, despite this talk being 13 years old now, his remarks about religion in politics, seem as relevant as ever. -
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 Goldfinch, the latter of which became a bestseller, a film and a Book of the Year by numerous publications including, New York Times Book Review, the Economist and NPR. 'The Goldfinch' even won the Pulitzer Prize.
Support the show -
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 compare them to the state of the US government today. Is our democracy in danger? Yes, says Ziblatt. He warns us against politicians who reject the democratic rules of the game; who deny the legitimacy of opponents; who tolerate or encourage violence; and who indicate a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
Support the show -
In 2009, one of the most important American writers of her generation took the John Adams Institute stage for the first time. Toni Morrison—as renowned for her magical realism as for her portrayal of the African American struggle—is that rare writer who is acclaimed by critics and adored by the reading public. In her novel, A Mercy, a mother gives away her daughter as she struggles for a better life, and the reader unravels the meaning behind seemingly cruel acts. Join us for an evening with this distinguished writer of whom the Nobel Prize committee wrote: “…in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, she gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.
Support the show -
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 questions from the audience.
The Corrections is a novel about the American Family. You could interpret it as a family soap opera of sorts, but Franzen has much more to say, giving a view on modern western society that is both humorous and poignant. The Lambert family takes you to everyday America and brings you into the world of ‘consumerism, pharmacology, biotechnology, the ‘optimistic egalitarianism’ of the American Middle West, the superstitious magic of the stock exchange, and the unbearable lightness of virtual being on the home pages of the Infobahn, not to mention asparagus steamers, refrigerator magnets, a vacuum pump to keep leftover wine from oxidizing, cell phones, and class hatred’ (New York Review of Books). It creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we’re under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read’ (The New York Times).
Support the show - Visa fler
