John Adams Institute

The John Adams Institute is pleased to highlight an upcoming external event: What does it mean to celebrate 250 years of friendship — when friendship has rarely been a simple thing?

That question sits at the heart of the closing lecture in the series “A Firm Peace and Sincere Friendship?”, The Netherlands and the United States share the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in American history: two and a half centuries of ties shaped by wars, revolutions, and continents remade. But longevity is not harmony — and the story is far more contested, surprising, and instructive than the commemorative version suggests.

Ian Kenny traces three moments. John Adams in Amsterdam in 1780, securing recognition for a republic still doubted in Europe. The post–Second World War era, when American aid rebuilt a shattered Netherlands while U.S. pressure weighed on Dutch decisions in Indonesia. And the 1980s and 1990s, when Dutch resistance to American military policy grew even as strategic and economic ties deepened.

Across these moments runs a single thread: not simple alliance or opposition, but a relationship repeatedly renegotiated through disagreement. Friendship was never guaranteed. It was worked for.

Followed by a conversation with Kenneth Manusama on where the relationship stands in 2026 — and what, if anything, can still be taken for granted.

📅 18 June
🕗 20:00–22:15
📍 Oude of Pelgrimvaderskerk, Rotterdam
🎟️ Tickets via https://depelgrimvaderskerk.weticket.io/lezing-ian-kenny-directeur-john-adams-institute

✍️ An evening with Kaveh Akbar unfolded around his debut novel “Martyr! “ and the fragile ways a life is assembled: through migration, inheritance, rupture, and what resists simple articulation.

🕊️ Akbar spoke about Cyrus, a q***r Iranian-American poet moving through grief, addiction, faith, and the long afterlives of family history. In the novel, identity is not stable ground but something constantly made and unmade by what is carried forward and what is lost.

🛩️ At its center sits a historical rupture—the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988—an event that never resolves into the past so much as continues to echo through private lives, shaping how memory behaves.

🎨 Around Cyrus, art becomes a kind of pressure system: an Iranian artist turning her final days into DEATH-SPEAK, relationships that return as variations rather than conclusions, and a constant negotiation between expression and survival.

📓 Akbar captured that emotional logic in a single line, referencing his own personal journey: “The joy in my life has been made great by knowing pain, and the pain has been made complex by knowing joy.” The book doesn’t resolve that tension—it stays inside it.

🤝 Within the this month’s series on literature and ideas, in partnership with the , , and , the evening widened into something larger: a reflection on the American experiment at 250 years—its promise, its fractures, and the unresolved question of what it means to belong to a story still being written.

📚 Martyr! is available via .

📸 Gerrit Serné

🧠 What is consciousness—and how is it shaped by what we notice, ignore, and allow ourselves to feel?

✍️ reflects on our event with Michael Pollan, where we explored consciousness as something we don’t simply observe, but inhabit. From neuroscience and philosophy to psychedelics and attention itself, Pollan invites us to consider the mind not as a fixed entity, but as a constantly shifting field of experience.

📺 If the mind resembles a kind of receiver, then much of life depends on what we are tuned to—and what is tuned out. In an age where attention is continuously captured and redirected, the question becomes not only what consciousness is, but how we protect the space in which it unfolds.

🌍 This piece traces the history, fragility, and evolving science of consciousness—and asks what it means to remain fully present in a world designed to fragment attention.

🔗 Read the full article on our Medium (link in bio).

💡 Want to publish with the John Adams Institute? Reach out to [email protected]