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John Adams Institute

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27/05/2026

🏛️ Who’s Afraid of Julius Caesar?

✍️ In this new essay for the John Adams Institute, historian Thomas Bersee explores a political anxiety that has haunted the United States since its founding: the fear that democracy may one day produce its own Caesar.

⚖️ From the Declaration of Independence to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, the American republic has long understood itself through the lens of ancient Rome. The Founding Fathers admired the Roman Republic’s checks and balances — but they also feared the rise of strongmen, executive overreach, and the collapse of republican norms.

🌎 Tracing a line from Thomas Jefferson and Cicero to Andrew Jackson, Nixon, Bush, Obama, and even a controversial Trump-era production of Julius Caesar in Central Park, this essay examines how the specter of Caesar continues to shape American political imagination.

📚 At its core lies a timeless question: how does a republic defend itself against tyranny without undermining the very principles it seeks to protect?

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

💡 Interested in publishing with the John Adams Institute? Contact [email protected]

26/05/2026

✍️ An evening with Rachel Khong unfolded around ambition, intimacy, and the seductive instability of reinvention. She writes with startling precision about people trying to outrun histories still living inside them.

🌊 In conversation with Els Quagebeur, Khong spoke about family as something both inherited and performed: love sharpened by expectation, closeness interrupted by distance, identity shaped in the space between who we are and who we learn to become for others.

🧬 In her work, migration moves like a quiet undertow—shaping desire, shame, success, and the fantasy of self-creation that sits at the heart of the American story.

📓 What lingered was the tension itself: between freedom and inheritance, reinvention and memory, belonging and the private fear of remaining unknowable.

🤝 Within this month’s series on literature and ideas, in partnership with , , , , the evening widened into a reflection on contemporary American life—its promises, its performances, and the emotional cost of constantly remaking the self.

📚”Real Americans” is available via .

📸 Gerrit Serné

25/05/2026

With summer just around the corner, three voices come together to reflect on the ideas, stories, and commitments that shape life in America today. A leading civil rights lawyer considers the promise of justice and the legacies that shape us; a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist turns to storytelling, narrative, and the American experience; and a senior national security figure reflects on values, trust, and the transatlantic alliance—together tracing how meaning is made through the stories we inherit, the systems we build, and the principles that carry us forward.

12/05/2026

💪 “Fitness to Lead?” — a follow-up to “The Rube Goldberg Amendment”

✍️ Written by Dr. Robert C.J. Krasner, retired Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps and former Attending Physician to the United States Congress, this essay builds on the constitutional questions raised in our previous interview with John D. Feerick, turning from removal mechanisms to the more fundamental issue of capacity itself.

⚖️ When one individual holds authority over nuclear command, global crisis response, and national security decision-making, the question of fitness is not abstract — it is structural. Yet the systems designed to evaluate it remain fragmented, politicized, and ad hoc.

🌎 If “The Rube Goldberg Amendment” exposed the complexity of removing a president, this follow-up examines what comes even earlier in the chain: how we determine whether the office is being held in a condition capable of bearing its own weight.

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

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

11/05/2026

✍️ 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

06/05/2026

🧠 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]

05/05/2026

How do the stories from the past and the stories we imagine help us understand the world—and envision what comes next? Join us in celebrating Pulitzer Prize winners Jill Lepore and Daniel Kraus, two extraordinary voices and past guests of the John Adams Institute. Jill Lepore was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Daniel Kraus for Fiction—an extraordinary recognition of work that deepens our understanding of the past and expands the possibilities of storytelling. We’re proud to have welcomed them to our stage and even prouder to celebrate this remarkable achievement.

16/04/2026

🗽 There’s a line from “The Great Gatsby” that lingered throughout the evening, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s indictment of Tom and Daisy Buchanan — a portrait of carelessness at the top, and the quiet assumption that someone else will clean up the consequences.

🗞️We had the pleasure of welcoming Evan Osnos, in conversation with Tahrim Ramdjan and moderator Tracy Metz — that brought that century-old observation squarely into the present, unpacking how extreme wealth shapes influence, institutions, and the modern American Dream.

🎲 Drawing on “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich”, Osnos offered a darkly lucid account of the ultra-rich — and what their distance from consequence does to the rest of society.

🤝 And fittingly, four generations of John Adams leadership were in the room — a living continuity of the questions we keep returning to.

15/04/2026

📜 The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was designed as a constitutional safeguard for presidential incapacity, a mechanism for the most extreme moments of crisis in the American system.

🏛️ In conversation with Sean Cotter-Lem, John D. Feerick — one of its principal architects — reflects on how Section 4 has never been invoked, even as the amendment itself has quietly shaped presidential continuity in more routine, procedural ways.

⚖️ While Section 4 remains untested, other provisions have been used in far more mundane but essential circumstances — temporary transfers of power during presidential surgeries and medical procedures under Section 3, and seamless vice-presidential successions under Section 2, including during the Nixon, Reagan, W. Bush, and Biden administrations. The result is a constitutional tool that is dramatic in theory, but largely administrative in practice.

🧠 The paradox at the heart of the amendment: it is built for political catastrophe, yet it has functioned most often as a quiet instrument of continuity.

🔗 Read the full piece on the John Adams Institute Medium (link in bio).

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

09/04/2026

A rising tide lifts some boats. Others are left to weather the storm. Some reap the benefits. Others bear the cost of carelessness.

🎙️Evan Osnos & Tahrim Ramdjan in conversation with Tracy Metz

🎟️ Tickets in bio
📆 13 April 2026 | 🕗 20:00–22:00
📍 Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam

07/04/2026

In Real Americans, Rachel Khong follows a Chinese-American family across eight decades, tracing inheritance in the broadest sense: the stories we’re told, the choices we make, and the circumstances we never choose. From Maoist China to contemporary America, the novel asks how identity forms over time—and how the past quietly shapes the lives we think we’re building freely.

At the center is a young woman whose connection to a wealthy heir sets off ripples across generations and continents. Part love story, part social novel, with a hint of the speculative, Real Americans explores class, migration, and the lure of reinvention, probing the unsettling question: what do we truly inherit—family traits, family myths, or the futures we imagine for ourselves?

With sharp insight and subtle humor, Khong captures America not as an ideal, but as a lived reality, shaped by power and chance, ambition and longing, and the intimate pressures of family life.

In conversation with Els Quaegebeur.

📆 May 21, 2026 | 🕢 7:30–9:30 PM
📍 OBA Theater, Oosterdok

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