Amsterdam, 7 January 2008

Effective January 1, 2008, Russell Shorto is the new Director of The John Adams Institute. Shorto is an American journalist—a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine—and author of the bestselling book The Island at the Center of the World, which argued that the Dutch founding of Manhattan influenced New York City’s immigrant culture and laid its foundation as a free trading center.

Shorto’s interests are in history and in trying to understand the complexities of American society: how, for example, one of the world’s most innovative and forward-looking cultures can also be rooted in deep social and religious conservatism. His plans for the John Adams Institute for 2008 involve using the presidential election campaign as a vehicle to explore the seismic changes taking place across American society.

The program for 2008 begins on January 14 with a lecture by Robert Reich—the influential American economist and President Clinton’s former Labor Secretary—on “supercapitalism,” an event moderated by Alexander Rinnooy Kan. On February 13, the provocative writer Christopher Hitchens will talk about his bestselling book God Is Not Great, which argues that “religion poisons everything.” The Institute will also collaborate with the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam in presenting a series of public lectures on the presidential election, and will participate actively in the Wereldboekenstad events, which begin in April.

The year 2009 will mark the 400^th anniversary of the Dutch “discovery” of New York by Henry Hudson, and Shorto plans a program that will explore the cultural connections between “New Amsterdam” and its parent city.

The John Adams Institute is an independent, nonprofit foundation, which was founded in 1987 to further cultural exchange between the United States and the Netherlands. Since that time it has brought hundreds of speakers to the Netherlands, including Al Gore, John Irving, Madeleine Albright, Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Frank McCourt, E. Annie Proulx and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.