Qualla: Nexus Instituut

Nexus Instituut: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In September 1994, in a university auditorium in Tilburg - a Catholic-rooted city of about 200,000 people in the south of the Netherlands, not a place anyone associates with global intellectual life - Edward Said gave a lecture on European culture. It was the first Nexus Lecture. Over the next three decades, the speakers who followed him to that stage would include George Steiner, Jurgen Habermas, Daniel Barenboim, Simon Schama, Sonia Gandhi, Mario Vargas Llosa, Garry Kasparov, Wynton Marsalis, and an as-yet-unknown French politician named Emmanuel Macron. Patti Smith came to talk about counterculture. Susan Sontag came to argue. The institute has no permanent campus, no faculty, and a tiny staff. It runs on conviction.

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Nexus Instituut: A Magazine First, Then an Idea

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Nexus Institute began as a magazine. Rob Riemen, a Dutch cultural philosopher then in his early thirties, founded *Nexus* in 1991 as a book-form journal of essays - the kind of project that nearly always loses money and folds within five years. It did not fold. By 1994, Rieme...

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Nexus Instituut: The Speakers Who Said Yes

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The most surprising thing about Nexus is not who speaks - it is that they do. Riemen has spent thirty years writing letters to people he admires and persuading them to come argue with each other in a country most of them have no professional reason to visit. The first Nexus Confe...

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Nexus Instituut: The Questions

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nexus Conferences open with a lecture by a single well-known thinker, then break into public discussion among a panel of artists, philosophers, politicians, and scientists. The questions on the program are deliberately enormous. How can we change the world? What are the consequen...

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Nexus Instituut: From Tilburg to Amsterdam

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For its first twenty-three years, Nexus was a Tilburg phenomenon. In 2017 the institute held its final Nexus Lecture in the city - the auditorium was full, the American jurist who spoke was treated to the kind of standing ovation Dutch audiences ration carefully - and in 2018 the...

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