What does the world’s capital need? It needs resilience. Rome has resilience. Matthew Kneale’s creative book Rome, A History in Seven Sackings shows how time and again, Rome rebounded, adding layers to its tapestry of history.

A capital for the world needs character. Rome has character. Coffee is always espresso. You can have it with milk, but really only in the morning. Never StarBucks. Traffic is chaotic but cordial. And even though the city has become much more European in the decades since I last visited, as a classical student on the obligatory tour of Italy, this has added to rather than subtracted from its identity. Rome is still loud, just loud in more languages and identities.

The capital of the world needs crowds. Rome has crowds. I’m glad we paid handsomely for skip-the-queue tickets and reserved timeslots at the Vatican, Colosseum and Pantheon and we skipped queueing for Saint Peter’s Cathedral. Lines stretched for two hours or more, in already considerable heat in late April. But Rome can also be quiet. Just outside the city center, there was always a free table or near empty bus.

A true capital of the world needs history; deep history. According to legend, Romulus and Remus established Rome in 753 BCE, but the history of the city reaches back in time much further, to the sack of Troy and the legend of Aeneas. While fictional, even Rome’s earliest historians, including Livy, acknowledged its value as a founding story. What can be historically verified anyway shows signs of even earlier human settlement in Rome in the 17th or 18th century BCE. Plus, Rome always acknowledged to be the new kid on the block, audacious in its ambitions yet humble when it comes to how it intended to rule the world.

Which brings me to the most important characteristic of the capital of the world: it needs to be welcoming.

On the eve of our first day in Rome I went for a run. The Via Appia Antica seemed appropriate, given people have been running up and down this road for 23 centuries. After a thrilling stretch with cars through rush hour, it soon turned historic. Roman legionaries marched here, popes, countless tourists. And now I ran up the queen of roads, practically deserted only a few kilometers from the bustle of the Forum Romanum. Parts were newly paved, others consisted of rough cobblestones. Too rough for bikes, tough for runners. Probably not the original, although there are stretches of this BCE road that are still as they once were. Lush gardens stretched alongside the road, as did construction and renovation works. I looped back through a deserted gas station and 80s high rises reminiscent of a Mediterranean Clockwork Orange, to end up among the ruins of Roman aqueducts.

On the Saturday, liberation day in Italy, my family and I went back to the Parco degli Acquedotti, aqueduct park, which I had run through. Throngs of Italian families had gathered to celebrate their victory over fascism and the beautiful spring weather. Bad Bunny drifted by as I saw a flock of sheep graze underneath Aqua Claudia, an aquaduct initiated by Caligula and completed by Claudius in the first century CE. Parks are amazing institutions regardless of their landmarks, but cultural heritage certainly adds to the atmosphere, if only for the shade the arches provide. We played games, ate strawberries, and almost blended in.

The defining trait of the ancient Romans was their openness to turn enemies into friends and the have-nots into emperors. Later, as capital of the Papal States and fascist Italy, Rome became more exclusive. And given the general trend, I don’t know if contemporary Rome is welcoming to all, but it certainly felt welcoming to me.

Importantly, when we turn into a multi planet species and have to select a capital for Earth, it had better have a future. Rome is well above sea level and although the Mediterranean is warming up and drying out, Rome’s always dealt well with water. In ancient times, its eleven aqueducts provided an estimated thousand liters of drinking water per person every day. It will be a challenge for Rome (as for any city) to adjust to a fully sustainable economy, but Rome has faced worse and thrived.

The capital of the world, more than anything else, needs fans. A generation after my last visit, I’m a fan again, so it has at least one. And given the crowds at the Trevi fountain, the hustle and bustle around the Forum Romanum and the packed crowd in the Sistine Chapel, I venture I’m not the only one. Anyone up for a vote?

— Jasper

In the late 10s, I spent quite some time trying to make sense of how organizations navigate the future. We called the resulting method quantum culture. Its premise was simple: no organization runs on a single logic. At any moment, multiple systems compete to shape its decisions. Some reward continuity, others change. Leadership, I argued, lies in recognizing which system to activate when.

We distinguished three primary systems: markets, relationships, and what we called open-source culture. Markets reward efficiency and scale, operate on clear hierarchical lines largely independent of society. Relationships build on trust and clearly delineated responsibilities. Open-source systems mobilize collective intelligence around ambitious causes. Successful organizations rarely rely on only one. They shift between them continuously. My work in public organizations had exposed me to innumerable approaches, existing in parallel, hence the quantum.

When I moved into the private sector, however, that complexity seemed to disappear. Here the rules appeared straightforward: the market decides. My task seemed simple too: make the company I work for as sustainable as possible while leaving its core logic intact. Within market rules, anything seemed achievable.

But sustainability is not simply about improving outcomes within a system. It often requires changing the system itself. Markets alone rarely produce that shift. Even their most committed advocates, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, et al. relied on coordinated legal, institutional, and cultural strategies to make the market dominant. Durable change never comes from one logic alone.

I soon met colleagues who instinctively understood this. They were not just optimizing their own tasks; they were quietly, decidedly reshaping the conditions around them. And to understand what they were doing, you have to understand asphalt.

Asphalt is, at first glance, a simple material: stones bound together with bitumen. It is cheap, flexible, and well suited to countries like the Netherlands with soft soils and dense traffic. Yet its simplicity hides a paradox. Because it is cheap, it is bought competitively. Because it is bought competitively, margins are thin. And because margins are thin, investments in cleaner production methods or longer lifespans are difficult to recover and justify. Which is especially tragic, as asphalt production and application account for roughly one percent of all Dutch carbon emissions.

This combination of low price, high volume, and significant environmental impact creates a structural tension. Innovations exist and have existed for decades: lower-temperature production, circular reuse of materials, biobased binders, quieter surfaces, longer-lasting mixtures. Technically, sustainable asphalt is already possible. Economically, however, it struggles to scale.

The reason is systemic. In a highly competitive procurement environment, any company that invests heavily in sustainability risks being undercut by competitors who do not. Public clients, bound to ensure fair competition, cannot easily reward pioneers at scale. The result resembles a large-scale prisoner’s dilemma: everyone sees the need to change, yet no single actor can move first without risk.

Which brings us to an insight that increasingly shapes my work: If we fail to organize sustainability as a system, we will soon lose both our business and our front runner position in our sector and market. This is not an ethical warning. It is an economic prediction.

As long as sustainability remains an optional feature, investments remain uncertain, innovation fragmented, and emissions persistent. But if we manage to embed sustainability in procurement rules, material standards, and shared roadmaps, the logic changes. Investments gain predictability. Standardization reduces costs. Scale makes new technologies viable. Sustainability stops being a competitive disadvantage and becomes a market standard.

Across the Dutch asphalt sector, that shift is beginning to take shape. Authorities are moving from buying tons of material toward managing infrastructure as long-term assets. A high point was last year, 4 December, when Rijkswaterstaat, the national road organization, set the new rules for the sector after years of thoughtful debate. Procurement increasingly rewards lifespan and performance. Standardization of mixtures is encouraged to enable cleaner production and circular reuse. Data systems are being developed to track material flows and validate quality. And at the same time, collective initiatives such as the National Platform for Sustainable Road Paving (NPDW) are emerging to align initiatives, validate innovations, and coordinate efforts across the chain.

These developments may appear technical, but their significance is structural. Asphalt is no longer treated merely as a commodity to be delivered, but as a system to be governed.

And this is where the lesson extends beyond infrastructure. And why I’m so proud and honored to play my little part in this movement.

We often imagine that changing the world requires new ideas or stronger arguments. But large systems rarely change through creative breakthroughs or top-down persuasion alone. They change when rules, incentives, and collaborations begin to shift in the same direction. Once that happens, future-proof decisions follow almost automatically.

Asphalt is an ideal playground for lasting change. While its impact is significant, the sector is relatively manageable — we’re talking hundreds rather than thousands of involved organizations. A country like The Netherlands may have 140,000 km of paved roads, it only has twenty odd asphalt plants. Its transformation is a complex problem, but doable while remaining instructive for larger, more complicated contexts.

That’s not to say that there is no pushback. It is naive to think that a system can be changed without it affecting the actors in the system. And while some will benefit from a more sustainable road paving sector, others will see their business model evaporate. Especially if your competitive advantage depends on externalizing costs.

In quantum physics, a particle can exist in more than one state at once. Roads cannot. We cannot sustain a market built on externalizing costs while also demanding collective climate responsibility. One logic will shape the system, and the system will shape the outcomes. The question is not whether we choose, but whether we recognize that the choice is already being made.

— Jasper

Richelieu, of Three Musketeers fame, France’s Cromwell, imagineer of the modern French state, whose name lives on in the village where once his castle stood and where I spent the waning and waxing days of 2025 and ’26.

I take the quote from book two of Carl Jacob Burckhardt’s three-volume biography of the Cardinal, Richelieu and His Age (1972). Books that are about a person and their age intend to showcase how times make people and people make times. Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. As if, in Richelieu’s line, they have a relationship unlike any other. Richelieu’s age was the early 17th century. An age of centralized regimes, religious oppression, and the Académie Française, which he founded. He was a hard-working, intriguing, and sickly man. It was an age he shaped.

I found the biography on top of the piano in the music room of Académie Le Grippault, where we spent the winter holiday at the invitation of Jeroen and Leonoor. Richelieu, the village, was next door. The floor tiles from his now-lost castle decorated the central hall. I went running in the Cardinal’s park. Yet the time was decidedly not early 17th but rather late 19th century.

Jeroen and Leonoor, friends from the Netherlands, bought and renovated Le Grippault over the last few years. Dutch readers may know them from the RTL series that documented their adventure. We’d visited a few times for a day; this was the first time we actually stayed there, together with a few other families, to celebrate the New Year. It was a marvel.

The word château has different connotations based on your frame of reference. My initial thought is of a castle. Le Grippault, however, is a country house. More Downton Abbey than Knights of the Round Table. Jeroen and Leonoor have updated its ancient splendor and filled the place with art, music, and literature. As alive as heritage sites tend to be stale, places like this trigger my intellectual self-indulgence. Next to the coffee machine I found Rilke’s The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch):

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen, die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen, aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm, und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm oder ein großer Gesang.
— Rainer Maria Rilke

I sat down to pretend to understand German in the dining room, and the late 19th century came to life. With 22 people, half of them kids, breakfast in a high-ceilinged room with a fireplace felt like an Ibsen play. I’d always imagined such rooms, one door on the left, two doors on the right, and a door in the back leading to the kitchen and staff quarters, as a convenient theatrical setting. Turns out that if you eat oats in such décor even in the twenty-one-twenties, life becomes A Doll’s House. Kids clamor in through door stage left, recounting a game of Werewolf. Conversations really do drift in and out through doors, while I read Rilke as a prop.

Nostalgic about a time I never lived in, the second thing that struck me about the late 19th century was how pleasant it was to prepare large dinners, read in the salon, or make a puzzle. It must have been wonderful to be an aristocrat. I spent most of my time on the estate, apart from the occasional hunt (to the Intermarché) and ride (run). I’m aware we now call this a vacation, but with a fireplace roaring and surrounded by antiques, I felt like a lord. Lesson two: just like the room with doors, the leisurely conversation of so many great plays isn’t a ploy, but based on lived experience.

“The past is not dead. It is not even past.”
— Te-Nehisi Coates

Among the books I brought myself was Te-Nehisi Coates’s The Message. The quote isn’t from the book; but the message is. Coates seemed as apt as Richelieu’s biography in an atmosphere of art, curiosity, and play. History is a widening circle that leaks, influences, echoes endlessly, and returns. So that even when I use AI to turn leftovers into party snacks at scale, I can still be in a modern drama in a Renaissance town.

In The Message, Coates writes,

“But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this — to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.”

Hence, we are left with three choices: the past has no relevance to the present, it circles ever wider, or it haunts.

The 21st century added a swim in the icy pool on Jan. 1 to my stay. It added giving a helping hand to the work in and on the “downstairs” areas of the house. It added long days spent in the kitchen preparing food with the other guests, one of my favorite pastimes, which I would have hated to miss had I been an aristocrat. It also added centuries of understanding about how societies can be made fairer, and at least 150 years to the social critiques of Ibsen.

I look forward to the stories of the new year, drawing on history and art and all that is beautiful from the 17th, 19th, or 21st century. There is simply so much at stake. Thanks for your hospitality, Jeroen and Leonoor, and for reminding me it’s nice to write about the people that create places for reflection. Like I was not going to.

— Jasper

Bravado has always come easily to me, but here I was surrounded by people forty times as qualified as I am. Luckily, they were also kind and generous, and the facilitator was exceptionally good. When I joined in to give an impromptu masterclass on the methodology, lightheartedly, because I couldn’t yet do it more justice, an intense joy came over me. During the session, we propelled the idea of Biodiversity Net Gain forward, and in the weeks that followed the idea took flight, carried by a growing coalition of advocates. It may have been relief at not having fallen through the ice as a newbie, but I still think back to that session as one of the most fun I participated in during a year that included hundreds of sessions for dozens of great ideas.

In 2025, my employer awarded me the privilege of time to follow my curiosity and to develop my leadership skills. To the best of my ability, I turned that opportunity into an agenda: to increase my impact on the world one hundredfold before I turn fifty. First 10x, and then another 10x. That agenda urges learning: how to change systems, how to scale platforms, and especially how to play public politics.

Having read close to one hundred political biographies, ranging from Empress Dowager Cixi and Princess Margaret to Richard Holbrooke and Saladin, the theory of politics isn’t my weakest link. Practice is. After decades as a citizen of the world, and now a denizen of a well-off suburb, I lived in the luxury of not having to care much about politics. My politics worked for me, as the general trend of the world rewarded my preferences. Two things changed that: Donald Trump and my agenda.

Donald Trump challenged my political aloofness because his movement exposed the unsustainability of my lackluster idealism. No longer would the most influential political decisions conveniently benefit both my wallet and my worldview, simply because my wallet and my worldview cannot be satisfied simultaneously. If I truly believe in a world of equality and harmony, I will have to make sacrifices to achieve that: living simpler, working harder, deserving less. I may not like that, but blaming Mr. Trump for placing this reality front and center will not change it.

So in 2025, I started listening to intellectual right-wing podcasters to better understand where my ideas and ideals fall short. Especially The New York Times’ Ross Douthat continues to be a delight, on par with reading Niall Ferguson, whose ideas also make me deeply uncomfortable.

Douthat taught me about the role of practical Christianity in politics, how to distinguish between wrong and right conspiracy theories, and the value of exploring radically different value structures.

More importantly, he taught me that if I want to disagree with the politics of the conservative right, I’ll have to do better. There are many lunatics on the conservative right, but there are also very solid arguments, undeniable facts, and stellar storytelling. The progressive left will have to build a counter to all of that. And more.

My agenda also challenged my sense of unconnectedness. I cannot scale my impact tenfold by working harder; let alone one hundredfold. That requires engaging in politics, and doing so with the same craft, intellect, and creativity as Douthat’s most esteemed guests. Thankfully, my employer gave me the time and freedom to start doing the legwork needed to develop this craft.

I got to watch lobbyists at work and occasionally stuck my toe into their handiwork. I sat front row during the coalition-building and haggling required to change legislation. And I was invited to partake in the quiet magic that turns ideas into movements. Near the end of the year, for instance, when we proposed Biodiversity Net Gain in the Netherlands as a way to restore nature while accelerating other necessary transitions. It was wonderful to see how the initiators (among them a bank, nature organizations, and others) skillfully assembled a coalition, bridged differences, and presented something acceptable to business, politics, and the future. I will draw on this experience for years to come as I continue working to multiply my impact.

I’m never quite sure where the boundaries of politics lie. As I understand it, if the economy is a set of agreements about how we deal with value, and culture is about the ideas and stories of a society, then politics is about how decisions are made and enforced. In a democracy, decisions are formally made by the people, but if one engages in decision-making only at the ballot box, most decisions are in fact made by others. Opting out of politics by merely voting, I’ve learned, is not neutral democracy; it is a political act in itself, one that almost always works in favor of those who already hold power.

When one is faced, as I am now, with a host of future-defining challenges and a solid, powerful, creative, virile, and competent opposing worldview, politics means applying your full self and your best effort at every opportunity to make the world a better place. 2025 introduced me to how much fun it can be to do exactly that. I look forward to spending the years ahead turning this introduction into a profession.

Have a wonderful 2026, stay in touch!

— Jasper

Charles de Gaulle… While I would never mistake RFK or LBJ or MLK for the change they brought about in the world, CDG to me was primarily the Paris airport. De Gaulle was also the pre-eminent French politician of the 20th century and one of Europe’s iconic figures of the last century. On par with the likes of Churchill and Adenauer, yet probably far less well known now. So I decided to read Jonathan Fenby’s (long-out-of-print) biography The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved. Given that it deals at length with the infighting between France’s ever-evolving political factions, the biography is a surprisingly engaging read. I come away disliking de Gaulle for his cold calculations on Algeria and his extreme austerity, and admiring his courage and political strategising.

Political biographies are management books for leaders who want to do the hard work of making their own frameworks for change. De Gaulle’s scheming and cajoling in the early 1940s to get France to come out on top at the end of the Second World War, winning not only the war against Germany, but also its right to self-determination afterwards as a defeated and collaborating nation, is not a replicable ‘case study’ for the boardroom. Only by comparing it to, say, LBJ’s approach to getting the Democratic Party to embrace social reform, and countless other political fights, can one learn a little about how to lead change in adversity.

In his book, Fenby describes the pivotal moments in de Gaulle’s political life day-by-day. “10 June [1940]. ‘A day of extreme anguish,’ de Gaulle recalled.” “18–19 May [1968] (weekend). The President was in a thoroughly bad temper when he landed at Orly. ‘Playtime is over,’ he told the ministers who welcomed him at the airport.” It gives the book urgency and oomph, and shows the art and craft of the statesman in detail. Well-timed words, strategic waiting, a relationship nurtured or neglected. While these minutiae keep me indoors on a Friday night, having read through hundreds of tiny struggles, they reward me with patterns about how the world is changed.

Some of these patterns are obvious. To change the world one needs a values-based commitment to the future. Political leaders of note tend to have a profound intellectual curiosity. They read and learn in all ways possible. After all, the world is complex, and nudging it in any direction takes broad learning and understanding.

Other patterns may have more to do with the leaders I admire. My favourites balance idealism with pragmatism. Lafayette, LBJ and Václav Havel (to name a few) had big ideas yet recognised the practical steps necessary to make change happen. They regularly sacrificed success in the short term for paradigm shifts in the longer run. And thus, moral ambiguity is a key characteristic of the politics I like. Ideals are easy; turning them into change is hard. The right decision is not always obvious or comfortable. Mistakes are inevitable. And thus, like Simón Bolívar and Charles de Gaulle, biographies of change often include horrific episodes. Many of the leaders I’ve learned from regularly faced down the “black dog.”

And while back-room conniving, bullying and smooth talking are the bread and butter of a political biography, it is the moral complexities that make the best ones sparkle. I don’t think I’d ever have appreciated de Gaulle — he’s just too austere, too unconcerned with human suffering, too autocratic to be inspirational to me. But trying to understand how he combined his love for his disabled daughter Anne with his disregard for Algerian lives is an engaging (I’d say literary) activity.

Which brings me back to that man on the couch.

He’s not escaping the world by reading about the past. He’s studying how others dealt with situations I one day hope to deal with. Because no matter what management books want you to believe, there is no roadmap to a sustainable future where we live in harmony with all living things. We can only get there by being willing to learn, adapt, and act with ideals and pragmatism. Even if it means we make mistakes along the way.

Changing the world is never simple, rarely clean, and always worth the effort.

Have a wonderful day,
Jasper

In Dominion (2019), historian Tom Holland calls Christianity “the most influential framework for making sense of human existence that has ever existed.” He chronicles the religion’s history through its influence on the world, especially Western culture. His thesis: even in our secular age, the West remains profoundly Christian in its morality, values, and social norms. The book convinced me that although I live without an active Belief, my convictions, equality, environmentalism, individual freedom, and other progressive causes, are themselves profoundly Christian.

There’s no doubt Lux is an homage to the divine. But Rosalía wouldn’t be Rosalía if that homage didn’t challenge every possible expectation. Her debut Los Ángeles was a classical work of flamenco; her breakthrough El Mal Querer made flamenco pop. Then, with Motomami, she turned flamenco pop into a musical revolution. Like a perpetual butterfly transforming into something new each time, Rosalía keeps reshaping pop music at breakneck speed. Unsurprisingly, Lux is both revolutionary and deeply rooted in the palmas, cante, and emotional intensity of flamenco. Much has been made of her singing in 13 languages, of working with the London Philharmonic and Björk—and Berghain, where this all culminates, makes the fullest sense. As does my personal favourite, De Madrugá, which would have perfectly fit on any earlier album yet also sounds fresh.

To promote Lux, Rosalía appeared on the NYT Popcast. I highly recommend the conversation. She speaks about the reading (mostly feminist biographies) that inspired the songs, learning to sing in new languages, and how Nick Cave has duende. It’s one of the most intellectually stimulating things I’ve heard in months.

Especially when she talks about writing music that makes space for everyone. Rosalía contrasts her (feminine) music with (masculine) rap, which she calls reductionary and exclusive. Instead, she seeks songs that help you feel freer inside—open to possibility. Writing with confidence not from the certainty of success, but from the absence of fear. In theme, morality, and values, it is profoundly religious music. Christian music.

Listening to Rosalía makes me want to make music, read and study, be an activist and an intellectual. I may not be religious, but in her rebellious, feminine divinity, I want to believe.

— Jasper

Last Sunday on Vlieland, at Into The Great Wide Open, I walked past the rapper above. My backpack contained ten kilos of concrete mix, a hi-vis vest, a helmet, and a biography of Charles de Gaulle, the most punk packing I ever did for a day out. Tempted as I was to join the moshpit, networking called. While shortstraw. lit up the crowd and I felt the most punk I’ve felt in years, I walked on towards a networking event mixing construction, festivals, and sustainability peeps.

For years, ITGWO has led the way on festival sustainability: almost zero-waste, climate neutral (all scopes), and recognised as a best practice in the Dutch Council for Culture’s Cultuur Natuurlijk report we wrote a few years back. They put it best:

“Sustainability can sometimes be frustrating, but more often it is a major source of renewal and improvement. By being a frontrunner, we develop an extra drive to keep reinventing ourselves. As a result, the best people in the sector and forward-looking partners are eager to collaborate with ITGWO.”

This year, BAM joined that group of forward-looking partners. Together with Lab Vlieland, TBI, and others, we’re imagining climate neutral, circular and biobased construction sites and festivals. Because festivals and construction sites have more in common than you’d think. Both are temporary. Both require massive energy and logistics. Both leave a lasting footprint. One leaves behind music memories; the other leaves housing, energy systems, and hospitals. Both can and must become more sustainable.

Here’s the punk track listing of how we’re about to do this:

Diesel is so last decade

The hum of diesel generators is still the soundtrack to most festivals and building sites. At ITGWO, they stood idle. Ten thousand people, all bands and catering, powered by batteries, smart grids, and hydrogen. Not a drop of biodiesel needed. We know it works; we’ve operated dozens of zero emission (ZE) construction sites already. Now, we’re scaling up, which brings its own challenges. Such as a complete reimagining of how we think about electricity: local, sustainable, finite.

Heavy metal, zero emission

From bands backstage to beer for the crowd, festivals move a lot of things around. As do construction sites. At ITGWO, everything arrived ZE (obviously). Heavy plates for the festival floor were ferried over hundreds of kilometres without burning a drop of dinosaur juice. There’s a lot to learn about ZE logistics, as anyone driving an EV can confirm, but it’s hard to defend the need for fossil engines (on land). If you still want to burn fossils, you’ll soon need to plan carefully, ZE machines are becoming the norm.

The secret life of geotextiles

Temporary sites are material hogs: fences, roads, flooring, scaffolding. Traditionally, these mean plastics, steel, concrete: high-impact, polluting materials. There is a simple fix: more circular, more biobased materials that reuse and reduce impact, and sometimes even remove carbon from the atmosphere. We piloted just such materials on Vlieland. For instance, biobased geotextiles.

A geotextile separates layers of materials in the ground. We use it for temporary roads to ensure sand and asphalt don’t mix with the soil. Festivals use it to protect the parks and fields they transform into their temporary venue. Traditionally, geotextiles are made of fossil-based materials, which is undesirable because of climate impact and microplastics. Together with Joosten Group, BAM has developed a biobased alternative made of wood fibres. An added benefit of the material may be that after use, it can be left in the ground to enrich the soil, saving energy for removal of the typically single-use product.

Punk in safety gear

At the end of the day, at the networking, ideas and needs flowed as freely as the music. Suppliers, clients, and festival organisers all sharing, scheming, and dreaming. And then we danced. We were at a festival after all.

Secretly, that’s my dream: to merge the joy and openness of festivals with the scale and permanence of construction. So that a construction site isn’t just tolerated as a noisy, messy in-between stage towards your dream home or green neighbourhood. But celebrated as a place where the air gets cleaner, the soil healthier, and communities gather, as if for a festival, to witness progress.

I honestly believe that if we really commit, that future is closer than we think. Maybe only a few years away. This demands a revolution. But we’re all punks, so let’s turn up the amps!

— Jasper

One summer, decades ago, I was reading through whatever the English-language section of the Fnac off Gran Vía in Madrid had to offer. Ulysses, by James Joyce, this time. I sat down in the Retiro park expecting a day in Dublin, but instead was pulled into a rabbit hole and into a lifelong fascination with language. Joyce once mused, “I’d like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.”

His musing resonated with me deeply. While I taught English, my students were teaching me Spanish. And when we were lucky, we met in the middle, in perfect Spanglish, to discuss concepts that neither language fully captured. Hence, Ulysses to me, above anything else, became a book about language.

Then and there, I committed to learning a fourth natural human language. Ideally a difficult one, far from the Latin script that I’m comfortable with. I worked on Russian but stopped for obvious reasons. I dreamed about learning Arabic. Now, I would simply love to be able to read Le Monde. Learning another language is #1 on the list of 50 things I want to learn before I’m 50.

I say “human language” specifically, as life and learning are about many more languages and dialects than our mother tongue. Programming languages such as Python and HTML are an obvious example, but as I learned this summer, almost all of the 50 things I want to learn come down to learning another language.

Such as #3: to fix a Rubik’s Cube. The Rubik’s Cube is the ubiquitous puzzle that has been sold over 500 million times since its invention half a century ago. People can solve them in seconds, which made it all the more annoying to me that I had no idea how to fix a scrambled cube. I spent a good day on a Swedish campsite making sense of conflicting YouTube videos to figure out my own failproof approach. To do so (and write it down), I had to learn a simple language: R U R' U', L' U' L U.

Fixing a Rubik’s Cube is an exercise in recognizing patterns, applying an associated algorithm, and accepting that no matter how hard you try, even the world’s dullest computer can do this a gazillion times faster. “R U R' U'” is one such algorithm, shorthand for right turn clockwise, up turn clockwise, right turn counterclockwise, up turn counterclockwise. Each face and line of the cube has a letter and two directions: the syntax of this language.

Once I had recognized the Rubik’s Cube as a linguistic obstacle, I started seeing languages everywhere. The harmonica (#40) has its own language. For instance, 56 -56 56 -45 45 -45 45 34 -34 45 -34 45 -45 is part of the intro to Billy Joel’s Piano Man.

Music, of course, has its score and tabs as language. But as I become more proficient on guitar and play with others more, I’m learning these are too cumbersome to write down fully. Instead, much like someone from Andalusia merely mumbling suggestions of Spanish words that the C2-speaker intends to understand, songs are written in a language of single letters. (Example below of Snow Globes by Black Country, New Road, as we played it at this year’s Buitenkunst.)

My list of 50 things is full of languages. The Latin of the Dies Irae, the mystical connotations in Tarot, birdsong, yoga. Others are less straightforward, such as being able to read and respond to the physical sensations that allow an arrow to hit its target (#6: learning archery). Or the subtle nuances and accents needed to be able to buy second-hand men’s clothes (#33).

I’m not just learning skills; I’m decoding the many languages needed in life. ChatGPT suggested putting them in a visual map:

What excites me now is not just learning all these languages, but seeing how they collide. Yoga and running speak to each other. Magic tricks slip into Tarot. Guitar shapes harmonica. Each new language expands the grammar of how I move through life, setting me free from tradition. In this, I can learn a lot from Joyce. Not perfection, but invention. Not mastery, but fluency, in all of life’s languages.

Hasta la proxima,
Jasper

It’s tempting to read Fukuzawa through the lens of hindsight — to weigh his views on equality, individualism, and Westernisation against later chapters of Japan’s history. But I won’t. He died long before Japan’s global entanglements led to wars he would never have championed. The transition he documents is one of opening — of turning toward opportunity through curiosity, connection, and personal responsibility. That’s the kind of “opening up” I want to talk about today.

Institutional

Next month marks my three-year anniversary at BAM. In that time, I’ve seen the company change in real and measurable ways. After being named by climate advocacy group Milieudefensie as one of the Netherlands’ major polluters, our initial focus was clear: reduce our direct environmental impact. And with success. Operational emissions have been cut by double-digit percentages year on year. At the same time, we’ve increased our positive contribution to the world around us — often through decisions made within our own walls, using the tools of existing hierarchies and systems.

But even our boldest internal actions barely scratch the surface of our total impact. While we’ve reduced tens of kilotons of emissions annually, our indirect footprint — from materials, mobility, and beyond — is measured in megatons. Addressing that demands something else entirely: a different kind of organisation.

Yes, we’ve always worked with clients and suppliers — we’re a contractor, after all. But over the past year, something has shifted. We’ve found a new confidence in collaboration, and we’re beginning to open up. This week, for example, we announced a multi-year partnership with Into The Great Wide Open, a pioneering sustainability-focused festival. It’s just one sign that we’re reaching beyond our sector — seeking out ideas, energy, and alliances in unexpected places.

Professionally, I now spend much of my time not only with clients and colleagues, but also with competitors and civil society — building the conditions for shared success, not just market share. Moving forward means rethinking hierarchies, reimagining collaboration, and taking open innovation seriously. If we want to thrive in the years ahead, we must open our gates — to the world, to each other, and to what none of us can achieve alone.

Personal

In my early years at BAM, the focus on reducing our environmental footprint gave me a kind of clarity I hadn’t felt in a long time. My academic background had trained me to stay informed about everything — politics, culture, global affairs. Working internationally only reinforced that habit: my mental bandwidth was always full. But at BAM, something shifted. For the first time in years, I allowed my curiosity to narrow. I became radically focused — on asphalt, concrete, heavy machinery. Luckily, there was plenty to learn.

In parallel, I started a private challenge: to learn 50 new things before I turn 50. Running, guitar, magic tricks — isolated skills requiring more dedication than reflection. But now that I know the ABCs of construction and can fumble through More Than Words, something deeper is resurfacing. My studies are kicking back in. I’ve begun to see the harder things I still want to learn: how to age into fatherhood and partnership. How to make and keep close friends. How to lead anyone, anywhere.

None of these are automatic. For instance, I hadn’t grasped the danger of the resurgent patriarchy until I watched Adolescence and listened to therapists unpack the appeal of the Manosphere. I joined a leadership programme, confident in my “why,” “what,” and “how” — only to discover I still had little idea how to put them into practice. So I’ve started opening up: experimenting, showing up, saying yes to committees, platforms, and real conversations — not just with people like me, but across difference. If I want to be part of a more open world, I need to become a more open person.

Societal

Fukuzawa wrote about individual and institutional awakening but what makes his story enduring is that it’s ultimately about a society learning to open up. And that’s the level where I think we’re most in need of courage today. The personal and professional forms of openness I’ve described only matter if they contribute to something larger.

As I was reducing emissions and learning bar chords, the world around me seemed to be shutting down — borders closing, climate action defunded, inclusive values dismissed. As a progressive, I often hope this is the last gasp of an outdated worldview. But as a contrarian, I know better. Both progressives and conservatives are dreamers. Some long for a romanticised past. I long for an imagined future.

Part of my own opening up has been learning to truly listen to conservative thinkers — not to agree, but to understand. Where I see the past as a source of exclusion, crisis, and inequality, others see a time of cohesion, stability, and meaning. We can’t ignore that. Somewhere along the way, progressives made the future sound like a burden — all sacrifices, rules, and guilt. We forgot to make it seductive.

If we want people to move forward, we’ll need more than new policies. We’ll need new stories. That will require imagination, discomfort, and some very different thinking. We may even need to borrow a trick or two from conservatives — especially when it comes to designing a future people actually want to live in.

The Meiji-era reforms were controversial. But Fukuzawa saw in them the seeds of a society that could honour tradition while embracing modernity. His memoir is, in that sense, a quiet manifesto — a record of opportunity unlocked by openness. That’s the spirit we need today.

I believe the coming years will demand more than conviction. They will demand complexity. The future won’t be idealistic in one direction. It will be plural, messy, even contradictory. And that’s what makes it worth striving for. It also makes it a hard sell.

I’m energised by my employer’s turn to curiosity, collaboration, and responsibility. It’s worth noting that our sustainable progress has gone hand in hand with strong financial performance — proof that doing good and doing well aren’t at odds. Privately, it’s been a relief to shift from trying to know everything, to knowing some things deeply. Now, I want to build on those experiences to help create a world where I can once again visit Moscow in May, fly across the Atlantic for work on DEI, and take pride in my country’s progressive example to the world.

A world where we’ve tackled climate change and built fairer, more curious societies. A world that’s open. Not just in theory, but in practice. A future more attractive — and more possible — than any past we can remember.

Until then,
All the best,
Jasper

Meryle Secrest writes about Frank Lloyd Wright, the beloved architect, in her biography:

“He was an early riser and often at work long before breakfast. He often said his best ideas came on the farm, in the fields and woods or beside the stream banks. (…) He worked with enormous patience and concentration, giving extreme attention to detail, and the design inevitably went through innumerable revisions while he eliminated what might be extraneous, discordant or capricious, Howe wrote. Such periods of concentrated effort would be interspersed with intervals at the keyboard playing Bach, Beethoven or his own improvisations. Or he might pull out a new group of Japanese prints to be admired at extravagant length. No matter how chaotic or tempestuous his personal life might be, Wright always stepped into the studio a happy man. He was agile on his feet and often hummed snatches of favorite tunes, quoted the punchline of a familiar joke, or did a make-believe juggling act indicating that he was 'keeping all the balls in the air.'”

One of the wonders of doing many things at once is that separate actions inevitably get entangled, ideas intertwine. Watching Netflix’s AVICII - I'm Tim documentary while reading about Wright, I couldn’t help but see parallels.

The documentary traces Tim Bergling’s life and extraordinary rise to fame as a DJ and producer, all the while foreshadowing his untimely death at 27. Footage of Bergling in his mother’s womb was especially poignant. When Netflix is good, they’re great at the emotions game.

I came to AVICII late. His stardom coincided with years when I was too distracted with life to notice mega trends. I discovered his music when Buitenkunst staged a workshop and show about his work—only then realizing so many songs I love were his. By that time, Tim was already gone.

The high point of the documentary, to me, is how Wake Me Up came to life. Together with guitarist Mike Einziger and vocalist Aloe Blacc, Bergling seems to pull the song out of thin air—as if it had always existed. I remember searching for the original believing it to be a cover of a beloved classic. Timeless art.

Seventy-eight years earlier, Frank Lloyd Wright also conjured a masterwork from thin air, albeit in architecture and not music, when he designed Fallingwater. Secrest writes:

“It was one of the most famous moments in architecture and one of the best documented—it was witnessed by Blaine Drake, Edgar Tafel, Bob Mosher, John Lautner, Jack Howe and others as well as Caraway—tantamount to being at Mozart's elbow the day he dipped his quill pen into the ink and began to compose The Magic Flute. They were waiting to see how this champion juggler, who had kept so many balls up in the air, would retrieve this one. Wright calmly began work, and, Caraway continued, "took three sheets of tracing paper in different colors, one for the basement, another for the first floor and a third for the second floor and sketched it to a scale of one-eighth inch equals one foot. We were all standing around him. I'd say it took two hours." Section, elevation and details: they were all pouring onto the paper, and pencils were being worn down and broken off as fast as they could be sharpened. As he worked, he kept up a running commentary: "The rock on which E.J. sits will be the hearth, coming right out of the floor, the fire burning just behind it. The warming kettle will fit into the wall here. . . . Steam will permeate the atmosphere. You'll hear the hiss. . . ." He had even decided upon the name of the house; it was a tour de force.”

A tour de force, imagined in an instant. I often use an image of Fallingwater in presentations, and it never fails to draw gasps. It’s timeless.

Frank Lloyd Wright lived to be 91; AVICII passed away at 27. They worked in different disciplines, in different cultures, in different times—yet their approach to art feels strikingly similar. Secrest again:

“Very creative men are aesthetically sensitive to a degree often labelled, in Western society, as "feminine," Storr writes, and are able to make contact with the intuitive and irrational side of themselves, the wellspring of their dreams, visions and poetic fantasies. Along with an appreciation for design and form goes a preference for complexity, asymmetry and incompleteness, rather than whatever is simple, straightforward and completed; in fact, the idea of a problem to resolve seems to be essential since it acts as a stimulus to their creativity. They are intensely motivated, endlessly curious people, with a breadth of interests; great talkers, impulsive and expansive by nature. They have the ability to work over long periods toward complex goals with great tenacity of purpose.”

Maybe none of us will sketch a masterpiece in two hours or write a timeless anthem in an afternoon. But by absorbing the works of those who did, by playing their music, admiring their buildings, and reading their words, we might learn to see the world as they did—if only for a moment. And maybe, one day, when the moment comes, pull something worthwhile out of thin air as well.

— Jasper

Lafayette earned that honor the hard way—by showing up when it mattered most. Born (hold on!) Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette in 1757, he was orphaned young but inherited unimaginable wealth and married into even more. Instead of a life comfortably navigating the intrigues of the Bourbon court, at 19, he defied orders, bought a ship, and crossed the Atlantic to fight in a revolution that wasn’t his. Where most sought glory, Lafayette brought something rarer—commitment. He fought at Brandywine, wintered at Valley Forge, and played a key role in securing French support, which ultimately turned the tide against the British. It’s no surprise that George Washington became a lifelong friend—Lafayette earned it.

I recently finished Mike Duncan’s biography of Lafayette (four stars), Hero of Two Worlds. As with any hero, it’s the contradictions that make Lafayette interesting. For all his devotion to liberty, Lafayette never fully reconciled the fact that the America he loved was built on slavery. He owned enslaved people himself—he was no saint—but the injustice bothered him deeply. Unlike many of his peers, he didn’t just wring his hands about it. He lobbied his powerful friends (with limited success), pushed for emancipation schemes, and even attempted to fund a colony where formerly enslaved people could live freely. It cost him politically, especially among America’s slaveholding elite, but Lafayette’s belief in liberty wasn’t selective—it was unusually consistent.

After America, Lafayette tried to bring those ideals home. His early efforts in the French Revolution echoed the hopeful optimism of 1776, but France was not America. In Europe, the fight for liberty ended in the cold efficiency of the guillotine. Lafayette fell from grace, spent years imprisoned in Austria, and returned to a country where the revolution had devoured many of its children. Still, he never abandoned the cause. When he returned to the United States in 1824 for a grand tour, he found something remarkable: the nation he had helped to create had not forgotten him. Across all 24 states, crowds lined the streets to cheer the last living general of the Revolution. They named cities and towns after him. They still do.

If you want the world’s gratitude, there are two ways to get it. One is to force it down people’s throat—a strategy that in Lafayette’s time often led to either a swift beheading or the loss of an empire. The other is to stand for something that is larger than you. Lafayette chose the latter. His legacy isn’t perfect—whose is?—but by showing up, by believing in liberty even when it was inconvenient, and by never quite giving up, he secured something more lasting than power. Long after his time, the world still remembers his name. And, in America at least, you’re probably never far from a reminder.

— Jasper

Until this year, few things stressed me out more than lighting a match in anything but perfect conditions. (Perfect being indoors, well-rested, and armed with a brand-new pack of matches.) My experience was, well, nonexistent. On autopilot, I’d see the wood crack, the fire die out, and match after match fail to light a candle or burner.

One can get by easily without matches—using a lighter or, in my case, relying on the abundant electricity I’m typically surrounded by. But there’s always the campsite. And the possibility of an apocalypse. So, as number 24 on my list of things to learn, I settled on “light a match in adverse situations.”

Ever since reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, her vivid description of Camille Desmoulins calling Parisians to arms has stuck with me. The scene outside the Café de Foy, when Desmoulins jumpstarts the revolution by climbing on a table, has impressed on me the feeling that I should always be ready to start a revolution. Any stage I step onto, any Monday morning meeting I join, any rainy afternoon in a city center could offer a moment to light the spark of a just revolution—for climate justice and against rampant inequality. And to light a spark, I might have to light a match.

But how does one learn something that seems, by all accounts, easy? There are no courses on lighting matches, and most online tutorials focus on survival-grade matches designed to work in extreme conditions.

Turns out, the trick to lighting a match—wind or no wind—is the unambiguous act of doing it. Schwammm. No doubt. No hesitation. Just a single-minded purpose: light that match.

Last year I devoured Marie Arana’s biography, Bolívar: American Liberator. Simón Bolívar was ready when revolution called. Yet through Arana’s magnificent account, I learned that Bolívar’s path was anything but easy. He floundered and struggled to keep the spark of revolution alive, learning in hard, painful ways what it takes to liberate a continent. There was no template, no earlier experience to build upon: France’s revolution had failed, the United States’ liberated only its elites at the expense of millions of enslaved people, and even Haiti’s remarkable independence came at a terrible cost.

Bolívar succeeded because he went all in—riding harder, fighting braver, and thinking sharper than anyone else. More than experience, his revolution required unambiguous action.

A bit like lighting a match.

So, in 2024, I approached every candle like the Bastille, every campsite coffee like Boyacá—the first decisive battle in Bolívar’s campaigns. And it worked. Wind, exhaustion, distractions—nothing stops me now from starting a fire with a match. When revolution calls, I’ll be ready to light the spark.

In the new year, what is the smallest skill you’ll learn to be a true revolutionary when duty calls? I think I’ll focus on number 8: to whistle on my fingers.

The “50-things” list started a few years ago, when I turned forty and wrapped up my 15-year career plan. I needed a new project. Something daunting and appealing. So, I channelled my irritation with being bad at a million things and my love for long-term goals into a list of self-improvements. Then I let it marinate in overconfidence for a while.

After two years of procrastination, I decided it was time to knock out a couple of easy wins. I started to memorize the first 20 Roman emperors (number 42) and pulled out my running shoes. With a few months of training, I figured, I’d bag three victories: a marathon under four hours, Roman bragging rights, and a smug sense of accomplishment. I signed up for the Amsterdam marathon and found a trustworthy-looking training program online.

For a while, it worked. I clocked 1,100 kilometres of runs. Then, one Friday, one of my legs hurt so badly I couldn’t finish a session. Two days later, I ran a race in record time—and could barely walk afterward. It was September. The marathon was a month away. A physio told me I could probably still do it if I rested. I took a six day rest. Then, I ran a half marathon (also record time) and could not walk afterward.

The physio wasn’t amused. They found a muscle tear and gave me the bad news: Amsterdam was off.

Shit.

After a month of rest and some yoga (number 47, “Start a yoga routine”), I tried running again. A massage therapist—our household’s go-to for injuries—pointed out my legs are different lengths. Five millimetres, but still enough to warrant a special sole for my shoes. Meanwhile, the physio threatened dry needling if I again didn’t stick to their plan to get me back on my feet. My overconfidence had by now killed my marathon-dreams and cost me hundreds of euros in specialists’ fees, but I convinced myself I had just been unlucky.

Then came the running analysis.

My physio was curious to see how I ran. The app he hooked me up to didn’t mince words: everything about how I ran was a disaster. My posture? Bad. My rhythm? Terrible. My movements? Messy. Every score was in the red zone. I didn’t even do this badly in my first driving exam. The physio, now my running coach, spelled it out for me: the injury wasn’t bad luck. It was the inevitable result of me being a fundamentally terrible runner.

Since then, I’ve been relearning how to run. I bought a book on running technique. My YouTube algorithm has pivoted from magic tricks and Ed Sheeran guitar tutorials to a relentless feed of running advice. On Strava, I meticulously study my cadence and heart-rate zones. Conditionally, I’m back to where I was a year ago. Minus the bravado. I also still mess up the order of the emperors.

What I’m amazed by is how mouldable the body still is after four decades. This is probably the greatest gift the “50-things” plan has given me so far. E.g. I’ve built from scratch the muscle memory to find every fret on my guitar and make some bar chords sound acceptable. I can now control multiple cards while shuffling a deck. I guess I can learn how to run again.

The 2024 running debacle has turned into more than ticking off number 43; it has become a study in retraining the body and the mind. I used to believe that self-improvement meant adding more. More runs, more speed, more grit. But learning is as much about unlearning, forgetting and breaking habits that have developed over a lifetime. Instead of ‘fun’ or ‘aspirational,’ the “50-things” plan may evolve into a reckoning with how much I’ve been getting wrong, and whether I can fix it. Learning to run again is only the start.

Have a great Christmas and Hannukah and overall wonderful days,
— Jasper

The essence of this lesson is that regardless of good intentions, engaging in development activities without careful design involving all beneficiaries is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities.

Rich countries such as The Netherlands are currently in the midst of what may be the largest development programmes in decades, possible centuries. We’re spending tens of billions of euros on updating our energy infrastructure, climate adaptation, and upgrading our infrastructure for a carbon-free future. All this money, if thoughtlessly spent, will add to the growing inequality between countries, communities, and people. Joy’s lessons, summarised in her farewell lecture, are more relevant than ever.

What, you may ask, has gender to do with energy and vice versa?

Everything we do uses energy. And everything we do is shaped by our culture and social norms. Gender comes with a lot of social expectations. Who’s supposed to cook a meal? Who can start a business? Who controls the household car?

Gender disparities persist in access to and control over energy resources and technologies. This is true in the global South as much as the ‘developed’ world. Even in the European Union, women are more likely than men to live in households that cannot afford adequate heating or cooling due to energy costs. Women only take up a small percentage of leadership positions within the energy sector.

Gender inequalities also intersect with other forms of social, economic, and cultural disparities, exacerbating the challenges faced by marginalised groups in societies everywhere.

When it comes to the energy transition we’re in right now, this begs the question who is favoured in the transition. Does clean and affordable energy go first and foremost to disadvantaged communities and SMEs, or is priority given to large corporations and EV charging stations? And then, how do these choices affect the equality between people?

The solution, I learned from Joy, is straightforward: work with all intended beneficiaries of an energy development programme. Spend time to reach out to harder to reach individuals. Recognise that every community is different and will have different dimensions of inequality. Then, support the community to find a solution that may reduce the inequality between its members.

People everywhere find this hard. And it’s harder still when the pressures you’re on to deliver a project are paramount. As they are right now when it comes to transitioning to clean energy. If you want to go fast, go alone, etcetera. Yet we may wonder what we’ll lose if we design our future infrastructure (whether its power lines or levees) thoughtlessly.

Which is why it saddened me to watch Joy’s farewell lecture. Her lessons, and the engaging way she shared them, continue to be pivotal for our world moving forward. As her student, I realise that it’s now up to me to continue to put her lessons into practice. And I may not have been doing enough of that, recently. Fortunately, Professor Clancy has had many students and as she points out in her lecture, many of them have been more successful in addressing inequalities through their work.

Professor Clancy also taught me curiosity. When I joined her minor As the world turns, she challenged us to learn everything we could about the world around us. As I wrote before:

our teacher handed out photocopied maps of the world. Then she started asking questions. It started simple enough: Where is Paraguay? Pakistan? Equatorial Guinea? Then it got tougher: Which countries are not democracies? Which are the biggest oil exporters? Which have a female head of state?

I’m not ashamed to say my performance on this test was abysmal, like that of most of my class. That was the point my teacher was trying to make. After the test, the teacher, Joy Clancy, posed a simple question: How can you be a part of the development of the world if you don’t know about the world?

In that sense, Joy taught me to read books; the importance of reading books. There is no greater gift.

Allow me to end on an anecdote. There is one class Joy taught I will never forget. The first time I joined the introductory course of As the world turns, it was taught on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in four hour blocks. 2-6pm. I remember the timing well, as the fourth or fifth class was on Tuesday 11 September 2001. In the break, we watched the towers burn. After it, I remember Joy said everything we’d learned would be different now. The world had literally turned.

Thanks Professor Clancy!

And thank you all for joining me,
All the best,

Jasper

This week, I embarked on reading The Power Broker. As a devoted fan of its author and of grand biographies, I had absorbed gigabytes of information about the book beforehand. It felt like the perfect moment to delve in, especially since 99pi is hosting a year-long book club on it. In the inaugural episode, they interviewed the author, Robert Caro, providing an excellent preamble to the book and its remarkable author. Caro, eloquently as ever, in the podcast:

"If you're going to write about political power—the kind that shapes people's lives—you can't just focus on those wielding power. You must also explore the impact on those subjected to it, whether for good, like with Lyndon Johnson's legislative achievements, or for ill, like displacing communities."

As Tolstoy, of the other book-you-don’t-have-to-read-to-have-read-it would concur: history isn’t just about the big names, it’s mostly about the small men and women that are forgotten by it.

Two of my favorite Dutch activist artists have collaborated on a podcast addressing extinction with first-aid for extinction. While promoting a Dutch-language podcast to an international audience isn't ideal, I want to highlight a statement from episode 3 made by sociologist Reint Jan Renes regarding climate action: Once you commit, you'll inevitably fall short.

Pause. Rephrase. Once you commit to climate action, you'll always fall short.

Increasingly, I feel this shortfall. Perhaps you do too. There's always more to do, another action to take, yet it never feels like enough. I’ve learned to leverage the wisdom of the people around me, I’ve started working for a consequential company, and lately I’ve been interviewing people to understand how I can further scale my actions, but it still feels inadequate. I have contributed exactly a naught degrees decrease in global temperatures. Yet, if I just do one more thing...

The Power Broker delves into Robert Moses's influence on shaping New York City. Moses was a dominant figure in the city's urban planning for a significant part of the 20th century. The book explores his ascent to power, his impact on infrastructure, and his controversial methods, offering a nuanced view of power and politics. While I've only read the introduction so far, it's already evident of Caro's biographical prowess.

Similar to his later work on Lyndon Johnson, Caro doesn't solely rely on well-thumped written sources. Instead, he meticulously interviews as many individuals connected to his subject as possible and scrutinizes the minutest details. Consequently, he publishes an average of only about 100 pages per year, but each page is profoundly impactful.

"In historical events, great men—so-called—are but labels that merely name an event, with minimal connection to the event itself."

This quote isn't from Caro, but from Tolstoy. Tolstoy, who depicted Napoleon's march on Moscow without ever elevating Napoleon beyond a distant figure. While Lyndon Johnson and, presumably, Robert Moses take center stage in Caro's biographies, I can't shake the feeling of a deeper connection here.

Whether as a soldier at Borodino or a family displaced by an express way, you're not just witnessing history; you're shaping it as much as those issuing orders. Perhaps, as mere cogs in the climate action wheel, we're doing the same. And perhaps one day, a biographer will interview us, to add a footnote to the story of our times

Wishing you a fulfilling week; you're doing more than enough!

— Jasper

This is how Beckham shaped my youth: hardly. Sure, I knew who David Beckham was, but having little interest in soccer, what I most cared about was his hair. He also married my least favorite Spice Girl. Good for him.

The documentary is wonderfully made and a pleasant watch. I never knew how big Beckham was, and I’m glad he’s doing as well as he’s doing in the documentary. I’m happy to edit him into my personal history retrospectively, as if he’d always been there. But it’s easy to like a millionaire living in apparent perfect harmony with his family, especially with such a wardrobe.

Moving from coincidence to striking, another recent documentary about an icon from my youth is quite another story.

Robbie Williams is about Robbie Williams, and Robbie Williams I did know who he was. His music and his being shaped a significant part of my early twenties. I think about Robbie Williams more often than I think about the Roman Empire.

I remember one night when we were sailing in a small boat on the Amsterdam Rhine Canal. I must have brought or someone must have left the Live at Knebworth album on the boat. Dark outside, light in the boat, music playing loud, we completely missed the inland vessel on a collision course until it blew its horn and burst the magic of feeling all alone in the world. I run past the spot where this happened weekly now and remember it fondly.

I’ve modeled many of my dreams on Mr. Williams. There have been few instances before I went on stage that I didn’t think of him at Glastonbury or during the Close Encounters tour. I wish I could entertain you the way he could. But then I only do business presentations, and one thousand has been my biggest crowd. One percent Robbie. Not even. I loved the way he dressed, the way he moved, his piercing glance, the fireworks, the ease with which he made conversation, his humor.

The documentary about Robbie Williams doesn’t come close to Beckham. We’re confronted with a terrible-looking Williams in bed in his underwear. Depressed, destroyed by the tabloid press, disillusioned. It’s no fun to see your heroes this way, but that’s probably part of your childhood becoming history. It’s relatable. I wouldn’t say I feel closer to my adolescent hero now, but I certainly find him as much entertaining.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy adolescent heroes are alike; each unhappy hero is unhappy in its way. And that own way merits a thick book, it being endlessly entertaining.

The best scene, to me, by far, is when Robbie Williams leaves on another tour but now he’s the Robbie Williams of today. His daughter cries wholeheartedly upon his goodbye. My kids have cried that way. Age has brought us closer together. We know we’ll always be blessed with love.

Then, turning the striking into a pattern, the NYT labeled Mr. Brightside a generational anthem.

The Killers (authors of the song) picked up the baton where Williams dropped it. Stadium rock mixed with glam and indie, accessible and acceptable. A perfect song for a time we’d put songs on other people’s iPods as little mementos of time well spent.

Apparently, people love playing it at weddings nowadays.

“For brides and grooms in their 30s, “Mr. Brightside” would have been a bop of their formative years — a time when late nights were spent chugging Four Loko, sweating through skintight American Apparel disco pants, and making out with the wrong person (or knowing that, actually, you were the wrong person).”

It’s a bit odd to play Mr. Brightside at weddings, given the topic of the song and all. But we had a Klezmer band, so what do I know. We’d been doing just fine.

While I listened to Robbie Williams on a sailboat, I most vividly remember listening to The Killers in a tiny park in or near the Miraflores neighborhood in Lima. High summer in a deserted park. Gotta gotta be down, because I wanted it all.

Finally, to cement the pattern, my parents brought a box full of memories over the weekend. It had a photo of the time when I listened to Robbie Williams, sailing the Dutch canals. I look so young. And do we know, the places where we go, when we’re grey and old?

Have a great week, we’ll be in touch soon!

— Jasper

For the past week, Extinction Rebellion has been daily blocking one of the highways in the Netherlands, the A12, which provides access to our constitutional capital. Thousands have been arrested in a protest against the 37.5 billion euros in benefits that our government annually awards to fossil companies. On Tuesday, climate change furthered their cause by blocking another highway, the A2, with torrential rains and flooding. It's uncertain how much water was arrested.

That said, it might be in poor taste to make jokes about water when flash floods have killed thousands in Debra, Libya, this week.

Some media outlets, albeit halfheartedly, attempted to shift the blame for Libya away from climate change (and thus industrial countries), arguing that the dams that burst hadn't been adequately maintained in the war-torn country. The war in Libya, after all, is the result of the country’s own actions and solely their responsibility (a decision we made in 2011 to protect oil interests in the country), so we can absolve ourselves of responsibility. Blah blah. The floods are an example of climate change, and we bear the blame.

Moreover, it's not as if stable democracies always maintain their dams properly.

This week, the renowned Stockholm Resilience Centre published research findings indicating that we have exceeded six out of nine planetary boundaries, placing us "well outside the safe operating space for humanity."

What surprises me the most is the fact that we haven't crossed three of these boundaries. Ozone depletion, a problem we addressed a generation ago, is now within safe limits, serving as a reminder that if we commit to it, we can rectify all these boundaries. "Atmospheric aerosol loading" is a complex term for air pollution. Lastly, ocean acidification is also still within acceptable boundaries. Fortunately, I’d add, as historical changes in ocean acidification have wreaked havoc on global ecosystems, and it's always the dominant species that suffer the most.

We know what needs to be done, and 37.5 billion euros would be more than just a drop in the bucket.

A photographer I'm connected to, thanks to our participation in the same workshop a decade ago, posted an image that speaks volumes. It's a picture taken at the A12 XR protests. I tried to obtain a license for it but couldn't, so I had an AI replicate it. You can view the (undoubtedly superior) original here.

In this black and white photograph, an activist faces a powerful deluge of water from a water cannon, yet they remain resolute. There are at least four narratives within the image, in addition to the one it initially portrays. Thank you, Daphne, for sharing it.

The sun is setting on our little garden. A fat spider has made its web in an opportunistic location. Undisturbed, the bumblebees snack on. There are even butterflies, the white kind we call cabbage whites. A waft of sweet perfume blows. It will be a few months before I sit here again, likely. I wonder what the world looks like then,

Have a good weekend, whether you’re protesting or just worried,

— Jasper

This summer, J went to a theatre camp, and on the final Friday, they performed a show they had crafted together. Their performance centered on the idea that even the smallest among us can make a significant impact. And indeed, they did just that. It's remarkable how a diverse group of young talents can accomplish so much in just a few hours when they're having fun.

My favorite part was when the actors spoke about the fears they once had, but had overcome or exchanged for new fears. In the dark, holding blue lights, theatrically, J spoke about how instead of being afraid, he now confronts the Gruffalo in his dreams and makes fun of him. I think it’s exceptionally brave, to stand in front of a crowd of strangers and talk about your fears.

J’s been on stage repeatedly this summer. At Buitenkunst, he performed a dreamy star dance about black holes. Also, at the week’s closing party, he jammed with the band for over an hour. He joined me at a campfire with his guitar — a first for both of us.

I’m at the point where I’m learning more from my kids than I can ever teach them. It came sooner than I expected. The main lesson is that when you do something, you do it outright. Kids (at least my kids) are not reserved when offered a genuine opportunity. They embrace it, with all its challenges. I also want to live that way.

Thus, this summer, I found myself suspended from a zipline in a treetop adventure park, with my son dancing ahead of me. As a family, on a cloudy day, we ventured into the ocean, surrounded by a breathtaking multitude of sardines, attempting to catch them with our bare hands. And for R's birthday, he orchestrated a disco party beneath the canopy of a 400-year-old oak tree, with R contributing his disco lights. (he always brings his disco lights).

The transition researchers at DRIFT in Rotterdam present transitions in an X-curve. Along the horizontal axis, one line gently swoops up. This is the new reality emerging throughout the transition. On the same axis, another line dives down. This, obviously, is the old reality. They cross in the middle, creating an X. (See the model here.)

The idea behind the X is that while we spent a lot of effort on experimentation and acceleration to create the new, we need to also work on destabilizing the old. For instance, the speed at which we're adopting EVs in the Netherlands means that soon there will be a lot of electric vehicles. However, at the same time, we need to get rid of cars with combustion engines, or we'll not complete the transition. One is an act of creation, the other of destruction. We need both.

Right in the middle of the X-curve is the point where creation and destruction meet. The point is labeled "chaos" by the researchers. This is the moment where an old system is almost undoubtedly on the way out, while the new system isn't fully formed yet. Historically, such moments are called The French Revolution, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Civil Rights Movement. Recently, they tend to carry brand names: Kodak, Napster, Blockbuster.

The X-curve is a neat model and the above examples hint at an inevitability of transitions. Alas, the moment of chaos can also reverse the transition. Just remember Tiananmen Square, most of the Arab Spring, or the Dot-Com Bubble and Google Glass. (Do you remember Google Glass!) 

Back at work, our sustainability efforts are moving along the X-curve valiantly. We are steadfastly progressing toward our ambitious goals, with a heightened sense of urgency, enthusiasm, and concerted efforts. Following a summer marked by unprecedented weather disruptions in many of our holidays, the perceived stakes are higher than ever.

The change in just one year is unmistakable. What was once a brief mention of sustainability in our quarterly introduction meetings for new colleagues has evolved into a spirited and comprehensive debate, which I had to curtail last week to accommodate other pressing matters. During a meeting with our design leads later that same day, I was met with well-informed inquiries about carbon emissions intricacies, as our team seeks ways to infuse their work with greater meaning. While last year, when we presented our sustainable machines to the general public in Rotterdam people were surprised, this year they expected it of a company our size and status.

All my career, I’ve worked on transitions, experimenting, accelerating good ideas. Now, in the middle of my career, I find myself in the middle of the sustainability transition in a company that’s in the thick of it. We’re at the point of chaos and we don’t want to turn back. It's a genuine opportunity, and I'm determined to tackle it with the same wholehearted enthusiasm I've learned from my children. It’s warranted. I may start bringing the disco lights to work.

Have a wonderful chaos,

— Jasper

More and more and more (I don’t know where we’re going to). — Captain Hollywood Project

Last week marked my third visit to Buitenkunst, the art camp where I bravely sung Beyoncé and Bruno Mars tunes previously. This year, our week coincided with a relentless 90mm of rainfall, turning the grounds into the muddy mess that reminded me of my youthful festival days. Amidst the rain, I indulged in a morning rave, played a tango, and explored various forms of protest.

Let's start with the morning rave. It had been ages (possibly decades) since I last attended a rave at any time of day, let alone a morning one. The concept is quite simple: a rave without alcohol or drugs, guided by an enthusiastic facilitator who insists you keep moving. Our dance leader, Lodewijk van Dijk, a dancer and performer with the mantra "go hard or go home," took charge. For two hours, along with fifty strangers, I danced with an intensity that surpassed any previous experience, fueled by Ki/Ki's recorded techno set. There was no rest, no break, and certainly no going home. Our collective energy turned the tent into a sauna, our sweat-filled mist emulating smoke machines. It was an enchanting, transformative encounter. My heart rate raced at 155 bpm, just a touch below the music's tempo. The promise of a high was delivered, and it surpassed any high from my previous muddy festival experiences.

Techno stands as a pinnacle of human development, merging the industrial and post-industrial vibes of Detroit with Berlin's moody club scene and complex history. Unlike some other electronic genres, techno, I believe, isn't hedonistic. Instead, it champions inclusivity, unity, and resistance to mainstream norms. Check out 99pi's podcast on how techno united Berlin before politics did (“Tanz tanz revolution.” You’ll have to Google it as somehow Substack refuses to add links). Despite its underground nature, the genre holds considerable sway. As a counter to our consumer-driven society, it might just hold the key to our redemption.

At Buitenkunst, every day, facilitators present their creative plans for the day ahead. The camp offers programs in visual arts, theater, dance, music, and creative writing, led by artists and professionals. Occasionally, they collaborate across disciplines for workshops that transcend genres. In the evenings, some workshops' participants showcase their work, making those nights the highlight of the week for me. Each day's end turns into a mini-festival, welcoming kids as well. The anticipation of the unknown makes it even more exciting.

I had a few goals in mind for my time at Buitenkunst. One of them was playing guitar during an evening show. Chance had it that, on Thursday, three facilitators joined forces to interpret a tango song. With a group of 160 dancers, singers, and musicians, we brought Erwin Schrott's "Rojotango" to life. I played the guitar, despite it being a couple of notches above my current skill level. Thanks to the assistance of my fellow guitarists, I managed quite well (minus a few tricky Aø and B7(d9) chords). Orchestrated by music teacher Jesse Brouwer, choreographed by dance instructor Johanna Sauër, and directed by singing facilitator Isabel Pronk, the performance took center stage that night, and I cherished every moment of it.

On another day, in the theater department, we immersed ourselves in exploring different forms of protest and applying them to minor causes within the camp. We playfully "abducted" the voluntary donation box for the freezers, staged a peaceful sit-in against “overpriced” (ten euro) festival shirts (curse you, capitalism!), and disrupted theatrical elections through silent protests, counter campaigns, and even a streaking incident.

Naturally, such activities sparked discussions about our responsibility to combat injustice and advocate for a sustainable planet. Younger participants voiced doubts about bringing children into a world in crisis, while we older folks justified expanding our families in a crowded world. I faced several inquiries about my choice to work for a major polluter and the role protesters have in keeping such a company focused.

More than in previous years, these questions lingered in my mind throughout the week. Balancing enjoyment with the urgent need for action weighed on me. Can we have fun amidst such pressing tasks? Is there room for art as we fight to save the Earth? Will our efforts be enough to allow guilt-free dancing and music-making in my lifetime?

By Friday, I was utterly drained. Opting out of the scheduled program, I went for a run through the forest surrounding the camp. Inspired, I listened to a techno set. The forest houses a radio telescope, complete with a radiation exclusion zone. I've jogged through this forest countless times before, while editing De Tegentijd or clearing my mind, but this was a novel experience. Along the winding paths, I encountered deer and the telescope's discs, all while keeping pace with the beat. As industrial as the music was, it perfectly synced with the tranquil industriousness of the trees, ferns, and fungi.

I believe that if we ever send another compilation of human achievements into space, it should feature a techno set instead of the likes of Beethoven, Bach (on Voyager) or Chuck Berry (New Horizons). This choice would instantly convey our technological and cultural progress to extraterrestrial beings, along with our potential to surmount our challenge ahead. Having undoubtedly faced their own reckoning with rapid technological advancement and ecological turmoil, the aliens would appreciate the significance of techno. By listening, they could gauge if our culture possesses the strength to navigate the upcoming decades. Our response now will determine whether we're on target. These beings will possess the answers to the questions that consumed me all week. And based on that, they can decide whether to initiate contact or await the emergence of the next intelligent species on Earth. More and more and more.

Wishing you a fantastic summer (if you're in the northern hemisphere),

— Jasper

The committee was initiated by the Council for Culture, a group of witty individuals advising the government on all matters related to art and creativity. Our mandate was crystal clear: provide recommendations to make culture and the creative industries more ecologically sustainable. For months, I found myself surrounded by a team of self-proclaimed experts locked in a room, interviewing each other (and occasionally an artist) until we couldn't bear it any longer. And finally, just last Wednesday, we unveiled our groundbreaking results—a whopping 76 pages in the finest Dutch, with a summary in English for those daring enough to give it a glance. The heart of our conclusion? If we strip life of its joy, the world will magically become more sustainable.

You see, I belong to a generation that remembers a time when sustainability meant adding fun to people's lives. We used to bring clean and cheap electricity to villages, enabling them to enjoy the luxury of a clinic and cold drinks. Building schools meant empowering the disenfranchised. Parks and pollution-free forests provided an escape from the mundane. But alas, those days are long gone, my friends.

Now, we claim to know better—or at least, we like to think so. We've come to the obvious realization that the environmental cost of flying a philharmonic halfway around the world to perform a concert, when there are already a hundred recorded versions available on Spotify, simply cannot be justified. It is undeniably unethical to create exhibitions with fresh contemporary art when there are thousands of existing, unseen classical paintings. And why on earth do we continue producing romantic comedies set in a multitude of countries? It baffles me. Oh, and let's not even get started on books—remember, trees don't grow on trees!

In this brave new world, fun is a luxury we can no longer afford if we wish to survive climate change.

So, with an air of DeSantian delight, we have fervently recommended to the government (among other equally ludicrous things) to discourage incessant creation. Naturally, the alt-right vehemently disagrees. They've always championed more theater, more contemporary art, more books—the audacity! Their response this week was as predictable as the sunrise. Less fun for them means fewer "woke" ideas to protest against. Ah, the self-serving bunch they are. "Let's make more art we can boycott!" they proclaim.

I firmly believe that giving the right something to boycott isn't worth depleting our ever-dwindling CO2 budget.

But fear not, dear friends, for I am not content with solely prohibiting fun in the private sphere. Oh no, I have much grander plans. Boredom, my comrades, is the secret ingredient to sustainability. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to promote excruciatingly dull ideas in the workplace as well. Just this week, I triumphantly raised the temperature of our refrigerators, ensuring our cakes no longer freeze—a true revolution in the office, I assure you. And a brilliant colleague had the bright insight to suggest turning off lights and air conditioning when leaving an office. Imagine that! We are even in the process of limiting the use of diesel oil, favoring the grandeur of biofuels instead. Out with the fun, in with the new!

Before you know it, fun will be nothing more than a dusty relic of the past. We will have reached the pinnacle of sustainability—a world where everyone can prosper, well, if you can call a life devoid of enjoyment and excitement "prosperity." But hey, at least we'll be alive. Alive!

May your week be the dullest of them all,
— Jasper