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, Riemen had built an institute around it, hosted at Tilburg University, with the explicit mission of confronting current questions through the European humanist tradition. The model was unusual. Most think-tanks publish papers and chase policy influence. Nexus publishes essays and stages conversations. The work product, in any given year, is a few books and a handful of public events that everyone in attendance will remember.

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 Conference in spring 1996 brought Gyorgy Konrad, Avishai Margalit, Peter Sellars, Ian Buruma, Allan Janik, and Eva Hoffman to Tilburg. In 2004, during the Dutch presidency of the European Union, Nexus was commissioned to organize a series of working conferences in Warsaw, Berlin, and Washington, with a kick-off in the Ridderzaal (the Hall of Knights) in The Hague and a closing event in Rotterdam. The speakers included Jacqueline de Romilly, Mario Vargas Llosa, and then-European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. The Nexus Library series has published volumes by George Steiner, Thomas Mann, Sonia Gandhi, Adam Zagajewski, and Daniel Barenboim. The conversations are bilingual, the books are bound, and the events sell out.

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 consequences of the triumph of science and technology? How civilized are we, actually? Who is truly educated? The symposia are smaller and more intimate - in 2018 Patti Smith spoke at one about being raised inside a counterculture. The masterclasses, aimed at students, have featured Michael Sandel, Sherry Turkle, Sidney Blumenthal, and Salam Fayyad introducing topics from social media to genetic engineering before opening the floor. The format is consistent across all of them: bring in someone who has thought hard about something, let them speak, then let people in a room push back.

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 institute moved its headquarters to Amsterdam. The conferences and symposia had already been running there for years; the move only formalized what the audience patterns had been telling Riemen for some time. The magazine continues. Three issues a year. Each anniversary edition is published as a hardcover - *Nexus* 65, titled 'The University of Life,' and *Nexus* 70, 'The Return of Europe,' both reached collectors. The institute remains small, deliberately so, and persists on the conviction that the cultural inheritance of Europe is worth arguing about, in front of an audience, in the company of people who write the books the audience has read.