RfD | ☃️🎅🌧️⛸️ Winter Recommendations from the Committee
To our Room for Discussion community,
Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
It has been a busy, exciting, growth-filled year for our committee and we are so glad that you could join us for our interviews and staying up to date with our events. To mark the holiday season and the start of the new year, we compiled some of our committee’s favourites and recommendations and wanted to share them with you!
If you are looking for a new book to cozy up with as your Glühwein is simmering, a movie to watch alongside siblings and cousins, or a cafe to step into in the coming weeks, we have some great suggestions for you.
On another note, we want to thank you all for joining our interviews and workshops. We have a lot more planned for the coming year - great guests, interesting topics, and workshops. We’d love it if you could share our newsletter and information about our events with friends, colleagues, and professors that you think might be interested. Let us know who you think we should invite and what we can do to improve our interviews.
But for now - grab a hot chocolate and a warm blanket and enjoy some of the favorites we have listed below!
With love,
Room for Discussion
📖 Book Recommendations
Some of our committee’s favorites
Biographies
- “Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell” (A Biography by John Preston). Our interviewer says: “have never read a more insane life story.”
- American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin)
Our favorite
- Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin) “No explanation needed. (His best work).”
- Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
- Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
Non-fiction
- Empire of Pain (Patrick Radden Keefe). “It's awesome”
🎥 Top tips for movie night
- Love Actually - A committee-wide favourite!
- Good Will Hunting - "If someone hasn’t seen it they should be prosecuted.”
- The Holiday
- Mr. Bean’s Holiday
🚲 Things to do in Amsterdam over the Holiday season
Are you going to be in the city during the holidays? These are some of our committee member’s favourite things to do over the holiday season.
- Ice skating
- The Amsterdam light festival
- Drinking mulled wine
- Eating oliebollen!
- Staying in and watching movies (like some of the ones recommended above 👀) *“because its too cold and rainy to go out” *
🍺 Favourite cafes
Are you looking to try a new cafe in Amsterdam for a hot chocolate, cappuccino, or glühwein? Here are some of our favourite ones:
- Back to Black
- Cafe ‘t Smalle
- Cafe de Eland
- De Gieter - We have held many of our borrell’s here and highly recommend that you give it a try! Don’t forget to order some Salmari!
- Saint Jean - but go early and prepare to stand in line. In the words of one of our interviewers, “but jesus christ, so many people out there!”.
🎤 Finally… Which of our interviews should you re-watch?
Did you know that all of our interviews are recorded and uploaded on YouTube and Spotify? You can listen to them on your walks, as you’re biking to dinners and lunches, and while you’re helping cook with family! Our committee’s favourites go in this order:
-
A tie between…
Hans van den Berg, CEO of Tata Steel NL and 
Mike Kuehnel, the CEO of Flow Traders
A very recent interview we did with the Russian media magnet and founder of “The Moscow Times”
Acclaimed science fiction writer and author of the “The Ministry for the Future”, which made Obama’s favourite books list of 2020.
Quotes of the Year
To top it off….we’ll leave you with some of our favourite quotes from the past few months. To understand the context, you can check out our YouTube channel ;)
“There was only one law, and that was the law of the street”
- Derk Sauer
“Following the news every single day was just exhausting. And my children deserve more of their father than someone who is anxious because of Twitter.”
- Cas Mudde
That was all for this year. We hope to see you at one of our many events next year, and for now we would like to wish you happy holidays, and a lovely 2024!
Best,
The Room for Discussion Committee
