A round up of the best stories about the Netherlands and all things Dutch from leading international publications
Taiwan’s Covid-19 measures could be seen as intrusive. But seven people have died there, compared with 5,000 in the Netherlands. More >
Rem Koolhaas, the Pritzker prize–winning Dutch architect, author and academic, has long had a beef with airports. It’s not the same beef that everyone else has with airports–the Cinnabon smell, the brusqueness of security, the $7 snack. Koolhaas’ beef with airports is that they’ve lost their sense of purpose. More >
King’s Day in the Netherlands is always more or less the same. Almost the whole country takes the day off, and the streets are flooded with people dressed in orange, drinking beer and generally acting as if they’ve been given get-out-of-jail-free cards. More >
As we all long for freedom from lockdowns and home confinement, people would love to believe ‘there is an app for that’. Many countries are discussing, planning or even implementing so-called contact tracing apps. There are heated debates about privacy and security issues. More >
The Volkskrant has produced an animated walk-through showing the different scenarios that could lead us out of the coronavirus pandemic and explaining how we ended up in our intelligent lockdown in the first place. More >
AZ Alkmaar were chasing the Eredivisie title with a group who had been at the club since the age of 12. Adam Bate caught up with academy director Paul Brandenburg to find out how they did it… More >
Isolated in a recent European Union council of ministers, with attitudes described by European leaders past and present as ‘repugnant’. It sounds like an old script of Britain in the EU. Yet it is the Netherlands that has found itself at the heart of the union’s most bitter row during the coronavirus pandemic. More >
The rest of the eurozone is getting fed up, says the Economist More >
It might not win any beauty contests, but the Dutch port is a slow burner of a city, where discovering its charms requires a little persistence. More >
In most languages, if someone said you had cancer, it would be a diagnosis. In Dutch, it is more likely to be an insult. Kankerlijer (“cancer-sufferer”) is one of a long list of Dutch profanities and expletives derived from diseases. More >
In the low-lying Gelderse Valley some 85km east of Amsterdam, a Dutch university is changing how humans eat. There, a bright-eyed press officer with Willy Wonka flair is showing me the miracles of modern food science. One laboratory door swings open to reveal giant, fragrant basil leaves growing under multicoloured lights. More >
It was a political masterclass to watch Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte switch roles at last week’s EU budget talks, from the ever-reliable neighbour and ally of German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to the intransigent leader of the Frugal Four whose behaviour she panned as childish’. More >
As recent numbers show, the Netherlands ranks very high in international rankings on innovation and competitiveness. It ranks fourth in the 2019 editions of both the Global Innovation Index and the Global Competitiveness Index, making it Europe’s most competitive economy. At the same time, its energy usage is least sustainable of all countries in Europe and its air is one of most polluted in Europe too. What is going on? Do we have a new “Dutch Disease?” More >
f there’s one contradiction that goes to the heart of why Dutch drugs policy has lost its way, it’s this: that while it’s legal for ‘coffee shops’ to sell cannabis for personal consumption, growing the cannabis they sell is illegal and subject to stiff penalties that have forced production underground. More >
The Dutch are coming. That is the upbeat message from Ido Abram, director of See NL, the umbrella body for the promotion of Dutch films and film culture. ‘Dutch films overall did really well internationally in 2019,’ he says. ‘Documentaries, short films, youth films, feature films all made the festival circuit in an incredible way.’ More >
Oscar-winning actor presents documentary retracing life of Jewish teenager killed by the Nazis. More >
Shortly after her capture by the Nazis in 1944, Dutch resistance fighter Selma van de Perre was transferred from a regular prison to the worst concentration camp in the Netherlands. Van de Perre arrived at the infamous Camp Vught about five months after its commander, Adam Grunewald, had killed 10 women by cramming them and 64 other inmates into an unventilated, 100-square-feet cell for 14 hours. More >
When he was asked to create a memorial to the 104,000 Jewish, Roma, and Sinti people from the Netherlands who were killed during the Holocaust, Daan Roosegaarde hesitated. The Dutch artist, engineer, and master of light-based art and design was not sure at first whether to accept such a delicate and complicated assignment. More >
The Dutch justice system is cutting jail populations by offering specialist rehabilitation to people with mental illnesses. More >
When she came across a Nazi killing an infant by repeatedly swinging its tiny body against a brick wall, Truus Oversteegen didn’t flinch. The freckle-faced teenager, who was just three months shy of her 17th birthday when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, was a newly minted member of the Dutch resistance. She had been mostly assigned to hide Jewish children, political dissidents and homosexuals in various safe houses throughout Haarlem, her hometown, which was about 12 miles west... More >
