1. The Public Domain Review's 2026 survey, or the year 1930 finally exhales
Every January the Public Domain Review publishes its patient inventory of what has just fallen out of copyright, and the 2026 list is one of the good ones: Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage, the first four Nancy Drew novels, Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, alongside the earliest properly electric recordings from 1925. There is something salutary about a calendar rite that is neither commercial nor moralised: the culture quietly enlarging its usable past. Read the introduction, then wander into the essays. Their July piece by Anne Lawrence-Mathers on the medieval Ars Notoria and the very old dream of instant knowledge is exactly the kind of thing our current worship of the oracle machines refuses to remember it inherited.
2. Ed van der Elsken. Up Close at the Rijksmuseum
Nine galleries, roughly two hundred prints, contact sheets, magazines, films — the Rijksmuseum's Ed van der Elsken retrospective runs until 13 September and rewards a full slow afternoon. Elsken photographed like a man who had already decided the twentieth century was worth loving and worth mocking in the same breath: Paris in the '50s, Amsterdam, Tokyo, the Bagara in the Congo, and eventually his own dying body, unflinchingly. The trick of him is that he made intimacy without sentimentality — a discipline modern photography, drowning in its own approval, has almost entirely forgotten. Go on a weekday morning if you can. Give it two hours, not forty minutes.
3. Grachtenfestival, closing weekend
The 29th Grachtenfestival, themed Flow, ends on Sunday 16 August after ten days and something like 250 concerts across ninety-odd locations — pontoons, courtyards, canal houses, roofs, the odd allotment garden. Many of the neighbourhood concerts are free. The point is not to hunt the marquee names but to accept the small ambush: a Bach suite from a barge in the Jordaan at seven, a jazz sextet in a hidden courtyard at nine. The city, briefly, remembers what it was built to be.
4. The Prinsengrachtconcert, Saturday night
The festival culminates as it always does: the free Prinsengrachtconcert on Saturday 15 August, a full classical programme performed on a pontoon in front of the Pulitzer Hotel and broadcast live on national television. Arrive early, take a bridge and a folding stool, bring bread, cheese, and something dry to drink. Do not try to be clever about it. Amsterdam does very few civic rituals well, but this one it does with an almost embarrassing beauty. If Saturday's forecast turns, watch it on NPO with the windows open; the fiction of a shared city still counts.
5. Robeco SummerNights, Concertgebouw, Sunday evening
And if the weekend needs a proper indoor ending, the Robeco SummerNights programme at the Concertgebouw runs its final August stretch with a Sunday 16 August main-hall concert at 20:00. The summer series is uneven by design — some evenings are film scores or chansons rather than serious repertoire — but the acoustic is what it always was, and an August Sunday spent inside that room is not a wasted August Sunday.
Enough. Recover a book that has just become free, stand in front of a photograph made by someone who was paying attention, and let a stranger with a bow across the water make the city feel, for an hour, like it still means it.