Issue i — April 25, 2026
There is a particular kind of restlessness that reading both causes and cures. You are acutely aware that there is more to know, more to question, more to understand. You begin a book in one mood and finish it as someone else. You feel less adrift, not because you have all the answers, but because you are actively in pursuit of them. You're slightly displaced and newly equipped with questions you did not know you needed to ask.
Nothing centres you like a good book. It makes you at peace with the world and your imagination.— Armistead Maupin [Tales of the City]
We read not only in pursuit of information, but we also use books, essays and long, winding articles as a centring force in a world that is attuned to speed and doomscrolling. Reading is one of the few acts that insist on depth. It asks you to slow down and sit with an idea long enough for it to leave a mark.
Links & Notes is born out of that impulse. Each edition will be a small gathering of things I have read and thought to share. The links will speak for themselves, the notes are small annotations where I try to say why they matter to me, and perhaps why they might matter to you.
Welcome to the first edition. I am glad you are here.
“The moment we have something that we think is effective, cancer cells find a way to work around it, and the solution to that is to have multiple tools to fight it”Reminded me of what Tomi said about the snakes getting clever by removing the hooks to avoid death…😀
Like snakes, like cancer cells, I guess.
I like how he began by explaining how the American Congress created markets for risk capital that eventually gave rise to venture capital as we know it today.
The beauty of “markets” is that they are ideologically agnostic. It doesn’t matter which political system is at play; they work when the rules and regulations are clear and there is no capture. Capture creates distortions.
On Africa, I quote:
“The lines they drew had nothing to do with the ethnic, linguistic, or cultural realities of the people who lived inside them.”
“They were lines of administrative convenience, drawn by people who had mostly never visited the places they were carving up, based on what European powers had managed to claim or could be negotiated into claiming.”
He was referring to the Berlin Conference in 1884, when Africa was divvied up among Europeans who had no clue about the continent’s constituents.
This is the sad reality of policy-making in Nigeria today. People who have no idea what’s going on in daily economic activities sit in their offices in Abuja to determine the economic fate of millions. This is the “people problem” Blessing highlighted.
Africa was a victim of the Cold War.
It’s like the saying: when two elephants fight, the grass suffers. Being creations of Western Europe, any political ideology at odds with theirs at the time meant you were collateral damage.
Wonderful piece overall. The only irony I find there is Dangote.
Many things to unpack: politics and numbers; freedom, innovation, and productivity; economics and geography; institutional inertia.
I quote:
“By the time of the Civil War, the productivity of these crops had improved enough, and the cost of slaves [had] increased enough, that cultivating these crops with paid workers was possible. But by then, the system was locked in: The Southern farmers didn’t want to lose their massive investments in slaves and juicy profits! Their entire economy depended on these slaves, and they were willing to go to war to keep them.”
Let’s keep this in mind when we think about taking Nigeria from its current low-level equilibrium to a better one. Some people are willing to waste others’ lives to protect this system because it’s the only way they know, and their survival depends on it. The entire economy is based on a rentier political arrangement. So we need technological innovation, new elites who would ride it, and the numbers. Not population-wide, but just enough critical mass to push through.