The Dictator's Handbook
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith
Selectorate theory in plain language. Once you read this, every cabinet reshuffle reads like a math problem.
Books, articles, reports, papers. Updated monthly. No reviews, no ratings — just what's on the desk and why it earned the slot.
Last updated: May 2026
Re-reading it because every chapter still maps to a ministry I'm watching this year. The infrastructure of the thing has not changed — only the names on the contracts.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith
Selectorate theory in plain language. Once you read this, every cabinet reshuffle reads like a math problem.
Joe Studwell
Why some countries got rich and others didn't. Three levers — land reform, manufacturing for export, finance discipline. Africa's stuck on lever one.
Martin Meredith
5,000 years on the continent in one volume. The long view that makes today's headlines look smaller and the patterns underneath them look larger.
Robert Greene
Read it once for the laws. Read it twice for the historical case studies. Read it three times to spot which law your minister is currently violating.
Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky
The five filters that shape what makes the news. Forty years old, more relevant than ever, especially with the algorithm now doing the editor's job.
Dambisa Moyo
Why aid hasn't worked, and what would. A Zambian economist taking apart the donor consensus. Required reading before any conversation about NGOs in the region.
Trevor Noah
Memoir, not analysis — but the way he writes about apartheid, language, and identity is sharper than most academic texts on the same topics.
International Monetary Fund, 2026 release
If you want to know what international finance actually thinks about ZiG, skip the press releases and read the footnotes here. They tell on themselves in the annex.
Daniel Kahneman
Useful for the show because every viewer is reasoning under both systems and most of them don't know which one is talking. Helps me write for both.
Ryan Holiday
The mechanics of how stories travel from blog to cable news to Twitter — written before TikTok but the architecture is identical. Updated for what we're living through now.
Updated the first Sunday of every month. Want a recommendation? Send it through.