CHUDE JIDEONWO
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Chude Jideonwo

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THE EXPANDING EMPIRE OF DONALD TRUMP

THE EXPANDING EMPIRE OF DONALD TRUMP

The idea that they would ever be allowed to get into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, let alone be successful in disarming the world, seems the naive musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried. But he believes that through years of making his views known and through supporting candidates who share his views, it could someday happen.
Rimbaud's Illuminations: The Agony of Restlessness and the Unbearable Brightness of Being

Rimbaud's Illuminations: The Agony of Restlessness and the Unbearable Brightness of Being

In her own questioning of self, Smith asks the purpose of a life spent creating: "Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination." Would each artist who lives to create argue that illumination is their trade, means, and end? Rimbaud thought so and indeed existed only for such—an incandescent human.
Donald Trump Is Not Going Anywhere

Donald Trump Is Not Going Anywhere

I asked whether he had ever experienced self-doubt. The question seemed to catch Trump off guard, and he flashed a split second of, if not vulnerability, maybe non­swagger. ‘‘Yes, I think more than people would think,’’ he told me. When? ‘‘I don’t want to talk about it.’’ He shrug-­smirked. ‘‘Because, you know — probably more than people would think. I understand how life can go. Things can happen.’’ This was a rare moment when Trump’s voice trailed off, even slightly. He then handed me a sheet of new polling data that someone had put on his desk. ‘‘Beautiful numbers,’’ he said, inviting me to take them with me.
How a $20bn bet paid off for Africas richest man

How a $20bn bet paid off for Africas richest man

More importantly, it has added credence to his vision of how the continent should develop: combining private capital and entrepreneurialism with government protectionism to eradicate dependence on imports and turn raw materials into finished products.
Donald Trump on sex, money and politics

Donald Trump on sex, money and politics

What did you learn from that? A lot. No.1: I could handle pressure. A lot of my friends couldn’t and just took the gas. I knew tough guys, or people who I thought were tough but who crawled into a corner, put their thumbs in their mouths and cried, “Mummy, I want to go home.” I didn’t lose sleep, I never, ever gave up, and I fought hard to survive. The biggest thing I learnt is that economic cycles don’t last forever, they go up and they go down. And whatever you try to do to keep a cycle going, they end.
Trump’s Art of the Steal

Trump’s Art of the Steal

Employees, executives, aides and others who’ve known Trump well say he’s not a book-reader so much as a room-reader, “sucking in information that he finds valuable,” grabbing “nuggets” that he thinks can help him get what he covets, which is some slurry of wealth, attention, respect and power. “A creature of feel,” the late strategist Pat Caddell described him to me in the summer of 2018, “a visceral stimulus creature”—who could repackage what he took in and sell it back to the hoi polloi. He talked to Pat Caddell about what he was picking up on the trail. “He would put forth his position or his feelings, and he would judge the level of the response to it, and that helped him organize, I suppose to whatever degree it was organized, his views about issues,” Caddell told me in 2018. “Things he said that didn’t go over disappeared. Things that did stayed.”
How Wole Soyinka Inherited the Drama of the Gods — and Shadowed the Nigerian Tragedy

How Wole Soyinka Inherited the Drama of the Gods — and Shadowed the Nigerian Tragedy

Long ago, his very life paralleled what he reached for in his work: the drama of the gods. As with those deities whose stories communities cast and reinterpreted as ritual and art, his public life morphed into mythos. Then he woke up one morning to find that his legend outgrew him. He wanted to be human again but his people would not let him; it was unthinkable, like Sango seeking to come down from the sky. Many faithfuls had altered the terms of worship, not because they thought the gods must always hover, but because the era of unimpeachable gods may have passed. And now, trapped in his sky, he was a deity on the verge of passing judgement.
The journalist on the friendship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein

The journalist on the friendship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein

The problem with how people try to understand Trump is that they plug him into a whole range of assumptions about what a politician is, who a politician is, what his background is, what his interests are, and they try to see him through a political lens. In truth, none of that is apropos to Trump. He comes from somewhere entirely different. His experience has nothing to do with politics, has nothing to do with respectability, has nothing to do with the political logic of public life. That stuff is just not relevant to understanding Trump.
‘A Writer Who Has Nothing to Say Has Nothing to Write’

‘A Writer Who Has Nothing to Say Has Nothing to Write’

The second thing I hope to see from writers of my generation is sustained critical thinking about the state of Nigeria and Africa. It is good to have some capacity for political contextualization. And we must be bold enough to decentre the American and Western perspective and get back to discussing the world from a strictly Nigerian, or broadly African, perspective. Capturing Nigeria from Nigerian eyes is the only way for our work to benefit Nigeria. It requires us to pause and think deeper about our place in the world; we cannot progress without that humble acknowledgement that we have been slower than we are able to. It is precisely what our forebears fought for, a mental space for Africans to think for themselves, and yet we are drifting back intellectually and emotionally to the West and laying waste to a Nigerian ideal. It is true that rampant corruption and insecurity and the breaking of dreams have forced young Nigerians to seek belonging elsewhere, but it is a problem when our new intellectuals speak and all that comes out are ideas that are not about how Africa can be better but about how the West envisions itself. There is a new ‘we’ and they have hitched their allegiance to that, while continuing to mine the old ‘we’ for literary and traumatic material for career-branding. Stop. This issue of point of view originated in culture and politics—fields that resisted it—but is now finding new growth in literature. It is a weird performance, done for watching Westerners at the expense of your own people. When done intentionally, that, too, is betrayal.
Deconstructing the Worldview of Peter Thiel

Deconstructing the Worldview of Peter Thiel

The outcome is not a coherent philosophy but a sophisticated rationalization, a veneer of intellectual depth masking a project driven by personal grievances and anxieties transformed into cosmic dramas, where his fears become universal truths and his preferences, moral imperatives. Thiel’s philosophy is not a product of intellectual rigor or profound insight but rather a symptom of an arrested development, a retreat into a fantasy world where he can play the role of a hero and where he is not forced to grapple with the messy realities of human experience. His worldview, like an elaborate make-believe game, is ultimately incoherent, and profoundly out of touch with the actualities of human existence. It is not a philosophy for adults, but rather like the musings of a resentful child who clearly struggles to grapple with the complexities of modernity, and who has therefore permanently retreated into a realm of fantasy.
Obama’s Journey from Arrogance to Incompetence

Obama’s Journey from Arrogance to Incompetence

I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln.” (The use of the word “possible” is priceless.) Mr. Obama has compared himself to LeBron James; his aides compared him to Michael Jordan. He clearly conceived of himself as a world-historical figure
Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.
Peter Thiel, Irresistible Pariah

Peter Thiel, Irresistible Pariah

He believes that the truth exists, that the truth is rare, and that the truth is almost always obscured by the majority and the minority alike. They are locked in their own battle for power; whichever narrative is more fashionable often passes for the truth in any given milieu.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Did the Most Dangerous Thing a Novelist Can Do: Become a Public Intellectual. The Fallout Was Swift.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Did the Most Dangerous Thing a Novelist Can Do: Become a Public Intellectual. The Fallout Was Swift.

While the row revealed the author’s heterodox politics, it was also, in many ways, an age-old trap: Adichie was certainly not the first high-profile West African artist urged to weigh in on a context-specific hot-button issue in place of a qualified expert from the same region. Her pluralist perspective can also shroud the unique cultural context in which Adichie—an Igbo woman from an academic family in Nigeria—is situated and which has shaped her ideas.