I have never thought I would read a book by Matthew McConaughey. I had this cliché image of a shirtless rom-com Southern beau.  But I also thought he killed it in True Detective and Dallas Buyers Club. So I was curious and bought his book. Greenlights is a fun read and I laughed out loud a few times. It is filled with excerpts from the diaries he kept since he was a teenager and his self-help taglines. I skipped these.  What I enjoyed where stories about some crazy adventures he took to learn and the focused work he put into changing his life.  One such story is how he turned his career around. He spent a few years locked in Texas refusing multi-million rom-com offers, then not receiving any scripts and having self-doubts, then getting completely forgotten and un-branded, to then being re-discovered. How he engineered this transformation was super interesting to me. One needs entertainment during long-lasting confinements and curfews. This is some.

The first African…the first woman to head the WTO….done! More profile articles of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will be published in the coming days but today, I enjoyed BBC Kunle Fayali’s. It puts the spotlight on her upbringing and values, on her victories in fighting corruption and de-linking Nigerian budget from oil price, and on her role modelling for female leadership. On the latter, she just came out with a book with Julia Gillard on “Women and leadership” which I have not read yet. You can get the gist of it in this 10 min TED video [H/T Dan Toole, thanks!] which is rather stiff or in this conversation with CGDev Amanda Glassman which is longer but more lively. What is covered: the need to take considered risk, how women are called to solve the most complex situations, how female leader appearances are over-scrutinized, the struggles with work-life balance bul….it [my word here as this balance concept is simply non-sense], the impact of COVID on female workforce etc.  

My graph is from Gabriella Turrisi and Gabrielle Debinski who compiled the number of coups and coup attempts since 1946 to show that their frequency and success have diminished over the past 20 years.

My quote is from US Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci: “To get a drug out as quickly as you possibly can, based on the fact that the benefit looks like it was better than the risk and you didn’t have to fully show efficacy yet, originated way back during the years of HIV. Compassionate use of a drug — even before you get an emergency use authorization — originated way back in the days of HIV.”