Thread

A new year often marks the start of new chapters. In recent weeks, many leaders and entrepreneurs we’ve spoken to in Kigali have said the same thing, in different ways: January is a moment to pause, reassess, and reset.

Around them, friends and families do something similar, filling journals with resolutions and plans. It is rarely a wrong time to reflect on what’s working and isn’t.

With The Kigalian, we’re publishing again. And Thread is part of that return. It’s designed to be a space for slower, candid exchange between our writers and contributors over the course of a month. Think of it as listening in on an ongoing conversation, writers gathered around a coffee table at one of our favourite cafés, with a bookish atmosphere, unhurried music in the background, and enough quiet to let ideas wander before they settle.

Over the past year or so, our reading shifted. We were even more drawn to work that resisted urgency: essays that complicated their own arguments, profiles that focused on how people think, books that trusted the reader with time and ambiguity. Much of it circled familiar questions: how decisions are made, how institutions shape character, and how culture and ambition quietly influence one another.

What follows here will take different forms. Some entries will be reflective, others more argumentative or observational. Some will respond directly to what came before; others will widen the frame. The aim is not tidy conclusions, but continuity of thought — ideas unfolding through conversation, given time to develop.

That image of a table and a few chairs fits. Much of what I enjoyed reading this past year came from writers who weren’t in a rush to conclude and who trusted the reader to sit with a thought a little longer. I also enjoyed reading “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century” by W. David Marx. Thanks for the recommendation, by the way.

That feels like the right tone for this space too: notes exchanged, ideas tested, some left unresolved.

Alas, what have you been reading (or watching, for that matter) lately?

What I have been reading? Nothing to talk about.