Shake, Rattle and Roll: Maduro in Custody & Mamdani Sworn In as New NYC Mayor

January 6, 2026

What I’m Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: To use another oft-repeated citation, here’s an oldie but a goodie.

• Taking Maduro Out of Venezuela: What happens when a very bad man gets captured in a very bad way.

• New Kid on the Block: Liking the fresh new face but less certain of the substance.

• The New York Times gets jazzed up: if you want to learn about jazz, a great article tells you where to start. Plus, Michel Petrucciani plays Caravan…“a little person” shows how it’s done.

• What I’m Watching: Sinners, Directed by Ryan Coogler

• What I’m Reading: The making of Showtime Lakers Legend Michael Cooper.

• Jukebox Playlist = Charlie Parker: No matter his age, he had “it.”

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Kareem’s Daily Quote

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Theodore Parker (1810-1860), American unitarian minister, transcendentalist theologian

This citation is brought up so often that it’s frayed with use and abuse. Still, there are times when nothing else comes to mind that fits a particular situation so perfectly. So here’s my best attempt to put a small spin on what we seem to have endured in the first few days of 2026, along with my hope for the days ahead.

To begin with, this “moral arc” doesn’t have volition. It doesn’t bend on its own. It bends only when people and institutions force it to. This is done through the legal system, through the restraint and moral clarity of people in power, through the slow work of personal and institutional accountability, and most importantly, through the will of the American public. You know who we are. Folks who, for the most part, are content to live our lives. Many of us will go along for weeks or months or years turning a blind eye to injustice, until others of us want to scream, “Don’t you see what’s happening here??” And then, seemingly out of nowhere, they do. We do. We see and we act, nearly as one. That sometimes awkward, often difficult but always inspiring ballet of “we the people.”

Throughout history, the awakening of we the people topples governments, restores democracies, brings injustice to heel, restores the health of a nation. And what this collective of people often reminds us, at its best, is that the methods used in moments of crisis matter as much as the outcome. That, no matter how tempting the ends, the means cannot and must not justify them. When powerful countries like ours substitute unilateral force for diplomatic and legal processes, we may win the immediate confrontation. But we risk destabilizing and even destroying the very frameworks that make justice possible to begin with.

We don’t have to be diplomats or historians to understand this. We sense it in our bones. And so, as one, when we’ve had enough or more than enough, we grab hold of that arc of the moral universe, and with all our collective weight and strength, we push and we prod and lay all our weight upon it until it bends once again towards justice for all.

Taking Maduro Out of Venezuela: A Perfect (and Perfectly Ugly) Example of Ends Justifying the Means.

Credit: Bloomberg/gettyimages

Let me be frank: When I first saw the headline of U.S. forces capturing Maduro, I wasn’t sure what to think. There’s no love lost for this man, who put his nation through so much turmoil, who stole its resources, imprisoned its people, and ran roughshod over its laws. Still…

…sorry, getting ahead of myself. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride,” it’s too much. Let me sum up.

Nicolas Maduro started his public life as a bus driver and union organizer. This working-class background shaped his early political identity, while loyalty to Hugo Chávez moved him up the chain of command. He went from legislator to president of the National Assembly, to foreign minister, and ultimately to vice president. When Chávez died in 2013, Maduro didn’t just inherit a presidency. He inherited the ideological weight of the socialist revolution that had defined Venezuela since 1999. It was a heavy mantle to carry, and his rough-and-tumble rule quickly caused wall-to-wall turmoil. His government faced persistent accusations of authoritarianism, human‑rights abuses, and the dismantling of democratic institutions. I remember a Univision interview in 2013 when President Obama openly questioned the legitimacy of Maduro’s election and condemned the government’s repression. By 2015, Obama had put out an Executive Order stating that Venezuela posed “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

From the jump, in other words, Maduro was a bad, bad man. He was no friend to the U.S.A., and no friend to the vast majority of his people. In a wild 2024 election, opposition candidate Edmundo González is said to have captured 70% of the votes, but his victory was short-lived. The country’s electoral council declared Maduro the winner, and Gonzàlez was forced to flee the country.

Given all that, my first thought when I heard about the U.S. military abducting Nicolas Maduro had to do with precedent. Once you establish that military force can replace diplomatic and legal processes in dealing with heads of state (even authoritarian ones), you’ve opened a door that’s going to be very hard to close. Who decides which leaders deserve this treatment? What standards do we apply consistently across the globe? How are we monitoring it?

This is not to say that the toppling of a foreign leader at the hands of the U.S. is unprecedented. It’s not. But that pesky ‘arc of the moral universe’ thing is much in effect here. History has not looked kindly on other attempts, and the results have been, in a word, dismal.

There’s a scene in “The Dark Knight” where Batman conducts illegal surveillance of the entire city to catch the Joker. Bruce Wayne/Batman’s business manager Lucius Fox helps him, but he makes it clear that this kind of power is too dangerous to exist, even in the hands of someone with the best of intentions. Which is why Fox programs a self-destruct mechanism into the device. That’s the tension here: even when you’re fighting a genuine threat, the methods you use matter. But in our world, there’s no helpful Lucius Fox, no self-destruct mechanism.

That’s the trap, that pesky precedent. The moment you say that the ends justify the means, you’ve abandoned the very principles you claim to be defending. Maduro’s record is heinous (protestor deaths, fraudulent elections, the economic collapse that has devastated 30 million people), and I’m not minimizing any of that. But when you respond to authoritarianism by bypassing international law, you’re undermining the frameworks that exist to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral action. You’re essentially saying, “Rules are for other people.”

Oh, and as to the drug war justification…that’s been the greatest hits album for Latin American intervention for decades. The charges against him are described as “drug- and weapons-related.” When you’re abducting a head of state, the American people deserve better than a two-word reason that conveniently echoes every intervention narrative since the 1980s because “fighting narco-terrorism” polls better than “we’re conducting regime change.”

We also don’t pay enough attention to what comes next for ordinary people. Our focus stays on the dramatic (the abduction, the regime change, the military operation), and then we’re shocked (shocked, I tell you!) when the aftermath is chaos and misery. Iraq, anyone? It’s the textbook example. The U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein was followed by years of instability, sectarian violence, the rise of ISIS…fun stuff.

(And, as of this morning—Monday, January 5—Secretary of Everything Marco Rubio is already discovering that running Venezuela won’t be the cake walk Donald Trump thinks it is. Take a look at today’s Letters from an American from my fellow Substacker, the great Heather Cox Richardson, for a deep dive into Rubio’s sad and sadly funny press conference.)

So what would accountability actually look like? To begin with, it’d be nice to have a detailed transition plan. Who’s going to govern, how will basic services continue, what happens to the military and security forces? These are prerequisites that must be addressed before one acts. But too often, the focus is entirely on removal, with the assumption that democracy will somehow spontaneously emerge from the rubble. It’s akin to bulldozing your house because of mold, then waiting patiently for it to spontaneously reassemble itself. And this time, I’m not even sure that “democracy” is the goal. Donald Trump’s reign has been transactional, to put it mildly. And he’s never been shy about showing favoritism for strongmen.

But, regardless who is in charge, what concerns me most is the dangerous cycle we’re in. When institutions fail to deliver justice, people look for alternatives. But when the alternative is unilateral military force that itself bypasses institutional frameworks, can institutional decay be far behind? When you’re a kid and you tell a lie and get away with it, the next lie becomes easier to justify. Human rights violations work much the same way. We can publicly claim that Venezuela’s government failed its people, so the U.S. intervened. But by bypassing international legal institutions to do so, we’ve weakened those very frameworks for everyone. It’s a race to the bottom.

The pattern is pretty clear: short-term expedience creates long-term catastrophe. We armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, and that gave us the Taliban. We destabilized Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, and that gave us ISIS. The alternative (everyone acting unilaterally based on their own judgment) is just chaos dressed up as righteousness.

Having said all that, I can’t hide that part of me is happy for the Venezuelan people. Maduro was a dictator and a thug, and Venezuelans paid a hefty price for years. But those emotions that move me towards complacency because Maduro is (in Trump’s parlance) a bad hombre are the very emotions that must be brought to heel if we have even a glimmer of a chance to keep the democracy we’ve fought for centuries to maintain.

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New Kid on the Block

Credit: Angela Weiss/gettyimages

SUMMARY: The following was culled from the NY Times on January 1, 2026:

Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, was sworn in as New York City’s mayor. In his inaugural speech before thousands at City Hall, Mamdani pledged to “govern expansively and audaciously” and carry out his affordability agenda without resetting expectations for what government can deliver. “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he said. Senator Bernie Sanders administered the oath of office, with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivering opening remarks. Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim mayor, first South Asian mayor, first millennial mayor, and youngest mayor in a century. He won over 50 percent of the vote in the general election, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo who ran on an independent line after losing the Democratic primary. Mamdani faces significant challenges ahead, including managing a $7 billion-a-year agenda of universal day care and free buses while navigating federal funding cuts, an unpredictable president, and a moderate governor. He has just five years of legislative experience and will oversee 300,000 city workers serving 8.5 million residents.

MY TAKE: We’ve created a political culture where going viral counts more than knowing how to run things. Zohran Mamdani has several pluses in my book. The first Muslim mayor of New York City, he swore his oath on the Koran. Beyond that, he can communicate in multiple languages on social media, and his videos rack up views. But managing 300,000 city workers serving 8.5 million people requires a completely different skill set. Apparently, if you can craft a compelling TikTok video, we’re supposed to trust you with the nation’s largest municipal government. The danger comes when we mistake the performance of leadership for leadership itself.

I catch myself wanting to be optimistic about Mamdani’s inauguration—the historic firsts, the progressive energy, the promise of change after Eric Adams. But I’ve been alive long enough to know that, though charisma might get you elected, it won’t balance a budget or deliver universal day care when the money isn’t there. John Wooden was charismatic in his own quiet way, and it helped him build the UCLA dynasty. But he also knew basketball inside and out. His charisma amplified his competence without replacing it.

I understand why voters are frustrated with the Adams years of corruption and self-dealing. When the previous mayor gets indicted, people want something completely different. But Adams’s experience wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he used that experience to enrich himself and his cronies instead of serving the public. Mamdani’s Executive Order 01 revoked all orders issued after Adams’s indictment, which makes for powerful political theater. But symbolic gestures aren’t enough.

When you run as a democratic socialist who’s going to transform the system, you should probably not let a billionaire heiress remain in charge of the nation’s largest police force. A first move like that reads either as pragmatic flexibility or a pretty quick abandonment of principles. If you’re going to govern as a democratic socialist, at what point do you actually have to implement democratic socialist policies instead of just staffing your administration with the same establishment figures? When will your base notice that the revolution got postponed indefinitely?

Then too, Mamdani promised he would “never, not for a second, hide from you.” But Mamdani’s every utterance is tightly scripted, every response is pre-approved. Nothing spontaneous gets through. Public relations masquerading as openness is the opposite of transparency. If your press conferences are so controlled that reporters can’t derive news from them, what’s the point beyond using journalists as props for predetermined talking points?

But here’s where all these concerns converge: when the math stops working. Mamdani promises to “govern expansively and audaciously” without “resetting expectations” while facing a $7 billion price tag for his agenda. Estimates for universal child care alone range from $6.6 billion to $9.6 billion, depending on whether workers get living wages, and free buses would cost around $900 million in lost transit revenue. These aren’t rhetorical questions: they’re math problems requiring actual answers. And while it’s certainly true that other developed countries have figured out free childcare and free transportation, and that our failing to do—given we’re the richest country in the history of the world—is more than a slight embarrassment, that doesn’t mean we can pull it off simply because “other countries have done it.” And yes, by all means, tax the rich. We should all be paying our fair share, no matter where our income bracket falls. But the question still stands: will it be feasible? And will it be enough?

Audacity without a plan produces wishful thinking and massive disappointment. (See the first essay in this newsletter, “Capturing Maduro in Venezuela.”) When you’re facing a $7 billion funding gap and federal cuts, how exactly do you deliver on ambitious promises without either finding new revenue or scaling back expectations? Refusing to reset expectations when the numbers don’t work sets you up for failure and disappoints the people who believed in you.

I saw this pattern play out in basketball: young players with incredible gifts thrust into leadership roles before they’d learned the nuances of the game. The ones who succeeded had great people around them and the humility to learn. Mamdani has 100,000 campaign volunteers and Bernie Sanders telling them he’ll need their help to govern. That’s the right instinct. But volunteers (no matter how dedicated) aren’t the same as experienced administrators who know how city government works.

The first year will tell us everything. Does he hold press conferences where he actually answers questions, or will he hide behind controlled messaging? Will he implement at least some signature policies, or slow-walk everything while blaming obstacles? Right now we’re in the honeymoon phase where everyone projects their hopes onto him. The test comes when he has to make his first genuinely unpopular decision and we see whether he explains it straight or spins it. As for me—in spite of this rather skeptical view (because, at my age, I pretty much have skepticism wired)—I really do want him to succeed and am rooting for him. My native city of New York can certainly use a leader who loves her without measure and is willing to work his fingers to the bone to make life there livable again.

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The New York Times Gets Jazzed Up

I’m New to Jazz. Where Do I Start? (NY Times)

I included this NYT article because it’s very well written. The author is spot on. But when it comes to selecting jazz cuts for beginners, it depends on what you want to focus on. Cultural background is important: even beginners wouldn’t confuse the jazz of New Orleans with that of New York City. Other choices are strictly emotional. I liked Herbie and Coltrane and Monk not just because they were inordinately talented but because I knew them personally. That meant a lot to me. So I’d say choose an era and location that speak to you emotionally, along with an instrument you’re drawn to, and you’ll be on your way.

For instance, I’m a big fan of pianists, of songs written in the 1930s and given a more recent spin. Below is one at the top of my list.

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What I’m Watching:

Sinners (Warner Bros)

I walked into Ryan Coogler’s Sinners expecting a solid period drama, but what I got was something far more ambitious and original. Set in 1932 Mississippi, the film follows twin brothers (both played brilliantly by Michael B. Jordan) who return from WWI to open a juke joint, only to face down a supernatural threat that’s as much about America’s racial sins as it is about vampires. The film works because Coogler lets the music and visuals tell the story instead of over-explaining, and Jordan delivers what might be his best performance yet, playing two distinct characters. Sinners keeps you engaged and interested through the whole film. Beyond its plot, Sinners feels confident in a way that’s increasingly rare for studio films. Warner Bros. deserves real credit for backing something this bold and allowing Coogler the space to fully commit to his vision, rather than sanding down its stranger edges. The result is a film that trusts its audience, rewards close attention, and lingers long after the credits roll. Sinners isn’t just entertaining—it’s the kind of swing that reminds you what a major studio can still do when it prioritizes creative ambition over formula.

Grade: A+

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What I’m Reading:

The Making of a Showtime Lakers Legend, Michael Cooper

Coop’s memoir takes you inside our Showtime years from the perspective of the guy who did the dirty work while Magic, James, and I got most of the glory. What works here is his honesty about growing up in South Central L.A., the insecurity that drove him to become one of the league’s fiercest defenders and truly our best supporting cast. If you want to understand what it meant to sacrifice individual stats for team success, to be the sixth man who guards Larry Bird in the Finals, then Coop delivers that perspective with authenticity and heart. I lived those years alongside him and his contributions in every championship that we won is bigger than any word could describe. I absolutely enjoyed reading his book. Coop, my brother, I love you and thanks for all the memories.

Grade: A+

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Jukebox Playlist:

Charlie Parker, “Bird” (1941)

In the spring of 1941, Charlie Parker was twenty years old and playing alto sax with Jay McShann’s Kansas City orchestra. On April 30, the band went into a Dallas studio to record for Decca Records. It was Parker’s first time making a commercial record. The session produced six songs, including “Hootie Blues,” which Parker co-wrote with McShann. That recording marked the first time anyone heard Parker solo on a record. This was years before bebop, before Parker became “Bird” the legend. The music was swing-era dance music, the kind Kansas City bands played in ballrooms and clubs. Parker was still finding his voice, still learning, still part of a big band section rather than leading his own groups.

I picked this recording because there’s something powerful about an artist at the very beginning. You can hear the technique already there, the confidence, but also the searching. Parker would go on to change jazz completely, but in 1941 he was just a talented young player making his first record. That’s the moment worth remembering: the person learning his craft, taking his first steps toward something he couldn’t yet imagine.

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To be good, you must do good. We’re in this together.