Sunday, January 11, 2026 · 56 newsletters

Might Unmakes Right

politics · ai · fintech · culture · foreign-policy

Published on Sunday, January 11, 2026.

Pulled from 56 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. Saturday is a quieter inbox, but the through-line was loud: a week that began with U.S. forces capturing Maduro ended with an ICE agent killing an American citizen in her own car. Here's the signal, cut from the noise, organized by trend.

The Big Story: Minneapolis, Caracas, Greenland, and the Collapse of Norms

This was the dominant thread across nearly every political newsletter in the inbox. The week's bookends were the U.S. seizure of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7. By Saturday, multiple writers were treating these as a single story about U.S. power untethered from law.

The Minneapolis killing dominated the day. Noah Smith at Noahpinion walked through the Washington Post's frame-by-frame video analysis, which raises sharp questions about Kristi Noem and Trump's "domestic terrorism" framing. Marc Elias at Democracy Docket led with the same images of a bloody airbag and stuffed animals spilling from the glove compartment, then pivoted to JD Vance's pivot toward investigating progressive media. Brian Daitzman at Lincoln Square reported GOP Rep. Randy Fine's Newsmax line that he did "not feel bad" for Good, and Jim Swift at The Bulwark flagged Greg Gutfeld telling Fox viewers the shooting "was a set up" by the left who "were hoping for a Black woman." Sam Osterhout's Lincoln Logue framed the personal grief from his old Minneapolis stage. 1440 added the parallel: Oregon's AG has opened a probe into a Thursday ICE shooting in Portland that wounded two Venezuelan nationals.

Venezuela aftermath dominated the foreign affairs writing. Paul Krugman interviewed military historian Phillips O'Brien, whose verdict was that Trump achieved "regime change without changing a regime," ousting Maduro while leaving the Chavista machinery intact. Dan Kurtz-Phelan at Foreign Affairs flagged Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro's "Might Unmakes Right," arguing Trump is shredding the post-1945 norm against using force, and reminding readers that for centuries before WWI war was "the order" itself. The Flip Side ran the comprehensive week-in-review with Reuters and CFR sourcing. Anand Giridharadas at The Ink pulled together a Barn Raiser piece arguing "both are worse" on Trump vs. Maduro. Joe Trippi at Lincoln Square connected Venezuela to Greenland and the next January 6th.

Greenland is the next shoe. George Bounacos at Gov Brief Today led with Trump's on-camera promise to take Greenland "the hard way" if Denmark won't sell, while also flagging ExxonMobil's CEO calling Venezuela "un-investable" despite Trump's pitch of "total safety" for $100B in oil investments. Stuart Stevens and Simon Rosenberg at Lincoln Square framed it as Trump "Emperor of the Americas," and Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box tried to answer the perennial reader question (yes, Dems still suck at messaging) against this exact backdrop: invasion, Greenland, Minneapolis, all in a week.

AI: The Plateau Becomes the Story

Easily the largest non-political cluster, and the framing has noticeably shifted from "what's next" to "where's the floor."

Adoption is plateauing, and builders know it. Contrary Research led with the eye-catching numbers: enterprise AI usage fell from 46% to 37% between June and September 2025, and 42% of enterprise AI initiatives were discontinued in 2025 vs. only 17% in 2024. Their thesis: foundation models are commoditizing, and value is migrating up to specialized, workflow-embedded systems. Guillermo Flor at The AI Opportunity channeled Marc Andreessen's new $15B raise into "trillion-dollar questions" (usage vs. value pricing, open vs. closed, wrappers as real businesses). Flor also went deep on Claude Code as agentic OS, arguing the unlock is coordination, not generation, citing a 30-second Hermès ad built by orchestrating ElevenLabs, Veo, ffmpeg, and a script agent.

Enterprise infrastructure keeps shipping. Tom Krazit at Runtime led the Saturday Product issue with Databricks' new agent-tuned retrieval (the next RAG) and Lenovo's new servers aimed at on-prem inference, validated by Phil Fersht of HFS Research. ByteByteGo ran a clean refresher on 12 core architectural concepts and flagged Sentry's "Seer" pipeline that ties production failure signals to PR review. Lewis C. Lin made the argument that enterprise search is the top LLM use case of 2026 and that most teams are measuring the wrong thing (query volume, not value delivered).

AI's edges keep getting weirder. The Culturist asked whether AI is replacing God, citing engineers claiming sentience and LLM-induced spiritual delusions ending marriages. Ruben Hassid at his Substack went deep on why Microsoft Copilot is losing the LLM war (Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini are better at writing, thinking, searching) but argued the collaboration layer is the actual prize, with a useful note on the divergent-then-convergent prompt pattern for creative work. McKinsey made the corporate-governance version of the same point: boards need to "evolve" for the AI era and build a "second muscle" of domain-owning AI leaders. Katie Harbath's Anchor Change called it the cleanest: "AI is no longer an innovation layer, it's an institutional challenge."

Fintech: A 17x Markup and Voice Agents Hit the Core

Nik Milanović at This Week in Fintech led with stablecoin card-payments provider Rain raising a $250M Series C at a $1.95B valuation, a 17x markup from its Series A only ten months earlier, led by ICONIQ. FinAi News reported Eltropy's AI voice agents integrating with 13 banking core systems including Fiserv, plus Bluevine's chatbot resolving 80% of customer queries and Droit launching a gen-AI compliance tool. The pattern: voice and compliance are where AI is quietly winning inside regulated workflows.

On the venture-mechanics side, Zachary Ginsburg at Last Money In made an interesting case for uncapped SAFEs in two narrow scenarios: instant-markup plays around a closing priced round, and access plays for top-tier deals you'd otherwise be shut out of. The takeaway: "uncapped" triggers an allergic LP reaction, but the mechanics sometimes pencil out.

Crypto, Conflict, and the Anti-Authoritarian Stack

David Hoffman at Bankless wrote a meaty essay on the anti-authoritarian tech stack, drawing on real-time use cases in Iran where, per 1440, the regime cut off phone and internet access amid anti-government protests. Hoffman's argument: crypto's underlying utility as a censorship-resistant tool is back in the spotlight even after the mainstream political embrace. Worth pairing with Hathaway/Shapiro at Foreign Affairs.

Marketing, Brand, and the Hard Calls

Jaskaran at The Social Juice opened a Gen-Z marketing series with one striking stat: 69% of young American men think "no one cares if men are OK," and Africa, "home of ubuntu," is now the world's loneliest region. Jonathan Metrick at CMO Show & Tell shared a CMO hiring scorecard pulled from 25+ hires, and Michael Girdley used his Kodak deep-dive to argue that smart people acting rationally on short-term incentives is how companies die. Girdley's gut-check question for founders: who in your company is actually paid to think in decades, not quarters?

David Cummings posted a short piece on intentional storytelling for founders, recommending a "story note" habit. Alex Brogan at Faster Than Normal profiled April Anthony, who was fired during her C-section and went on to build a $750M home healthcare empire. Tim Denning did the Kobe-Bryant-broken-wrist parable for "no days off" hustle.

Pirate Wires, Faction Fights, and the Right's Civil War

Evan Milenko at Pirate Wires ran a long Q&A with James Fishback, the 30-year-old VC running for Florida governor against Trump-endorsed Byron Donalds. Fishback is courting Nick Fuentes Groypers, promising to ban AI data centers, charging foreign students $1M tuition, and cancelling state contracts with H-1B employers. A year ago that profile would have been disqualifying; today it's a primary plan. Worth pairing with the Lincoln Square / Bulwark coverage as evidence of the same fragmentation Dan Pfeiffer is wrestling with from the other side.

Health, Wellness, and Saturday's Quiet Notes

The Epoch Times flagged research suggesting metformin may interfere with exercise's metabolic benefits. Jim Swift at The Bulwark hosted Andy Marso's first-person warning on the horror of RFK Jr.'s new vaccine guidelines. Nautilus had a nicely strange piece on people who get drunk without drinking (auto-brewery syndrome), plus a Wired writeup on saline nasal rinses as a cold-prevention practice. Robert Waldinger sat with Big Think on the Harvard Study of Adult Development's 85-year finding: relationships, not status, predict happiness.

Sports, Culture, and Grace Notes

The GIST ran a strong Saturday piece on why brands are finally chasing emerging women's sports leagues like AUSL, the Maybelline Women's Lacrosse League, and the new Women's Professional Baseball League. PUNCH profiled three bartending tools to level up at home, including Jeffrey Morgenthaler's batch cocktail calculator. Yotam Ottolenghi opened a delightful chickpeas-and-lentils series with a story about hiking the Atlas Mountains in 27th-December cold. The Met sent a Saturday note on a new home for the Tiffany "Garden Landscape" Window and Helene Schjerfbeck's The Lace Shawl. Wendy MacNaughton's DrawTogether hit Day 10 of its 30-day series with bilateral drawing. And Jaime Feldman at The Daily Skimm wrote up sweet potato stacks, ghost roots, "Brotox," and the eternal "are men OK?" question, which weirdly rhymes with Jaskaran's Gen-Z loneliness numbers.

Three Takeaways for You

The norm against using force isn't a fact of physics, it's a 1945 construction. Hathaway and Shapiro at Foreign Affairs spell that out cleanly, and the rest of the inbox (Krugman, Elias, Pfeiffer, The Flip Side, Gov Brief, Lincoln Square) is essentially watching that construction creak in real time. Maduro to Minneapolis to Greenland in one week is the story.

The AI conversation flipped this week from "what's possible" to "what's actually working." Contrary Research's 46-to-37% drop, the 42% enterprise abandonment rate, Andreessen's "we don't know the product shape yet," McKinsey on building a leadership muscle, and Harbath calling AI an "institutional challenge" all point the same direction: the model layer is commoditizing and value is moving to workflow embedding. If you're an operator, that's the regime change to plan for.

If you only read three pieces this weekend: Hathaway and Shapiro's "Might Unmakes Right" at Foreign Affairs for the frame, Krugman's conversation with Phillips O'Brien for the practical "what did we actually accomplish in Venezuela" answer, and Contrary Research's Case for Specialized AI for the cleanest numbers on where AI value is actually accruing in 2026.