January 6, 2026 ❧ INTERVIEW: A DSA way to look at Mamdani, a grocery store chain tracking biometric data, a hockey labor win, and nose bubbles that keep 

Plus: Protesters becoming government PR, and a dance video that might have sent Trump over the edge and into Venezuela

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HERE & ABROAD

❧ DEEP DIVE: How to look at Zohran Mamdani ❧

Last week, Current Affairs associate editor Alex Skopic and I attended the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, a (say it with me) 34-year-old, Muslim, immigrant, democratic socialist who is now the mayor of New York City. His election is a massive victory for the left, one that inspires hope, excitement, and that great cavernous pressure of potential yet to be fulfilled. A lot is riding on the Mamdani administration as they take the socialist left’s biggest swing at governance in American history. 

Although Mamdani is now among the most famous and powerful politicians in the country, we don’t actually know him very well. He’s brand new to the national stage. 

So after the inauguration, I rang Alex Pellitteri, a member of the South Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America, who started working on DSA campaigns when he was 17 years old. Pellitteri first met Mamdani in 2017 while volunteering for Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian Lutheran Minister running for City Council in Bay Ridge. The next year, Ross Barkan tapped Mamdani to be his campaign manager for his state assembly run, and Mamdani hired Pellitteri as a staffer. Pellitteri has spent his entire adult life organizing on the political left, often working alongside New York’s new mayor. I asked him how he understands Mamdani, how he is thinking about Mamdani’s actions as mayor, and what he envisions for the future of the DSA. 

An edited version of our conversation follows:

Art by Mattie Lubchansky from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 1

Alex Pellitteri: I don't really think he changed his personality for the campaign. They really just let him shine. He's probably one of the most charismatic people I've ever met. Like he's someone who could make boiling water seem interesting. But I think that he also does expect a lot from people. Like, as I said, I worked with him when I was a high school student, and then the summer between my high school and college, and he never really treated me differently because of my age, which I think is kind of an anomaly in politics. And I think he had the same expectations for me as he would anyone else. And I think that that approach really helped me rise to the occasion.

EC: There's a lot of questions around how democratic socialist Mamdani will stay. Is he going to be a lowercase democratic socialist, an uppercase Democratic Socialist, or will he begin to compromise? From your perspective, as someone with DSA bonafides deeper than most, as well as a relationship with Zohran that helps you interpret his actions, what would be green flags and what would be red flags? What are you looking for?

AP: I think that DSA—or really not even just DSA, like the socialist left strategy for the past several decades—has really focused on state legislators, occasionally a member of Congress. The fact that we do have someone who is in not just any executive office, but the mayor of New York City, shows that we really do need to redefine our expectations, our definition for what it means to be a good cadre in office.

I think that he is going to do things that I'm sure he does not want to do, or that we do not want him to do. But what really is important to me is that he still stays responsive to DSA. He still respects the internal democracy of DSA. He's hired several DSA leaders already, which is great, but I think if he still is regularly—or someone from his administration is—still regularly meeting or in touch with DSA, I think if he is respecting the Democratic votes of DSA in terms of endorsements or priority campaigns or things like that. I think if he still really continues to understand that his power stems from the movement behind him, that that is a real recipe for success.

Read the rest of the conversation at the end of this newsletter.

❧ In Other News ❧

❧ THE PANOPTICON OF THE FROZEN FOOD AISLE. Wegmans is now surveilling shoppers in such disturbing detail that you know Jeff Bezos is cursing himself in his office, angry he didn’t think of it first. The grocery chain has begun collecting biometric data on its shoppers, including faces, eyes and voices. According to the Gothamist, “The chain had initially said that the scanning system was only for a small group of employees and promised to delete any biometric data it collected from shoppers during the pilot rollout. The new notice makes no such assurances.” At a time when ICE agents are using facial recognition to kidnap people off the street, even the grocery store can’t pinky promise that it’s not working with the feds.

Art by Tyler Rubenfeld from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 1

❧ 2025 WAS THE YEAR PROTESTERS BECAME GOVERNMENT PR. U.S. protest policing has shifted from quiet surveillance to overt spectacle, as federal and local authorities increasingly deploy troops, militarized police, and highly visible force—not primarily to manage crowds but to project power and deter dissent. As Wired reports in their excellent documentation of Trump’s protest policing, this replaces the older model of preemptive monitoring and controlled protest zones with a theatrical crackdown designed for cameras and political messaging, reframing protest as a public threat rather than a democratic right. “Together, these shifts trace a clear arc in US protest policing—from suppression, to management, to prevention, to performance—where authority is asserted as much through optics and narrative today as it is by force.”

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

What’s new in the magazine this week?

The Coup In Venezuela Is An Assault on the Whole World

Welcome to 2026. We’re six days in and Trump has already threatened the global order, violating international law as well as the U.S. Constitution, by bombing Venezuela and kidnapping its president. Nicolás Maduro is now being held in a Brooklyn jail, where he faces federal charges including narco-terrorism and weapons offenses. The reason he’s there is obviously money, given flimsy cover by the ridiculously named “Don-roe Doctrine.” (It is the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, but with a D, you know, for Donald.) The Donroe Doctrine asserts, basically, that the United States has domain over the western hemisphere, and we have every right to intervene in the huge region how we see fit.  (Already Trump is saying troubling things about Columbia, Mexico and Cuba.) The real impetus for overthrowing Venezuela, obviously, is Trump’s stated goal to “take back” the country’s oil. If Trump actually cared about Latin American leaders’ involvement in drug trafficking, then he probably wouldn’t have pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández last month, for nearly the exact same crimes.

“It’s hard to overstate the danger of the precedent that’s been set here,” Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson and associate editor Alex Skopic write. “Trump has just sent a message to the world that, if any head of state acts in a way the U.S. disapproves of, the U.S. may unilaterally attack and kidnap that head of state, provided it can come up with a ‘crime’ to accuse them of in a U.S. court. In other words, no country is actually sovereign.” What’s happening is very bad; their piece lays out just how dire the stakes are, how vast the implications, and how necessary our resistance is.

❧ In More News ❧

❧ MADURO’S DANCING MIGHT HAVE BEEN TRUMP’S LAST STRAW IN VENEZUELA. I’m not sure how the New York Times reported on this with a straight face. According to the outlet, what ultimately pushed Trump to kidnap Maduro and his wife was … Maduro’s dancing. “Mr. Maduro’s regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance in recent weeks helped persuade some on the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them and trying to call what he believed to be a bluff,” the article states. “So the White House decided to follow through on its military threats.” The jokes write themselves, but it's hard to make them. The reality is just so grim: Right now, we’re in a political system where silly video clips matter more than the stability of another country, and more than congressional votes, to say nothing of the votes of you or I.

Art by Tyler Rubenfeld from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 1

❧ MAJOR LABOR WIN FOR MINOR SPORTS LEAGUES. Last month, minor league hockey players in the East Coast Hockey League went on strike for the second time in the league's history. Organized by their players’ union, Professional Hockey Players’ Association, their asks were basic: no traveling for just three days, from December 24 to 26, so players can be with their families; guaranteed contracts to provide stability, healthcare during the offseason, more control over their likeness, better pay. Right before New Year’s, the EHCL announced they reached a tentative new collective bargaining agreement with the players. Sorry, Heated Rivalry fans, there are no reports on romantic entanglement within the player’s union, but I would tune in for that show. Worker protections are so hot.

❧ The Rest of Our Conversation with Alex Pellitteri ❧

EC: At the inauguration, AOC started out talking about this return to public life. Zohran ends with the lines, “Stay outside.” It seems like there is an acknowledgement that Zohran Mamdani is as much as the people behind him in the movement that he is Zohran Mamdani. How did you react to hearing those kinds of things at the inauguration?

AP: He gave very strong indications. And I think DSA will be a very big part of his coalition. I think not only him appointing Cea Weaver and Tascha Van Auken within 24 hours of the inauguration, but also the fact that it's probably the first time in history that a New York City mayor mentioned DSA twice in his inauguration speech, right? He will govern as a Democratic Socialist. So I really saw it more as an embracing of that movement and embracing DSA. And I think part of the reason why I left the inauguration feeling so optimistic.

EC: Two of the bigger controversies of Zohran’s transition would be the decision to keep Jessica Tish as the commissioner of the NYPD and the decision not to endorse Chi Ossé in a primary challenge against Hakeem Jefferies. What did you make of these decisions?

Art by Mort Todd from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 1

AP: With Tisch, I was definitely disappointed by it. I think many people at DSA were. I don't know what went down behind the scenes, but I think it was one of the many compromises he will make. But I think that he is running the campaign on public safety that he said he would when he applied for a DSA endorsement, right? He never said he was going to defund the police in the questionnaire, and he talked about the Department of Community Safety. While I think Tisch surprised a lot of people, his general stance on policing shouldn't be a surprise. Despite that, he still got 80 percent of the DSA endorsement. I think we knew what we were signing up for when we endorsed him. 

EC: And then Chi Ossé. What's your thinking around that?

AP: I was also against endorsing Chi Ossé. I don't know the deeper reasons for why he came to that decision. But I think the fact that he took the time to come in person to the DSA endorsement forum and got in line and waited in line like everyone else really does indicate what I was talking about before, a real respect for DSA and our internal democracy.

EC: And it sounds like for you that's paramount.

AP: I agree. I think he still should not only respect that democracy, but also should participate in that democracy. Because the beauty of his election is that he still is a DSA member.

EC: The word pragmatism keeps coming up in conversations around Zohran. Is that a word you would attach to him?

AP: I think probably not, in the way that other people do. I think when people talk about pragmatism, they often talk about it in contrast to being overly ideological and being like, “Well, we can't achieve everything we want, so we're going to achieve as much as we can, and even if that means sacrificing some of our ideology.” But I think that Zoran was pragmatic in that he looked around and saw the issues that were impacting New Yorkers, like rent, child care, transportation, and ran on those very issues.

Art by Mort Todd from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 1

EC: The way I've described Zohran is that he's agenda first.

AP: He focused on the things that everybody could agree with. Everyone, regardless of where you are in the political spectrum, hates the MTA (Metropolitan Transport Authority). Everyone thinks their rent is too high. And him ruthlessly staying focused on that, while also being able to bring together a broad coalition of people, isn't a coincidence.

EC: You are really committed to the growth of DSA. You're on the Growth and Development Committee. You did a panel on coalition building across phases of life. How are you moving forward and perhaps moving differently in this moment?

AP: I have been reflecting a lot on when I first joined DSA in 2017. Partly because Zohran was a big part of that, but also because there are many people who are now joining DSA for the first time, and I think it can be a very daunting thing to do for a number of reasons. I think it can also be a very exciting and empowering thing to do. So my focus is to really meet new members where they are, to develop them into cadre socialist organizers. I recently got elected to the South Brooklyn Organizing Committee, which is my branch. And the reason I wanted to run for that was because that is where many people will have their first experience with DSA. … So I want to be able to not only be someone who can be one of the first people to meet new members, but also can shape the agenda, political education and things like that, to make sure that they stick around and get more involved in the organization.

Art by Mort Todd from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 1

EC: Do you think there’s anything I'm missing or overlooking? Me, or the media more broadly?

AP: Zohran is not only the mayor, but I would say the leader of the Democratic Socialist movement. And I think Bernie Sanders swearing him in was symbolically him handing over that title to Zohran. It won't just be a test of how he can lead New York City, it will be a test in how he can lead the democratic socialists.

EC: Did you ever rap with him? 

AP: I was in his music video. Yeah, in “Nani.” I guess he wanted a baby, but he couldn’t find one, so he found the next youngest person he could, which was me. I was 17. It was actually the day of my prom. I was late to my prom because of it. They like shaved me to put makeup on me to make me younger.

ANIMAL FACT OF THE WEEK

Echidnas blow nose bubbles to cool off!

If there is anything I learned from watching Kangaroo Jack, it’s that Australia is hot and dry. Finding water can be a challenge for any of its fauna, and the echidna, well, they don’t have sweat glands. Rather, these porcupine-looking critters blow bubbles with their nose, then let them pop and cover their snouts in liquid. As the liquid evaporates, the little echidna cools. Yes, the bubbles look like snot bubbles.

Photo via Wildlifecartoons, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Emily Topping and Nathan J. Robinson. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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