Hello and welcome back to Five Things!

What a year! We are only a couple of days in and we are witnessing the end of the rules-based order as we knew it. Russia and China will now be able to legitimate their landgrabs with pointing to some imaginary right as a continental hegemon.

On Monday the kids have to be back at school and we actually have done mostly nothing the last few days, which was necessary after the hectic December. I love it when my kids say that they are bored, I think boredom is wonderful for kids. They then have to figure out what to do. And it is good to know that even that new iPad is no longer appealing after some time…

What I also didn’t expect to happen in the first week of the year: snow in Hamburg. Everything is white and it is beautiful and it won’t be long until everything turns into unbearable annoying grey slush again.

So, I hope you all made amazing plans for 2026 and I sincerely hope that you achieve everything you aspire for! I am looking forward to be writing this newsletter for every Sunday of 2026 and I sure hope not everything will turn out as grim as it looks right now.

To Trump, on Venezuela: You Break It, You Own It

How the Trump administration is going to run Venezuela is simply not clear. Does it have an arrangement with the remnant of the Maduro regime to step aside? Does Trump plan to pose to Maduro’s rump team an ultimatum to leave and then the U.S. will organize elections? What is clear is that America running Venezuela would be a huge job, and there will be a significant portion of Trump’s isolationist MAGA base that is not likely to embrace that task.

I would also add that listening to Trump vastly exaggerate the threat posed by Venezuela and Maduro to the United States had very disturbing echoes of the way the George W. Bush team exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify its invasion. When you don’t call things by their real and honest name, you get in trouble.

Do you remember the movie "Wag the dog”? What a total shitshow.

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15 Scenarios That Could Stun the World in 2026

Brits tend to bring up the Northern Irish Troubles in discussions of conflict, and sometimes they overdo it. But Ireland’s Troubles do resonate ominously in contemporary America. With President Donald Trump deploying National Guard and active-duty U.S. troops to heavily Democratic cities, a violent backlash could send America in a similar direction.

Well, these scenarios didn’t include Trump taking over the Venezuelan government. Still, really interesting and scary scenarios.

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Killing in the name of… nothing

It’s useless to call for civil debate as “politics in the right way”; politics has moved beyond words. Where there are words at all, they are but a way to express a meme, a vibe, an aesthetic. They are a method to channel brainrot, like any other medium of communication. To expect words to mean words, for them to attach to objects in time and space and to line up with any internal logic — this is the sort of cringe that will fade into the periphery along with the millennial pause, that half-second of silence where the older generation gathers their thoughts.

It is so absurd.

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Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring

Which means it’s up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit. In an age in which information on the internet is so abundant and so low-quality that it’s essentially noise, job number one is to fight our evolutionary instinct to absorb all available information, and instead filter out unreliable sources and bad data.

Fortunately, there’s a way: critical ignoring.

This is the one trend I will try to succeed in this year.

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The Year in Cheer

Germany is arguably the “risky playground” capital of the world, home to about 400 play spaces where putting kids at risk is the point.

The good old Abenteuerspielplatz where kids can build all sorts of stuff with hammer and nails and whatnot. My favorite playground when I was a kid. Oh, and also read the 97 other wonderful things that happened in 2025, especially when you get the feeling everything is going down the drain in 2026.

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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:

Five Things: The Final Five of 2025 and a quick announcement Nico Lumma · December 28, 2025 Read full story

— Nico