From Sarah Palin to the Dreyfus Affair to Stalinist torture rooms, from World War II to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this conversation with Marci Shore covers a lot of ground.

Marci is a Professor and Chair of intellectual history at the University of Toronto. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s The Black Seasons, and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.

Towards the end of the podcast, she mentions the website Small Acts of Democratic Resistance. This site is meant to be a platform for solidarity and moral support, but also a resource for journalists, especially those outside of the U.S.

If you’re in the U.S. and are taking part in any acts of democratic resistance, large or small, you can write to [email protected] to get in touch with the website.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Historian and sinologist Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of many books, including The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, and most recently, The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing.

We chatted to him about the Milk Tea Alliance, and America. This was recorded on the resonant date of June 4, 2025, before the No Kings protests in the U.S. of June 14.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

We can learn a lot about Trump and Musk from studying other strongmen in other countries and at other times, especially those who have entered politics after careers in media and business.

This interview, recorded on the afternoon of June 6 as the terrible two of the Oval Office were feuding online, is an amazing crash course in the Italian strongmen Mussolini and Berlusconi, with Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

She is a leading scholar of fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and how democracies can stay resilient, Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University, and the author of numerous books in English and Italian.

Her most recent book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, examines how how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, the persecution of scapegoats, and machismo. As the author of the first book to look at how Trump compares to other authoritarians of the last 100 years, Ruth is the perfect guest for Rhyming Chaos to help us understand how Musk and Trump function. And how we might defeat them.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Michela Wrong has reported from many African countries for the BBC, Reuters, and the Financial Times since the 1980s. Her books include In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: The Rise and Fall of Mobutu Sese Seko and the Destruction of Zaire (now called the Democratic Republic of Congo); I Didn’t Do It For You, a history of Eritrea; It’s Our Turn to Eat, about the Kenyan corruption whistleblower John Githongo; and Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad on President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda.

In this show, we focus on Rwanda, Kagame, and the chilling tale of a hit squad murdering one of Kagame’s oldest friends.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Stacy Torres is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America. She recently wrote an essay for The Guardian newspaper, titled “I used to laugh at my Chilean father’s paranoia about life in the U.S.—not any more.”

We talked to her about her father, intergenerational paranoia, life at an American university right now, how to cope in an authoritarian regime, fingerspitzengefühl, and more.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Related: A short photo essay about hats

Kaya Genç is the author of The Lion and the Nightingale, an account of happenings and conversations in 2017 in Istanbul and around Turkey and stories of the lives of all kinds of people from different social strata, the year after the 2016 coup attempt. His other books are Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey (2016), An Istanbul Anthology, and in Turkish, Macera, a novel that has yet to be translated into English.

We talked about recent Turkish history, life under the rule of strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and what the United States might learn from Turks, young and old.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Richard Poplak is a South African investigative journalist, author, and filmmaker who was the guest on the second episode of Rhyming Chaos, How to loot a country: Lessons for the U.S. from South Africa.

He returns to answer my questions about the absurd “white genocide” story currently being propagated by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and other bigots, and what real South Africans think of the 59 people who came to the United States invited by the Trump administration as “refugees” from the fake “white genocide.”

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts.

This Rhyming News special episode opens with The daffodil, improvised and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei, and closes with Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese-American journalist and author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections On The Vietnamese Diaspora which won the PEN American Beyond Margins award in 2006. He has also reported as a journalist from around the U.S. and Asia, and written many essays, and a number of other books, including a wonderful collection of short fiction, Stories from the Edge of the Sea, published in March this year.

Andrew spent his early childhood in Vietnam, but fled with his family to the United States when Saigon fell to the Communist North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Filip Noubel is the Editor at Large for Global Voices, “an international community of writers, bloggers and digital activists that aim to translate and report on what is being said in citizen media worldwide,” and Senior China Analyst at AMO, the Prague-based Association for International Affairs. From 2006 to 2016, Filip was the Managing Director for Internews China, training Chinese journalists and lawyers before such work became impossible. He has lived all over Europe, in China and Central Asia, and worked in Ukraine and West Africa.

In our first show co-hosted by both of us—Maria Repnikova and Jeremy Goldkorn—we asked Filip how his experiences in other countries compare with what he sees in the United States right now, and how Americans can resist and remain resilient in these dark times.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Paul French is the bestselling author of the historical murder mystery, Midnight in Peking, and many other books about people and historical events in China. He has visited North Korea several times, and written the book North Korea: State of Paranoia, and a Kindle Special titled Our Supreme Leader: The Making of Kim Jong-un. Paul also presented the BBC radio drama documentary, The Defectors, about people who have fled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as its rulers like to call it.

We discussed what rhymes with the U.S.A. in 2025 in North Korean history, from the country’s founding at the end of the Korean War in 1953, and the subsequent rule of the Kim dynasty: Kim Il-sung who ruled until 1994; Kim Jong-il, who ruled until 2011; and Kim Jong-un, who still runs the country.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.