Rhyming Chaos

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.rhymingchaos.com

Anthony Kuhn is the NPR (National Public Radio) correspondent in Seoul, South Korea. He has been reporting from Asia for decades, including long stints in China and Indonesia.

Anthony told me all about recent events in South Korea, a country that only became a democracy very recently, but that has vigorously defended its democratic system against the Trumpish former president Yoon Suk-Yeol, who attempted to subvert that system in December 2024 with the declaration of martial law. His trial for insurrection charges began on April 14. If found guilty, Yoon faces life imprisonment, or even the death penalty (although there has been a moratorium on executions in South Korea since 1997).

Anthony also dropped a bombshell at the end of the podcast—or at least a bombshell to those of us not immersed in Korean politics.

* The recording and editing on this episode is a little rough, which is particularly painful for me since Anthony is an NPR veteran: please forgive me the rough cuts!

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by me, 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 Gymnopedie 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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.rhymingchaos.com

Maria Repnikova is a scholar of political communication in China and Russia. Originally from Latvia, she is an Associate Professor in Global Communication at Georgia State University. She is author of the books Chinese Soft Power and Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism, as well as many articles and papers on related topics.

Now, here we are in the U.S. where the Trump and Musk administration are pressuring and squeezing universities, law firms, and the media, and American news organization—not all but many—are bending the knee one by one to our new authoritarian government. I asked Maria what we can learn from China and Russia when it comes the mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes control and manipulate the news, and how critical journalism can survive in a newly hostile environment.

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

Please support Rhyming Chaos with a paid subscription!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.rhymingchaos.com

Miklós Haraszti is a writer, journalist, human rights advocate, scholar, and erstwhile politician who was born in Jerusalem, and grew up Hungary. He became an opposition activist in the 1960s. He continued to organize politically, and write and publish critical works for the next two decades. His books include A Worker in a Worker's State (1978) and The Velvet Prison (1988).

He participated in the negotiations on the transition to free elections in Hungary in 1989, and was a member of the Hungarian Parliament from 1990 to 1994, after which he spent most of his time as a scholar and university professor, including at Columbia University in New York. He has also served as a UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus as the Representative on Freedom of the Media for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

In this interview we discuss the American parallels with the rise of Viktor Orbán, who was elected prime minister of Hungary in 2010. Since then, Orbán has overseen a transition to an “illiberal, falsified democracy.” There are many lessons for Musk and Trump’s America.

Thanks to Jeff Wasserstrom for introducing me to Miklós.

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

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.rhymingchaos.com

Elizabeth Becker began reporting for the Washington Post in 1973 from Cambodia. She covered the Vietnam War and the rise of the Khmer Rouge for the paper. In December 1978, together with two other Westerners, she interviewed Pol Pot, the genocidal leader of the Khmer Rouge.

Elizabeth is the author of When the War Was Over, a modern history of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, and was an expert witness in 2015 at the international war crimes tribunal of senior Khmer Rouge leaders. She is also the author of You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women rewrote the Story of War about three female journalists who reported on the Vietnam war, breaking barriers and taboos and blazing a trail for women in media.

In this episode, Elizabeth outlines the story of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and we discuss some of the ways that Washington D.C. under Musk and Trump resemble Phnom Penh under Pol Pot.

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

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.rhymingchaos.com

Donald Trump likes to insult Venezuela and its people. But Trump has a lot in common with Hugo Chávez, the strongman who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, and is often blamed for the once-prosperous country’s turn away from democracy, and decline into poverty.

In this episode of Rhyming Chaos, we discuss what the U.S. can learn from Venezuela with Parsifal D’Sola, a Venezuelan and advisor in 2019 to the country’s interim government.

Parsifal is the founder and Executive Director of the Andrés Bello Foundation — China Latin America Research Center, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

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

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.rhymingchaos.com