Rhyming Chaos – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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.

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.

Richard Poplak is an author, investigative journalist, and filmmaker based Johannesburg, South Africa. Much of his work has focused on corruption, and especially state capture, which refers to business people using their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making for their own profit.

With Elon Musk’s companies already benefiting from his high-profile role in the U.S. government, this might sound familiar to Americans. There’s a lot else going on in the U.S. right now that rhymes with South Africa’s recent past, and in this episode, we discuss state capture and other parallels in this episode of the podcast.

Poplak is the author of many things, including Ja No Man: Growing Up White In Apartheid Era South Africa, The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World, and the journalistic graphic novel Kenk: A Portrait about notorious Toronto bike thief Igor Kent. He is also co-author of Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa's Changing Fortunes, the co-director of Influence, a documentary film about corruption in South Africa, senior contributor to the Daily Maverick, an extraordinary South African news organization.

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

Geremie R. Barmé is a Sinologist, historian, filmmaker, translator, and author of a shelf of books on China.

In 1974, in the dying days of the Cultural Revolution, he went to China as a student and occasional farm laborer. He has studied both the ancient and modern history of the country, and observed firsthand momentous changes from the death of Mao to the rise of Xi Jinping.

In this podcast, we discuss the echoes, parallels, and rhymes he sees happening now in Musk and Trump’s America with power grabs and self-coups in recent Chinese history, when the ruler carries out a self-authored coup against the system he is running.

Links

* China Heritage: Contra Trump — American Tedium by Geremie Barmé

* New York Times: Welcome to America’s Fourth Great Constitutional Rupture by Noah Millman

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.

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.

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.