About Rhyming Chaos
The Rhyming Chaos podcast interviews people who’ve lived through or studied upheavals and authoritarian takeovers all over the world.
We ask them about what they’ve learned, and how to apply it to the United States in 2025.
Maria Repnikova is a Russian-Latvian-American-Jew. She grew up in post-Soviet Latvia, and moved to Vermont with her mom and brother as a teenager. She has studied China (and Russia) for the past two decades, and has lived in Atlanta, Georgia since 2016.
Maria is an Associate Professor in Global Communication and the William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. She is the author of Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press 2017), and Chinese Soft Power (CUP 2022). She has written for NYT, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and other venues, along with academic journals.
Maria holds a Doctorate in Politics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Jeremy Goldkorn grew up just down the road from Elon Musk in South Africa. His paternal grandparents had moved from Riga, Latvia to Johannesburg before World War II. He lived in China for 20 years before moving to Nashville, Tennessee in 2015.
He edits and publishes The China Week newsletter, is an editorial fellow at ChinaFile, and and tweets regularly on Bluesky.
In 1997, he rode a bicycle from Peshawar to Kashgar, and then through Tibet to Kathmandu. He was editor-in-chief of The China Project from 2016 until 20123; founding editor of Danwei and producer of Danwei TV from 2003 to 2014; co-founder of the Sinica podcast in 2010; and managing editor of the P.R.C. capital’s first independent English language entertainment magazine, Beijing Scene from 1998 to 1999.
