Megan K. Stack has been a foreign correspondent in China, Russia, Egypt, and Israel, and covered the post-9/11 wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan, after which she wrote the book, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War. Her second book is Women's Work: A Personal Reckoning with Labor, Motherhood, and Privilege.

Megan is a contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, and recently published a piece there: Can we see our future in China’s cameras?

In this podcast, we discuss:

* Living under state surveillance in Moscow and Beijing

* Being a foreign correspondent in Beijing from 2010 to 2013

* Traveling in the Chinese panopticon in 2025

* Algorithmic policing in China

* The perils of data centralization

* DOGE and U.S. government surveillance and AI policy

* How to cope

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.

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