Before he was a global symbol of dissent, Ai Weiwei was a professional card player working Atlantic City blackjack tables in the late 1980s. This episode follows how that analytical, risk-taking mindset carried over into a lifetime of confronting authority. We begin with his birth in Beijing in 1957, the denunciation of his father, a revered poet, and 16 years of family exile in Xinjiang living in dugouts, before his 1981 move to New York, dropping out of Parsons, drawing street portraits, and absorbing the ready-made ideas of Duchamp and Warhol.

Returning to China in 1993, he turned to blogging and then to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where his citizen investigation crowdsourced 5,385 names of children killed in poorly built schools. We cover the police beating that led to emergency brain surgery in Germany, the demolition of his Shanghai  ...