Crisis in Perception

What if anatomical terminology is not merely a vocabulary for describing the body, but a record of how generations of people learned to perceive it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Anatomical Oddities: The Otherworldly Realms Hidden within Our Bodies, Dr. Alice Roberts explores anatomy through etymology, illustration, visual metaphor, and the his...

What does preparedness actually mean if an institution cannot turn knowledge into coordinated action? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis as an entry point, this investigation examines the gap between America’s reputation for pandemic preparedness and its ability to respond when COVID-19 arrived....

What if an organization's strongest assumptions about who belongs also create its greatest blind spots? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime, Ron Stallworth recounts the extraordinary 1978 investigation in which the first Black detective in the Colorado Springs Police Depar...

What if political independence does not necessarily mean independence from the systems shaping political choices? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams as an entry point, this investigation examines African decolonization through the competing pressures of sovereignty, C...

What happens when awareness of mortality becomes a threat-detection system that never switches off? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin follows Gilda, a twenty-seven-year-old atheist lesbian whose chronic anxiety and fixation on death shape nearly every part of her life. Using Austin’s novel as...

Why can a novel become dangerous to a system that depends on certainty? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times by Azar Nafisi as our lens, this investigation examines why literature can become a form of resistance when political or ideological systems attempt to reduce reality to...

What if the most durable response to crisis is not simply delivering resources, but increasing a community’s ability to coordinate for itself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade as our lens, this investigation explores mutual aid as both immediate survival work and a...

What if loneliness is sometimes less about being alone than about living inside an incomplete story? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt as an entry point, this episode investigates the hidden structures connecting grief, isolation, family identity, and incomplete information. Tova Sullivan, Cameron C...

What happens when a communication network becomes powerful enough to change how information, coordination, and influence move through society? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick as our lens, this investigation explores Facebook’s transformation...

What if nuclear deterrence is stable only until the moment it is needed most? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen uses interviews with former military and national-security officials, scientific research, and declassified records to reconstruct how a nuclear attack could move from detection to retaliation and e...

When what we see with our own eyes conflicts with a larger scientific model, what should determine what we believe? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. This two-host Debate stress-tests the stationary flat-Earth model against the rotating globe-Earth model using six sources spanning flat-Earth advocacy, astronomy, geodesy, skepticism, and research into...

What happens when the systems designed to distinguish effective professional practice from unsupported claims become unreliable themselves? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Science and Pseudoscience in Social Work Practice by Bruce A. Thyer and Monica G. Pignotti as our lens, this investigation examines how questionable assessments and interven...

What if the most important part of foreign influence happens before anyone recognizes it as political? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia by Craig Unger as our lens, this investigation examines the decades-long network Unger argues connected Russian organized c...

What changes when we stop asking only whether individuals are prejudiced and begin examining the systems surrounding them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Race in America by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer as our lens, this investigation explores race as a socially and historically constructed system with consequences extending far beyon...

What if people arguing about “the economy” are not actually imagining the same thing? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Rigged: Understanding ‘the economy’ in Brexit Britain by Anna Killick as our lens, this investigation explores how lived economic experience influences what people believe “the economy” actually is. Killick’s political ethnogra...

What happens when political power operates through networks designed to leave no fingerprints? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House by Craig Unger revisits the October Surprise—the allegation that figures associated with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campai...

If meaning and morality are not assigned from outside humanity, where do they come from? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Little Book of Humanism by Andrew Copson and Alice Roberts as our lens, this investigation explores the humanist model of a meaningful and ethical life within a natural universe. Copson and Roberts argue that human being...

Humanity’s global expansion can look like a deliberate journey across a stable world. Alice Roberts reveals a much more dynamic process in which both humans and the landscapes around them were continually changing. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Incredible Human Journey by Alice Roberts as our lens, this episode investigates how Homo sapi...

Domestication looks like a story about humans gaining control over nature. Viewed as a system, however, it becomes a story about species changing one another. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Tamed: From Wild to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History by Alice Roberts as our lens, this episode investigates the evolut...

What if the most important result of a political campaign is what people remain capable of doing together after the election ends? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism by Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht was written during the 2020 Sanders campaign as a strategic argument about...

What happens when a safety net built around steady employment meets a labor market where steady employment cannot be guaranteed? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer as our lens, this investigation examines the institutional conditions surrounding extreme cash p...

What if racial progress can be genuine while racial domination continues operating through less visible mechanisms? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer as our lens, this investigation examines race not as a biological reality but as a soci...

Why can military victory be much easier to achieve than political control? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Stephen Tanner’s Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban traces centuries of conflict across a territory repeatedly caught between expanding empires, neighboring powers, local communities, and competi...

D-Day is remembered as one of history’s great military operations. But the familiar images of beaches, generals, and individual heroism reveal only part of the system that made the invasion possible. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using D-Day: The Oral History by Garrett M. Graff as our lens, this Deep Dive examines how years of industrial mobiliza...

What happens to negotiating power when a country leaves the institution whose rules it once helped shape? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Inside the Deal: How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck provides a first-hand account of the Brexit negotiations from inside Michel Barnier’s European Union team. De Rynck argues that many assumptions surr...