Crisis in Perception

During a crisis, information must move quickly. But the systems that make rapid communication possible can also allow emotionally compelling falsehoods to outrun verification. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Communication and Misinformation: Crisis Events in the Age of Social Media, edited by Kevin B. Wright, this Deep Dive investigates the so...

How can a society expand through aggression, remember itself as the victim, and turn that memory into a shared identity? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South by F. Evan Nooe as its lens, this episode investigates how settler violence, Indigenous res...

Why do so many politicians enter office wealthy—or become substantially wealthier after gaining power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Filthy Rich Politicians: The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling-Class Elites Cashing In on America by Matt K. Lewis as our lens, this investigation traces the system connecting personal wealth, campaig...

How can journalism document belief when belief influences what witnesses notice, remember, and understand? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief, edited and introduced by Jeff Sharlet, collects literary journalism examining the unstable intersection of Americ...

What happens when people embrace conformity because it offers relief from anxiety, uncertainty, and social isolation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet as its lens, this episode investigates the psychological conditions that can make a population receptive to mass formation and expanding instit...

What if some of the most consequential battles in war are fought against heat, noise, infection, blast forces, exhaustion, and the limits of the human body? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Mary Roach’s Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War investigates a side of military science that receives far less attention than weapons or strategy: the re...

Can an institution built to enforce domination become the instrument that ends it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The State and Revolution by V. I. Lenin as an entry point, this episode investigates the state as a structure of class power rather than a neutral authority standing above society. Lenin argues that the capitalist state cannot sim...

What happens when a society reorganizes life so completely that freedom begins to look like a defect? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using We by Yevgeny Zamyatin as our lens, this episode investigates how authoritarian control becomes durable when it is embedded not only in laws and punishment, but in time, architecture, identity, intimacy, art, an...

What if the Mediterranean was less a boundary between civilizations than the network that allowed them to exist? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia as its lens, this episode investigates the ports, islands, merchants, migrants, navies, and institutions that connected Mediterran...

Why do societies that depend on cooperation keep organizing life in ways that make collective action so difficult? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions by Astra Taylor as our lens, this episode investigates how concentrated power, economic insecurity, and institutional abandonment can fragment the p...

What if growing up is not simply about making choices, but about discovering which choices society has already made acceptable? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Stay Solid! A Radical Handbook for Youth, edited by Matt Hern and the Purple Thistle Centre, this Deep Dive investigates how institutions shape youth agency, identity, and definitions o...

When the costs of war are distributed unequally, what does responsible citizenship require? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War by Michael S. Foley as its lens, this episode investigates the movement that publicly challenged conscription, the Vietnam War, and the government’s aut...

What happens to a universal right when no political institution is required to enforce it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, and Samuel Moyn—with an afterword by Astra Taylor—as its source lens, this episode investigates Hannah Arendt’s argument that membership in an or...

The Internet dramatically expanded our ability to publish, communicate, and create. But wider participation does not necessarily mean that ownership, compensation, or decision-making power have been distributed equally. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor a...

More information can make a network more powerful without making it more truthful or wise. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. This Mini Explainer uses Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari to investigate a hidden feature of the information age: networks are often optimized for connection, coordinat...

Institutions appear powerful because their authority is visible. Their dependence on cooperation is much harder to see. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using We the Resistance: Documenting a History of Nonviolent Protest in the United States, edited by Michael G. Long, this episode investigates the interconnected history of nonviolent resistance in...

Can equality exist in law while remaining absent from the systems that organize everyday life? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America, edited by Chester Hartman with a foreword by Congressman John Lewis, this episode investigates how race and poverty become intertwined across American institutions....

Religious freedom may be universal in principle, but its practical meaning depends on institutions deciding what counts as religion, whose conscience deserves protection, and when competing rights justify limits. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom, edited by Heather J. Sharkey and Jeffrey Edward Green, th...

Can democracy survive when political equality exists on paper but power remains concentrated throughout economic and institutional life? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor as our lens, this investigation examines democracy as an unfinished practice of collective self-rule r...

What happens to a political movement when outrage becomes more profitable than governing? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism by Joe Conason as our lens, this investigation traces the development of a political industry that converts fear, institutional distrust, a...

What happens when producing an answer becomes easy, but demonstrating genuine learning becomes harder? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using ChatGPT AI in Education: What it is and How to Use it in the Classroom by Brent A. Anders, PhD. as our lens, this episode investigates how generative AI challenges the assumptions built into traditional assessm...

How can a machine generate coherent human language without automatically knowing whether its answer is true? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram as the foundation, this episode investigates the mechanisms beneath ChatGPT’s conversational surface. Wolfram explains how large language...

How well can we know another person when much of what we see is a story constructed from memory, reputation, and expectation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Paper Towns by John Green as its lens, this investigation explores how interpersonal projection can transform a complicated human being into a simplified character. Quentin’s search for M...

A robbery can be completed in hours. Converting its proceeds into usable power can reshape an entire criminal landscape. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Wensley Clarkson’s The Curse of Brink’s-Mat: Twenty-Five Years of Murder and Mayhem: The Inside Story of the Twentieth Century’s Most Lucrative Armed Robbery investigates the long aftermath of the 1...

What happens when the models used to understand an economy exclude the forces capable of destabilizing it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Debunking Economics – Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen as our lens, this investigation examines why neoclassical economics failed to anticipate the 2007–0...