Crisis in Perception

What happens when protecting the sacred also gives institutions the authority to decide which beliefs may be questioned? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how restrictions on apostasy, blasphemy, heresy...

What happens when loyalty to a country becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the people who govern it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Superpatriotism by Michael Parenti as our lens, this episode investigates how patriotism can become what Parenti calls “superpatriotism”: a form of national identification in which criticism of leaders, mil...

A financial bubble becomes especially dangerous when its own success begins to look like evidence that the system is sound. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith as our lens, this investigation explores how speculation becomes a self-reinforcing system rather than simply a collection of bad investment...

What if an ordinary personal crisis is only the visible surface of forces that began long before you noticed them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami as our lens, this investigation explores how seemingly private disruptions can reveal deeper structures of memory, identity, history, and power. Toru Ok...

How much of fitting in depends on who we are—and how much depends on learning the unwritten rules of the people around us? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris as our lens, this episode explores how embarrassment, correction, family expectations, and cultural misunderstanding reveal the hidden rules governing...

What if the systems that appear most stable are sometimes the ones whose hidden risks we understand least? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as our lens, this investigation examines why human beings repeatedly mistake a stable-looking past for a predictable future. Tale...

Some suffering looks personal only because the systems distributing it are harder to see. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Dirty Truths, Michael Parenti moves across politics, media, labor, poverty, ideology, foreign policy, and personal experience to argue that many apparently separate problems become more intelligible when traced back to larger...

When does public diplomacy stop being an exchange of ideas and become a system for shaping how other societies understand America, markets, and power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World by Nancy Snow as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the United States Information Agency and the s...

What happens when the state powerful enough to enforce the rules begins treating those same rules as constraints mainly for everyone else? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy by Noam Chomsky as our lens, this investigation examines his argument that some characteristics associated with...

What if democratic breakdown can occur while the institutions of democracy still appear to be intact? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis as an entry point, this investigation examines how economic insecurity, political spectacle, nationalism, institutional accommodation, and public passivity can interact to...

What if foreign intervention, economic expansion, and military power are not separate policies, but interacting parts of the same system? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race by Michael Parenti as our lens, this investigation examines the political economy Parenti argues lies bene...

What changes when economic life stops being judged as part of a common moral order and begins to operate as a separate sphere? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, historian R. H. Tawney investigates the changing relationship between religious thought and economic activity from the medieval period through the begin...

The stories societies tell about their past do more than preserve memory. Once repeated through politics, media, education, and institutions, they can help shape what seems legitimate and possible in the present. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, edited by Kevin M. Kru...

What happens when a political movement committed to equality begins interpreting inequality through the worldview of society’s most successful professionals? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank as our lens, this investigation examines Frank’s argument that the Demo...

What happens when distrust of government begins shaping the institutions responsible for making government work? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation by Thomas Frank as our lens, this investigation examines the relationship between anti-government i...

Does a generous welfare state depend on social sameness—or on institutions capable of creating a shared sense of membership? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine: Immigration and Social Democracy in Twentieth-Century Sweden by Carly Elizabeth Schall as our lens, this investigation explores how wel...

Why does war keep returning even when its human, financial, and political costs are enormous? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism by Joel Andreas traces more than two centuries of American military expansion, from Manifest Destiny and overseas empire through the Cold War, the War on Terror, Iraq, A...

Productivity can be converted into more goods, more income, or more time. The outcome is not determined by technology alone. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet B. Schor as our lens, this episode investigates why rising productivity did not automatically produce shorter working l...

What happens when distrust of institutions is interpreted not as a possible response to institutional failure, but as evidence that ordinary people cannot be trusted with political power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank as our lens, this investigation traces the changing meaning...

If technology can save labor, why does it so rarely give people their time back? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society, edited by Freedom Press with an introduction by Nina Power, this investigation examines what happens after technological progress makes human labor more productive. Across contributions f...

What if capitalism’s defining feature is not stability, but continual transformation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted and illustrated by Martin Rowson, this episode investigates the economic system Marx and Engels believed was revolutionizing nineteenth-century society. Their a...

What changes when political failure stops being merely a liability and begins producing political rewards? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy by Brian Tyler Cohen as an entry point, this episode investigates Cohen’s argument that much of the modern Republican Part...

A ruler can become more secure even while the state he governs becomes less capable. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development by Yuhua Wang as our lens, this episode investigates the long-term relationship between elite networks, ruler survival, and state capacity across imper...

What happens when a political movement challenges existing institutions while also attempting to perform some of the functions those institutions have failed to provide? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker, with art by Marcus Kwame Anderson, this investigation examines the Black P...

Many everyday disagreements begin with an assumption neither person realizes they are making: that their own way of doing things is simply normal. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places by Mary Roach as our lens, this episode explores the comic friction created when different habits, anxieties, expectatio...