Crisis in Perception

What if the appearance of untouched wilderness is itself the product of history? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks by Mark David Spence as our lens, this investigation examines the relationship between the creation of national parks and the exclusion of Native peop...

What happens when the laws describing gravity and the laws governing quantum information appear to demand different answers about what reality allows? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw as our lens, this investigation explores why black holes have become some of the...

What happens to political agency when history is understood primarily as the unfolding of objective structural forces? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Struggle to Make Democratic Socialism in the Twenty-First Century by David Neilson as our lens, this investigation examines the relationship between structure, knowledge, and purposeful huma...

What makes collective action possible when the rules appear designed to prevent it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity by Micah Uetricht as our lens, this investigation explores the transformation of the Chicago Teachers Union and the organizational system behind its 2012 strike. Uetricht arg...

What if the greatest obstacle to understanding reality is the mind trying to understand it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything, Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry explore the uneasy relationship between human intuition and the reality revealed through mathematics, measurement, and scientific investigation. Thi...

Why can having more opportunities make us less effective at what matters most? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown as our lens, this investigation explores how finite attention, time, and energy are distributed in environments where choices, expectations, and demands continually expand....

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...