Crisis in Perception

The laws of physics may be universal. The institutions through which humanity investigates them are not outside society. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein as our lens, this episode explores the relationship between scientific discovery a...

What happens when democratic responsibility becomes concentrated in the people we call leaders? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. as our lens, this investigation examines the relationship between leadership, self-trust, historical inheritance, and democratic agency. Glaude develo...

What if Abraham Lincoln’s political power came not from rising above his culture, but from understanding it deeply enough to reshape it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times by David S. Reynolds as our lens, this Deep Dive explores Lincoln as both a product and an interpreter of nineteenth-century American culture....

What has to be built before a society can become less dependent on punishment? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex by The CR10 Publications Collective as our lens, this episode examines the abolitionist framework developed through Critical Resistance’s first d...

What if a movement can become more representative while the deeper distribution of power barely changes? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò as our lens, this investigation examines how political movements and institutions can be redirected by pe...

How does political power become durable enough to survive criticism, social change, and even the people who originally built it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago by Mike Royko as our lens, this episode investigates the political Machine that helped Richard J. Daley dominate Chicago while overseeing one of the m...

Racism is often treated as something people consciously believe. Studs Terkel's interviews reveal a more difficult possibility: racial assumptions can continue shaping perception even when people consciously reject prejudice. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession by Studs Te...

What if American foreign policy is shaped not only by presidents and crises, but by institutions inherited from earlier generations? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the historical development and persistence of American global pow...

What if the deepest problem with work is not how hard we labor, but whether we can still see ourselves in what we do? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Working by Studs Terkel as our lens, this episode investigates work as more than an economic transaction. Through the voices of ordinary workers, Terkel reveals how employment can distribute dign...

What happens when a society outgrows the stories that once helped people understand who they are—but has not yet developed new ones? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers as our lens, this investigation explores mythology as more than ancient storytelling. Campbell presents myths as symbolic stru...

The American West is often remembered as a frontier being opened. Dee Brown asks us to turn around and examine what that same expansion looked like to the peoples already living there. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West reconstructs the conquest of the nineteenth-century West through...

What happens when the law remains the same on paper, but accountability changes according to who has power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald as our lens, this episode investigates his argument that the American justice system h...

Where do democratic ideas actually come from—and what disappears when history reduces their origins to a single intellectual tradition? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living by Thom Hartmann as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the cultural and intellectual...

What happens when the institutions watching us become increasingly powerful while the systems doing the watching remain largely invisible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy by Thom Hartmann as our lens, this Deep Dive...

What if the defining question in health care is not whether government or markets should run the system, but who the system is obligated to include? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid as our lens, this investigation compares the institutional structur...

What happens when an effective medical treatment exists, but the system surrounding addiction makes it unusually difficult to receive? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Opioid Fix: America’s Addiction Crisis and the Solution They Don’t Want You to Have by Barbara Andraka-Christou as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates why medications for o...

What happens when disinformation stops being merely false information and becomes a system for exercising power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how deliberate falsehoods can exploit human psychology, technological amplifica...

What if the political style associated with Donald Trump makes more sense when we trace the systems that rewarded it decades before he reached Washington? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the environments and relationsh...

What happens when a system designed to manage extreme risk begins consuming its own margin for error? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the interacting pressures behind the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Krakauer arrived on Everest as...

What happens when the pursuit of independence removes the very systems that make independence sustainable? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates Christopher McCandless’s pursuit of radical self-reliance and the tension between autonomy and human interdependence. Krakauer’s accoun...

What if authoritarianism becomes most difficult to recognize when it no longer resembles the regimes preserved in historical memory? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How to Spot a Fascist by Umberto Eco as our lens, this investigation explores Eco’s concept of “Ur-Fascism”: a recurring family of cultural, psychological, and political tendencies...

What should give a constitution democratic legitimacy: its historical endurance, or how well its institutions serve democratic values in the present? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How Democratic Is the American Constitution? by Robert A. Dahl as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the American constitutional system not as a finished blueprint,...

Governments appear powerful because their authority is visible: laws, courts, police, armies, budgets, and political offices. Howard Zinn asks us to look beneath those institutions at the cooperation that allows them to function. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn as our lens, this Deep Dive inve...

What happens when a military can measure almost everything except whether its theory of victory corresponds to reality? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam by James William Gibson as our lens, this episode investigates Gibson’s concept of Technowar: the transformation of warfare into a high-technology, capital...

What happens when an economy becomes better at rewarding the extraction of value than the creation of it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry by Dylan Ratigan as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the institutional incentives that Ratig...