Crisis in Perception

What if low voter turnout reflects more than individual interest in politics? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Why Americans Don't Vote by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward as an entry point, this investigation examines the institutional and historical forces that shape electoral participation in the United States. Piven and Cloward...

What if some of the most durable resistance to equality operates not through open confrontation, but through the ordinary machinery of government? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson as the lens, this episode investigates the recurring relationship between Black advancement and...

What happens when security stops being one concern among many and becomes part of how a society understands itself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Occupied Minds: A Journey through the Israeli Psyche by Arthur Neslen as our lens, this investigation explores Israeli Jewish identity through immigration, military service, historical memory, ethn...

What happens when universal principles encounter a situation where enforcing them becomes politically, institutionally, or personally costly? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using One day, everyone will have always been against this by Omar El Akkad as our lens, this investigation examines the gap between the values societies proclaim and the condit...

What happens when enormous systems of power and expertise converge on one person who ultimately has to decide? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Truman by David McCullough as our lens, this Deep Dive explores Harry S. Truman's unlikely rise from Missouri farmer and local politician to the presidency—and what his life reveals about the relati...

What turns a rumor into a catastrophe: the spark itself, or the systems that fail to stop it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by Mary E. Jones Parrish as our lens, this investigation examines the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District through Parrish’s eyewitness account,...

The Brooklyn Bridge appears to be a monument to engineering genius. Look more closely, and it becomes a study in how complex systems survive uncertainty. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, David McCullough reconstructs the engineering, politics, danger, personalities, and publi...

A warning can fail long before the system it describes. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough as our lens, this investigation explores how a known danger can gradually become normalized until the warning signs themselves lose their urgency. McCullough reconstructs the 1889 catastrophe through survivor accounts...

What allows scattered pieces of information to overcome a system designed to keep them separate? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as our lens, this episode follows the reporting process that transformed the Watergate burglary into a much broader investigation of political intelligence,...

What happens when the institution accused of wrongdoing also controls much of the machinery meant to investigate it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, historian Heather Ann Thompson reconstructs the conditions that produced the 1971 Attica uprising, the violent retaking of the p...

What if military superiority depends less on possessing a revolutionary weapon than on building the system capable of exploiting it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle by John Keegan and Richard Holmes, with John Gau, examines the transformation from warrior to professional soldier and the changing experience of com...

What happens when institutions become highly capable of treating suffering but remain unable to stop the system producing it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival by Sheri Fink as our lens, this investigation follows the doctors and humanitarian workers confronting the siege of Srebrenica during th...

How much of the American suburban landscape reflects private preference—and how much reflects the systems that made those preferences easier to pursue? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, historian Kenneth T. Jackson examines why American metropolitan development became unusually low-densi...

What happens when experiences understood as private problems become visible as recurring parts of a larger system? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus as our lens, this Deep Dive explores how Riot Grrrl transformed isolation and anger into collective awareness through a...

What if the apparent disorder of a successful city is actually evidence that a complex system is working? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs as our lens, this episode investigates why attempts to impose simplified order on cities can disrupt the social and economic relationships that make...

What looks like an individual limitation can sometimes reveal a much larger institutional design. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Women and Disability: The Double Handicap, edited by Mary Jo Deegan and Nancy A. Brooks, is a 1985 collection examining the social, economic, psychological, and institutional experiences of physically disabled women. Usin...

What does it really take to become “the first”—exceptional ability, or an institution finally creating a path for that ability to be seen? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space by Lynn Sherr as our lens, this episode examines the life of the physicist who became the first American woman in space and the...

A financial system does not require everyone inside it to behave irrationally in order to become dangerously unstable. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan as our lens, this investigation traces the interconnected political, economic, and financial pressures tha...

What happens when financial risk is distributed across so many institutions that the connections themselves become a source of instability? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. The Great Hangover: 21 Tales of the New Recession, edited by Graydon Carter and drawn from the pages of Vanity Fair, brings together journalists and economists including Michael L...

What happens when political freedom advances faster than the economic and institutional structures surrounding it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer by Chris Myers Asch as our lens, this investigation examines how Sunflower County, Mississippi, chan...

Some of America’s most important social programs helped millions build economic security. But their benefits did not pass through a neutral institutional landscape. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson as our lens, this investiga...

How does someone famous enough to fill lecture halls across America become nearly invisible to later generations? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby as our lens, this episode investigates the extraordinary influence—and subsequent disappearance—of Robert Green Ingersoll...

What happens when private conviction gains access to public coercive power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. What’s God Got to Do with It?: Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk, and the Separation of Church and State, edited and introduced by Tim Page, brings together Robert G. Ingersoll’s writings on freethought, humanism, religious liberty...

What if science succeeds not by eliminating failure, but by building a system capable of learning from it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Failure: Why Science Is So Successful by Stuart Firestein as our lens, this investigation examines why productive failure can be an essential part of scientific progress. Firestein challenges the familiar p...

Corruption is usually pictured as an exchange between a dishonest official and someone willing to pay. But the deeper question is what makes those exchanges valuable, sustainable, and difficult to challenge in the first place. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History, edited by Edward L. Gl...