Crisis in Perception

What happens when society learns to tolerate an environmental hazard simply because it cannot see it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Noise Pollution: The Unquiet Crisis by Clifford R. Bragdon as its lens, this Deep Dive examines how technological development, consumer expectations, transportation systems, architecture, land-use planning, and...

What happens when culture becomes inseparable from the economic system producing it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson presents postmodernism not merely as an artistic movement, but as the cultural dominant of late or multinational capitalism. Cultural production, commodity p...

When does an ordinary change in speech become classified as an error? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland as its lens, this investigation examines why speech habits such as “um,” “like,” “dude,” figurative “literally,” vocal fry, and singular “they” attract such intense...

If every city is unique, why do cities throughout history repeatedly generate similar patterns of growth, infrastructure, productivity, and inequality? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems by Luís M. A. Bettencourt as its lens, this investigation examines cities as comp...

What happens when a government creates a permanent capability for lethal action in the space between diplomacy and declared war? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins by Annie Jacobsen as its lens, this Deep Dive investigates the development of covert act...

What looks like a vanished pioneer road is still shaping how people, goods, energy, and information move across the American West. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck as our lens, this episode follows Buck’s modern mule-drawn crossing while investigating the trail as an adaptive mobility netw...

What if pointless employment persists because it is politically and institutionally useful, even when it produces little meaningful value? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber as our lens, this episode investigates why jobs that workers themselves consider unnecessary can survive inside organizations suppose...

A disaster can destroy more than buildings. It can also weaken the institutions, communities, and democratic processes that determine what comes next. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein as our lens, this investigation examines how collective trauma can create a compressed policy w...

What appears to be a collection of unstable jobs may represent a deeper reorganization of economic risk. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing as our lens, this episode investigates the emergence of a class-in-the-making defined by insecure income, weak employment protections, limited benefits,...

A wage records the price paid for labor-power. It does not by itself reveal who owns the product, controls production, or retains the value created through the working day. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Wage-Labor and Capital by Karl Marx as its lens, this investigation examines the relationship between wage labor and productive capital. Mar...

How can a society generate extraordinary productive power while making the people who create that wealth increasingly insecure? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how ownership of productive systems shapes class power, technological development, ins...

What if poverty is not simply a condition that wealthy countries are trying to solve, but an outcome continually reproduced by the rules of the global economy? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets by Jason Hickel as an entry point, this investigation examines how colonial conquest helped c...

A society may become increasingly rational in its procedures while losing the ability to judge whether its purposes are reasonable. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Eclipse of Reason by Max Horkheimer as an entry point, this investigation examines the historical transformation of reason from a faculty capable of evaluating human ends into an in...

What happens when domination no longer needs to issue every command because its hierarchy has been learned as identity? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon as its lens, this investigation examines how colonial power shapes more than political institutions and economic conditions. It also enters language, des...

A classroom can discuss liberation while its structure quietly teaches obedience. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks as its lens, this investigation examines how educational institutions shape authority, voice, participation, and intellectual independence. hooks presents e...

Totalitarianism is often understood as extreme power imposed from above. Hannah Arendt’s investigation reveals a deeper system involving political disintegration, atomized masses, ideological certainty, and the destruction of factual reality. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt as our lens, this epis...

How does a society remember its victories while forgetting the systems that made those victories necessary? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using William Abranowicz's This Far and No Further: Photographs Inspired by the Voting Rights Movement as an entry point, this episode explores how photography can reveal the hidden structures behind politic...

What happens when losing political dominance is experienced as evidence that democracy itself has become illegitimate? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry as its lens, this episode investigates how religious identity, ra...

What does neutrality mean when financial infrastructure keeps a war machine supplied? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Hitler’s Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide by Adam LeBor as our lens, this investigation examines the gap between Switzerland’s formal neutrality and the financial systems that LeBor argues helped sust...

A society can contain intense disagreement among experts while leaving its deepest assumptions almost entirely untouched. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Responsibility of Intellectuals by Noam Chomsky as our lens, this episode investigates how institutions shape the relationship between expertise, public responsibility, and political powe...

The pioneer is often imagined as an independent figure surviving through courage, faith, and hard work. But the historical record reveals that endurance depended on systems of cooperation that later became easy to overlook. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Life and Labour of Rev. A. E. Garrison by Rev. Abraham Ellison Garrison as our lens, this...

What if the behaviors we condemn as laziness are actually signals that human capacity has been exceeded? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked by Dr. Devon Price as our lens, this episode investigates the belief system Price calls the “Laziness Lie.” Price argues that mod...

What happens when a collection of writings from different centuries, genres, and communities comes to be treated as one timeless voice? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book by John Barton as our lens, this episode investigates how diverse biblical texts became consolidated into...

What does it take to transform an invisible theoretical structure into reliable knowledge about reality? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll as our lens, this investigation explores the Higgs boson, the Higgs field, and the...

What happens when the leaders most trusted to understand a crisis become insulated from the evidence that could prove them wrong? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam as our lens, this episode investigates how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations became increasingly committed to the Vietnam War desp...