Crisis in Perception

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...

What makes a democratic right real: the words that guarantee it, or the institutions willing to enforce it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident by Howard Zinn brings together essays written for The Nation across several decades, including firsthand reflections on the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, constitutional liberty...

What happens when a technology capable of opening the world becomes part of a system that narrows what people are allowed to hear? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr as our lens, this investigation explores the invisible systems surrounding communication, perception, institutional power, and individual...

Stories can cross centuries, but they do not survive by themselves. Preservation is not merely a matter of storage—it is a continuing process of transmission. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr links characters separated by centuries through a fictional ancient Greek story about Aethon and his search for an ideal city...

What happens when institutions assume that private self-interest will reliably contain systemic risk? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis by Darryl Cunningham as an entry point, this episode traces the ideas, incentives, and institutional changes surrounding the 2008 financial cr...

What happens when a government retains formal power but gradually loses the cooperation that makes that power sustainable? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Rise of Red China by Robert Goldston as our lens, this episode investigates the systems behind China’s revolutionary transformation and the Communist victory of 1949. Goldston connects t...

What happens when a system can genuinely perform miracles—but those miracles depend upon turning other people into resources? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw as an entry point, this investigation examines a world where resurrection, bodily reconstruction, mythology, and institutional authority become inse...

What if slowing growth and rising inequality are partly two consequences of the same hidden system? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles as our lens, this investigation examines how regulatory capture can allow organized interests to convert political influence into economic protection. Lind...

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...