Crisis in Perception

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...

What if part of the gender earnings gap is not simply a difference in pay, but the downstream consequence of how the economy rewards time? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin as our lens, this episode investigates the century-long transformation of women’s efforts to...

What if earning more money does not actually make a household more secure? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein draw on extensive interviews with 379 low-income single mothers to examine how families actually survive welfare and low-wage employment. The...

When someone loses a job, why is the worker so visible while the system that eliminated the work remains largely invisible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Some Folks Won't Work by Clinch Calkins uses family histories, employment records, and contemporary unemployment studies to challenge the belief that joblessness can be understood primarily a...

What happens when a society responds to the eruption of disorder without changing the conditions that helped produce it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Kerner Report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders as our lens, this investigation examines the institutional forces behind the urban unrest of the 1960s. The Commission...

What does it actually take for a society to defeat a disease? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. David M. Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story traces the American struggle against one of the twentieth century’s most feared illnesses. But the history extends far beyond the eventual vaccines. Franklin Roosevelt’s experience with paralysis, the creation of...

A household can earn enough over the course of a year and still struggle because the money does not arrive when the bills do. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty by Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider as our lens, this investigation looks beyond annual income to the mont...

How does a historical person become a national monument—and what gets lost along the way? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe as our lens, this investigation examines the systems through which Washington’s complicated life became one of America’s most durable national stor...

What if the history we remember as America’s beginning is actually the final layer of a much longer story? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz as our lens, this episode investigates the centuries of exploration, contact, settlement, and ecological transformation that preceded t...

Why did the Little Bighorn become far more famous than battles in which vastly more people died? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Custer by Larry McMurtry as our lens, this investigation examines George Armstrong Custer, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the systems that transformed a military defeat into an enduring American legend. McMurt...

What turns a lived event into a legend—and when does the story become more powerful than what actually happened? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Telegraph Days by Larry McMurtry as our lens, this investigation examines the machinery through which the American West becomes mythology. McMurtry’s fictional narrator, Nellie Courtright, moves throu...