Crisis in Perception

What happens when the most powerful office in a political system has no dependable method of succession? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Dark History of the Roman Emperors by Michael Kerrigan as our lens, this episode investigates the institutional structure beneath Rome’s history of assassination, betrayal, corruption, military rivalry, and c...

What happens when the political value of announcing a development project arrives immediately, while the financial consequences remain hidden for years? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes & the Sacking of Local Government by Lawrence Tabak as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the corporate subsid...

What if the most dangerous form of corruption is produced by institutions functioning exactly as designed? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic by Camila Vergara as its lens, this investigation examines how representative governments may gradually become oligarchic while pres...

What if the competition to attract jobs is actually a system that makes communities compete against themselves? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation by Greg LeRoy as our lens, this investigation examines how corporations use secrecy, relocation threats, and fragmented...

What happens when a political party becomes more responsive to its financial supporters than to its traditional voters? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using To the Ramparts: How Bush and Obama Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency, and Why It Isn’t Too Late to Reverse Course by Ralph Nader as the lens, this investigation examines the institutional...

What if politics operates most deeply not through elections or public debate, but through the power to determine which forms of life are protected, recognized, or exposed? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics by David Kishik as its lens, this investigation examines Giorgio Agamben’s effort to conne...

Every model makes complexity usable by leaving something out. The harder question is whether the missing relationships are precisely what we need to understand the wider system. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Future of Complexity: Conceiving a Better Way to Understand Order and Chaos by Peter Baofu as our lens, this episode explores why n...

What happens when the economic model used to interpret the world also begins changing the world it describes? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How to Think Like an Economist by Robbie Mochrie as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the evolution of economics from ancient ethical reflection to a modern discipline shaped by mathematics, psycholo...

Beneath the failure to predict the 2008 financial crisis was a deeper question: what if the dominant economic framework made the approaching instability difficult to recognize? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai as its lens, this investigation trace...

Modern progress has improved billions of lives, but what happens when its underlying system requires ever-increasing flows of energy, water, land, and materials? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How We’re F***ing Up Our Planet by Tony Juniper as our lens, this investigation traces how population growth, urbanization, economic expansion, and une...

A growing economy does not necessarily produce growing security. To understand the difference, we have to examine who receives the gains, who carries the risks, and who has the power to shape the rules. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class by Elizabeth Warren as its lens, this inves...

Consumer-finance disputes often appear private and isolated. Viewed structurally, they reveal a marketplace in which fragmented individuals confront institutions that write the contracts, control the information, and can distribute small harms across millions of customers. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can...

What happens when the human need for meaning tries to become a method for discovering truth? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell as the lens, this episode investigates how mystical intuition and scientific reasoning can both shape philosophy. Russell argues that mysticism may offer a valuabl...

What happens when a society praises free inquiry but rewards people for reaching the approved conclusion? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Will to Doubt by Bertrand Russell as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the relationship between rationality, institutional power, and the social cost of uncertainty. Russell argues that rational beli...

What changes when healing is understood not only as something purchased from institutions, but as a living system people learn to cultivate? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Medicinal Plants: Heal with Plants and Herbs and Specific Techniques for Improving Your Health with Natural Medicine by Melissa Laurel as the lens, this episode investigate...

How does a local protest become a national movement—and why does history often remember the leader more clearly than the system that made leadership possible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 by Taylor Branch as our lens, this investigation examines the interconnected institutions, relations...

A legal system can promise equality while rewarding the institutions that move cases quickly, cheaply, and with minimal scrutiny. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts by Stephen B. Bright and James Kwak as our lens, this investigation examines why...

What happens when a democracy concludes that a safeguard is no longer necessary because the safeguard appears to have worked? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman as our lens, this investigation traces the transformation of American voting rights from the Selma campa...

What if ecology is not just the study of nature, but the study of the hidden operating system beneath human civilization? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. This Deep Dive uses The Ecology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, published by DK with a foreword by Tony Juniper, as a lens for investigating how ecological systems shape the conditions human soci...

What makes something real—its materials, its abilities, or the relationship that gives it meaning? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real by Margery Williams as an entry point, this episode investigates how sustained attachment, shared experience, and recognition can transform an ordinary object into some...

How does a political tradition embedded in a nation’s founding institutions come to be remembered as foreign to that nation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby as its lens, this investigation traces the frequently overlooked role of secularist thought in American constitutional govern...

Genre labels appear to divide music into restrictive categories. Yet without those divisions, many of the communities surrounding music might never have formed. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh as its lens, this episode investigates how rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-h...

What appears to be a disagreement about musical sound may also be a struggle over identity, authenticity, and cultural authority. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology by Deena Weinstein as an entry point, this episode investigates how artists, audiences, media organizations, critics, and institutions collectively c...

If music is fundamental to humanity, why has most of its history vanished—and why have so many people become listeners rather than music-makers? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Musical Human by Michael Spitzer as our lens, this investigation follows music across the human lifespan, world history, and biological evolution. Spitzer presents...

The classical canon can appear to be a natural collection of works that survived because their greatness was self-evident. Music history reveals a more complicated process. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A Student’s Guide to Music History by R. J. Stove as our lens, this episode investigates how historical knowledge changes what listeners can...