Crisis in Perception

How does a contested political idea become familiar enough to feel like common sense? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60, Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf examines the postwar struggle between American business and organized labor over the meaning of economic freedom, political au...

What happens when technological flexibility makes work easier to buy, but harder to live on? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers by Steven Hill as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates a structural change in the relationship between workers, employers, technology...

How can a food system create enormous abundance while simultaneously producing waste, hunger, and unhealthy diets? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Envisioning a future without food waste and food poverty: Societal challenges, edited by Leire Escajedo San-Epifanio and Mertxe De Renobales Scheifler, this episode investigates the systems connecti...

What happens to family stability when the economic foundation supporting a particular family model begins to disappear? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America, sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin traces the development of the American working-class family from industrialization throug...

Who decides what an economy is ultimately organized to accomplish—and what changes when ownership itself becomes the variable under investigation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Socialist Reconstruction: A Better Future for the United States by the Party for Socialism and Liberation as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the authors’ proposal f...

Che Guevara is often remembered as an icon. This episode asks what becomes visible when we reconstruct the systems behind the image. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Che: A Graphic Biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón as our lens, this Deep Dive follows Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s transformation from traveler and physician to revolutionary, go...

What changes when climate disruption, work, health, inequality, and political power are treated as parts of the same system? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal by Naomi Klein as our lens, this episode investigates Klein’s argument that the Green New Deal should be understood as an interconnec...

What if wars, territorial expansion, labor conflict, and political repression become easier to understand when we examine the systems connecting them across time? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle as its lens, this investigation explore...

What happens when democratic governments still possess formal authority, but increasingly compete for the investment and cooperation of economic actors they are supposed to regulate? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy by Noreena Hertz as our lens, this episode investigates her argu...

What happens when reality stops fitting the theory meant to explain it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using On Practice and Contradiction by Mao Zedong as our lens, this episode investigates the relationship between theory, experience, political strategy, and changing conditions. Mao argues that knowledge develops through practice rather than thro...

A government can concentrate enormous power while simultaneously damaging its own ability to understand what is happening inside it. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Death of Stalin, written by Fabien Nury and illustrated by Thierry Robin, this Deep Dive examines the institutional consequences of governing through fear. The fictionalized gr...

How does an official explanation become accepted history—and what should happen when later evidence reveals that important pieces never fit cleanly? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring as our lens, this investigation examines how prosecutors,...

What actually breaks a monopoly when the monopoly controls much of the system in which competitors must operate? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Breaking Rockefeller: The Incredible Story of the Ambitious Rivals Who Toppled an Oil Empire by Peter B. Doran as our lens, this episode explores the rise of Standard Oil and the rival commercial netw...

What happens when political fundraising, lobbying, access, and private career incentives begin reinforcing one another? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert G. Kaiser as our lens, this investigation traces the transformation of lobbying through the career...

Martin Luther King Jr. is often remembered through the parts of his message that eventually became part of America’s national memory. His final year presents a more complicated picture. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year by Tavis Smiley with David Ritz as our lens, this ep...

What looks like a housing affordability problem can also reveal a deeper question: who holds power over the places people need to live? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the authors’ argument that rent functions not simply as a market price but as a rel...

What if the awareness of death influences human behavior most powerfully when we are not consciously thinking about dying? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski as our lens, this episode investigates Terror Management Theory and the psychologic...

What if America’s political division is less a recent rupture than the result of pressures accumulating across interconnected systems for decades? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer as our lens, this investigation traces how modern American polarization...

How does a political idea become so deeply embedded in public life that people eventually experience it as tradition? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by historian Kevin M. Kruse, this Deep Dive investigates the systems behind the rise of modern American civil religion. Krus...

What happens when an older political arrangement becomes unsustainable but the incentives and conflicts underneath it remain? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse as our lens, this episode investigates his argument that white flight from Atlanta was more than population m...

What happens when supernatural belief disappears but the human needs religion organized remain? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton as our lens, this episode investigates whether secular societies may have discarded useful social technologies along with religi...

We often assume that more data produces a clearer picture of reality. But what if the systems that make information easier to process also determine what becomes visible in the first place? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Trouble With Big Data: How Datafication Displaces Cultural Practices by Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann a...

What happens when the financial system prevents a collapse by moving the losses somewhere else? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis as our lens, this investigation follows the global aftermath of the credit boom and asks how private financial risk became entangled with governments, taxpaye...

Power is easy to picture as something held by presidents, parties, corporations, institutions, or elites. It becomes much harder—and more revealing—when we ask how influence is actually converted into political outcomes. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Princeton Readings in American Politics, edited by Richard M. Valelly, this Deep Dive explor...

The convenience of buying almost anything with a click can make the transaction look simple. The system producing that convenience is anything but simple. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How to Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine as our lens, this episode investigates how Amazon’s growth has reshaped bookselling, labor, logistics, marketplace...