Crisis in Perception

Why can a novel become dangerous to a system that depends on certainty? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times by Azar Nafisi as our lens, this investigation examines why literature can become a form of resistance when political or ideological systems attempt to reduce reality to...

What if the most durable response to crisis is not simply delivering resources, but increasing a community’s ability to coordinate for itself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade as our lens, this investigation explores mutual aid as both immediate survival work and a...

What if loneliness is sometimes less about being alone than about living inside an incomplete story? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt as an entry point, this episode investigates the hidden structures connecting grief, isolation, family identity, and incomplete information. Tova Sullivan, Cameron C...

What happens when a communication network becomes powerful enough to change how information, coordination, and influence move through society? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick as our lens, this investigation explores Facebook’s transformation...

What if nuclear deterrence is stable only until the moment it is needed most? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen uses interviews with former military and national-security officials, scientific research, and declassified records to reconstruct how a nuclear attack could move from detection to retaliation and e...

When what we see with our own eyes conflicts with a larger scientific model, what should determine what we believe? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. This two-host Debate stress-tests the stationary flat-Earth model against the rotating globe-Earth model using six sources spanning flat-Earth advocacy, astronomy, geodesy, skepticism, and research into...

What happens when the systems designed to distinguish effective professional practice from unsupported claims become unreliable themselves? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Science and Pseudoscience in Social Work Practice by Bruce A. Thyer and Monica G. Pignotti as our lens, this investigation examines how questionable assessments and interven...

What if the most important part of foreign influence happens before anyone recognizes it as political? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia by Craig Unger as our lens, this investigation examines the decades-long network Unger argues connected Russian organized c...

What changes when we stop asking only whether individuals are prejudiced and begin examining the systems surrounding them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Race in America by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer as our lens, this investigation explores race as a socially and historically constructed system with consequences extending far beyon...

What if people arguing about “the economy” are not actually imagining the same thing? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Rigged: Understanding ‘the economy’ in Brexit Britain by Anna Killick as our lens, this investigation explores how lived economic experience influences what people believe “the economy” actually is. Killick’s political ethnogra...

What happens when political power operates through networks designed to leave no fingerprints? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House by Craig Unger revisits the October Surprise—the allegation that figures associated with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campai...

If meaning and morality are not assigned from outside humanity, where do they come from? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Little Book of Humanism by Andrew Copson and Alice Roberts as our lens, this investigation explores the humanist model of a meaningful and ethical life within a natural universe. Copson and Roberts argue that human being...

Humanity’s global expansion can look like a deliberate journey across a stable world. Alice Roberts reveals a much more dynamic process in which both humans and the landscapes around them were continually changing. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Incredible Human Journey by Alice Roberts as our lens, this episode investigates how Homo sapi...

Domestication looks like a story about humans gaining control over nature. Viewed as a system, however, it becomes a story about species changing one another. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Tamed: From Wild to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History by Alice Roberts as our lens, this episode investigates the evolut...

What if the most important result of a political campaign is what people remain capable of doing together after the election ends? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism by Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht was written during the 2020 Sanders campaign as a strategic argument about...

What happens when a safety net built around steady employment meets a labor market where steady employment cannot be guaranteed? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer as our lens, this investigation examines the institutional conditions surrounding extreme cash p...

What if racial progress can be genuine while racial domination continues operating through less visible mechanisms? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer as our lens, this investigation examines race not as a biological reality but as a soci...

Why can military victory be much easier to achieve than political control? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Stephen Tanner’s Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban traces centuries of conflict across a territory repeatedly caught between expanding empires, neighboring powers, local communities, and competi...

D-Day is remembered as one of history’s great military operations. But the familiar images of beaches, generals, and individual heroism reveal only part of the system that made the invasion possible. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using D-Day: The Oral History by Garrett M. Graff as our lens, this Deep Dive examines how years of industrial mobiliza...

What happens to negotiating power when a country leaves the institution whose rules it once helped shape? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Inside the Deal: How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck provides a first-hand account of the Brexit negotiations from inside Michel Barnier’s European Union team. De Rynck argues that many assumptions surr...

How much of modern England is still being shaped by structures created centuries—or even millennia—ago? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Shortest History of England: Empire and Division from the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit—A Retelling for Our Times by James Hawes as our lens, this episode examines English history as a problem of structural persi...

What happens when the costs of an economic system accumulate in places most people rarely see? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco documents what the authors call America’s “sacrifice zones”—communities where human beings and the natural world have borne extraordinary costs in the pursuit...

What makes a society vulnerable to a threat it believes it has already defeated? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using J.K. Rowling’s seven Harry Potter novels as a longitudinal case study, this episode follows the development of hidden vulnerabilities across the wizarding world—from the defenses surrounding the Sorcerer’s Stone to the eventual infi...

What if the Great Wall reveals less about permanent separation than about the recurring problem of controlling a boundary? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC–AD 2000 by Julia Lovell as our lens, this investigation follows three millennia of Chinese wall-building to examine the relationship between...

What happens when acknowledging a danger threatens the institution responsible for confronting it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling follows Harry as he attempts to warn the wizarding world that Voldemort has returned. Instead of investigating his testimony, the Ministry of Magic protects its...