Crisis in Perception

If institutions can inherit property, contracts, authority, and accumulated wealth across generations, can they also inherit obligations created by the past? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, edited by Raymond A. Winbush, brings together historians, legal scholars, activists, legislator...

Covid-19 did more than trigger a recession. It exposed how deeply economic activity depends on public health, social behavior, financial stability, political institutions, and global networks. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze as our lens, this episode investigates the historically unus...

Credit Suisse survived enormous financial losses and decades of scandal. In the end, the resource it could not replace was trust. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Melt Down: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse by Duncan Mavin as our lens, this investigation traces the hidden systems behind the disappearance of one of global bankin...

What looks like overwhelming military strength can conceal a system operating against severe material limits. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the economic foundations of the Third Reich and the widening contradiction between...

What protects a society from becoming so certain of its own worldview that it loses the ability to correct itself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens as our lens, this Deep Dive examines Christopher Hitchens’s defense of pluralism, secular institutions, dissent, criticism, literature, and unrestricted argu...

What if the most dangerous intelligence failure is not missing information—but finding exactly what a system has been ordered to find? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre as our lens, this investigation follows Oleg Gordievsky, the senior KGB officer who secretl...

What happens when schools teach democratic ideals but do not give students enough tools to test institutions against those ideals? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Howard Zinn on Democratic Education by Howard Zinn with Donaldo Macedo as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how education helps construct the historical and political frameworks...

What happens when imprisonment becomes concentrated so heavily in particular neighborhoods that incarceration itself becomes part of the environment those communities must continually adapt to? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse by Todd R. Clear as our lens, t...

History is not the past itself. It is what survives of the past—and that distinction changes how we understand nations, institutions, and political truth. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore as our lens, this episode investigates the relationship between historical evidence, political pow...

What does a presidential campaign reveal about a candidate—and what does the process itself change? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer as our lens, this episode examines the 1988 presidential campaign through George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, and Micha...

What happens when the same political ideals are translated through radically different institutions? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Socialism: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Newman as our lens, this investigation examines socialism not as a single political or economic blueprint, but as a diverse tradition connected by recurring commitm...

Democratic power is usually measured by who gets to vote. Alex Carey asks us to examine something that happens much earlier: who possesses the resources to shape the assumptions voters bring with them. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty by Alex Carey as our lens, th...

The Civil War is often remembered through battles, generals, and decisive moments. This investigation asks what becomes visible when we treat those moments as parts of a much larger system. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Shelby Foote’s complete three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative as our lens, this Deep Dive examines how the American Civil...

What happens when an institution becomes better at defending a failing strategy than correcting it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Showa 1944–1953: A History of Japan by Shigeru Mizuki as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the collapse of Japanese military strategy through the gap between decisions made at the top and conditions experienced by...

If individual prejudice disappeared tomorrow, would racial inequality disappear with it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Third Edition by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic as our lens, this episode investigates the shift from viewing racism primarily as individual prejudice to examining the institutional...

A justice system can prohibit explicit racial discrimination while still producing unequal outcomes through the accumulated effects of history, policy, discretion, and institutional design. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment, edited by Angela J. Davis, this investigation examines how r...

When does a historical injustice stop being history and become an obligation carried into the present? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks by Randall Robinson as our lens, this investigation examines his argument that slavery, legalized racial discrimination, economic exclusion, and historical erasure created...

What if the life that looks safest from the outside leaves the least room to become yourself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston as our lens, this investigation explores Janie Crawford's search for autonomy within systems of family history, marriage, gender expectations, community judgment, e...

Can the creation of a state settle questions of identity and historical purpose that had been evolving for centuries? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Zion Reconsidered by Jakob J. Petuchowski as our lens, this episode examines the transformation of Jewish identity after the establishment of the State of Israel. Writing in 1966, Petuchowski doe...

Propaganda is usually associated with lies and manipulation. Philip M. Taylor asks us to consider a more difficult possibility: persuasion itself may be neutral, while the intentions, institutions, and systems behind it determine what it ultimately serves. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the...

What if violence does not end when the immediate danger disappears? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A History of Violence, written by John Wagner with art by Vince Locke, as our lens, this investigation explores violence as something more persistent than an isolated act. The story begins with an ordinary small-town family man caught in an extr...

What if culture is not just what societies inherit, but also a system that shapes power, identity, and social order? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. This episode explores The Culture Struggle by Michael Parenti, examining how cultural beliefs and traditions become connected to larger systems of institutions, authority, and material interests. Throug...

Who controls the meaning of a war when the government, military, journalists, politicians, and public are all competing to define it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953 by Steven Casey as our lens, this investigation examines the extraordinary informa...

What holds a society together when jobs disappear, incomes collapse, and familiar measures of success stop working? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using It's Up to the Women by Eleanor Roosevelt as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the Great Depression from an unusually intimate starting point: the household. Roosevelt argues that national reco...

What happens when political ideas leave protest movements and institutions and enter popular culture? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The Secret History of Wonder Woman, historian Jill Lepore uncovers the largely hidden intellectual and political origins of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring fictional characters. Wonder Woman did not em...