Crisis in Perception

What happens when abolishing slavery threatens the institutions, identities, and relationships upon which an entire society has been built? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale by Donald Barr as its lens, this investigation examines the slave-owning society of Kossar and the institutional depen...

What turns scattered hardship into a shared political identity? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson as our lens, this episode investigates how class becomes a historical relationship through shared experience, cultural traditions, organization, and conflict. Thompson rejects the idea that i...

When an experience changes someone’s life, does that establish the truth of the experience, the explanation attached to it, or both? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using I Didn’t Believe Any of This Hippie Dippy Bullshit Either: A Skeptic’s Awakening to the Spiritual Universe by Julie Rasmussen as our lens, this Deep Dive examines how people constr...

What if propaganda is most effective when it appears to defend the ideals it is actually weakening? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How Propaganda Works by Jason Stanley as our lens, this investigation examines how liberty, equality, objectivity, law, and efficiency can be mobilized to support outcomes that undermine democratic autonomy and ra...

What happens to a crisis after governments, institutions, and the public begin treating it as finished? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and the Forgotten by J. Malcolm Garcia as our lens, this investigation examines the civilians, refugees, wounded soldiers, missing people, and displaced families who contin...

What happens to democracy when software regulates what citizens can know, protect, communicate, and contest? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism by Maureen Webb as its lens, this investigation examines how code, networks, platforms, and digital infrastructure ha...

The struggle over historical education is also a struggle over the political future citizens are capable of imagining. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley as an entry point, this investigation examines how authoritarian and fascist movements use education to cont...

Who is treated as fully American when national belonging becomes fused with one religious and cultural identity? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry as its lens, this Deep Dive examines Christian nationalism as a distinct cultural fra...

What if the most effective foreign propaganda is the kind that no longer appears foreign? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow as its lens, this investigation examines the domestic networks that helped Nazi Germany spread propaganda, deepen political divisions, and obstruct American resist...

Watergate is often remembered as a burglary, an investigation, and a presidential resignation. The deeper story is how a political culture built around secrecy, loyalty, ambition, and perceived threat transformed separate abuses of power into a self-reinforcing institutional crisis. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Watergate: A New History by G...

History is often organized around leaders and revolutions. Wild Swans reveals what those transformations look like when they enter the body, the household, the school, and the family. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang as its lens, this Deep Dive investigates how three generations of women experi...

Conspiracy belief does not always begin with ignorance. Sometimes it begins with a real wound, a failed institution, and someone offering an emotionally satisfying explanation. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker explores the converg...

The Second World War was fought through words, images, sounds, and information networks as well as through physical armaments. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Allied Communication to the Public During the Second World War: National and Transnational Networks, edited by Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam, brings together studies of the communication systems...

What survives when the machinery of government is protected, but the society it governs may not be? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die by Garrett M. Graff as our lens, this investigation explores the secret Continuity of Government system developed...

What happens when a system designed to count people becomes capable of organizing their persecution? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black as its lens, this investigation examines how information infrastructure can expand the administrative capacity of a destructive state. Black argues that IBM, principally throu...

What happens when society learns to tolerate an environmental hazard simply because it cannot see it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Noise Pollution: The Unquiet Crisis by Clifford R. Bragdon as its lens, this Deep Dive examines how technological development, consumer expectations, transportation systems, architecture, land-use planning, and...

What happens when culture becomes inseparable from the economic system producing it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson presents postmodernism not merely as an artistic movement, but as the cultural dominant of late or multinational capitalism. Cultural production, commodity p...

When does an ordinary change in speech become classified as an error? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland as its lens, this investigation examines why speech habits such as “um,” “like,” “dude,” figurative “literally,” vocal fry, and singular “they” attract such intense...

If every city is unique, why do cities throughout history repeatedly generate similar patterns of growth, infrastructure, productivity, and inequality? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems by Luís M. A. Bettencourt as its lens, this investigation examines cities as comp...

What happens when a government creates a permanent capability for lethal action in the space between diplomacy and declared war? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins by Annie Jacobsen as its lens, this Deep Dive investigates the development of covert act...

What looks like a vanished pioneer road is still shaping how people, goods, energy, and information move across the American West. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck as our lens, this episode follows Buck’s modern mule-drawn crossing while investigating the trail as an adaptive mobility netw...

What if pointless employment persists because it is politically and institutionally useful, even when it produces little meaningful value? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber as our lens, this episode investigates why jobs that workers themselves consider unnecessary can survive inside organizations suppose...

A disaster can destroy more than buildings. It can also weaken the institutions, communities, and democratic processes that determine what comes next. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein as our lens, this investigation examines how collective trauma can create a compressed policy w...

What appears to be a collection of unstable jobs may represent a deeper reorganization of economic risk. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing as our lens, this episode investigates the emergence of a class-in-the-making defined by insecure income, weak employment protections, limited benefits,...

A wage records the price paid for labor-power. It does not by itself reveal who owns the product, controls production, or retains the value created through the working day. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Wage-Labor and Capital by Karl Marx as its lens, this investigation examines the relationship between wage labor and productive capital. Mar...