Crisis in Perception

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...

What happens when a culture stops imagining life as a cycle and begins imagining it as a path of progress? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how ideas about childhood, adulthood, success, aging, death, and immortality have been repeatedl...

The gunfire may last minutes. The consequences can continue for a lifetime. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence by Taylor S. Schumann as our lens, this episode investigates what disappears from view when gun violence is understood primarily th...

Gun violence is often discussed as a sequence of exceptional events. But what if the more revealing question is why similar risks continue to converge across different places, institutions, relationships, and historical moments? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Published by Melville House in 2020, Too Many Times: How to End Gun Violence in a Divided...

What if healing does not come from recovering the perfect family we lost, but from discovering that belonging itself can be rebuilt? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd as our lens, this Deep Dive follows fourteen-year-old Lily Owens through grief, guilt, racial conflict, maternal absence, and a search for...

What happens when an economic system must keep growing to remain stable, but the physical world can no longer sustain unlimited expansion? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The End of Capitalism: why growth and climate protection are incompatible — and how we will live in the future by Ulrike Herrmann as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates whe...

What if the welfare system people argue about most is only the part that is easiest to see? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Take the Rich Off Welfare by Mark Zepezauer and Arthur Naiman as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how tax breaks, subsidies, bailouts, procurement practices, and other government policies can transfer public resource...

What if the futures a society can imagine depend partly on whose stories it has learned to see? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, brings together twenty-five speculative-fiction writers to imagine American futures through perspectives conventional narratives often...

What if people with the least conventional political power become most influential precisely when ordinary institutions stop functioning normally? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward as our lens, this episode investigates how lower-class politi...