Crisis in Perception
Crisis in Perception is a long-form educational podcast that examines how we misunderstand the world around us. Each episode uses books as entry points to explore history, psychology, economics, science, and power structures. It reveals how systems actually work and why our perceptions often fail. The content is clear, evidence-based, and non-tribal.
Episodes
My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places — Who Decides What’s Normal?
Many everyday disagreements begin with an assumption neither person realizes they are making: that their own way of doing things is simply normal.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places by Mary Roach as our lens, this episode explores the comic friction created when different habits, anxieties, expectations
All the Light We Cannot See — How Invisible Systems Shape What We Hear
What happens when a technology capable of opening the world becomes part of a system that narrows what people are allowed to hear?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr as our lens, this investigation explores the invisible systems surrounding communication, perception, institutional power, and individual c
Cloud Cuckoo Land — How Stories Survive Erasure
Stories can cross centuries, but they do not survive by themselves. Preservation is not merely a matter of storage—it is a continuing process of transmission.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr links characters separated by centuries through a fictional ancient Greek story about Aethon and his search for an ideal city i
The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis — Private Gain, Public Risk
What happens when institutions assume that private self-interest will reliably contain systemic risk?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis by Darryl Cunningham as an entry point, this episode traces the ideas, incentives, and institutional changes surrounding the 2008 financial cris
The Rise of Red China — How Political Legitimacy Becomes Revolutionary Power
What happens when a government retains formal power but gradually loses the cooperation that makes that power sustainable?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Rise of Red China by Robert Goldston as our lens, this episode investigates the systems behind China’s revolutionary transformation and the Communist victory of 1949.Goldston connects that
The Salt Grows Heavy — When Salvation Becomes Control
What happens when a system can genuinely perform miracles—but those miracles depend upon turning other people into resources?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw as an entry point, this investigation examines a world where resurrection, bodily reconstruction, mythology, and institutional authority become insepa
The Captured Economy — How Regulatory Capture Slows Growth and Widens Inequality
What if slowing growth and rising inequality are partly two consequences of the same hidden system?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles as our lens, this investigation examines how regulatory capture can allow organized interests to convert political influence into economic protection.Lindsey
Why Americans Don't Vote — How Institutions Shape Participation
What if low voter turnout reflects more than individual interest in politics?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Why Americans Don't Vote by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward as an entry point, this investigation examines the institutional and historical forces that shape electoral participation in the United States.Piven and Cloward arg
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide — How Backlash Becomes Policy
What if some of the most durable resistance to equality operates not through open confrontation, but through the ordinary machinery of government?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson as the lens, this episode investigates the recurring relationship between Black advancement and in
Occupied Minds: A Journey through the Israeli Psyche — When Security Becomes Identity
What happens when security stops being one concern among many and becomes part of how a society understands itself?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Occupied Minds: A Journey through the Israeli Psyche by Arthur Neslen as our lens, this investigation explores Israeli Jewish identity through immigration, military service, historical memory, ethnic
One day, everyone will have always been against this — When Values Become Conditional
What happens when universal principles encounter a situation where enforcing them becomes politically, institutionally, or personally costly?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using One day, everyone will have always been against this by Omar El Akkad as our lens, this investigation examines the gap between the values societies proclaim and the conditio
Truman — The Architecture of Presidential Responsibility
What happens when enormous systems of power and expertise converge on one person who ultimately has to decide?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Truman by David McCullough as our lens, this Deep Dive explores Harry S. Truman's unlikely rise from Missouri farmer and local politician to the presidency—and what his life reveals about the relation
The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — When Safeguards Fail
What turns a rumor into a catastrophe: the spark itself, or the systems that fail to stop it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by Mary E. Jones Parrish as our lens, this investigation examines the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District through Parrish’s eyewitness account, th
The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge — How Resilience Was Built
The Brooklyn Bridge appears to be a monument to engineering genius. Look more closely, and it becomes a study in how complex systems survive uncertainty.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.In The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, David McCullough reconstructs the engineering, politics, danger, personalities, and public
The Johnstown Flood — How Systems Learn to Ignore Risk
A warning can fail long before the system it describes.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough as our lens, this investigation explores how a known danger can gradually become normalized until the warning signs themselves lose their urgency.McCullough reconstructs the 1889 catastrophe through survivor accounts, e
All the President’s Men — How Hidden Information Becomes Public Accountability
What allows scattered pieces of information to overcome a system designed to keep them separate?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as our lens, this episode follows the reporting process that transformed the Watergate burglary into a much broader investigation of political intelligence, ca
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy — Who Controls Accountability?
What happens when the institution accused of wrongdoing also controls much of the machinery meant to investigate it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.In Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, historian Heather Ann Thompson reconstructs the conditions that produced the 1971 Attica uprising, the violent retaking of the pri
Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle — The System Behind Military Power
What if military superiority depends less on possessing a revolutionary weapon than on building the system capable of exploiting it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle by John Keegan and Richard Holmes, with John Gau, examines the transformation from warrior to professional soldier and the changing experience of comba
War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival — When Relief Is Not Protection
What happens when institutions become highly capable of treating suffering but remain unable to stop the system producing it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival by Sheri Fink as our lens, this investigation follows the doctors and humanitarian workers confronting the siege of Srebrenica during the
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States — The Systems Behind Suburbia
How much of the American suburban landscape reflects private preference—and how much reflects the systems that made those preferences easier to pursue?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, historian Kenneth T. Jackson examines why American metropolitan development became unusually low-density
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution — How Private Anger Became Power
What happens when experiences understood as private problems become visible as recurring parts of a larger system?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus as our lens, this Deep Dive explores how Riot Grrrl transformed isolation and anger into collective awareness through a d
The Death and Life of Great American Cities — The Hidden Order of Urban Life
What if the apparent disorder of a successful city is actually evidence that a complex system is working?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs as our lens, this episode investigates why attempts to impose simplified order on cities can disrupt the social and economic relationships that make n
Women and Disability: The Double Handicap — When Social Roles Become Barriers
What looks like an individual limitation can sometimes reveal a much larger institutional design.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Women and Disability: The Double Handicap, edited by Mary Jo Deegan and Nancy A. Brooks, is a 1985 collection examining the social, economic, psychological, and institutional experiences of physically disabled women.Using t
Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space — The System Behind a Historic First
What does it really take to become “the first”—exceptional ability, or an institution finally creating a path for that ability to be seen?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space by Lynn Sherr as our lens, this episode examines the life of the physicist who became the first American woman in space and the l
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy — Rational Choices, Systemic Risk
A financial system does not require everyone inside it to behave irrationally in order to become dangerously unstable.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan as our lens, this investigation traces the interconnected political, economic, and financial pressures that
The Great Hangover: 21 Tales of the New Recession — How Risk Became Systemic
What happens when financial risk is distributed across so many institutions that the connections themselves become a source of instability?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.The Great Hangover: 21 Tales of the New Recession, edited by Graydon Carter and drawn from the pages of Vanity Fair, brings together journalists and economists including Michael Lew
The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer
What happens when political freedom advances faster than the economic and institutional structures surrounding it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer by Chris Myers Asch as our lens, this investigation examines how Sunflower County, Mississippi, change
When Affirmative Action Was White — How Policy Built Unequal Opportunity
Some of America’s most important social programs helped millions build economic security. But their benefits did not pass through a neutral institutional landscape.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson as our lens, this investigati
The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought — How Historical Memory Erases
How does someone famous enough to fill lecture halls across America become nearly invisible to later generations?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby as our lens, this episode investigates the extraordinary influence—and subsequent disappearance—of Robert Green Ingersoll.J
What’s God Got to Do with It?: Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk, and the Separation of Church and State
What happens when private conviction gains access to public coercive power?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.What’s God Got to Do with It?: Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk, and the Separation of Church and State, edited and introduced by Tim Page, brings together Robert G. Ingersoll’s writings on freethought, humanism, religious liberty,
Failure: Why Science Is So Successful — Why Being Wrong Makes Science Work
What if science succeeds not by eliminating failure, but by building a system capable of learning from it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Failure: Why Science Is So Successful by Stuart Firestein as our lens, this investigation examines why productive failure can be an essential part of scientific progress.Firestein challenges the familiar pict
Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History — How Systems Restrain Corruption
Corruption is usually pictured as an exchange between a dishonest official and someone willing to pay. But the deeper question is what makes those exchanges valuable, sustainable, and difficult to challenge in the first place.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History, edited by Edward L. Glae
Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity — The Price of Greedy Work
What if part of the gender earnings gap is not simply a difference in pay, but the downstream consequence of how the economy rewards time?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin as our lens, this episode investigates the century-long transformation of women’s efforts to a
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work — The Hidden Ledger
What if earning more money does not actually make a household more secure?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.In Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein draw on extensive interviews with 379 low-income single mothers to examine how families actually survive welfare and low-wage employment.Their
Some Folks Won't Work — Who Bears the Risk When Jobs Disappear?
When someone loses a job, why is the worker so visible while the system that eliminated the work remains largely invisible?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Some Folks Won't Work by Clinch Calkins uses family histories, employment records, and contemporary unemployment studies to challenge the belief that joblessness can be understood primarily as
The Kerner Report — Why Urban Disorder Becomes a Systems Problem
What happens when a society responds to the eruption of disorder without changing the conditions that helped produce it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Kerner Report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders as our lens, this investigation examines the institutional forces behind the urban unrest of the 1960s.The Commission rej
Polio: An American Story — The System Behind the Vaccine
What does it actually take for a society to defeat a disease?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.David M. Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story traces the American struggle against one of the twentieth century’s most feared illnesses. But the history extends far beyond the eventual vaccines. Franklin Roosevelt’s experience with paralysis, the creation of W
The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty — Hidden Volatility
A household can earn enough over the course of a year and still struggle because the money does not arrive when the bills do.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty by Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider as our lens, this investigation looks beyond annual income to the month-
You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington — How Founders Become Myths
How does a historical person become a national monument—and what gets lost along the way?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe as our lens, this investigation examines the systems through which Washington’s complicated life became one of America’s most durable national storie
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World — Who Gets Remembered?
What if the history we remember as America’s beginning is actually the final layer of a much longer story?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz as our lens, this episode investigates the centuries of exploration, contact, settlement, and ecological transformation that preceded the
Custer — How Defeat Became an American Myth
Why did the Little Bighorn become far more famous than battles in which vastly more people died?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Custer by Larry McMurtry as our lens, this investigation examines George Armstrong Custer, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the systems that transformed a military defeat into an enduring American legend.McMurtry
Telegraph Days — How the West Became a Story
What turns a lived event into a legend—and when does the story become more powerful than what actually happened?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Telegraph Days by Larry McMurtry as our lens, this investigation examines the machinery through which the American West becomes mythology.McMurtry’s fictional narrator, Nellie Courtright, moves through
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts — When Power Writes History
What happens when the institutions that shaped oppression also shape the records historians inherit?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by historian Rebecca Hall, illustrated by Hugo Martínez, this episode investigates how archives shape what later generations are able to know about resistance, ag
We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care — Why Patches Keep Failing
America has spent decades trying to close gaps in health insurance. Einav and Finkelstein argue that the repeated need for new fixes may itself reveal the deeper problem.Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care by economists Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein as our lens, this investigation examines how
Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks — Empty Wilderness
What if the appearance of untouched wilderness is itself the product of history?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks by Mark David Spence as our lens, this investigation examines the relationship between the creation of national parks and the exclusion of Native people
Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe — Where Spacetime Meets Information
What happens when the laws describing gravity and the laws governing quantum information appear to demand different answers about what reality allows?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw as our lens, this investigation explores why black holes have become some of the mo
The Struggle to Make Democratic Socialism in the Twenty-First Century — Beyond Determinism
What happens to political agency when history is understood primarily as the unfolding of objective structural forces?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Struggle to Make Democratic Socialism in the Twenty-First Century by David Neilson as our lens, this investigation examines the relationship between structure, knowledge, and purposeful human
Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity — How Unions Build Power
What makes collective action possible when the rules appear designed to prevent it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity by Micah Uetricht as our lens, this investigation explores the transformation of the Chicago Teachers Union and the organizational system behind its 2012 strike.Uetricht argues
The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything — How We Correct What Feels True
What if the greatest obstacle to understanding reality is the mind trying to understand it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.In The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything, Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry explore the uneasy relationship between human intuition and the reality revealed through mathematics, measurement, and scientific investigation.This D
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less — Why More Can Mean Less
Why can having more opportunities make us less effective at what matters most?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown as our lens, this investigation explores how finite attention, time, and energy are distributed in environments where choices, expectations, and demands continually expand.Mc
Anatomical Oddities: The Otherworldly Realms Hidden within Our Bodies — How Names Shape Anatomy
What if anatomical terminology is not merely a vocabulary for describing the body, but a record of how generations of people learned to perceive it?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.In Anatomical Oddities: The Otherworldly Realms Hidden within Our Bodies, Dr. Alice Roberts explores anatomy through etymology, illustration, visual metaphor, and the histo
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story — When Preparedness Fails to Become Action
What does preparedness actually mean if an institution cannot turn knowledge into coordinated action?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis as an entry point, this investigation examines the gap between America’s reputation for pandemic preparedness and its ability to respond when COVID-19 arrived.Lew
Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime — Identity Blind Spot
What if an organization's strongest assumptions about who belongs also create its greatest blind spots?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.In Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime, Ron Stallworth recounts the extraordinary 1978 investigation in which the first Black detective in the Colorado Springs Police Departm
White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa — Power After Empire
What if political independence does not necessarily mean independence from the systems shaping political choices?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Using White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams as an entry point, this investigation examines African decolonization through the competing pressures of sovereignty, Col
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead — How Anxiety Turns Uncertainty Into Danger
What happens when awareness of mortality becomes a threat-detection system that never switches off?Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin follows Gilda, a twenty-seven-year-old atheist lesbian whose chronic anxiety and fixation on death shape nearly every part of her life.Using Austin’s novel as a l
Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times — Why Stories Threaten Power
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 a
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) — Building Collective Capacity
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 me
Remarkably Bright Creatures — When Missing Information Becomes Isolation
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 Cass
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World — Networked Power
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 fr
Nuclear War: A Scenario — When Deterrence Becomes an Escalation System
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 eve
Flat Earth vs. Globe Earth — What Does the Evidence Actually Show?
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 co
Science and Pseudoscience in Social Work Practice — How Weak Evidence Gains Authority
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 interventi
House of Trump, House of Putin — How Money Becomes Influence
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 cri
Race in America — How Systems Reproduce Racial Inequality
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 beyond
Rigged: Understanding ‘the economy’ in Brexit Britain — Who Gets to Define the Economy?
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 ethnography
Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House
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 campaign
The Little Book of Humanism — How Humans Build Meaning and Morality
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 beings p
The Incredible Human Journey — How Climate and Adaptation Shaped Our Global Spread
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 sapien
Tamed: From Wild to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History
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 evolutio
Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism — Collective Power
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 wh
$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America — The Gap Between Work and the Safety Net
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 pov
Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America — How Racism Changes Form
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 social
Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban
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 competing
D-Day: The Oral History — The System Behind the Landing
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 mobilizati
Inside the Deal: How the EU Got Brexit Done — How Unity Became Leverage
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 surrou
The Shortest History of England — Why England’s North-South Divide Keeps Returning
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 persist
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt — How Sacrifice Zones Are Made
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 o
Harry Potter — When Institutions Mistake Stability for Resilience
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 infilt
The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC–AD 2000 — Boundaries as Control Systems
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 se
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — When Institutions Deny Reality
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 p
Recommended
Mother Daughter Relationship Show
Skin Deep MDs with Dr. Mamina Turegano, Dr. Lindsey Zubritsky and Dr. Jenny Liu
girl talk 🎧🫧
Booked, Blonde & Busy w/ Olivia Ponton
LOVE SOMEONE with Delilah
Classical Christian Education
Veritas Vox - The Voice of Classical Christian Education
Enjoy Teaching Again | Elementary, Teacher Burnout, Student Behavior, SEL, Classroom Management
Entrepreneur Kids Legacy Show - Family Motivation, Business Boss Babies, Inspirational Speakers and Healthy fun food
McKinsey on Consumer and Retail
megahired.com
Telli Talks with Telli Swift
