Shows / Crisis in Perception
Crisis in Perception
Crisis in Perception is a long-form educational podcast examining how we misunderstand the world around us. Using books as entry points, each episode explores history, psychology, economics, science, and power structures to reveal how systems actually work—and why our perceptions so often fail. Clear, evidence-based, and non-tribal. Crisis in Perception uses AI-assisted tools for narration and synthesis in service of long-form educational analysis.
Episodes
Crisis in PerceptionWhen Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough — The Hidden Aftermath of Gun Violence
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…
Crisis in PerceptionToo Many Times: How to End Gun Violence in a Divided America — When Safeguards Fail
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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Secret Life of Bees — How Belonging Rebuilds a Life
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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe End of Capitalism — Why Growth Collides With Climate Limits
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…
Crisis in PerceptionTake the Rich Off Welfare — How Hidden Subsidies Redistribute Upward
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…
Crisis in PerceptionA People’s Future of the United States — Who Gets to Imagine the Future?
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…
- Crisis in Perception
Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail — How Disruption Creates Political Power
What if people with the least conventional political power become most influential precisely when ordinary institutions stop functioning normally? Welcome to…
Crisis in PerceptionThe First — Why Free Speech Is Never Neutral
Free speech is often treated as a neutral principle standing above politics. Stanley Fish argues that the reality is much messier: every meaningful speech…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump — The Cynicism Loop
What if contempt for politics helps produce the dysfunction that makes people despise politics in the first place? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionSmall Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered — When Growth Consumes Its Foundations
What if economic growth can make a society look richer while consuming the resources that make future prosperity possible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionPerilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy — When Security Produces Insecurity
Can policies designed to suppress insecurity become part of the system that reproduces it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems…
Crisis in PerceptionHistory for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity — The Past as a Guide
What if our inability to imagine different futures is partly a failure of historical memory? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems…
Crisis in PerceptionPoverty is not Natural — Who Captures the Value of Progress?
Why can a society become dramatically more productive while poverty remains? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world…
Crisis in PerceptionSilenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide — Who Controls Belief?
What happens when protecting the sacred also gives institutions the authority to decide which beliefs may be questioned? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where…
Crisis in PerceptionSuperpatriotism — When Loyalty Becomes Political Obedience
What happens when loyalty to a country becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the people who govern it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Great Crash, 1929 — When Speculation Becomes a Self-Reinforcing System
A financial bubble becomes especially dangerous when its own success begins to look like evidence that the system is sound. Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — The Hidden Histories Beneath Ordinary Life
What if an ordinary personal crisis is only the visible surface of forces that began long before you noticed them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionMe Talk Pretty One Day — The Hidden Rules of Belonging
How much of fitting in depends on who we are—and how much depends on learning the unwritten rules of the people around us? Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable — When Models Mistake Stability for Safety
What if the systems that appear most stable are sometimes the ones whose hidden risks we understand least? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…
Crisis in PerceptionDirty Truths — How Power Makes Social Harm Invisible
Some suffering looks personal only because the systems distributing it are harder to see. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping…
Crisis in PerceptionPropaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World — Public Diplomacy as Persuasion
When does public diplomacy stop being an exchange of ideas and become a system for shaping how other societies understand America, markets, and power? Welcome…
Crisis in PerceptionFailed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy — When Power Exempts Itself
What happens when the state powerful enough to enforce the rules begins treating those same rules as constraints mainly for everyone else? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionIt Can’t Happen Here — How Democracies Become Vulnerable from Within
What if democratic breakdown can occur while the institutions of democracy still appear to be intact? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race — Capital, Power, and Empire
What if foreign intervention, economic expansion, and military power are not separate policies, but interacting parts of the same system? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionReligion and the Rise of Capitalism — When Economics Became a Separate Sphere
What changes when economic life stops being judged as part of a common moral order and begins to operate as a separate sphere? Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionMyth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past — Myths Shape Power
The stories societies tell about their past do more than preserve memory. Once repeated through politics, media, education, and institutions, they can help…
Crisis in PerceptionListen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? — Meritocracy and Power
What happens when a political movement committed to equality begins interpreting inequality through the worldview of society’s most successful professionals?…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Wrecking Crew — When Distrust of Government Becomes a Governing System
What happens when distrust of government begins shaping the institutions responsible for making government work? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine: Immigration and Social Democracy in Twentieth-Century Sweden — Who Belongs in the People’s Home?
Does a generous welfare state depend on social sameness—or on institutions capable of creating a shared sense of membership? Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionAddicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism — The System That Sustains War
Why does war keep returning even when its human, financial, and political costs are enormous? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure — Who Gets the Productivity Dividend?
Productivity can be converted into more goods, more income, or more time. The outcome is not determined by technology alone. Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionThe People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism — Who Gets to Define Democracy?
What happens when distrust of institutions is interpreted not as a possible response to institutional failure, but as evidence that ordinary people cannot be…
Crisis in PerceptionWhy Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society — Who Gets the Time Technology Saves?
If technology can save labor, why does it so rarely give people their time back? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Communist Manifesto — Capitalism as a Revolutionary System
What if capitalism’s defining feature is not stability, but continual transformation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our…
Crisis in PerceptionShameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy — Failure Pays
What changes when political failure stops being merely a liability and begins producing political rewards? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development — Power vs Capacity
A ruler can become more secure even while the state he governs becomes less capable. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History — Power, Survival, and Legitimacy
What happens when a political movement challenges existing institutions while also attempting to perform some of the functions those institutions have failed…
Crisis in PerceptionMy 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 PerceptionSome Truths Are Not Self-Evident — When Rights Aren’t Real
What makes a democratic right real: the words that guarantee it, or the institutions willing to enforce it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…
Crisis in PerceptionAll 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…
Crisis in PerceptionCloud 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…
Crisis in PerceptionWhy 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…
Crisis in PerceptionWhite 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 PerceptionOccupied 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…
Crisis in PerceptionOne 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…
Crisis in PerceptionTruman — 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…
Crisis in PerceptionAll 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…
Crisis in PerceptionBlood 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…
Crisis in PerceptionSoldiers: 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…
Crisis in PerceptionWar 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…
Crisis in PerceptionCrabgrass 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…
Crisis in PerceptionGirls 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…
Crisis in PerceptionThe 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…