The Distraction Machine

For more than two thousand years, powerful institutions have understood something that gets rediscovered in every generation: an absorbed public is a manageable public. In this episode I follow that idea from the sands of the Roman arena all the way to the phone in your pocket, and I separate what's actually documented from the conspiracy version of the story, because the truth turns out to be stranger and better supported than the myth.

We start in ancient Rome, where the grain dole and the games were openly accounted for as instruments of rule, and where a courtier...