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Music Hello, and welcome back to the David From show.

I'm David From, a staff writer at the Atlantic.

Today's show will be about history, its use, and its misuse.

Now, that's not so unusual.

There's a lot of discussion of history in the podcast world, but this show is unusual in that my guest is not some self-taught crackpot, not some professor of chemistry somewhere who has some thoughts about Jews.

Today's guest will be Dame Mary Beard, who is Great Britain's leading

classicist and expert on the history of Rome and the ancient world. So you're going to be talking

to somebody or hearing from someone who knows what she's talking about. And that's a little

different from what often happens in discussions of history on the internet. Walter Lippman, a century

ago in his book on public opinion, wrote,

The really important thing is to try and make opinion increasingly responsible to the facts.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.

Now, we live in a very peculiar, perverse, modern world where no one lacks information.

Information has never been more abundant. You can have all the information you want. You can

have good information if you want it. You can have the best information if you want it. You can

have not only everything that's available to you on the internet, but thanks to the internet and

thanks to the internet commerce, you can have books, the best books,

delivered to you instantly tomorrow and not just today's books, but the classic.

Anything that's out of print somewhere on planet Earth, it exists somewhere, and you can

...