This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a number. My new book reaches the world this week. It is called The Eighteen-Minute Lie, and it is the biography of a statistic that was never true, followed from the hour someone forged it to the moment it convinced a civilization that it had lost its mind. I spent two years on it, in part because I owed the work. I helped carry the lie. You have heard the louder version of my number, the one that beat mine and traveled the world. The human attention span, it says, has fallen to eight seconds, one tick shorter than a goldfish's. You have met it in a TED talk, on a morning show, inside a slide deck built to sell you the software that will rescue the same focus the previous slide told you that you had lost. It is one of the most repeated figures of the age.
