weeks on and still a bit fascinated about how the "men are thinking of the roman empire" meme just got sort-of accepted as truth. closest i've seen to any number is a survey1 showing that less than 15% of men think of it more frequently than once per month, with the most frequent response being "never".
people have been cooking up all these long think pieces and theories about the manly mind based on something that just isn't a thing. like physicists crawling out of the woodwork to fit their own models of nature to any newly published sigma-32 result of a "new particle" that vanishes in follow up studies lol
1 YouGov, September 2023: Thinking about historical topics. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/crosstabs_Thinking_About_Historical_Topics.pdf
2 https://news.mit.edu/2012/explained-sigma-0209