Continuing its fascination with the Roman Empire, the internet has a new fixation.
The phrase “bread and circuses” from the Roman poet Juvenal explanans how the corrupt Ancient Roman government placated its citizens with spectacle as the empire whittled away their freedoms. In 2026, I’ve seen the term used online to decry everything from technocratic influence on American politics to the attention economy to influencer culture on social media.
As the governments of modern empires like the U.S. inch further away from democracy, modern allusions to Ancient Rome become more and more frequent. But it’s important to consider which distractions are pure entertainment, and which qualify as art and engage with real-world issues.
“Modern entertainment is just the new ‘bread and circuses,’” one Reddit user wrote in a 2025 post with 240 upvotes. This argument points to cinema’s decline in quality at the hands of streaming companies like Netflix as evidence. Here, art becomes entertainment: corporations focus on pumping out content over preserving artistic qualities like storytelling and presentation. Just look at the final season of Netflix’s streaming hit Stranger Things (2025), whose writing was so atrocious fans theorized it was fake. It wasn’t.
Shows like Stranger Things become bread and circuses when they dominate our attention spans, diluting coverage of real-life events. Though not all entertainment is government-funded, it does obscure reporting on the quality of life in our modern Empires.
For example, Canadian streamer CRAVE’s smash hit series Heated Rivalry (2025) engulfed news outlets and social media in late December and early January. During these same months, a water treatment plant failure in Kashechewan First Nation caused its 2,300 residents face evacuation. Though the problem began in December, mainstream Canadian news outlets only picked up the story after a state of emergency was declared on Jan. 4.
But just as art can become entertainment, entertainment can be art. It’s not Roman poetry, but Heated Rivalry has welcomed celebration and critique for its take on queer romance, starting discussions on how to best tell diverse love stories in a particularly conservative time for Hollywood.
In an article discussing Heated Rivalry, Forbes calls this “soft power,” the ability for art to “lower defenses, expand empathy, and slip new norms into the bloodstream through pleasure rather than arguments.” As political polarization increasingly causes division in Canada, the power of true art is to do just this: subtly advocate through the beauty of true human expression, not merely rack up streams in line with corporate profit margins.
So, don’t get lost in the scroll, stream, or otherwise endless slop of entertainment. If attention is the most modern form of currency, spend it wisely—on art that speaks to you, challenges your perceptions of the world, and fights back against those in power. In times of political turmoil, art can be more than just bread. It can be nourishment.
As a final example, I turn to poetry once again, one of my favourites: Adrianne Rich’s “What Kind of Times Are These” (1995). On the surface, the poem appears to be about a place in nature Rich won’t disclose. But her non-disclosure itself becomes important, concealing ideas about war and political power. Rich confronts the importance of artistic expression as a vessel for political discourse in the final lines, “In times / like these / to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees.”
Picking out trees of art in the forest of modern entertainment is a difficult task. But it’s a worthwhile one, both for the preservation of democracy, and art itself.
Marijka is fourth-year psychology student and The Journal’s Senior Arts & Culture Editor.
Tags
Ancient Rome, Entertainment, Media
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