By the mid-1950s, being awake at home meant being sold to

Evidence

As David Halberstam writes, “Whereas at the turn of the century, only an occasional door-to-door salesman visited the American home, by the middle of the century a ceaseless stream of the most subtle electronic impulses created by the nation’s most richly rewarded hucksters was beamed into this new marketplace, relentlessly selling not just the American dream but an endless series of material products through whose purchase that dream might be more quickly achieved.” In this way, for the first time, to be at home and awake was, for most Americans, to be sold something. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 494

Categorization

• CANDY: A vivid, shareable one-sentence characterization of how broadcast advertising colonized domestic life — good dinner-party material.