Join us for an intimate evening with New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC podcast host Chris Hayes in celebration of his new book The Sirens’ Call, an examination of the decline of attention spans and the implications for the world today. This evening is generously hosted by Diane Archer and moderated by Dr. Richard Friedman. Books will be available for all attendees.
“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.” —New York Times
“Brilliant book… Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.” —Rachel Maddow
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.
Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the big book we all need to snap everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
About Chris Hayes
Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award-winning host of “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MSNBC, as well as host of MSNBC’s “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.”
“Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast” launched in May 2018 and new episodes are released weekly on Tuesdays wherever podcasts are available. Each week on the podcast, Chris Hayes asks the big questions that keep him up at night. How do we make sense of this unprecedented moment in world history? “Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and features interviews with political figures, journalists, writers, and academics.
Previously Hayes hosted the weekend program “Up w/ Chris Hayes,” which premiered in 2011. Prior to joining MSNBC as an anchor, he had served as a frequent substitute host for “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” Hayes became an MSNBC contributor in 2010 and has been with “The Nation” since 2007.
Hayes is a former Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. From 2008-2010, he was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. From 2005 to 2006, he was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times.
Since 2002, Hayes has written on a wide variety of political and social issues, from union organizing and economic democracy, to the intersection of politics and technology. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian, and The Chicago Reader.
Hayes published his most recent book, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” in January 2025. The book debuted at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Hayes’ first book, “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy,” which is about the crisis of authority in American life, was published in June 2012 and was also a New York Times best-seller.
Hayes grew up in the Bronx and graduated from Brown University in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.
About Dr. Richard Friedman
Dr. Richard Friedman is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and Director of the Psychopharmacology Clinic in the Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Friedman has a particular interest and expertise in the psychopharmacology and neurobiology of mood disorders, treatment-resistant depression, and resilience.
He has also done research in depressive disorders, including studies of new medications for depression and a large collaborative study of the genetics and neurobiology of bipolar disorder. At Cornell, he is actively involved in teaching and training psychiatric residents and is director of the biological psychiatry curriculum in the department. He was the director of the Cornell Student Mental Health Program from 1999-2020.
Dr. Friedman writes for several medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, The American Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of the American Medical Association. He writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Atlantic on mental health, addiction, human behavior, and neuroscience.
Please contact Renee Lamarque at [email protected] if you’re interested in attending this special evening. Donations to attend this evening are $350. Following your RSVP, you will be sent the address for the dinner. The donation is considered 100% tax-deductible and supports PEN America’s mission to defend writers and free expression at a time of unprecedented need. Your generosity is deeply appreciated.
About PEN America Authors’ Evenings
The PEN America Authors’ Evenings are nights of literary dinners in private homes and intimate settings. Please visit the Authors’ Evenings webpage for our full calendar of dinners.Proceeds from the PEN America Authors’ Evenings support PEN America’s programming to secure the liberty of persecuted and imprisoned writers around the world, to defend freedom of expression, and to promote literature and international cultural exchange.