Chris Hayes + Jonathan Haidt: The Sirens’ Call

Moderating this discussion is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by Jan. 22 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com

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From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

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 book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

Photo credit: MSNBC

Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award-winning host of All In with Chris Hayes at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the host of the MS NOW Original podcast Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.

Photo credit: Rob Holysz

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012), and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). He has given four TED talks and been named a TIME100 Health leader.

Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction.

His most recent work includes the New York Times #1 bestsellers The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) and The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World (2025, with Catherine Price).