CHAT with Chris Hayes"
”The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource”
Friday, February 5
5pm, Online through Zoom
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. 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 a transition whose only parallel is that of 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.
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 shares, “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: Kate Simon
Chris Hayes the host of All In with Chris Hayes, which airs at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday-Friday on MS NOW. He is the host of the MS NOW Original podcast, “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.” He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, "The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource,” which is out in paperback on January 27.
Castle Hill Author Talk (CHAT)
Join us for a series of provocative and entertaining discussions with some of today’s most talented and creative authors. In a series of live, one-hour events, host Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party, will interview acclaimed, debut, and award-winning authors of fiction and non-fiction about their new books and their paths to publication. Available individually or as a series, the interviews will include time for questions from the audience. Events are FREE although donations greatly appreciated!
About the Host:
Karen Dukess, who has hosted the Castle Hill Author Talks since 2021, is the author of the IndieNext and Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick THE LAST BOOK PARTY and WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK. She has been a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia, and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master's in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro on Cape Cod.