“Chris Hayes’s spirited new book, The Sirens’ Call, takes a strong stand against the temptations of social media and information overload, on the grounds that the human attention span is ill equipped to absorb and act on such a constant stream of data. Among other things, the book—already a best seller, and one of our recommended titles this week—reveals that Hayes has abandoned scrolling for the old-fashioned pleasure of reading the newspaper in print each day, which sounds like a pretty good prescription to this fan of old media.”—Gregory Cowles, The New York Times

“The Sirens’ Call is a provocative book, readable and well-argued and alarming. Hayes thinks that ‘even the most panicked critics’ of tech haven’t yet reckoned with the full breadth of its disruption, with the vast transformation it has wrought on both our public and inner lives. The book takes big swings—at political and economic regimes—but it’s also quite intimate. Reading it, I thought a lot about my son . . . I don’t want my son’s consciousness in the custody of Google and Meta and ByteDance and Apple; I want it to belong to him.”—The Washingtonian

“Chris Hayes persuasively and heartrendingly argues . . . it has become almost impossible to ‘agree’ to attend to anything in the true, voluntary sense of that word . . . This book is Hayes’s attempt at sounding the alarm, one befitting a great fire, to remind us what’s at stake . . . His writing comes alive with an emotional truth . . . with passion and erudition.”—The Washington Post