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The Sirens Call
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| With Jonathan Haidt (Social Psychologist & Author, The Anxious Gen), Chris Hayes (Emmy-winning Host). |
| The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 E 7th St |
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Feb 05 (Thu) , 2026 @ 07:00 PM
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$20 |
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/-73.99047089,40.72910309,13,0,0/550x200?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiZ2FyeXNndWlkZSIsImEiOiJjamtobmRiYmgwb3gwM3F1a2o2Mmd0YWw3In0.DinA62CR3-OKtf3axa5O7Q)
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| DETAILS |
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Join us for an event with Emmy Award-winning host Chris Hayes, discussing his novel THE SIRENS' CALL.
Moderating this discussion is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. This event will be hosted in The Great Hall located in the Foundation Building at Cooper Union at 7 East 7th Street between Third & Fourth Avenue.
ACCESSIBILITY:
Wheelchair Accessible
Assisted listening devices are also available upon request.
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From the New York Times bestselling author & MSNBC & podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds & our hearts has reordered our politics & 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, & sometimes they're us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, & then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public & 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, & from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens' Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity & guidance.
Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, & now they are going off in our bedrooms & kitchens at all hours of the day & 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, & 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, & our future.
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, & how morality varies across cultural & political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), & of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012), & The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). He has given four TED talks & been named a TIME100 Health leader.
Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health & 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) & The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun & Freedom in a Screen-Filled World (2025, with Catherine Price).
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