When Hayes met me on a frigid January afternoon at his stately, well-appointed townhouse in Park Slope, naturally my first thought was, Not one of us. Hayes wore dark slacks and a striped button-down shirt,

Chris Hayes is in the attention business, and it’s in trouble. “Public discourse is a now a war of all against all for attention,” the MSNBC host writes in The Sirens’ Call, which Penguin will publish on Tuesday.

I was looking for self-help advice in Chris Hayes’ “The Sirens' Call,” an examination of the system widely monopolizing our time and eroding our focus: the attention economy. In recent years, my attention has felt continually besieged by a barrage of information,