The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick 2025From New York Times bestselling author and television 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: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are inc