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

by Chris Hayes

Circe when she gives him some crucial advice about how to navigate the perils of the next leg of his voyage.[1] “Pay attention,” she instructs him sternly: First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.