ENCOUNTER Chris Hayes Made a Chamber of His Own. New York Magazine

ENCOUNTER

Chris Hayes Made a Chamber of His Own

How Kierkegaard and a book contract saved the MSNBC host from smartphone addiction. New York Magazine

Chris Hayes cuts a peculiar figure in the media landscape. He is omnivorously inquisitive, his owlish frames imparting the sense that he is always on the lookout for new information to hunt down and digest. He is an archetypal social-media know-it-all, equally confident dispensing his thoughts on sports, culture, and politics. And he is the rare pundit to have truly important insights into the workings of the world, predicting our anti-Establishment era in his 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites. Yet somehow he has ended up in cable news, as the host of MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes, making him an object of curiosity for those journalists who turn their noses up at the talking-head roundtable, the election countdown clock, and the sensationalist chyron. Is he one of us or what?

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, underneath which glinted a large Zuckerberg-esque chain. This is a recently acquired accoutrement that has not gone unnoticed by fans since he embarked on a publicity tour for his new book, The Sirens’ Call, about how tech companies have precipitated a national crisis by creating products that severely diminish our attention spans. When one commenter called out his “gold” chain after Hayes appeared on Ezra Klein’s talk show, Hayes was quick to clarify that it was actually brass and a gift from his wife, former Obama White House lawyer Kate Shaw, with a retail value of only $60. So maybe he is like us after all.

Hayes’s book is similarly caught between circumstances that are both ubiquitous and uniquely applicable to him. He writes poignantly of his 6-year-old daughter asking him to read her a book and his “instinct, almost physical,” to look at the phone in his pocket instead. “I let it pass with a small amount of effort.”