On this date in 1979, journalist and political commentator Christopher Loffredo Hayes was born in the Bronx, N.Y., to Geri and Roger Hayes. His mother and father, respectively of Italian and Irish descent, raised their three sons in a Catholic household. His father was a Jesuit seminarian who ended up leaving the seminary to become a community organizer like Saul Alinsky.
Hayes earned a B.A. in 2001 from Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he met his future wife Kate Shaw when they were first-year students. He had stopped going to church while he was majoring in philosophy at Brown. He joined the weekly Chicago Reader as a reporter for four years and then for four more years worked as a writer and senior editor at the labor-focused In These Times publication based in Chicago.
He and Shaw married in 2007. She majored in religious studies and gender studies before earning a law degree at Northwestern University in Chicago and clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who lived to be 99. She co-edited “Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories” (2019, the year Stevens died) and joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2024. She and Hayes have a daughter Ryan (b. 2011), a son David (b. 2014) and a daughter Anya (b. 2018).
Hayes had joined The Nation magazine as a contributing writer and was named its Washington editor, succeeding David Corn, in 2007. He first guest-hosted “The Rachel Maddow Show” in 2010, which led to hosting gigs on MSNBC shows such as “The Ed Show,” “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” and “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell.”
“Up With Chris Hayes” debuted in 2011 as a two-hour weekend show and featured Rep. Nancy Pelosi. “All In With Chris Hayes” started airing as an MSNBC weekday prime-time program in 2013. At age 34, he became the youngest host of a prime-time show on any major cable news channel. It won Emmys in 2015 and 2018.
“Up With Chris Hayes” devoted two hours in March 2012 to the topic of atheism in America. It aired a day after the Reason Rally on the National Mall in Washington and examined how religious and political views intersect on the left and the right and the marginalization of nonbelievers. Guests included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Susan Jacoby.
MSNBC separated from NBC News in late 2025 and rebranded as MS NOW (My Source for News, Opinion and the World) as part of Comcast’s spin-off of its cable networks. “All In With Chris Hayes” remained on the regular weeknight lineup. He also hosts a podcast titled “Why Is This Happening?”
While remaining skeptical about religion, Hayes wrote in 2013 that the late Pope Francis restored his hope for institutional change in the church. “Now, I don’t have a whole lot of hope that the Church itself is going to come around and change tenets or official positions that I deeply oppose — its rejection of things like gay marriage, women in the priesthood, a woman’s autonomy over her own body. But given the constraints of what being pope is, you can operate in one of two ways: you can be a jerk about it, or you can be awesome,” he wrote. And Francis, “is choosing to be awesome.” (“Hayes declares Francis to be the best pope ever,” The Raw Story, Sept. 13, 2013)
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