Is America in danger of coming apart at the seams? Why are elites no longer elite, institutions no longer functioning, and ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success? How does the U.S. experience mirror that of other countries?

George Packer, author of The New York Times best seller, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, maintains that there"s been an undoing of the deal that used to exist between Americans: if you work hard and do your part, there will be a place for you and your children in the nation. More and more people now feel they have to go their own way: for some this has been a good thing, for others it"s been destabilizing and even devastating. Winner of the National Book Award, The Unwinding was called by The New York Times, "Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term... [Packer has] written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece."

Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has won three Overseas Press Club awards and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.