The Emergency: George Packer in Conversation with Ben Rhodes

Join acclaimed author and journalist George Packer in conversation with writer, commentator, and former presidential speechwriter Ben Rhodes for an evening exploring politics, literature, and the moral imagination in times of crisis.

Packer’s new novel The Emergency (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) turns from his prizewinning nonfiction to fiction, imagining an empire undone not by conquest but by exhaustion and loss of faith in itself. The story’s fractured world asks what remains when the social fabric unravels and what we owe one another when institutions fail.

Rhodes, author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made and The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, joins Packer to discuss the novel’s themes and their resonance in today’s global politics: the erosion of democratic trust, the struggle for meaning, and the search for solidarity across generations and borders.

Books will be available for purchase from Village Well Bookstore. Reception and signing to follow.

George Packer is an award-winning author and a staff writer at The Atlantic. He has written many books, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award) and, most recently, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal. He is also the author of two previous novels and a play, and is the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

Ben Rhodes is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributor to MSNBC, and the author of two New York Times bestsellers: After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We Made and The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. From 2009 to 2017, he was a Deputy National Security Advisor and speechwriter to President Barack Obama, participating in all of President Obama’s key decisions on foreign policy. His work has also been published in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.