George Packer
speaker
697 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 May
George Packer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Absolutely.
There has to be a sense of agency and there has to be a sense of, yes, diversity, but diversity toward what end?
It should not be an end in itself.
It should be a form of inclusion that allows for greater unity.
But if unity is not the end, then we're actually kind of the mirror image of the right because the right also is practicing identity politics.
It's just of a particularly sinister kind, white Christian identity politics.
But in the end, it has the same effect of unity.
of leaving us separate from each other and eventually hating each other.
So I love fiction.
I always wanted to be a novelist.
After those first two novels in my 30s, I decided maybe I'm actually more of a journalist and spent 25 years at the New Yorker in the Atlantic.
But, you know, John, after the 2020 election on January 6th and writing The Last Best Hope, I felt like I had said what I had to say.
And we in journalism were just saying the same thing over and over.
There was this sort of political and
media stagnation, like the same arguments, the same language.
The language had kind of gone dead on me.
And as a writer, I need living language in order to be able to communicate with you.
And I began to imagine a story about
This came out of the pandemic when I was driving back and forth between New York City and a place in farm country a couple of hours north of the city where my family had kind of retreated during the pandemic.
And I began to feel the immense distance that just those two and a half hours was.
Showing 601–620 of 697 · page 31 of 35
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