Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0

George Packer has spent his career explaining America's fractures to itself, first through reporting on U.S. foreign policy for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, including the Iraq War chronicle The Assassins' Gate. His book The Unwinding, an oral history of the country's unraveling from 1978 to 2012, won the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and he followed it with an acclaimed biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke.