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This episode features a conversation convened by NYPL President Tony Marx on civics and politics. The aim of the Path Forward is to bring together thinkers from different background and with diverging political perspectives for frank and challenging discussions on complicated sociopolitical questions. To explore our age of anxiety, Marx invited New Yorker staff writer (and 2016–2017 Cullman Fellow) George Packer and National Review executive editor Reihan Salam.

The theme of the talk takes its title from the W. H. Auden poem of the same name. Written during and after World War II, and published in 1947, Auden's longest poem is a complex—at times inscrutable—piece of writing. The four characters in it are all found grappling with their own unique anxieties around politics and progress in a world with which their own life stories are not exactly in lock step. Packer, Salam, and Marx explored the ways in which Americans today are similarly unmoored, and how it has impacted the personal and political decisions that we all are making.