On 11 June, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the Master Conference "The crumbling. Thirty years of American decline", to be given by George Packer.
George Packer is a journalist at The New Yorker and the author of Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, for which he won several awards and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He has also written two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and two non-fiction novels, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Award, and The Village of Waiting. His play Betrayed, which ran off-Broadway for five months in 2008, won the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play.