On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome novelist ZZ Packer, the author of a story collection, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and editor of “New Short Stories from the South.” Born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Packer has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, Tulane, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. 

When is stability at duty and when is it a trap? This was the thought provoking and insightful question delivered in the New York Times Magazine last year. 

“The reality is that our instability often reveals much more profound ruptures and that the obvious kind of civility, the civility of niceness is only the most superficial marker of much deeper moral obligations,” Packer wrote. “This indeed demands us to differentiate between the civility of manners and that of morals after all,” she so compellingly writes, “Deep down we probably all know it's not just civility we're missing, but decency.”