From one of the most important figures in American journalism -- acclaimed historian, Pulitzer finalist, staff writer at the New Yorker, and dean of Columbia Journalism School--a devastatingly insightly collection of published and original work that paints a kalaescopic portrait of our last turbulent decade.
What just happened?
From the moment Trayvon Martin's senseless murder initiated the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, America has been convulsed by the new social movements--around guns, gender violence, sexual harrassment, race, policing, and on and on--and an equally powerful backlash. Jelani Cobb has been reporting and commenting on these changes--sometimes from the frontlines of places like Ferguson and Charleston, other times from a more studied remove, where he applies his gifts as a critic and background as a historian to penetrate the meaning of it all. He has written profiles of some of the key figures of the era--from directors and comedians to activists and politicians--and written on some of great cultural artifacts--film, television, and music. Through this shifting lens, he's captured the crises, the movements, and absurdity of an era--and helped readers understand what might be coming next.
As in this country's other great moments of turbulence, this has been an era of democratic expansion and contraction, the latest in a series of battles over what it means to be an American. Cobb strings this collection together with original work--the original pieces provide the connective tissue that helps readers see these powerful short dispatches as a cohesive, epic narrative of one of the most consequential, but hard to understand, eras in American history. Jelani Cobb is the current Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalim. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, author of several books including The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor/co-editor on multiple volumes including The Matter of Black Lives and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. Dr. Cobb is the producer/co-producer on documentaries including THE RIOT REPORT. He received the Peabody Award in 2020 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. Dr. Cobb currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project and the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library.
