Book Talk: Jelani Cobb — Three or More Is a Riot - with Jake Tapper

Watch author Jelani Cobb's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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 that abetted the rise of the MAGA movement. In this punchy, powerful collection of dispatches, mostly published in The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb tries to pull the signal from the noise of chaotic era. Cobb's work as a reporter takes readers to the frontlines of sometimes violent conflict and he uses his gifts as a critic and historian to crack open the meaning of it all. Through a stunning melange of narrative journalism, criticism, and penetrating profiles, Cobb captures the crises, characters, movements, and art of an era--and helps readers understand what might be coming next.

Cobb has added new material to this collection--retrospective pieces that bring these stories up to date and tie them together, shaping these powerful short dispatches into a cohesive, epic narrative of one of the most consequential periods in recent American history.

Jelani Cobb is the current Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. 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.

Cobb is in conversation with Jake Tapper. Tapper has written three New York Times bestselling novels, Original Sin (co-authored with Alex Thompson), The Hellfire Club, and The Devil May Dance, as well as the bestselling nonfiction books The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor and The Terrorist Detectives. His newest book, Race Against Terror, is available on October 7th. He is the chief Washington correspondent for CNN and anchor of the two-hour weekday program, The Lead with Jake Tapper. He also co-anchors State of the Union, which airs on CNN on Sundays. A Dartmouth graduate and Philadelphia native, he lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, daughter, and son.

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