From the moment that Trayvon Martin’s murder initiated the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, America has been convulsed by new social movements—around guns, gender violence, sexual harassment, race, policing, and so on—as well as an equally powerful backlash that abetted the rise of the MAGA movement. In Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, provides a powerful collection of dispatches, mostly published in The New Yorker, which guide readers through this chaotic era.
Cobb’s work as a reporter takes readers to the front lines of sometimes violent conflict, and he uses his gifts as a critic and historian to crack open the meaning of it all. Through a mix of narrative journalism, criticism, and penetrating profiles, Cobb’s writing captures the crises, characters, movements, and art of an era. Cobb has added new material to this collection—retrospective pieces that bring these stories up-to-date and tie them together, shaping these dispatches into a cohesive narrative of one of the most consequential periods of recent American history.