Three or More Is a Riot

<b>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.</b><br><br>What just happened? <br><br>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. <br><br>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.