CBH Talk | Jelani Cobb and Salamishah Tillet Discuss “Three or More Is a Riot”
Acclaimed historian, Pulitzer Prize finalist, staff writer at The New Yorker, and dean of Columbia Journalism School Jelani Cobb’s latest book is a searing portrait of America’s last turbulent decade. In Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, 2012–2025, Cobb chronicles the rise of the movements against gun violence, gender inequality, sexual harassment, systemic racism, and police brutality, alongside the equally potent backlash that helped fuel the ascent of the MAGA movement.
Drawing from a decade’s worth of incisive essays largely from The New Yorker, Cobb sifts through the noise of our chaotic era to reveal its deeper signals, capturing the crises, characters, and cultural touchstones that have defined these years. His reflections offer not only a clear-eyed account of where we’ve been, but an urgent meditation on where we may be headed next.
At a moment when writers like Cobb are themselves targets of political power, join him for a wide-ranging conversation led by Pulitzer Prize winner Salamishah Tillet. Together they explore the meaning of this tumultuous chapter in American life—and the possibilities for what comes after.
Participants
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.
Salamishah Tillet is the Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic-at-large at The New York Times. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece, and currently completing the book, All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made. Tillet recently received the 2025 Emerson Collective Fellowship for leaders taking on a hyperlocal project to help their community come together and solve complex problems and is the 2025 recipient of The Gordon Parks Foundation’s Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing. Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Lindback Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2003, she and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, founded A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women.
