Today, Jelani Cobb teases out the through lines of his celebrated commentary in The New Yorker—and warns us about some patterns we might’ve been ignoring.

In his new essay collection, Dr. Cobb moves from a 1986 shooting at Jamaica High School to the Obama-era contradictions of Trayvon Martin’s death, from the architectural grandeur we once built for public education to the messaging of “defund the police.” His argument? That America keeps cycling between hope and cynicism, between shared reality and fractured perception—and that understanding where we’ve been is the only way to see where we’re headed. The events he chronicles in Three’s A Riot aren’t just historical footnotes. They’re “notes on how we got here.”

Jelani Cobb is the current Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. He’s a Peabody Award winner and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. Dr. Cobb is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit skippedhistory.substack.com/subscribe