Cobb, Jelani: - Jelani Cobb is Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, New York. He is author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (2010) and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (2002) and The Essential Kerner Commission Report: The Landmark Study on Race, Inequality, and Police Violence (2021). He is a staff writer at the New Yorker.