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.

What just happened?

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.

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 listeners see these powerful short dispatches as a cohesive, epic narrative of one of the most consequential, but hard to understand, eras in American history.