Jelani Cobb

1 month ago | ourcommunitynow.com | Jelani Cobb

Share On a morning in May, Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, testified before a congressional subcommittee about the prevalence of far-left ideas among his faculty and students. Given that the federal government has historically provided funding for the university’s budget, through an annual allocation, Johnson had a difficult choice to make.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Jelani Cobb

On a morning in May, Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, testified before a congressional subcommittee about the prevalence of far-left ideas among his faculty and students. Given that the federal government has historically provided funding for the university’s budget, through an annual allocation, Johnson had a difficult choice to make.

1 month ago | portside.org | Jelani Cobb

Ryan Coogler’s Road to “Sinners” Published May 4, 2025 The decade-long dominance of Marvel Studios in American popular cinema has insured that, among other things, we all recognize an origin story when we see one. To the extent that such neat inception points exist in real life, an afternoon at an aging movie palace on the corner of Lake Park and Grand Avenues, in central Oakland, California, provided one for the filmmaker Ryan Coogler.

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Jelani Cobb

To prepare for “Black Panther,” Coogler made his first trip to Africa, and spent several weeks travelling there. He told me, “I realized, All right, African Americans are extremely African. We may be more African than we know.” That discovery shaped the way he understood Mississippi’s complicated past for “Sinners.” “With this film it was, like, Oh, we affected this place,” he told me.

Mar 10, 2025 | cjr.org | Jelani Cobb

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. On Monday, Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, delivered the 2025 Reuters Memorial Lecture at Oxford University. ***Journalism is the work of reporting the news. Often events transpire at such a pace that it is difficult to find a discrete beginning and end with which to frame one’s reporting.