Jonathan D. Cohen

Jonathan D. Cohen is the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Senior Program Officer for American Institutions, Society, and the Public Good at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, where he is the lead staffer for the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy.

Jon is the author of Losing Big: America's Sports Gambling Boom (Columbia Global Reports, 2025) as well as For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America (Oxford 2022), which was featured in the New Yorker and has been cited or reviewed in a wide variety of national and local outlets, including CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. He is also the co-editor of two volumes: Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen (Rutgers 2019, with June Skinner Sawyers) and All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States (Nevada 2018, with David G. Schwartz). His writing on gambling policy has appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, Vox, and The Hill and was cited in an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court's Murphy v. NCAA ruling. Prior to joining the Academy, he served as financial writer and editor at Tiger Capital Group. He completed his B.A. at McGill University and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia.