The New York Times will add another podcast to its slate in early 2025, a culture-focused weekly program hosted by critic-at-large Wesley Morris.
The still-untitled podcast will see Morris taking a deep dive into different parts of the culture, including music, film, and art, and featuring conversations with guests and experts to put popular culture into its historical context.
“I just really like talking about art and popular culture, and not just talking about it, but thinking through it, how it is functioning, how it makes us feel, what else is in it that isn’t apparent, is readily obvious,” Morris tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “I have a lot of feelings about my own feelings about how art and culture work, and I’m always looking for something, another way to think about something that’s been digested either because it’s old and has been around for a long time, or because it’s popular.”
Morris, a two-time Pulitzer winner, previously hosted the podcast Still Processing alongside J Wortham, and has been developing a series of pilots that have been available under The Culture Desk banner. The new podcast will take those learnings and apply it to the new format, which will see Morris paired with others to have deep conversations around cultural issues.
“These are conversations versus interviews,” says Paula Szuchman, director of audio for the Times. “Wesley is the host, but we’ve been talking a lot about what’s sort of texturally different about this show and this particular critic, so it’s two people working through an idea or a theory and being very excited to do so, and having done a lot of thought on their own about it … not people talking about their own work, but people who think deeply about art in ways that you can imagine them and Wesley doing when the microphones aren’t on.”
“I would like to talk to people that I have some relationship with. This is not a show where people who are making a thing come on to promote the thing they’re making,” Morris adds. “I’m not going to have a person with a movie coming out in a couple weeks come and talk about the movie they’re putting out. That’s less interesting to me.”
“There will be many opportunities to think about current, contemporary things, but I don’t want to have to do that work with the person who made the thing,” he adds. “And so a lot of the conversations we’re having are just between me and people I know, people that I’m friends with, people in my family, sometimes other critics.”
The Times has been expanding its audio offerings significantly in recent years, building off of the success of its flagship podcast The Daily, but also digging into other formats and genres, like The Interview.
The new Morris podcast will seek to carve out a place on the culture side of the equation, building upon the shows that he has been involved with before.
“We’re always looking for the magical combination of the Times journalist who has a unique point of view, deep expertise, and also is very fluent in the medium and can bring something distinct to it. That Venn diagram is kind of what you’re seeing here,” Szuchman says. “Our audio informs, clarifies, explains, but it also moves you, right? It can move you in ways that nothing else can. And I think that this is an arena that we live in, and this is a show that I think can be a huge expression of that for us, where you come to us for all those things that inform and delight, but also to feel something and to see something differently.”
And the timing of the new show, in early 2025, could very well set itself up for a number of stories that feel of the moment.
“We are now back with a popular culture president, and a lot of the mood of American art and culture this entire century is sort of been oriented around some aspect of the national mood,” Morris says. “Of course, this has always been true. You go back to the 1970s and you think about the way movies felt back then, it was really connected to the [Vietnam] war and to Nixon.”
It’s about finding a unique way in to a topic that feels contemporary.
“There’ll be times when, in order to talk about Chappell Roan, for instance, you kind of have to talk about six other people, and a bunch of other singing approaches, songwriting approaches, personal styling approaches,” Morris says. “The two ideas of an archival or older cultural object and something more contemporary, those things are going to converge and be confluent in some way, always, at least with the way that I think about art and culture. There’s only the ways in which the present is sort of owing something to the past.”
English (US) ·