A new culture podcast has landed with a splash. “Cannonball! That’s perfect for the summer”, says Niela Orr, co-host on the first episode of critic Wesley Morris’s latest show for The New York Times. Morris responds to Orr’s observation with an excited “YES!” – one of many exclamations to come. After listening to the opening six instalments, Cannonball with Wesley Morris does indeed seem an ideal name for a show that delves into the cultural issues of the day with such depth and enthusiasm.
Listening to smart, engaging people thinking out loud can be an invigorating experience – and on Cannonball, it often is. The episodes average a little under an hour in length, which is plenty of time for Morris and his guests to dissect the minutiae of the subjects covered.
Cultural criticism is an art form that encompasses, well, pretty much everything; topics discussed on Cannonball have included, among many other things: Bruno Mars’s relationship to Blackness, the changing meaning of time on The Bear, the Diddy sex trafficking trial, and the recent NYT best movies of the 21st century list. To hear Morris and his guests trawl through different mediums and eras to explore the full context of their subjects can be downright thrilling.
However, Morris’s knowledge isn’t faultless, as we hear when he mislabels the recent Sydney-centred instalment of The Bear a bottle episode. And just sometimes, listening to him think out loud can be a messier, less satisfying proposition. The episode about the Diddy sex trafficking trial being a prime example. Unlike the other episodes so far, rather than Morris talking the subject through with an equal conversational partner, he had John White, one of the show’s producers, effectively interview him about the experience of attending the trial. While he had some worthwhile observations to make, and his train of thought does eventually end up somewhere valuable, it’s noteworthy how much less engaging the process is when the episode isn’t pitched as a conversation.
The variety of guests who enter the discourse with Morris is one of the best aspects of Cannonball. He spent six years hosting the NYT culture podcast Still Processing alongside fellow writer Jenna Wortham, and their chemistry and banter was one of the main reasons it became such a behemoth. Although you’d imagine there’ll be plenty of repeat guests if Cannonball runs for a similar time, it’s been an interesting change of pace to hear Morris engage with a different co-host every week. Alternating guest hosts seems a wise idea both as a way to keep the show fresh, and to give it a different identity to the previous project.
And it’s a testament to Morris’s hosting skill that, while he is not exactly a wallflower as a presenter, he gives his “co-pilots” plenty of space to shine. Some of the best moments at this early stage of the run have come from Samin Nosrat (Home Cooking) talking about her love of Jeremy Allen White’s chef-ing monologue in the first season of The Bear, and writer Eric Hynes’s description of his bodily adoration of the Wong Kar-Wai classic In The Mood For Love.
Though Cannonball is not afraid to criticize (see the Bruno Mars episode), the moments where Morris and his guests engage in passionate, knowledgeable fandom are generally the most enjoyable.
Not every episode will be for every person. The podcast is driven by Morris’s personal preoccupations and percolating theories. It stands to reason that those preoccupations won’t always align with the audience’s, and the show hasn’t yet quite proven itself vital enough to inspire interest in subjects where none existed already. When his interests do happen to align with yours, however, then Cannonball is certainly worth a listen.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.