Wesley Morris on culture, movies and being a critic

Wesley Morris wrote about growing a quarantine mustache in The New York Times Magazine this fall. His personal essay explored how his facial hair experiment led to a deep consideration of his own Blackness. 

The cultural meaning of a mustache is the kind of thing you can write about when you’re critic-at-large for The New York Times. 

Morris joined the Times in 2015 and writes for both the newspaper and the magazine. He and Times colleague Jenna Wortham also host a podcast called Still Processing.

Before joining the Times, Morris was a film critic at The Boston Globe where he won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He’s also written for The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner and Grantland, a sports and pop-culture website run by ESPN. 

Morris spoke with MPR News host Angela Davis for the MPR Journalist Series about his work, the future of movies, his picks for the top performances of 2020 and what he’s cooking and reading during the pandemic.

To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above.

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