Still Processing

» see nytimes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

This is a show about being a Black American in the years between 2016 and 2022, recorded in New York, published by the newspaper both hosts wrote for. The distance between that and an engineer in Ankara is the whole of it, so what follows describes what the show did rather than claiming a seat in its audience. Still Processing debuted on 8 September 2016 with an episode called First Date. The New York Times made it with Pineapple Street Media, and the hosts were two of the paper's own: Wesley Morris, critic at large, and J Wortham, a staff writer at the magazine.

Episodes ran somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour. The structure was a conversation with an interview folded into it, and the recording often happened wherever the subject was, which is how a culture podcast ended up with tape from Central Park and from inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum episode went out as "Journey to the 'Blacksonian'".

It collected the awards that kind of show collects. The Webbys gave it arts and culture in 2017, then arts and culture plus the People's Voice in 2019. There was a Shorty nomination in 2019 and iHeartRadio nominations in 2021 and 2022. The Atlantic named it one of the fifty best podcasts of 2016, three months after it launched.

~ the two of them ~

What made it work was that neither host was performing agreement. Morris and Wortham came at the same film or the same news week from two different directions and talked until something gave, and the episode ended when the conversation did rather than when the thesis was proved. Critics writing in a newspaper have to land somewhere by the deadline; the podcast let them stay in the part before that.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the election episode ~

The show was nine weeks old when the 2016 election happened, which meant its first real test arrived before it had a format to fall back on. The episode they made out of it was called "The Reckoning", and it is the one The Atlantic singled out when it put the show on that year's best-of list.

That set the pattern for everything after. The six years the show ran across hold a pandemic and a national argument about policing, and because the show was two people talking rather than a produced documentary series, it could turn around a response in days where a scripted series needed months.

~ the last tape ~

The final episode is dated 6 December 2022. The Wikipedia article says the show ran from 2016 to 2022 and offers no reason for the ending, and neither the paper nor the hosts put out a statement that any of the coverage picked up.

Both hosts stayed where they were. Morris is still the paper's critic at large and Wortham is still writing for the magazine, so the ending did not arrive through either of them leaving.

The feed was never taken down, and it got used once more. On 25 June 2025 a single new item appeared in it, thirty months past the last episode: a trailer titled "Introducing: Cannonball with Wesley Morris", announcing the weekly culture show Morris launched that August. The New York Times had trimmed the back catalog down by then, so what the feed now hands a podcast app is three items from September 2016 and one advertisement from June 2025 for the show that replaced it.

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