Me and Bruno Mars — a Love Story

The trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs ended on Wednesday when he was convicted of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution but was acquitted of the most serious charges against him: racketeering and sex trafficking. Wesley Morris, our critic at large, attended some of the court proceedings over the past couple months, and he walked away with deep and complicated feelings about witnessing the drama of, as he put it, “yet another very famous Black man on trial.” On today’s episode, Wesley wrestles with those feelings in conversation with our producer John White.Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] our show on YouTube: youtube.com/@CannonballPodcastFor transcripts and more, visit: nytimes.com/cannonball Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Host Wesley Morris has a confession to make: He loves Bruno Mars. Nothing wrong with that, right? With the help of the culture writer Niela Orr, Wesley untangles his crush from his discomfort with the pop star’s cozy relationship to Blackness.Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] our show on YouTube: youtube.com/@CannonballPodcastFor transcripts and more, visit: nytimes.com/cannonball Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

A new weekly podcast, hosted by the critic Wesley Morris. Come on in, the culture’s fine. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Today: The undoing of Kanye West. “We’re in deeply vile territory, and I can’t make intellectual sense of that,” Wesley Morris says about West, who now goes by Ye.In 2004, when Ye released “College Dropout," he seemed to be challenging Black orthodoxy in ways that felt exciting and risky. But over the years, his expression of “freedom” has felt anything but free. His embrace of anti-Black, antisemitic and white supremacist language “comes at the expense of other people’s safety,” their humanity and their dignity, J Wortham says.Wesley and J discuss what it means to divest from someone whose art, for two decades, had awed, challenged and excited you. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” came into theaters with a huge responsibility: It had to address the death of Chadwick Boseman, the star of the first “Black Panther” movie, who died of cancer in August 2020.Wesley and J discuss how the film offers the audience an experience of collective grief and mourning — something that never happened in the United States in response to the losses of 2020. They interrogate what it means that this gesture of healing came from Marvel and Disney, a corporate empire that is in control of huge swaths of our entertainment, and not from another type of leadership.Additional resources:To hear what Wesley and J had to say about the first “Black Panther” movie, listen to this episode of “Still Processing” from 2018. Ryan Coogler, the director of “Wakanda Forever,” spoke to the author Ta-Nehisi Coates about the making of movie, and how it captured the real-life grief that people experienced after Chadwick Boseman’s death. Listen to their conversation here. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.