The New Yorker writes Mar. 17, 2025:
Kelsey McKinney, a podcast host and a champion of gossip, is out to change the practice’s bad reputation.
“We gossip not only because we can but because we have to,” Kelsey McKinney writes in her new book, You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip…
McKinney left the Church long ago. Looking back, she concludes that its leaders did not merely despise gossip; in fact, they feared it. She points to cases like those of Bill Hybels, a founder of Willow Creek Community Church, based in Illinois, who was forced to resign in 2018 after being credibly accused of sexual misconduct, and Paige Patterson, the former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Texas, who was ousted from his position the same year after more than two thousand female congregants signed a petition denouncing him for counselling abused wives to pray for their husbands. (Hybels denies the allegations.) Convincing women that God will punish them if they don’t hold their tongues is one way to try to prevent such dark truths from getting out.
Certainly, Christianity has no monopoly on the prohibition of gossip. In Islam, McKinney tells us, there is a difference in degree between buhtan (slander), ghibah (backbiting), and namimah (malicious gossip); none is advised. Jewish law holds that a person who hears gossip—lashon hara, literally “the evil tongue”—is as much at fault as one who tells it. A few months before the #MeToo movement began, in the summer of 2017, the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith published a blog post called “In Defense of Lashon Hara: Why Gossip Is a Feminist Imperative.” Like McKinney, the post’s writer, Rachel Sandalow-Ash, concluded that women’s speech had been unfairly maligned by powerful men who would prefer that their doings not be discussed. By encouraging women to share information that might protect them, be it about a community leader or a college classmate known to play fast and loose with sexual consent, she argued, gossip actually fulfilled the Jewish imperative “to create a more just world.”
So gossip, in the service of truthtelling, can act as a check on power, and as a source of solidarity and irreverence for those who lack it…
Gossip, like sex, is an intimate, sensuous pleasure, most satisfying when the giver is attentive to the receiver. “I didn’t just want to hear gossip,” McKinney writes, of her younger, churchgoing self. “I wanted to take it in my hands and mold it, rearrange the punch lines and the reveals until I could get the timing right enough that my friends in the cafeteria would gasp.”
…McKinney knows that gossip can be weaponized as “an extralegal solution to enforce the community’s ideals and powers,” and the legality is not always so extra. East Germany, Soviet Russia—these are places where whisperings found their way into police files. And what was the House Un-American Activities Committee but one big, malevolent exercise in gossip-mongering? McKinney notes that the actress Jean Seberg’s career was derailed when the Los Angeles Times ran a blind item suggesting that she was pregnant by a Black Panther; Newsweek subsequently published her name. The story turned out to be an invention of the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO program. Her baby was born premature, and died. So, eventually, did Seberg, at forty, in what was ruled a probable suicide…
There is an estranging, witness-to-your-funeral quality to being talked about by others, as if you were no longer the subject of your own life but merely an object to be ogled in someone else’s.
…Gossip is oxygen to fame, and as fame has burned hotter so has our talk about it. McKinney uses the term “entitlement gossip” to refer to the notion that the public has a right to personal information about famous people, a belief that has taken on increasingly vampiric manifestations in our age of social-media madness. She is talking about something darker, too: the illusion that ardent fandom constitutes a mutual relationship with its object.
…Nothing is more alienating than gossip that is used for bragging rights, or in support of its teller’s smugness. That is why Capote’s story about his swans reads so sourly now. There is a touting tone, a noxious bragging. Capote is mounting his subjects on the wall of his prose like so many heads of stag. Look what I caught!
Grok says:
Kelsey McKinney’s You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, released February 11, 2025, is a juicy dive into a topic that’s as old as human connection—and it’s got some real teeth. As the co-creator of the Normal Gossip podcast, McKinney’s already a pro at spinning anonymous yarns, and this book takes that vibe deeper, blending journalism, memoir, and cultural critique. It’s not just a gossip fest; it’s a dissection of why we’re hooked on it, how it shapes us, and why it’s caught such a bad rap.
The book’s a collection of essays, kicking off with Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”—a perfect frame for McKinney’s angle: gossip’s messy, half-true allure. She digs into its history (16th-century Scotland’s branks for “idle tongues”) and its modern mutations (Britney Spears, #FreeBritney, parasocial fan entitlement). Her big pitch? Gossip’s not a sin—it’s a human wiring thing, a social glue that warns, bonds, and teaches. She’s got data to back it—anthropologists link it to group survival, neuroscientists to brain rewards—but she’s not afraid to get personal, like how losing hearing in one ear sharpened her eavesdropping game.
It’s not all rosy. Reviews—like from The New York Times—say it can drag; the dialectic style (defining gossip, debating its ethics) sometimes feels like a stretched essay, not a page-turner. The Washington Post calls it “entertaining” but notes it lacks the podcast’s zip. Fair point: gossip’s thrill is in the telling, less in the analyzing. Still, McKinney lands punches—gossip as a feminist issue, a tool for the powerless, gets real traction. Her take on power dynamics (teens cutting rivals, women flagging creeps) is sharp, and her “entitlement gossip” bit on celebrity obsession hits 2025’s parasocial nerve.
For me, it’s a mixed bag. The memoir bits—her own gossip cravings—hook you; the research (Gilgamesh to group chats) is clever. But it can feel like a lecture when you just want the dirt.
I ask Grok: “Gossip is generally considered bad. Is this because the powers that be, the ones who set our narratives and our morality, have much to fear from gossip that undermines their power?”
Grok says:
You’re onto a provocative thread—gossip’s bad rap could absolutely tie to the powers that be wanting to keep their laundry off the line. The elite—whether kings, priests, or CEOs—have always had skin in the game when whispers start cutting too close. If the masses are gabbing about the lord’s mistress or the rabbi’s racket, that’s not just noise; it’s a crack in the pedestal. Historically, yeah, there’s traction here: those shaping narratives—church, state, now media—often frame gossip as a moral failing to muzzle what could topple them.
Think about it. Medieval Europe slapped scolds’ bridles on “gossipy” women—not because they were wrong, but because loose tongues could spark peasant revolts or shame a noble. The Talmud’s lashon hara rules (Bava Metzia 58b) hit hard on speech, partly to keep communal order—rabbis didn’t want their clout questioned either. Fast-forward to 2025: politicians, CEOs, even influencers sweat X threads spilling their dirt. Gossip’s a grassroots power play—it’s the little guy’s megaphone, unfiltered by PR spin. McKinney’s book nods at this: she calls it a tool for the powerless, like women outing predators when courts won’t.
The “sin” label? It’s convenient. If gossip’s bad, you don’t have to answer it—just shame the teller. Religious codes (Leviticus 19:16, “no talebearing”) and secular etiquette (“mind your business”) both lean on this: control the story, kill the chatter. The powerful don’t fear gossip because it’s false—they fear it because it’s often true, or true enough to sting. Look at #MeToo or corporate leaks—gossip’s the match that lights the fire when official channels choke.
But it’s not the whole picture. Gossip’s chaos cuts both ways—innocents get torched too, and that’s not just collateral damage; it’s why the average Joe buys the “bad” tag. Still, your angle’s got teeth: the louder the “don’t gossip” chorus, the more it smells like a gatekeeper’s playbook. You see the powers in your world squirming when the whispers get loud?
