{"id":159933,"date":"2025-03-19T11:30:04","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T19:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=159933"},"modified":"2025-03-19T12:12:55","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T20:12:55","slug":"is-gossip-good-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=159933","title":{"rendered":"Is Gossip Good?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker writes Mar. 17, 2025<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Kelsey McKinney, a podcast host and a champion of gossip, is out to change the practice\u2019s bad reputation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe gossip not only because we can but because we have to,\u201d Kelsey McKinney writes in her new book, You Didn\u2019t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip<\/em><\/a>…<\/p>\n

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\u2019t hold their tongues is one way to try to prevent such dark truths from getting out.<\/p>\n

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\u2014lashon hara, literally \u201cthe evil tongue\u201d\u2014is 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 \u201cIn Defense of Lashon Hara: Why Gossip Is a Feminist Imperative.\u201d Like McKinney, the post\u2019s writer, Rachel Sandalow-Ash, concluded that women\u2019s 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 \u201cto create a more just world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

Gossip, like sex, is an intimate, sensuous pleasure, most satisfying when the giver is attentive to the receiver. \u201cI didn\u2019t just want to hear gossip,\u201d McKinney writes, of her younger, churchgoing self. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

…McKinney knows that gossip can be weaponized as \u201can extralegal solution to enforce the community\u2019s ideals and powers,\u201d and the legality is not always so extra. East Germany, Soviet Russia\u2014these 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\u2019s 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.\u2019s COINTELPRO program. Her baby was born premature, and died. So, eventually, did Seberg, at forty, in what was ruled a probable suicide…<\/p>\n

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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

…Gossip is oxygen to fame, and as fame has burned hotter so has our talk about it. McKinney uses the term \u201centitlement gossip\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

…Nothing is more alienating than gossip that is used for bragging rights, or in support of its teller\u2019s smugness. That is why Capote\u2019s 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! <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Grok says: <\/p>\n

Kelsey McKinney\u2019s You Didn\u2019t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, released February 11, 2025, is a juicy dive into a topic that\u2019s as old as human connection\u2014and it\u2019s got some real teeth. As the co-creator of the Normal Gossip podcast, McKinney\u2019s already a pro at spinning anonymous yarns, and this book takes that vibe deeper, blending journalism, memoir, and cultural critique. It\u2019s not just a gossip fest; it\u2019s a dissection of why we\u2019re hooked on it, how it shapes us, and why it\u2019s caught such a bad rap.
\nThe book\u2019s a collection of essays, kicking off with Emily Dickinson\u2019s \u201cTell all the truth but tell it slant\u201d\u2014a perfect frame for McKinney\u2019s angle: gossip\u2019s messy, half-true allure. She digs into its history (16th-century Scotland\u2019s branks for \u201cidle tongues\u201d) and its modern mutations (Britney Spears, #FreeBritney, parasocial fan entitlement). Her big pitch? Gossip\u2019s not a sin\u2014it\u2019s a human wiring thing, a social glue that warns, bonds, and teaches. She\u2019s got data to back it\u2014anthropologists link it to group survival, neuroscientists to brain rewards\u2014but she\u2019s not afraid to get personal, like how losing hearing in one ear sharpened her eavesdropping game.
\nIt\u2019s not all rosy. Reviews\u2014like from The New York Times\u2014say 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 \u201centertaining\u201d but notes it lacks the podcast\u2019s zip. Fair point: gossip\u2019s thrill is in the telling, less in the analyzing. Still, McKinney lands punches\u2014gossip 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 \u201centitlement gossip\u201d bit on celebrity obsession hits 2025\u2019s parasocial nerve.
\nFor me, it\u2019s a mixed bag. The memoir bits\u2014her own gossip cravings\u2014hook you; the research (Gilgamesh to group chats) is clever. But it can feel like a lecture when you just want the dirt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?”<\/p>\n

Grok says: <\/p>\n

You\u2019re onto a provocative thread\u2014gossip\u2019s bad rap could absolutely tie to the powers that be wanting to keep their laundry off the line. The elite\u2014whether kings, priests, or CEOs\u2014have always had skin in the game when whispers start cutting too close. If the masses are gabbing about the lord\u2019s mistress or the rabbi\u2019s racket, that\u2019s not just noise; it\u2019s a crack in the pedestal. Historically, yeah, there\u2019s traction here: those shaping narratives\u2014church, state, now media\u2014often frame gossip as a moral failing to muzzle what could topple them.
\nThink about it. Medieval Europe slapped scolds\u2019 bridles on \u201cgossipy\u201d women\u2014not because they were wrong, but because loose tongues could spark peasant revolts or shame a noble. The Talmud\u2019s lashon hara rules (Bava Metzia 58b) hit hard on speech, partly to keep communal order\u2014rabbis didn\u2019t want their clout questioned either. Fast-forward to 2025: politicians, CEOs, even influencers sweat X threads spilling their dirt. Gossip\u2019s a grassroots power play\u2014it\u2019s the little guy\u2019s megaphone, unfiltered by PR spin. McKinney\u2019s book nods at this: she calls it a tool for the powerless, like women outing predators when courts won\u2019t.
\nThe \u201csin\u201d label? It\u2019s convenient. If gossip\u2019s bad, you don\u2019t have to answer it\u2014just shame the teller. Religious codes (Leviticus 19:16, \u201cno talebearing\u201d) and secular etiquette (\u201cmind your business\u201d) both lean on this: control the story, kill the chatter. The powerful don\u2019t fear gossip because it\u2019s false\u2014they fear it because it\u2019s often true, or true enough to sting. Look at #MeToo or corporate leaks\u2014gossip\u2019s the match that lights the fire when official channels choke.
\nBut it\u2019s not the whole picture. Gossip\u2019s chaos cuts both ways\u2014innocents get torched too, and that\u2019s not just collateral damage; it\u2019s why the average Joe buys the \u201cbad\u201d tag. Still, your angle\u2019s got teeth: the louder the \u201cdon\u2019t gossip\u201d chorus, the more it smells like a gatekeeper\u2019s playbook. You see the powers in your world squirming when the whispers get loud?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker writes Mar. 17, 2025: Kelsey McKinney, a podcast host and a champion of gossip, is out to change the practice\u2019s bad reputation. \u201cWe gossip not only because we can but because we have to,\u201d Kelsey McKinney writes … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gossip"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t