THE NEW YORKER DAILY NEWSLETTER > "In today’s newsletter, shh. You didn’t hear this from me—we’re gossiping about a new book about gossip."

 

Thursday, March 20, 2025

In today’s newsletter, shh. You didn’t hear this from me—we’re gossiping about a new book about gossip.

Is Gossip Good for Us?

Kelsey McKinney, a podcast host and a champion of gossip, is out to change the practice’s bad reputation.

Illustration by Derek Abella

To be human is to talk about other humans. We all gossip, and those who claim they don’t are lying (I heard). “It’s true that few people would be proud to be thought of as a gossip—the label is too definitive, too judgmental, singed with implications of sluttish secret-hawking and moral incontinence,” Alexandra Schwartz writes. “Yet, at the ring of the phone or the ping of the group chat, our hearts leap at the hope of some enticing morsel, delivered hot.” In this week’s issue, Schwartz reviews a new book from the journalist and podcast host Kelsey McKinney, who argues that “gossip entertains, and it also sustains.”

Gossip can be serious, McKinney asserts, and it ultimately serves us well. The practice can act as a transmission of truth, as a check on power, and as a source of solidarity and irreverence; it brings us together and makes us curious about other people. Gossip is intimacy’s glue. “But what of the gossiped-about?” Schwartz asks. “They can’t all be tyrants, criminals, and creeps. If gossip can subvert norms, it can also enforce them; remember high school?”

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P.S. It’s the first day of spring, a time when winter-muted smells burst back to life in New York City. 

“All over town you can enjoy the blossoming of that chief attribute of New York: the smell of urine. Bus exhaust, hot garbage, clove cigarettes, Axe cologne,”  Nick Paumgarten writes. 

“Some of it is a matter of taste.”