Latest news with #NormalGossip
New York Times
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Modern Love' Podcast: Why Gossiping Could Help Your Love Life
'I was raised extremely evangelical, and the evangelical church is very clear in its stance on gossip, and it is that gossip is a sin.' For Kelsey McKinney, the author of the new book, 'You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,' spreading a good story occupied a morally gray zone throughout her childhood. McKinney, who is also the former host of the podcast, 'Normal Gossip,' talks with Modern Love's Anna Martin about navigating the ups and downs of gossiping in her own life. McKinney also reads the Modern Love essay 'We Were a Party of Two, but Never Quite Alone' by Linda Button, who tells the story of how gossiping with her rich suitor's exes brought the euphoria of her relationship back down to earth. While reading Button's essay, McKinney fields questions from Martin so they can do some gossiping of their own. How to submit a Modern Love Essay to The New York Times. How to submit a Tiny Love Story.
CBC
16-02-2025
- Politics
- CBC
The Sunday Magazine for February 16, 2025
This week on The Sunday Magazine with Piya Chattopadhyay: The Trump factor: How the US president is upending Canadian politics Polling shows the Liberals gaining ground on the Conservative party since U.S. President Donald Trump's promised tariff threats and musings about annexing Canada. What do trade wars and threats to sovereignty mean for Canada's political parties – and voters? The Economist's Rob Russo and the Toronto Star's Tonda MacCharles unpack another tumultuous week in politics. Gossiping about gossip: Kelsey McKinney on the origins and value of spreading juicy rumours As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, journalist and writer Kelsey McKinney was suddenly unable to collect the juicy stories she'd usually get over drinks with friends, so she started the popular Normal Gossip podcast… and it became an instant hit. After years of gossiping on the airwaves, McKinney joins Chattopadhyay to discuss her new book, You Didn't Hear this From Me , to break down the origins of gossip, the reason people everywhere love to to do it and the risks that come with spreading rumours if you don't know where they came from. Is the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in jeopardy? Middle East correspondent for the Economist, Gregg Carlstrom speaks about the latest developments on the Gaza ceasefire deal and what Donald Trump's comments about taking over Gaza mean for Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. Cancelling cancel culture: Social activist Loretta Ross on the merits of "calling in" over calling out After five decades as a social justice activist, Loretta Ross is no stranger to confrontation and debate. But years of working to deprogram white supremacists, reform perpetrators of sexual assault and advocating for reproductive rights has led her to rethink how she interacts with the people she disagrees with most. Ross joins Chattopadhyay to discuss her new book, Calling In , and her alternative idea to cancel culture that she believes works better at changing behaviours than public shaming does.
Washington Post
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A gossip guru ponders our love for scandalous hearsay
Until recently, every episode of 'Normal Gossip' — the hit podcast created by culture writer Kelsey McKinney in 2022 — began the same way. McKinney would ask her guest about their relationship with gossip: Did they ever engage in gossip? What beliefs or values informed their gossiping practices? After this prelude, McKinney spent the remainder of each episode regaling her guest with an 'anonymous morsel of gossip from the real world,' sent in by a listener and retold with McKinney's own emphases and embellishments. (McKinney has recently handed over the reins to another host, her colleague Rachelle Hampton.)
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Know Any Good Gossip?
The writer Kelsey McKinney had been in the wine bar-cum-restaurant for only a few minutes when the host waved her over — to seat her at a banquette in the center of the room, but also to share some personal news. As Ms. McKinney settled in, the host told her about an upcoming move to California for a big career opportunity but demurred on the specifics. 'I don't want to talk about it until I leave here,' she said. 'And if I start talking about a life coach and a guru, if I start taking ayahuasca, you have to come get me.' Ms. McKinney nodded sagely. 'But I'll be back,' the host said. 'My hair person is still here. That's a legally binding relationship.' Ms. McKinney is used to hearing about the lives of strangers. For the last three years, Ms. McKinney, a tattooed redhead from Texas with an open face, has been the host of 'Normal Gossip,' a podcast about the travails of everyday people. For each episode, Ms. McKinney and her producer, Alex Sujong Laughlin, bring on a different guest — often other writers and creative types — to discuss gossipy stories submitted by the show's tens of thousands of listeners. Think: someone who posts on social media about her status as a 'marathon runner' but who has never actually finished a race. What may seem low stakes at first — like the internecine sagas of a queer kickball league — usually unfurls into something riveting. Ms. McKinney, 33, frequently pauses to check in with her guest, 'How are you feeling right now, and whose side are you on?' 'Ultimately, it's equal parts, 'Oh my god,' and, 'This is the most fun thing anyone's ever asked me to do,'' said the humorist Samantha Irby, who has appeared on two episodes. 'You just sit there and have to react, and hope you say the thing that makes Kelsey cackle.' As the show has found a cult following, and as Ms. McKinney and Ms. Sujong Laughlin have become entrenched in the thorny lives of strangers, Ms. McKinney has developed theories about the wider cultural fascination with gossip. In a new collection of essays, 'You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,' Ms. McKinney explores the anthropological, sociological and philosophical uses of gossip, one of the oldest modes of self-understanding. 'We gossip,' she said, 'because that is how we each make sense of the world, with ourselves at the center reaching outward trying to connect with others, to prove to ourselves that we are real.' Social Beings On a recent snowy morning, Ms. McKinney showed me the charming, tchotchke-stuffed rowhouse in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia where she lives with her husband, Trey Dondrea, and her elderly dog, Georgia. When they moved there in 2021, she knew almost immediately that it would suit her. 'It's a loud town,' she said: loud sports fans, loud conversations at the bar, loud opinions. In her home office, a room tucked away on the top floor, looms a giant white board, covered in a chaotic-good palimpsest of outlines and to-do lists. 'This chart is how my brain conceives of all stories,' Ms. McKinney said, pointing to a line graph at the top that she uses to map out 'Normal Gossip' episodes. 'This is the five-act structure.' The idea for the show came to Ms. McKinney in 2020. It was the middle of the pandemic, and everyone needed fresh tea. 'Someone should simply give me a podcast called Normal Gossip where I talk about gossip that everyone has,' she posted on Twitter on a whim. At the time, Ms. McKinney was in the early days of running Defector Media, a worker-owned culture and news organization she had started with former staff writers from the sports blog Deadspin. When her colleagues saw her post, they encouraged her to make the podcast for their new company. She began looking around for a producer, and hit it off with Ms. Sujong Laughlin, whom she had never worked with but whose byline she recognized from her years in journalism. For each episode, Ms. McKinney rewrites the stories her listeners submit to her anonymously into theatrical retellings. Then, she and Ms. Sujong Laughlin hone into a script with buildup, a climax and hairpin twists and turns along the way. Everyone gets a pseudonym, and geographic locations and other details are obscured. Ms. McKinney does not mind that the resulting tales sit in an uncomfortable space between fiction and nonfiction. 'I'm incredibly interested in the obsession with 'confirmation' and 'the truth' and whether we can know that at all,' she said. She is partly inspired by the mystery novels she devoured as an adolescent growing up in Flower Mound, a small town near the Dallas-Fort Worth megachurch where her father was an evangelical pastor. A truly tantalizing piece of gossip, she suggested, is sort of like a whodunit. 'I was a library kid,' Ms. McKinney said. Once she'd burned through the young adult section, her mother turned her on to Agatha Christie. She attended a performing arts high school in Dallas, and then studied the humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. She moved east when she landed an editorial fellowship at Vox, which led to writing jobs at Fusion and Deadspin. Just before 'Normal Gossip' got going, she published her first book, a novel about the effects of a pastor's affair on his wife and daughters called 'God Spare the Girls,' set in an evangelical Christian community in North Texas. Growing up as an evangelical Christian herself, Ms. McKinney recalled learning that gossip was a sin; at the same time, connecting with others through stories was the bedrock of the church community. That seemingly idle chatter — which in fact contains fundamental human dramas — 'feels like a way to train you to be a social being,' she said. The Serious Side Though 'Normal Gossip' deals mostly in lighthearted subjects, in her new book, Ms. McKinney touches on the role of gossip in more serious matters. 'You Didn't Hear This From Me' features riffs on West Elm Caleb, a young man whom scores of women online accused of ghosting; a cheeky play on the Epic of Gilgamesh; and salacious bits about Picasso borrowed from the artist Françoise Gilot's account of her time as his lover. It also includes insights about how whisper networks can be a means of holding powerful people accountable, as they did during the #MeToo movement. The legal battles that surrounded Britney Spears, Ms. McKinney posits, are an example of how unchecked gossip has the potential to alter someone's life for the worst. In a personal essay, Ms. McKinney writes about how a childhood cholesteatoma destroyed her right eardrum and most of her ear canal, leaving her partly deaf. Growing up, the condition made her both listen more carefully and become more skeptical of what she did pick up. Sometimes, she argued, whether or not a scrap of gossip is strictly true is irrelevant. The best gossips may leave it up to their listeners to draw their own conclusions. 'When we gossip,' she writes, 'we have to acknowledge that the truths we are attempting to convey are in the meanings we take from the moments,' not in what is actually being said. In December, Ms. McKinney announced that she and Ms. Sujong Laughin would be leaving the podcast and handing it over to a new host, the journalist Rachelle Hampton. Ms. Hampton, one of the podcast's earliest guests, had quickly become an informal member of the 'Normal Gossip' team after she joined Defector last summer. In January, she released a 'bonus' episode as the incoming host, discussing the romantic plotlines of a low-budget Christmas movie. She'll take over Ms. McKinney's role in a new season later this year. 'A lot of podcast transitions happen too late, when someone is burned out,' Ms. Hampton said. 'But I'm being handed a show that's at the height of its powers.'
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
You Know You Love Gossip. Does It Love You Back?
For those who love it, live for it and regularly traffic in it, nothing is more delicious than exchanging gossip. Kelsey McKinney is one of us. In 'You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,' she writes, 'What I crave is a phone call that starts with, 'You're never going to believe this.'' McKinney is a creator of the podcast 'Normal Gossip,' which provides all the kicks of rumor-mongering and none of the baggage: Each week she recounts to a guest an anonymized story from someone else's life — drama at a dog park, say, or an episode of cheating at bingo. 'At its most basic, gossip is just one person talking to another about someone who isn't present,' McKinney writes in a fair example of the book's dialectic style. In 'You Didn't Hear This From Me,' she seeks to understand why we do it and why it's important. I just wish the result were more fun. The book, a collection of essays, contains some amusing historical accounts, such as how women in 16th-century Scotland were put into the brank 'to curb women's tongue's that talk too idle,' as one such iron bridle was inscribed. There is a passage about 'Town Topics' — a kind of Us Weekly of the Gilded Age — which published juicy blind items about Alice Roosevelt having allegedly listened to risqué jokes in Newport. More so than its lineage, McKinney aims to understand gossip's place in our lives. The book is laden with references to very recent history; topics that were obviously the talk of le tout internet at the time of writing but already feel dated: the show Hannah Gadsby curated at Brooklyn Museum, mentioned in a chapter about tell-alls; West Elm Caleb, who wooed many women via online dating platforms, referenced in a discussion of strangers online; the social media account Deuxmoi, which self-presented as arbiters of celebrity gossip. By the time McKinney mentions America Ferrera's speech about the expectations placed on women in the 'Barbie" movie, I had lost track of what the point was. Doja Cat's song 'Need to Know,' the finale of a 'Real Housewives of Salt Lake City' season, the reality game show 'Traitors' and Britney Spears's conservatorship are just a few of the topics in which the reader must be already interested — because the book doesn't manage to elevate them much. Much juicier are the anonymous anecdotes and vignettes slipped between chapters, which serve to illustrate how gossip is used in real life — including the scene in which members of a wedding party dish about the complicated love life of an arriving guest and the description of a high school that publicly posts students' disciplinary infractions. These interludes are brief but shine far more brightly than the book's essays. The writing of these essays relies heavily on quotes from an array of other thinkers. In just a few pages one encounters the philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze'ev on whether we are born with the desire to gossip; the anthropologist Robin Dunbar on gossip's relation to the animal kingdom; Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist, discussing its development in humanity. Soren Kierkegaard, 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,' Emily Dickinson, bell hooks, Oscar Wilde and Kurt Vonnegut all weigh the book down further. I'd far rather know what the author thinks. She occasionally dips into her own formative experiences, such as the time a storyteller came to her school to tell a spooky yarn from their small town that was really an urban legend, or the experience of growing up in an evangelical church culture where gossip was considered an affront to God. McKinney seems to still be wrestling with her own relationship to gossip, whether it can be fun or is something to condemn. 'The sense of awe I felt when a car careens around a turn and the land lies out in front of me and it feels divine is almost identical to the physical experience of the gasp that involuntarily escapes my mouth when someone sends me a 12-minute voice memo filled with good information.' She likes when gossip builds community or spreads warnings against predators. She approves of gossip that holds people accountable and keeps power in check. But she gets a little pious when it comes to parasocial relationships. About Taylor Swift and her love life, McKinney writes that the singer does not owe fans personal details. The essays don't dig deep enough into her ambivalence about gossip to come away with any big ideas. Instead she writes, 'In a few years I will have no memory of writing most of this. It will fade from me, even as it stays in print.' No one should aspire to write a book as ephemeral as a rumor.
