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USA Today
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Be the smartest person at the dinner party: Niche nonfiction books to read
Want to be the most interesting guest at a dinner party? Be the most well-read. There are many earnest, unpretentious reasons to be a regular reader, from stepping into someone else's shoes to escaping from the stress of day-to-day life. But admit it, there's a little part of you that also wants that scholarly reputation. Why not capture the attention of your peers with a riveting celebrity backstory or share a fun fact from a new wellness book? Lately, I've been talking up Sophie Elmhirst's 'A Marriage at Sea' to anyone who will listen, wowing them with the survival story of a shipwrecked couple who spent 118 days at sea. Whether you're looking to impress your friends or want to further your quest for knowledge, here are 10 niche nonfiction books that will keep you engaged as you get smarter. 'Waste Wars' by Alexander Clapp Learn the sinister afterlife of your trash in this investigation of the global garbage trade. Clapp spent two years reporting across five continents to uncover the 'secret hot potato second life' of trash and its devastating consequences for poor nations. You won't look at your trash the same once you know about the shipping, selling and smuggling behind the scenes. 'Everything is Tuberculosis' by John Green You're about to learn more about tuberculosis than you ever thought possible. In his latest nonfiction venture, Green makes the compelling case that much of human history is shaped by this deadly disease, from poetry to poverty and colonialism. With a narrative drive through charismatic tuberculosis patient Henry, 'Everything is Tuberculosis' is a fascinating deep dive. 'You Didn't Hear This From Me' by Kelsey McKinney Gossip is far more defined in cultural tradition and currency than you realize. 'You Didn't Hear This From Me,' from the host of the 'Normal Gossip' podcast, explores our obsession with gossip and its role as lighthearted banter to social capital and what happens when it gets weaponized. 'How to Kill a City' by P.E. Moskowitz Readers who live in major cities are guaranteed to look at their metropolis differently after reading Moskowitz's expertly crafted 'How to Kill a City.' Not only will you learn about the history behind major changes in cities like New York, New Orleans, Detroit and San Francisco, but you'll also learn about who the bad actors are in city-wide gentrification and the systemic forces allowing it to happen. 'What is Queer Food?' by John Birdsall This 2025 release from culinary writer Birdsall intertwines queer identity and food culture, showing how the LGBTQ+ community has often used food as a tool for joy and community in the face of persecution. 'What is Queer Food?' follows the early days of LGBTQ+ civil rights movements to Cold War-era lesbian potlucks to the appetites of icons like James Baldwin and Truman Capote. 'Say Nothing' by Patrick Radden Keefe Now a Hulu series, Keefe maps the consequences and trials of The Troubles in Ireland through the murder and abduction of Jean McConville. 'Say Nothing' chronicles the conflict with empathy, impact and narrative flair, from Irish Republican Army member Dolours Price to peace negotiator Gerry Adams to the McConville children. 'Why We Swim' by Bonnie Tsui This book is for anyone who's a regular at their local gym pool, played mermaids as a kid is ocean-obsessed. In "Why We Swim," Tsui investigates the human behavior behind the popular sport, from pleasure laps to exercise to swimming in dangerous terrain to test our limits. 'Before We Were Trans' by Kit Heyam A historical analysis of the past, present and future of trans identities, historian Heyam paints both a narrative and educational look at the complex realities of gender expression and identity. From Renaissance Venice to Edo Japan to early America, 'Before We Were Trans' teaches eager readers about people defying gender binaries throughout history. 'The Chiffon Trenches' by André Leon Talley If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in the cutthroat world of editorial fashion, "The Chiffon Trenches" is for you. This memoir from the former "Vogue" creative director will give you an intimate glimpse into fashion figureheads like Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld and Oscar de la Renta while also illuminating the industry's pervasive racism. 'The Soul of an Octopus' by Sy Montgomery I can't even count how many friends and family members I know who have read this and felt fundamentally changed. 'The Soul of an Octopus' is a 2015 deep-dive (literally) as naturalist Montgomery befriends octopuses, learning their unique personalities and cleverness. Along for the ride, you'll learn about how these intelligent creatures problem-solve and connect. Need a book that feels like a hug?: 8 comfort reads for when life gets hard Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
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.
The Guardian
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's how we make sense of the world': why are we all obsessed with gossip?
'We gossip and tell stories because that is how we make sense of the world,' Kelsey McKinney writes in her new book, You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip. Growing up in an evangelical community in Texas, McKinney was taught that gossip was a sin and spent years praying that God would take away her desire for it. She wanted to stop, but each time she heard a piece of gossip, she felt a deep desire to retell it. '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,' she writes in her book, out in the US this week. Eventually, McKinney came to understand and appreciate gossip for its more honorable qualities – as a source of information gathering, and a means of holding people to account for their actions. She left the church and found journalism, a profession based on asking questions and sharing stories. McKinney had no experience with podcasts when she came up with the idea for Normal Gossip, but 'I knew in my gut that it would be very popular,' she told the Cut in 2023. During the pandemic she was missing 'hearing stories from my friends about their friends' and she had a feeling that others were, too. Normal Gossip debuted in early 2022 and became a hit. The premise was simple: people submitted their stories about 'friends of friends' and on each episode, McKinney would anonymize the story and tell it to a guest. You Didn't Hear This From Me functions as a sort of thesis to conclude her gossip research (McKinney announced in December that she was stepping away as host of Normal Gossip). In a collection of essays that are simultaneously well-researched, intimate to McKinney's own life and are entertaining to read, she examines the role of gossip in everything from middle school to Mean Girls to Picasso, and concludes that 'perhaps the greatest purpose of gossip is helping us understand our own perspective'. Your book recognizes the beauty of gossip, and the fun of it, but it also delves much deeper than that. If there's one thing that people come away with after reading, what do you hope that will be? I think in writing the book, I realized that I want people to come away with, first off, an understanding that gossip is a much broader and more complicated topic than we allude to. It's not just two people talking about a celebrity or two people talking about a crush. It's a lot more complicated than that. And the second thing is that I want people to think about gossip more critically and the way that we use it and which parts matter to us. You write about sexual assault, both your own experiences with it and how 'the legal system is failing victims … We cannot trust it to save us, so it is tempting to believe that we can save ourselves'. Gossip in this case is a form of protection – 'it can teach us whom to trust'. At it's base definition, gossip is two people talking about someone who isn't there. So that can be you and me talking about Taylor Swift. It could be two doctors conferring over an X-ray. It can be all sorts of stuff. And one of the ways that we know that people use gossip is to protect themselves from power that is being abused. Sexual assault is a great example of this. But it's also true within a workplace. Lower level employees talking about a boss who misbehaves is a way to protect yourself against a powerthey don't have. There is power in numbers. It's what unions are made of. And gossip can be a way to create solidarity among people. And so that can be workers. It can be people who are scared of being assaulted in any form. You write about your own experiences with gossip and religion, and how gossip was intertwined with breaking your faith. What advice would you have for a young person experiencing that now? It's so hard to be a teen. And part of what's really hard about it is reckoning with the things that you've been told are true your whole life, and what you are actually seeing in the world around you, and that is so hard. I mean, for me, a huge breaking point was gossip. It was understanding that the things I had been taught about gossip were not the things I believed them to be actually, in my experience of the world. And that kind of broke open a lot of different problems for me to try and investigate. I think that is just part of growing up. It's hard to grow up and it's hard to realize that maybe you weren't told things that were true as much as you were told things to keep you in line. You've said in a past interview that on the podcast you tried to anonymize stories perfectly so that many people would think it's about them – 'people think it's their story because it's so good and so true'. How did you decide which things needed to change? We changed locations, we changed names, we changed anything that we thought could trace it back, because the goal of the podcast was not to hurt people. The goal was to entertain. Do you feel, after making this podcast and writing this book, that your understanding of gossip has reached its fullest point? Or do you think it will keep evolving? I think maybe when I finished the last draft of the book, I thought I knew it all. I thought I had taken this to the extent that it could be taken to, but there's always something new. Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively could have done me a real favor by doing this drama before I wrote the book. That would have been really great for me. But it is a reminder that there's always something to talk about. There's always an angle in to these stories that isn't what you think it is. May I share some gossip with you? Oh my god, yes. Tell me. What do you have? It breaks the rule of 'gossip is always about a friend of a friend', because it's about me. And I was thinking about how to write it down and retell it. It seems like a challenge to read a script and still keep it fun and conversational. How did you go about doing that? I wrote all the scripts for my episodes, which helps. Because it's in my voice. It's also part of why I was very tired. There are a couple of things – the first is, a gossip story gets better the more you tell it, always. So, I would tell it. I would talk to people at the bar, I would talk to my friends, I would tell it to myself, and it would evolve. The jokes would hit better. I would figure out which details were important and which ones weren't. And then I could go back and look at what the original story had said, and I would see how much it had changed, not intentionally, right? And that gives you a lot of insight. Well, here's my story. I went to drama camp in middle school in the 90s. And it was really exciting, because the drama camp had kids from all different middle schools there. So it felt like a whole new world of people. And I had a crush on a boy who was there, who I'll call Pete. One day, I was devastated to find out that Pete was dating another girl at the camp named Jessica. It was a tragedy. I was talking to Pete's friend about it, and he informed me that a group of kids were hanging out in the cafeteria, and someone asked Pete who he had a crush on, and that he was about to say my name, but then I walked into the room, so he said Jessica instead. And then apparently he had to date her. God, being in middle school is so bad. Yeah, there are rules, I guess. So that was very sad. And then, the summer ended, and life went on. And many years later, I was at home visiting my parents, and I went to the mall, and I saw Pete and Jessica – still together. This was probably like 15 years later. What?! And I looked them up on Facebook and confirmed it was true. And actually, before I did this interview, I looked them up again, and they're still together. They have three kids. Wow. Yeah, that's good self gossip. I wonder how they remember it. Memory is such a funny thing. Like, who knows? Who knows if he remembers saying that? Yeah, I wonder if they even remember who I am, or that that story exists at all. Because it's important to you, right? But in the narrative that they tell about their relationship, it probably doesn't exist. It would make it less romantic. Much less romantic! And the friend never made a move on you? Because that's another thing – if you lie about that, that grants you intimacy that you could then make a move on. Yeah! [Note: this was the first time it ever dawned on me that the whole naming story could have been completely fabricated by Pete's friend. A shocking revelation.] I'm sorry that happened to you. But also, you could have three kids. You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip is out now
