To be human is to talk about other humans. We all gossip, and those who don’t are either lying or dead. “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. Gossip entertains, and it also sustains.”

 

To be human is to talk about other humans. We all gossip, and those who don’t are either lying or dead. “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. Gossip entertains, and it also sustains.”
Gossip is amusing, even salacious. The journalist and podcast host Kelsey McKinney wants to show that it is serious, too. In a new book, she argues that gossip is a fundamentally human behavior, and that it ultimately serves us well. In the service of truthtelling, the practice can act as a check on power, and as a source of solidarity and irreverence for those who lack it; it brings us together and makes us curious about other people. “But what of the gossiped-about? They can’t all be tyrants, criminals, and creeps,” Schwartz notes. “If gossip can subvert norms, it can also enforce them; remember high school?” Schwartz considers what gossip does for us.

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