Gossip, Then and Now

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gossip, an essential human pastime, is full of contradictions. It has the potential to be as destructive to its subjects as it is titillating to its practitioners; it can protect against very real threats, as in the case of certain pre-#MeToo whisper networks, or tip over into the realm of conspiracy. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider the role gossip has played in society over the centuries. They discuss Kelsey McKinney’s new book on the topic, “You Didn’t Hear This from Me,” which Schwartz recently reviewed in The New Yorker, and consider instructive cultural examples—from the Old Testament to “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” Today, many celebrities have embraced being talked about as a badge of honor, even as new technologies allow questionable assertions about anyone—famous or otherwise—to spread more freely and quickly than ever before. “Just being in public makes you potentially fodder for gossip,” Schwartz says. “I do worry about a world in which privacy is compromised for everybody.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,” by Kelsey McKinney
“Is Gossip Good for Us?,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“A Lover’s Discourse,” by Roland Barthes
“Grease” (1978)
“The House of Mirth,” by Edith Wharton
“The Custom of the Country,” by Edith Wharton
“Moses, Man of the Mountain,” by Zora Neale Hurston
“Emma,” by Jane Austen
“Gossip Girl” (2007-12)
“The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” (2010—)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's what I want to know.
0:01.8	Men absolutely gossip.
0:03.6	We know I want listeners to understand this.
0:06.2	Not for me.
0:07.0	I'm not the authority.
0:08.3	Scientists, my friends, scientists have now shown it.
0:11.6	Here's the male gossip I want to know and I want to understand.
0:15.0	What is going on between Stephen A. Smith and LeBron James?
0:20.3	Well, it depends on who you believe, but they've always had an under, I love this.
0:27.3	Stephen A. Smith, a great sports broadcaster, and LeBron James had an altercation at the
0:33.0	Lakers game a couple weeks ago. LeBron James comes up to Stephen A. Smith, and you could see him saying,
0:39.1	like, leave my son out of this shit. And he is referring to Stephen A. Smith's denigration of the
0:46.1	basketball skills of LeBron Jibbs' son, who's now in the NBA, LeBron Jibbvre, aka Brani.
0:51.6	It's Brani. It's Brony. But the gossip behind it is either you could do it two ways. Stephen A. says, I'm the only person that doesn't kiss the ring. I refuse to say that he's better than Michael Jordan. And this is why he doesn't like me. LeBron's camp, the people that are like sort of in with LeBron, say it's as simple as LeBron has never wanted to speak with Stephen A or like show up officially on his show that there is a rift there. But it does it it crucially does this intrigue which has been going on for weeks now. Stephen A is on a press tour about it. He talks about it nonstop. And then LeBron James went on another show to talk
1:29.1	about it, address things. It has become a florid drama with hopefully many more passages to come.
1:36.4	I could not, I'm like a pig in shit with Stephen A. and LeBron.
1:40.1	Thank you for explaining it. I needed to know.
1:41.9	There you go.
1:46.4	Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from the New York it. I needed to know. There you go. Welcome to critics at large.
1:58.4	A podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Nomi Fry. And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How's everyone doing?
2:01.8	It's a weird overcast Monday in New York at least.
2:06.5	Sweety. Sweaty. Sweat is back. Yeah, we're in the shoulder. We're in the shoulder when summer's about to hit and winter has just ended and spring has shrunk. So sweat is back.
	...

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