You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

by Kelsey McKinney

But that is the truth about gossip: We want to separate ourselves from it at the same time we want to drown in it. We want the truth, all of it, not told slant, until suddenly we don’t.

What is essential, then, to weaving a good story of any kind (gossip or not) is to have an identity and a point of view from which to tell that story.

Social Identity Theory, which argued that people derive belonging, purpose, self-worth, and identity from the social groups they belong to.

“To some extent, the teenage market—and, in fact, the very notion of the teenager—has been created by the businessmen who exploit it,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in the New Yorker in 1958.

When we talk about sex and money, what we are actually talking about is power and who wields it.

It is hard to remember, as a fan, that you do not know the object of your affection at all, that anything you think that person feels is only your own feeling reflected back at you.

the last twenty years of American politics have taught us anything, it’s that it is more important to many people that something feel true to their personal experience than it is that it be factual.

“There are no facts, only interpretations,” Friedrich Nietzsche once said.

the greatest purpose of gossip is helping us understand our own perspective.