Help, I’m unwell. To self-diagnose, I’d say the issue is a pronounced lack of low-stakes gossip, the kind you get from what sociologists call “weak ties” and what regular people call acquaintances. It’s the kind of gossip that exists somewhere between completely banal to absolutely wild, and it’s shared at parties, dinners, drinks, etc., when one is trying to keep it light but also entertaining. These are stories told by friends of friends about people you don’t know. I’m weak-tie-gossip anemic right now, living as we are in the third year of the pandemic and with a much smaller life than before. Without seeing casual friends on a regular basis, how will I know what kind of strange, messed-up, or otherwise interesting stuff their friends are up to? For this reason, and because it’s fun, I take a supplement. Or a couple different supplements.
Normal Gossip, a month-old podcast, is one of two shows that debuted this year at Defector, the media company comprised of former Deadspin employees who now own and operate the business. Kelsey McKinney, its host, unwittingly named her future podcast in a tweet some time last year (it’s been automatically deleted since, but I saw it at the time and knew suddenly the exact contours of the hole in my life). In her words, McKinney’s tweet went approximately like, “Someone should simply give me a podcast called Normal Gossip where I talk about gossip that everyone has.”
Justin Ellis, Defector’s projects editor, said, “When Kelsey tweeted that, you know, there were a lot of us on staff that were like, ‘Hey, we love you, dummy. This is a good idea.’”
“There are just dozens upon hundreds upon thousands of chat shows, and there are a lot of shows that focus on stories,” Ellis continued. “I think the thing about [Normal Gossip] is it helps make it that much more real while also making it low-stakes. We’re not out here trying to solve a decades-long cold case murder. We’re not giving you the background on some of Hollywood’s biggest movie moguls during the studio era. We’re not talking politics.”
McKinney’s gossip—which listeners submit over email and voicemail, and she anonymizes with the help of her producer, Alex Sujong Laughlin, and then tells to a revolving series of guests (including, in an unplanned bit of timing this week, one of my colleagues) over the course of a 45-minute episode—is more simple. She summarizes it thusly: “It’s not celebrity, it’s not bad, and it doesn’t require action. It’s just fun.” These are stories that have unfolded over months in your life, stories that you’ve told so many times that by the time you call into the show’s hotline, you have all the beats down, and know the reactions each twist is going to elicit (and, McKinney adds, “You’ve already switched half the details just because you’ve amped it up”).
There is sorority-group-chat drama and DIY-craft-group drama and landlord drama and new-boyfriend drama. More than one of the stories involve enormous quantities of Amazon packages. It’s the stuff of everyday lives, but arranged suspensefully, it makes one’s heart go pitter-patter. “The most interesting thing about recording this show is that people have come on who aren’t my friends,” says McKinney. “In the beginning it’s a little stilted in the way that interviews are stilted…. But the minute you start gossiping, it’s like a switch flips. People become the person that they are in a bar. Even though we’re recording, even though I’m looking at you on Skype and we’re gonna play this back, you can’t help it.”
McKinney, Laughlin, and Ellis each told me they recognize the power of other kinds of gossip, like actionable gossip—which is the type where, for example, everyone at work is sharing salaries and then, girded with shared knowledge, the office is empowered to take collective action. This show isn’t that.
McKinney admits she’s usually a fan of celebrity news, but this show isn’t that either.
“[Celebrity] gossip is completely unrelatable to me,” she said. “Dating Pete Davidson is not relevant to my life. Especially during the pandemic where people who are as rich as celebrities are jetting around and they still have their real lives. It’s completely out of reach for me. What is in reach for me is someone whose boss at the Gap is terrible.” (Technically someone’s terrible boss at the Gap could be Kanye West right now, but the point here is taken.)
The stories of celebrities that are taking up space right now have an almost homey quality to them. Julia Fox has captured so much attention in part because she’s something of a hometown hero in provincial New York. Friends of friends have her phone number. Friends of friends just missed her at the bar. When she started dating West, one of the most famous men in the world, it seemed like she was taking a certain downtown circle in the city with her.
It could be argued too, (though I won’t put my back into arguing it for my sake and yours) that the recent “West Elm Caleb” story fascinated at first because of its small-world implications. Here was a regular guy doing all too regular things to several very similar women, who (perhaps) extraordinarily found one another thanks to TikTok. It got twisted from there, but initially, this was normal gossip at work.
But West Elm Caleb isn’t actually famous, and Fox is the exception rather than the rule. Most celebrities are, unfortunately, very boring. “I am kind of a sucker for the Daily Mail,” McKinney said. “It’s the poison that I inject every morning. But for me, part of the reason I have become less interested in what celebrities are doing is that they have become very calculated in general. And so everyone from yoga influencers to Angelina Jolie are innately aware of how their behavior is coming off, and they’re moderating it. So there really is just less to gossip about, I think, in general. They’re better at protecting it.”
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