Wendy Vogel traces the history of the term “gossip,” reflecting on how its origins have shaped the collective understanding of whisper networks and #MeToo.

Drawing on breathless vernacular speech, richly painted images that seem to bloom and blow away as quickly as dandelion floss, and the rhythms and idioms of hip hop, Joseph Earl Thomas’s poem explores what it means to think and speak about other people in a few of the many languages of Black masculinity.

Zachary Tavlin explores gossip’s utopian and dystopian possibilities through the story of Barbara Payton, notoriously hounded by mid-century gossip columnists, Hopper and Louella Parsons among them. Gossip is, in his account of Payton’s misadventures, an equivocal way of building social cohesion, for good and ill.