A letter from the editors (but shh, you didn't hear it from us)

Hedda Hopper used gossip to further a racist and nativist political agenda—a form expanded in the recent rise of right-wing media. Historian Jennifer Frost reconsiders her work on Hedda Hopper in light of Hopper's ideological heir, Donald Trump.

Writing in the voice of a chronicler of shades of old Hollywood (who sounds suspiciously like Hedda Hopper), Daniel Lavery resurrects old phantoms so that the gossip of yesterday overlays the gossip of today like an uncanny wavering in the hot air above a sidewalk in Los Angeles.

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.

Rachel Feder weaves together the sublime and the ordinary, the popular and the abstruse, the Romantic and the anti-Romantic. Really, how are celestial bodies and celebrities alike?

Catherine Weingarten helps you pinpoint your style of gossip.