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.

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.

Open call for submissions for Summer 2021