Opinion Today: Could you give up gossip for (your own) good?

A writer examined gossip abstainers and then tried abstaining herself.

View in browser|nytimes.com August 26, 2024 By Vanessa Mobley Ms. Mobley is a senior editor in Opinion. Chisme. Cackle. Whatever term you use to describe it, gossip is a source of information and, with that, power that can be hard to resist. In an age of data brokers and surveillance, it is also one of the most democratic forms of information. Anyone can gossip. And most of us do. The Times editor and writer Michal Leibowitz, as she explains in a guest essay published today, has long thought about the meaning and practice of gossip, so she decided to seek out abstainers — those who had given it up — as a kind of control group through which she could investigate how loose talk functions and why it is so hard to avoid. And then at some point, Leibowitz decided that she would try giving it up herself. The results were remarkable and hard to read about without inspiring envy: "I recently moved to a new Jewish community and found that by cutting back on gossip, I'm able to dodge a lot of the politics that naturally arise when a group of people engages in a shared project," she writes. "It turns out that when you don't take sides, fewer people come to you asking you to take sides." Giving up gossip, Leibowitz explains, can involve more than just examining the conversations you have with friends and family members. Giving up gossip is a kind of social experiment in building a better society one conversation at a time. Read the essay: Eva Stenram Guest Essay Gossiping Is Fun. It's Natural. And These People Won't Do It. Gossip is a universal feature of human culture. It's also the target of passionate, widespread censure. 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