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.”

Let’s consider here the dual stories of Jennifer Lopez that landed on the same day last week—one a People cover story and one a New York Times mid-career profile, both promoting her rom-com out this month, Marry Me. In the latter piece, which was nuanced yet glowing, the author, Nicole Sperling, takes a moment to consider the optics when Lopez’s boyfriend, Ben Affleck, comes into the room where they’re having the interview, and then the couple excuse themselves for a moment to talk, and then come back into the room, whereupon Affleck gives Lopez a kiss and calls her “my love” before leaving.

“It was a peculiar moment,” Sperling writes. “Was it planned? Spontaneous? My requests to speak to Affleck had been denied, yet here he was, the dutiful boyfriend sharing words of encouragement in front of the press.”

That sort of knee-jerk, lightly conspiratorial musing is something that ripples through many pop culture stories, not just Lopez’s. Thanks to what seems like perfect control over their social media, teams of publicists and other employees, and an industry-wide rejection of spontaneous interaction with the press, the last 20 years in celebrity largely have been about protecting one’s image at the expense of frankness. And when the celebrity gossip is actually juicy, it can feel horrible to consume—like when a certain couple litigates their custody disagreements publicly or Britney Spears works out her legitimate frustrations with her family on Instagram. Even favorite blind-item sites, like Crazy Days and Nights, have in recent years begun to read like QAnon message boards at times, what with all the alleged pedophilia rings. If you want to follow stories of human beings acting weird and human, but not feel absolutely miserable about it, you’re better off looking closer to home.

But sometimes your usual sources—family, your best friends, the ones you talk to every day, your work colleagues—aren’t providing as they used to. The proverbial water cooler has been slow to return. The networks for this stuff aren’t as strong as they were, say, during summer 2019. And it’s why we rely on people like Laci Mosley, A Black Lady Sketch Show and iCarly actor who also hosts her podcast, Scam Goddess, to tell us what’s going on in the lives of others (she was a recent guest on Normal Gossip as well).

When Mosley was first shopping around a podcast, she even pitched one focused on celebrity stories and kept hearing the market was saturated. Scams were celebrity-adjacent, but an area that hadn’t been exploited for entertainment as much. She calls Scam Goddess her own scam because it’s a Trojan horse for her improv. Her jokes are hidden in the irresistible stories about people who are getting one over on The Rules. It’s working. She just won an iHeartRadio Podcast Award in the crime category, which she thinks is hilarious. “[The podcast] is still such a huge scam to me ’cause I’m not Sarah Koenig,” she said. “I’m just over here making jokes with my comedian friends.”

She begins each episode with a short segment called “What’s Hot in Fraud,” where listeners submit their own scams or frauds. They can be perfectly strange and specific. Like in one episode someone wrote in about a Burger King in Pittsburgh that kept serving food as a Burger King after it lost its franchising license. Mosley, who went to college in Pittsburgh had actually been without realizing it.

“Friends from college hit me up after that episode and were like, ‘You know, we’ve been to that Burger King,’” Mosley said. “I mean, we were drunk, so we didn’t think anything of it. [The restaurant was] like, ‘No, we still gonna be Burger King. We can’t say, “Have it your way” anymore, but we’ll say, “Have whatever you like.”’”

Like that actionable gossip McKinney and Laughlin mentioned above, you can learn a lot about what not to do from Mosley’s podcast. But mostly, altogether, you get a sense of how normal it is for regular people to feel fed up and try to get theirs, how with a bit of confidence you too could be defrauding some big, evil corporations. And if you yourself don’t have the guts, you can marvel at the bravery (or audacity) of some people. At the very least, you can live vicariously through them.

Mosley’s name-check of Sarah Koenig as a podcast-host foil gets at where we are in the form too. The host is using the stories of strangers as fodder for her jokes, and in her capable hands the sometimes-heavy stories do feel light. But they’re still the lives of non-public personas. Ditto McKinney and team, though they work hard to anonymize the stories and pick tales that don’t feel gross to listen to, that aren’t about lives ruined, just lives altered.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing—again, I demand to read and listen to these stories, and if you take them away from me I’ll get cranky. It’s just that the great yawping maw of the internet feeds on content, and it will, left to its own devices, eat up stories anywhere it can get them. If at one time a podcast, like the first inescapable season of Koenig’s Serial, mattered because its subject may have been wrongfully imprisoned and the whole enterprise had the promotional backing of one Ira Glass, now it’s anyone’s game. A short seven years later, anyone’s story, when given the narrative podcast treatment, is worthy of an hour of your listening time.

In fact these personal stories are compelling because they don’t matter in a real way to anyone except who they’re happening to. Perhaps my favorite example of the form is a newsletter called Famous People. The Atlantic picked it up from Substack last month along with a slate of other newsletters, after its staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany and creative strategist at Vox Media Lizzie Plaugic had been writing it for more than four years already. The newsletter asks, What if they wrote up party reports where the main characters were just their friends and themselves? It’s written in a way where no one needs introductions because this is the place where everyone knows your name.

“We did have a celebrity blog for truly two months, and I think we just found it really boring,” Tiffany said, recalling how Famous People came to be. “It was just hard to come up with something funny to write about that other people hadn’t already written. Part of the fun of writing about regular people as if they’re celebrities is that you get to skip all the exposition.”

Adds Plaugic, “We also were just kind of into this idea of party reporting, except we never really went to the sorts of places you’d write about. It was never someone in the art world who seemed kind of mysterious. It was always just us.”

Their parties are regular too. They’ve gone to Atlantic City, upstate New York, Ocean Grove, old apartments, new apartments, friends’ apartments, and strangers’ apartments. (They did, in the early days, crash an N+1 party at the Ace Hotel, and during the pandemic, they recapped episodes of Bravo’s Summer House even though the show wasn’t new, because they really love Summer House.)

“I feel like when you read it, it’s just like overhearing friends. Nobody’s straining to have some big takeaway, which is something that’s really hard,” Tiffany said. “Half the time, I’m just like staring at my computer being like, What if someone just wrote something funny and dumb for me to look at?”

Sometimes, though, when you treat people like famous people, they react like famous people might. One time Plaugic got in trouble with a friend of a friend for saying she had “a lot of queso in her trunk” (even though “she did”). And another time, when Tiffany spelled some guy’s dog’s name wrong (she spelled it Gwyn, but for the record, it’s spelled Gwen), she heard from him too. “I don’t remember his deal but I remember him saying there were ‘a lot of inaccuracies,’” Tiffany told me in a follow-up email. “These are not fact-checked!”

Gossip, the low-stakes kind, is not fact-checked. Sometimes it’s a little inflated, a little exaggerated. Sometimes it’s merely fodder for some jokes. But that’s okay, because gossip isn’t news. The glory of good, non-life-ruining, basically anonymous gossip is ultimately that it doesn’t matter, which right now, when everything matters so much, is such a relief. In these stories, who is canceling whom doesn’t matter. A celebrity’s apparent downward spiral doesn’t matter. Whether or not a detail from the story line is absolutely true is not even totally pertinent because there’s no big conclusion to be made, no big lesson intended to be learned. Low-stakes gossip is simply the stuff that fills out in our lives, the connective tissue that attaches us to one another at the bar. And it feels good to have it in reserve again.

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