The Gossip

Every word you whisper In high school, rumors can make or destroy a reputation. A thoughtless nickname can turn each day into a living hell. Gossip is irresistible—and contagious. But sometimes, gossip can kill . . . Every secret you share Mackenzie Laughlin, formerly with Oregon’s River Glen police department, has reluctantly agreed to investigate a local woman’s disappearance. The case reconnects her with Jesse James Taft, a P.I. gifted at getting under Mac’s skin. But when the body is found tangled in river weeds, Mac and Taft realize that the case has changed, from one missing woman to a hunt for a terrifying and relentless killer . . . Could be your last In his old school yearbooks, they were the pretty, popular ones, confident and callous. Back then, they held the power. But now, it’s all his. He’s been waiting to teach them the lessons they should have learned long ago: that gossip and popularity have a price, and it’s time to pay . . .

"Holy fried onion rings! Fun from beginning to end." —Wendy Mass, New York Times bestselling author of 11 Birthdays and The Candymakers on The Dirt Diary The Gossip File: • Chandra lets little kids pee in the pool. • Melody stole $ from the café register. • Ava isn't who she says she is... Ava is cool. Ava is confident. Ava is really Rachel Lee who is lying her butt off. Rachel is visiting her dad at a resort in sunny Florida and is ready for two weeks of relaxing poolside, trips to Disney World and NOT scrubbing toilets. Until her dad's new girlfriend, Ellie, begs Rachel to help out at her short-staffed café. That's when Rachel kinda sorta adopts a new identity to impress the cool, older girls who work there. Ava is everything Rachel wishes she could be. But when the girls ask "Ava" to help add juicy resort gossip to their file, Rachel's not sure what to do...especially when one of the entries is a secret about Ellie. Praise for award-winning Author Anna Staniszewski's The Dirt Diary series: "Staniszewski keeps the focus on comedy... Gentle fun laced with equally gentle wisdom." Kirkus "Rachel's situation and feelings ring true...This realistic read is likely to appeal to middle schoolers and reluctant readers." -School Library Journal "I LOVED it...sweet, sensitive, and delicious!" —Erin Dionne, author of Models Don't Eat Chocolate Cookies

Gossip is a complex and ubiquitous phenomenon, widely found and variously practiced. Gossip and Organizations provides the reader with an analysis of gossip and informal knowledge across different national, organizational and cultural contexts, drawing upon empirical findings and the author's experiences of researching gossip in nursing and healthcare organizations and higher educational institutions. Kathryn Waddington aims to dispel once and for all the myth that women gossip and men have conversations, shattering the illusion that gossip at work is trivial talk. This book challenges the assumption that gossip is a problem that should be discouraged. While there is undoubtedly a dark side to gossip, Kathryn Waddington argues that paying closer attention to gossip as organizational communication and knowledge enables exploration of other ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding organizations. Gossip is not merely an impediment of organizing, it is a form of organizing which shapes perceptions and actions, and can forewarn managers of future failure in organizational systems. The complexity of gossip is such that a of range inter-disciplinary explanations is necessary in order to account for this form of communication and knowledge across multiple levels and spaces in and around organizations. Waddington provides a new evidence-based framework incorporating ethics, emotion, identity, sensemaking and power as a guide future research, theorizing and critical reflective and reflexive practice in the field of organizational gossip.

Although gossip is disapproved of across the world’s societies, it is a prominent feature of sociality, whose role in the construction of society and culture cannot be overestimated. In particular, gossip is central to the enactment of politics: through it people transform difference into inequality and enact or challenge power structures. Based on the author’s intimate ethnographic knowledge of Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, this work uses an analysis of gossip as political action to develop a holistic understanding of a number of disparate themes, including conflict, power, agency, morality, emotion, locality, belief, and gender. It brings together two methodological traditions—the microscopic analysis of unelicited interaction and the macroscopic interpretation of social practice—that are rarely wedded successfully. Drawing on a broad range of theoretical resources, Niko Besnier approaches gossip from several angles. A detailed analysis of how Nukulaelae’s people structure their gossip interactions demonstrates that this structure reflects and contributes to the atoll’s political ideology, which wavers between a staunch egalitarianism and a need for hierarchy. His discussion then turns to narratives of specific events in which gossip played an important role in either enacting egalitarianism or reinforcing inequality. Embedding gossip in a broad range of communicative practices enables Besnier to develop a nuanced analysis of how gossip operates, demonstrating how it allows some to gain power while others suffer because of it. Throughout, he is particularly attentive to the ways in which anthropologists themselves are the subject and object of gossip, making his work a notable contribution to reflexive social science. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics will appeal to students and scholars of political, legal, linguistic, and psychological anthropology; social science methodology; communication, conflict, gender, and globalization studies; and Pacific Islands studies.

From New York Times bestselling author Nancy Bush, a gripping page-turner that explores the dark side of popularity, when "harmless" high school gossip turns deadly... Every word you whisper In high school, rumors can make or destroy a reputation. A thoughtless nickname can turn each day into a living hell. Gossip is irresistible--and contagious. But sometimes, gossip can kill... Every secret you share Mackenzie Laughlin, formerly with Oregon's River Glen police department, has reluctantly agreed to investigate a local woman's disappearance. The case reconnects her with Jesse James Taft, a P.I. gifted at getting under Mac's skin. But when the body is found tangled in river weeds, Mac and Taft realize that the case has changed, from one missing woman to a hunt for a terrifying and relentless killer... Could be your last In his old school yearbooks, they were the pretty, popular ones, confident and callous. Back then, they held the power. But now, it's all his. He's been waiting to teach them the lessons they should have learned long ago: that gossip and popularity have a price, and it's time to pay...

Priding herself on having the most up-to-date information about everyone at Mount Olympus Academy, gossipy Pheme sends VIP messages that linger in cloud letters above her head, a habit that raises the ire of her fellow goddesses.

Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and markets.. Academic studies have found that gossip and reputation have the power to enforce social norms, facilitate cooperation, and act as a means of social control. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation fills this intellectual gap, providing an integrated understanding of the foundations of gossip and reputation, as well as outlining a potential framework for future research. Volume editors Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek bring together a diverse group of researchers to analyze gossip and reputation from different disciplines, social domains, and levels of analysis. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, organizations, social networks, or schools. International in scope, the volume is organized into seven sections devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Contributions from eminent experts on gossip and reputation not only help us better understand the complex interplay between two delicate social mechanisms, but also sketch the contours of a long term research agenda by pointing to new problems and newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions.

A look at the delights—and dangers—of gossip, from a New York Times–bestselling, “erudite writer, gifted with rare insight and a wry sense of humor” (USA Today). Gossip is no trivial matter. In this enlightening and entertaining study, the author of Snobbery takes a look at a human activity that may be looked down upon, but nevertheless plays a persistent role in our society—and therefore, must be taken seriously. Joseph Epstein, who admits to indulging in this activity himself from time to time, serves up mini-biographies of history’s famous gossips, and makes a powerful case that gossip has morphed from its old-fashioned best—clever, mocking, a great private pleasure—to a corrosive, destructive new version, thanks to the reach of the mass media and the Internet. This is an erudite and witty read from “a master observer of humanity’s foibles” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “Epstein defines categories of gossip, from personal to celebrity, workplace, and political, and discusses how gossip ‘enforces a community’s norms’ or, conversely, helps foster tolerance. . . . In his briskly erudite, zestfully original, and provokingly enjoyable anatomy of gossip, Epstein revels in the risky collusion of gossip within shared worlds and resoundingly condemns media-disseminated gossip that diminishes our ability to ascertain or value the truth.” —Booklist

Explores the nature, morality, and aesthetics of gossip; examines gossip in history and the psychology of gossip; and analyzes gossip--as subject and literary technique--in plays, letters, biographies, and novels.