I had the singular pleasure of visiting with a bunch of my high school friends the other week, and one of them put me on to a podcast I had not heard about before Normal Gossip.
She said it was something she thought I would like because, well, a thing about me is that I am interested in gossip — and I mean this in several ways. Firstly, I mean I am interested in gossip as an academic concept. I like thinking about the way gossip is discussed in medieval sources. Secondly, I also like to think about how gossip is conceptualised by anthropologists, which is to say, I enjoy thinking about what it is that gossip does socially.
Because it does a lot. Thirdly, I mean, look, I am a social historian. My job is to gossip about dead people. I sit around and read what they have written, or what was written about them. I rifle through records of their house contents to try to picture how they were living their lives. And I think about who is talking about them in order to try to put together an idea of what they were like — and then I tell people all about it. You have some? Great, I want it. Even better. To me, every bit of anonymous gossip is my own private soap opera, and I simply love to hear it.
This month my comrades at ALE and I are working on the theme of cooperation, and I thought a useful thing to think about in that context is not my usual favs of rebellion , or even collective republics , but architecture. In particular, I want to talk about what you could argue are the most important medieval buildings — cathedrals. However, we often talk about them as finished projects rather than as a testament to how humans cooperate with each other across time.
So over the course of the course of the last week OnlyFans decided that they were going to suddenly ban adult content from their site. This may be seen as an inexplicable decision given that this is, actually, the thing that they make all of their money from. It is especially odd, given that a majority share of the company was bought in by Leonid Radvinsky , who has for over twenty years been working expressly in the porn industry.
