Did you hear about …

… Gossip divine by John Simon | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 … gossip is not a clearly apprehensible phenomenon like, say, politics or publishing, but rather inchoate and largely deemed trivial, and therefore under-documented. To get a whole book out of it, one needs a flexible definition. For Epstein, as for Edward Eggleston (but attributed by Epstein to Oscar Wilde), “journalism is organized gossip,” and Epstein duly treats it as food for his book.