Isaac Chotiner reviews Joseph Epstein's new book, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit:
Gossip tends to be discussed as a pastime for adults, but it is children who actually bear its heaviest burden. I spent almost a decade working in a neighborhood pharmacy in Berkeley, where old men would wander in to pick up Viagra prescriptions and teenagers would circle the condom section before sheepishly bringing their selection to the counter. It was all so obvious that I hardly noticed: The elderly viewed their erectile dysfunction as nothing more than life’s course, and could not have cared less if someone saw them. The teenagers looked pained to buy birth control, even from someone who was their own age. The older you are, the less you care what other people think.
Gossip has the power it does because we are all wary of having too much of ourselves revealed. This is probably why those moments from childhood—the secret that a classmate uttered, the detail from your home life that made it to school—can still register years later. If age has not been good to the practice of gossip, as Epstein argues, aging is the only remedy for overcoming the pain of being gossiped about.
The Dish 