For the love of gossip

Oscar Wilde, in one of many witty demonstrations of brilliance, writes in The Picture of Dorian Gray, "It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true." Laura Moser on the amusement we derive from gossip:

[G]ossip is fun, one of the most profound and satisfying pleasures we humans are given. If Eleanor Roosevelt was right that “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people,” then count me among the 99 percent. I don’t even care if I’m unacquainted with the parties being dissected; if anything, total strangers make a purer sport of the conversation. I experience a similar frisson reading a Dear Prudence column as learning that my childhood dentist was once arrested as a Peeping Tom (fact!).

The whole thing is worth reading even simply for the last line, which I think you'll find rather memorable.