Word: gossipeer
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...Diana had snob appeal to burn. But that alone would not have secured her popularity. Most of the people who worshipped her, who read every tidbit about her in the gossip press and hung up pictures of her in their rooms, were not social snobs. Like Princess Grace of Monaco, Diana was a celebrity royal. She was a movie star who never actually appeared in a movie; in a sense her whole life was a movie, a serial melodrama acted out in public, with every twist and turn of the plot reported to a world audience. Diana was astute enough...
However, like many celebrities before her, she found out that she couldn't turn the media on and off at will, as though they were a tap. They needed her to feed the public appetite for celebrity gossip, and she needed them for her public performance, but what she hadn't bargained for was that her melodrama ran on without breaks. Everything she said or did was fair copy. After deliberately making her private life public, she soon discovered there was nothing private left...
...most important thing to keep in mind with observational studies like this is that they are the scientific equivalent of gossip. Subjects A and B show up together, which may be significant but is more likely to be an innocent coincidence. In this study, for example, the investigators didn't take into account whether the parents were nearsighted. That could explain a lot right there, since at least some aspects of myopia are inherited. Or perhaps nearsighted parents, are, for whatever reason, more likely to leave the lights on at night...
...open, all the needles and threats, but in a school of nearly 2,000 busy, ambitious kids, that quiet hissing sound was just background noise, drowned out by the gossip about who went to the prom with whom on Saturday night; the humming of the seniors' theme song, The Way You Look Tonight; and finally the normal sounds of a Tuesday morning, when the biology class was worrying about its test on the digestive system, the choir was rehearsing for its afternoon concert and it was warm enough outside to wear shorts, at last...
...inevitably pass through London in the mid-'60s and Manhattan in the '70s, already over-storied places and times about which Rai (and Rushdie) can find little new or interesting to add. When fictionalized versions of Rudolf Nureyev and Andy Warhol start popping up, an inspired fiction dwindles toward gossip...