From the Publisher: Mar 5 1990

Admit it. No matter how interested you are in serious news, every so often you glance at a gossip column, scanning its staccato list of items and bold- faced names to see if there is anything of interest . . . Yet, is American society becoming too obsessed with gossip, too absorbed with the private lives of public people? . . . For Naushad Mehta, interviewing columnist Liz Smith and her brethren for this week's cover stories was an amusing change of pace . . . Though Mehta kept asking about the troublesome issues raised by our national infatuation with the...