It can elicit a rush – a cheap thrill among friends, family or co-workers. It’s a friend pausing in conversation and asking, “Can I just say something, cone of silence?” The implication is clear: a good gossip session is imminent. Our current cultural moment is, in many ways, defined by our obsession with gossip. It feeds an entire tabloid industry and created the celebrity industrial complex, where news is made by Instagram accounts that traffic almost exclusively in hearsay and popular podcasts such as Normal Gossip take banal, specific pieces of gossip from their listeners and dissect it for a global audience. An innate part of social life, gossiping has been found to have numerous health benefits – if shared wisely. Getty Images “Our fascination with gossip comes from it being a central part of human social life,” explains Dr Marlee Bower.…