Insight into sadness …

… Where Tom Wolfe got his status obsession - Nieman Storyboard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Today, no less than in Wolfe’s grad-school days, the lure of what Weber termed “status honor” is all around us. If anything, the age of the Internet has opened up frontiers of status competition undreamed-of half a century ago. Thanks to social media, people edit — sorry, “curate” — versions of their lives to friends and strangers and compete for a dopamine-releasing tally of “likes.” And did Victorian England have anything on modern social media in its capacity for enforcing social conformism through shaming