I’m just getting around to reading this piece by Sandra Tsing Loh from The Atlantic’s March issue, and it’s pretty great. Its jumping-off point is Paul Fussell‘s wonderful 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. (It’s hard for me to recommend Fussell generally and Class specifically highly enough — both brilliant.)

Go read it yourself, and think about it through the lens of journalism. Its basic arguments — that the traditional status anxieties of the middle class are now being visited upon the so-called “creative class” — are interesting in the context of once-comfortable journalists suddenly seeing their paychecks challenged (by collapsing business models) along with their position in society (by bloggers and the like).