This Is How You Turn Hipster

Step one: grow a beard. Step two: move to Brooklyn. The New York Time enlightens us, once again, on how to become a hipster. Middle-aged Manhattanite writer Henry Alford spends a few days in Williamsburg, living among “the rooftop gardeners and the sustainability consultants and the chickeneers.” Some of his discoveries: the hip argyle wool socks he considers buying aren’t local; Bedford Avenue is a “veritable ocean of beard”; you still have to wait an hour for a restaurant that aesthetically aspires to “gulag in da hood.” But don’t worry, young people in Brooklyn, Alford’s conclusion is optimistic: the “eco-conscious, agrarian-seeming, hair-celebrating” 20-somethings are self-respecting.