The Non-Evolution of The New York Times #HipsterRead

This week, The New York Times updated its astonishingly exhaustive hipster canon – this time, a middle-aged reporter embeds in Brooklyn, camouflaged in a $225 plaid jacquard shirt! – with a 2,000-word Henry Alford story and multimedia gallery most enjoyable for the magnificent correction that was promptly appended:

Alford's piece is, at minimum, an amusing read in a schadenfreude kind of way (skip to the best part on Page 3, when he visits a used bookstore that barters books for wine and tea... and offers in exchange for whatever they'll give him a collection of Ronald Reagan speeches, a book from 1993 on the health care crisis, and another on comedy in the Third Reich). As with most hipster reportage, we're torn between mocking the author's amazement at the characters he encounters and mocking those characters themselves.