Christopher glazek what was the hipster

I was asked by a friend while reading the book if Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes had always been "kind of crazy rightwing.

McInnes, incidentally, was a panelist on the L. The true gem of the book is the final essay, Christopher Glazek's look at conflict between Hasidism and hipsters in South Williamsburg over a bike lane.

As usual, hipsters come off as entitled brats, but then, so do the anti-bike-lane Hasidic Jews, who complain about what is ultimately an improvement to transportation safety.

The volume raises plenty of questions I wish it had answered. Why are all the women writers relegated to the response essays? Why are we debating hipsters, when we could be talking about the growing levels of inequality in the United States? As Jace Clayton asked on the panel, "What are we not talking about when we're talking about the hipster?

Let's be honest: The only thing easier than hating the hipster is discussing him. And god knows making a profit in the magazine industry is an uphill battle. Time did pass. More from A Year in Reading Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come.

Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now. Summertime, and I spend my days working in a museum located in downtown Boston. Over the months, I learn how to count a cash drawer, teach Italians the meaning of a state sales tax, and struggle with how exactly to break the news that the Old Corner Bookstore is no more. Proper Bostonians would beg to differ. Once renowned as a hotbed of writers, the city remains a haven for readers.

The continuing popularity of these institutions is a case in point. Once this was the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe; no longer. Most of Infinite Jest is set in Boston. The Atlantic was founded in this city.

But for all these names, all these movements, all this history, Boston has, like other American cities in the new millennium, faded from literary prominence. On its face, this seems an exaggeration; there are journals, there are bookstores, there are eager young writers spilling forth from all the schools that litter the city.

But I am a child of the digital, and let me tell you this: sometimes it feels as though every young writer I know is in the process of moving down to Brooklyn. On certain fall days in Boston the air veers sharp, humming like a too-charged cell phone, and I understand why they hung witches here. The literature of Massachusetts seems to reflect this fear. You could jump out at a red light and split. And the Old Corner Bookstore?

Today, the Old Corner Bookstore sits, as its name implies, on the corner of Washington and School Streets, five minutes from Downtown Crossing and perhaps another 10 from the Common. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster?

Buy New Learn more about this copy. Customers who bought this item also bought. Stock Image. Maybe the hipsters and the Hasids started to seem more like cartoons. A friend of mine, raised in a Reform Jewish household, likes to joke that the most transgressive thing she could do would not be to marry another woman, or get addicted to heroin, but to become a Hasid.

At their most extreme, hipsters and Hasids present rival heresies, dueling rejections of bourgeois modernity. That each group selected Williamsburg as the terrain for carving out a secessionist utopia can only be blamed on the cunning of history, plus the L train. The symmetry is powerful, if accidental. Both factions are marked by recognizable hairstyles and unusual modes of dress. Both groups live in configurations unusual for the advanced capitalist west.

Hipsters often live with multiple roommates, encouraging a wide variety of romantic, or worryingly platonic, entanglements. Hasids live in enormous families. The average size of a Satmar family is nine people. It would not be unusual to enter either a hipster or a Satmar apartment and see a cot in the kitchen.

For all its medieval costuming, Satmar Hasidism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Satmars, a large and particularly conscientious division of Hasidim, were founded only in the 20th century, by Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, who would have been murdered by the Nazis had his freedom not been purchased from Adolf Eichmann by the Zionist Rudolph Kastner. Nevertheless, Teitelbaum hated the Zionists, even blaming them for the Holocaust.

Teitelbaum arrived in New York with a small retinue on Rosh Hashanah in , on the Jewish calendar , where he founded a synagogue and set for himself the task of recreating the cloistered world of Satu Mare, the Hungarian shtetl whence the Satmars sprang. Fur hats, Talmud study, and procreation were the order of the day. From an original colony with a reputed population of only ten after World War II, the Satmar population in Brooklyn, bolstered by immigration, grew by to more than 35, Although parts of the community are plagued by poverty, the Williamsburg Satmars are better off than the co-religionists in the upstate refuge of Kiryas Joel, which is often called the poorest place in the United States.

The downstaters got into Brooklyn real estate before several rounds of booms, and they also entered the traditional diamond business. The Satmars speak Yiddish to each other.

Their major paper, Der Yid , has a circulation of 50,, roughly on par with the London Review of Books about half as many as Vice Deutschland. Hipsters, too, have long evinced an affection for Yiddish, especially when combined with accordions, as in Klezmer music.