Phoebe Maltz

Megan McArdle, the center-left libertarian blogger, now blogs at The Atlantic. Today, she commented on Phoebe Maltz's assertion that hipsterism might be over:

Hipsters have been around at least since I was in college, which, as any fogey can tell you, is when the universe began, anyway. To be sure, we did not have iPods, and without cell phones we had to engage in rather elaborate signalling mechanisms so that people would know what bar you were likely to be at on Saturday nights circa 11 pm. But the ironic cynicism, the clothing rumpled with exquisite care, the chain smoking, the obsessive competition over who could discover the obscurest band, all these we had. We even had the habituating of coffee shops, though I'm not sure one could then procure a triple chai latte with soy milk. We used to write in them, you see; we had this stuff called paper that was very useful for creating parodic autobiographies of Karl Marx penned in the style of John Irving.