The New Yorker Covers Brooklyn Hipsters
- The New Yorker
- This is what The New Yorker thinks people in Brooklyn look like.
Even The New Yorker knows that the all of the best stuff in the literary scene is happening in Brooklyn now. For this week’s anniversary cover, The New Yorker presents “Brooklyn’s Eustace,” which was rendered by “Simon Greiner, a thirty-one-year-old reader from Sydney, Australia, who submitted it through our 2013 Eustace Tilley Contest.” A contest? Cool. We at Brooklyn Magazine/The L Magazine know the values of such contests, because it is how we got our new sex columnist.
Now, you might be thinking, what does “a thirty-one-year-old reader from Sydney, Australia” know about Brooklyn? How can he possibly know not to traffic solely in tired, hipster stereotypes, like beards, tattoos, and black-rimmed glasses? Well, Greiner “moved to the city a year and a half ago following his girlfriend (now wife)” and, based on reading so much about it in places like The New Yorker, decided to move to Park Slope. Lest you think that Greiner himself actually identifies with the Brooklynite he created for the cover, he is quick to assure anyone who asks that, “This is not me. I certainly move in a world where those people exist—they’re all around me—but they’re not my people. I’ve been identified as a Brooklyn hipster, but I’m sure I’m sort of at the edge of that Venn diagram.”
So, he has no identifying aspects of a Brooklyn hipster? Well, actually, he “used to have a studio in Williamsburg” and “has been known to ride his bike around Brooklyn” and even—even—has a beard. But no tattoos. So he fails the “hipster test” that all true Brooklynites must endure.