Free Republic

Urban Outfitters Pinpoints Hairroin Salons With Free Hypodermic Pens Urban Outfitters has teamed up with the NYC Hairroin Salon in glamorizing drug use at a time when heroin has devastated the city. Pinpointing Hairroin Salons in their stores that give away free hypodermic needle pens, it’s clear that Urban Outfitters has failed to learn their lesson. After previously pulling shot glasses designed as prescription medication bottles from its shelves after an uproar, the teen-focused store has actually teamed up with a hair salon with the name Hairroin in its latest New York City location. The so-called cutting edge salon glamorizes...

Corporate America can learn a lot from a chicken burrito. As many companies struggle to boost prices without alienating consumers, they may want to study Mexican-food chain Chipotle, which has managed to do both. Companies including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc (CMG.N), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and PepsiCo (PEP.N) have shown they're able to take advantage of quality, trendiness, and, in the case of Pepsi's snack foods, market dominance, to maintain high prices or even raise them faster than the inflation rate, now at about 2.1 percent in the U.S. Chipotle raised chicken-dish prices by 5 percent this year after leaving them...

While New Yorkers like to think of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as the epicenter of the American hipster, it's hardly the only place in the country where vegan, handlebar-mustachioed trustafarians ride their single-speeds to nanobreweries inside organic farm-to-table restaurants inside abandoned artist lofts tricked out with rooftop gardens where they grow only kale. Pretty much any US city, short of maybe Birmingham, AL, has some elements/neighborhoods of hipster culture at this point (you really just need a fixed-gear bike shop, right?), but these 10 cities are vying for the title of hipster-est. Behind Williamsburg, of course....

The feminist film critics can exhale now. Someone has finally concocted their dream movie: an "abortion comedy." Because apparently nothing sounds funnier than an unplanned one-night stand and a courageous destruction of God's most beautiful and most innocent creation. It's called "Obvious Child." Feminist lingo sells this monstrosity. Former "Saturday Night Live" cast member Jenny Slate plays Donna Stern, a standup comedian who "is forced to face the uncomfortable realities of independent womanhood for the first time." A "drunken hookup -- and epic lapse in prophylactic judgment -- turns out to be the beginning of a hilarious and totally unplanned...

It’s interesting that the director of the richest oeuvre of black films in the history of the medium doesn’t understand what the Civil Rights revolution was for. In his expletive-laced comments about the gentrification of Fort Greene during an interview at the Pratt Institute, Spike Lee seemed to think that what we Overcame for was to be grouchy bigots. Basically, black people are getting paid more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives for their houses, and a once sketchy neighborhood is now quiet and pleasant. And this is a bad thing… why? Lee seems to think it’s somehow...

It’s shear madness! Brooklyn’s hipster beard craze has grown so popular that men in New York are rushing to doctors for “facial hair transplants” — surgery that helps make beards look thicker and less patchy, sources said. Stubble-challenged guys are forking over up to $8,500 for the beard-boosting procedure, which has spiked in popularity in recent months, plastic surgeons told The Post. “Brooklyn is probably the nucleus of the trend, it’s the hipster ‘look’ guys want. If you have a spotty beard, and you let it grow out, it looks sloppy, ” said Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a Midtown-based plastic surgeon....

The tech-bus protest isn’t just a San Francisco thing anymore. This week, the anti-gentrification act of blocking a private shuttle full of high-paid tech workers spread to Seattle, where a handful of buses carrying Microsoft employees were stopped by demonstrators. The protest was chronicled by local Tweeps and community websites.

"In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore -- equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird -- Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening's dinner, they walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth." Those are two "hipsters", and the punchline is that they pay for their foodie porn with foodie stamps, which sounds like it should be a terrible thing, except it's in Salon.com, which means they're going to try and tell you how it's a good...

Hall & Oates has never won a Grammy but the No. 1 selling duo of all time has won something else: hipster respect. Putting aside those shoulder pads for a moment, Daryl Hall and John Oates looked like hand-picked opposites: The lanky blond Hall called himself the "more flamboyant" one, while the shorter dark-haired Oates — with his distinctive 'stache — embraced his role as "worker bee." But their union came from no design, except by the music gods: The Temple University students met in an elevator, both trying to duck a gunfight that had broken out at the Adelphi...

Here’s another reason to be annoyed at hipsters: They’re driving up the price of beer. A recent study has found that the price of low- and mid-range beers has been climbing at U.S. bars and restaurants. And the guy who oversaw the study for Massachusetts-based research firm Restaurant Sciences said he thinks the popularity of Pabst Blue Ribbon could be the cause. “While all the attention has been on craft beers, the price of mainstay brands in the mid-price tier have risen more dramatically,” Research Sciences President Chuck Ellis said. …

Where are today’s rebels?  Where is the counterculture? Ear-budded hipsters, with their sheep-like devotion to Apple products and the Obama administration, sit in on the April 20 “Day of Pot” in Denver, content and satisfied with their free birth control and legalized maryjane.  Meanwhile SWAT teams descend on Watertown, Massachusetts, trampling Fourth Amendment rights in search of a “person of interest”– while a Saudi National is quietly sent back to his homeland.These hipsters champion the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado while the war on Big Tobacco rages on.  Since 1997 the FDA inherited control over the $365.5 billion global...

If irony is the ethos of our age — and it is — then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living. The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what...

The Obama Campaign, that strange 4 year marriage of Generation X hipsters, inner city bosses, suburban college educated boomers longing for racial healing, Big Green businessmen and shady Saudis, appears to be finally sinking beneath the waves. It isn't going out in a blaze of glory, but with mumbles of trending topics. Obama was always a petty man and his campaign has descended into pointless pettiness, into Team Big Bird, binders full of women and bayonets and horses. Like so much hipster culture, it exists so that the participants can entertain each other with something that no one else thinks...

The concept of “cool” is, appropriately, like a snowball. Just when you think you’ve got a grasp of it, it melts away. Still, cool is the most resilient of slang words. While other terms have become cringeworthy from overuse, cool has stayed firmly within the lexicon. Cool is put in service to describe a galaxy of objects and incidents – from fleeting moments to multi-billion-pound brands. It's the beatnik's curse. Whole industries exist to tell us what's cool now, what will be cool next and when the cool evaporates. The annual CoolBrands survey, published this week, is just one small...

Angry extreme left-wing protesters lash out at tent to tent trick-or-treaters at Occupy Wall St. Hahaha. Cheers!

A visual history of the West's misguided attempts to send its hand-me-downs to the developing world.Most of us don't have billions of dollars to give away like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. But the charitable impulse is still strong: combined, Americans gave away almost $300 billion in 2010. Sometimes, though, good intentions have questionable results. In the rush to help after a crisis, public and private donors from around the world sometimes give without quite realizing what the needs on the ground are. Do Haitians really need your used yoga mat? Do the Balkans lack for clowns? Above, a young...

According to the May Nielson ratings, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart beat the entire Fox News network in terms of total viewers. Stewart averaged 2.3 million viewers, while the Fox News prime time and day time line up averaged 1.85 million viewers. According to Comedy Central, The Daily Show is dominant in its time slot, For the month of May 2011, “The Daily Show” averaged 2.3 million total viewers and a 1.2 P18-49 rating. Versus May 2010, “The Daily Show” grew an astounding +19% in total viewers, with incredible double-digit ratings growth across all key demos including P18-49 (up...

Somewhere in America right now a Religious Studies graduate in white shutter shades is sucking the Pabst Blue Ribbon from his wispy mustache while listening to a pig-tailed girl offer her position on Metamorphosis. They are hipsters. I know this because I met them. They hang out in front of a Coffee Bean. They are Aubrey and Aubrey and they live for the moments when strangers suggest that name ought to be gender exclusive. They work part-time gathering signatures for obscure causes and spend the rest of their time arguing about Sartre and Derrida and who borrowed whose pants. They...

It Appears Transients From All Over The Globe Converging On Bohemian Williamsburg -- And Residents Are FuriousPanhandling, Drugs Taking Over Parts Of Hip Brooklyn Neighborhood BROOKLYN, N.Y. (CBS) -- There's a neighborhood in Brooklyn that's known for being trendy and hip, but some residents say the Bohemian reputation is drawing a group of transient people from around the world known as "gutter punks" and it's now turning into a squatter invasion. And as CBS station WCBS-TV found out some are fighting to get them out of the neighborhood. Some call Northside Williamsburg along Bedford Avenue the new Greenwich Village, with...

I fancy myself open-minded and easygoing, which is why I was disturbed at my behavior last week when a pair of cyclists, riding side-by-side, blocked a lane of traffic and slowed my car to a speed that fell between trotting and brisk skipping. I laid on the horn, something I normally wouldn’t do, while my passenger, a generally subdued gentlemen and an avid cyclist himself, yelled at them to get out of the way. Discuss COMMENTS (41) It was only the next day that I realized the reason for my aggressive behavior. I was annoyed with these two because they...