Section Articles:  Introduction Being True to Yourself in a World that's Losing its Cool Hip Hot Spots 15 of the hippest neighborhoods in the U.S and Canada Let Them Eat Lifestyle From hip to hype -- the ultimate coporate takeover by The Baffler's Tom Frank Beyond Hip Looking for something better than the Next Big Thing The Queen of Cool Haysun Hahn gets paid to be hipper than the rest of us Are Black People Cooler than White People? Dumb Question. How I Escaped My Addiction to Hip by playwright and screenwriter Eve Ensler It Took a Village  There's nothing new about business co-opting hip life

Celebrated literary critic Malcolm Cowley recounts in this excerpt from his 1931 book Exile's Return how the anti-puritanical spirit of Greenwich Village helped fuel the consumer boom of the 1920s. 

Greenwich Village was not only a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine. By 1920, it had become a system of ideas that could roughly be summarized as follows:

1.

The idea of salvation by the child. Each of us at birth has special potentialities that are slowly crushed and destroyed by a standardized society. If a new educational system can be introduced, one by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation.

2.

The idea of self-expression. [Our] purpose in life is to express [ourselves], to realize [our] full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings.