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

S omewhere in the darkest, coldest corner of Sweden, thereís a hotel made entirely of ice. Haysun Hahn, globetrotting arbiter of all things hip, wants to go there, but she has run into a problem. "I can't get anyone to go with me," she says with an exasperated sigh. "My assistants refuse to sleep on beds of ice. They don't understand why I want to go there, but they will."

How could a place so cold possibly be hot? Take Hahn's word for it. As director of New York-based Bureau de Style, one of the world's top trend-forecasting agencies, Hahn is used to being one step ahead of the pack. She's in the business of predicting the latest hip trend, and she takes her research seriously.

Take cold and ice, for instance.

"Cold weather is really a lot more interesting to people right now than warm weather," Hahn explains. "Alaska is important. Antarctica is a big issue. Winter sports like snowboarding are also hot. Any piece of art with a snowflake or an icicle in it right now sells for $10,000 more than one without. We're on the verge of something big here, really on the cutting edge."