Homeless plans for Thanksgiving On a warm autumn afternoon, a homeless man lies against a wall on First Avenue just south of Ash Street. He's sharing a bottle of cheap vodka with an older homeless …

It has been a slow week in the mail room, so permit me a moment to editorialize a bit, if you would be so kind. If “Ask a Hipster” has a unifying theme, it has …

Dear Hipster: As I’m sure you and everyone else remember, this time last year was a bummer for a lot of people. It was obviously a bummer in the big picture (you know, the whole …

Dear Hipster: I have a co-worker named Cliff who is quite the hipster. He drinks good local coffee, he eats locally sourced food, he even rides a cool older bike with Italian parts on it. …

Dear Hipster: One thing I have gleaned from casually skimming this column over the years is that there’s a hipster version of everything. There’s beer, and then there’s hipster beer. There’s coffee, and then there’s …

Dear Hipster: It is no secret that culture and counterculture move in cycles, such that ‘old’ is periodically ‘new’ again, whether it’s regarding fashion, tech, or anti-prohibition homebrew in the cellar. Knowing what we do …

Dear Hipster: One thing that seems to be typical of twenty-first-century hipsters is a somewhat permissive, laissez-faire attitude towards, well, just about anything, really, from dress to habits to jobs and anything else. I think …

Dear Hipster: Here is one thing that simply doesn’t make sense to me. So much of the hipster scene revolves around elevating supposedly “lowbrow” culture over what we might call “highbrow” culture. But at the …

Hey Hipster: So my friend and I were having a conversation the other day about sports. He’s a PE teacher in North County. He says to me, “The only sport that you can win with …

Dear Hipster: At this point, I have heard of hipster bars putting just about everything into a cocktail, or even straight up opening entire bars devoted to obscure alcohols. However, I have yet to run …

Dear Hipster: One cannot help but grow up in America without being sold on the virtue of individualism, personal liberty, and the right for “you to do you,” as it were. At the same time, …

Dear Hipster: Here’s a bit of a hipster paradox that, at least in my opinion, requires a little unpacking. I would be a rich man if I got a nickel every time some random hipster …

Dear Hipster: Please pass along these cat name suggestions to Tyler from this last week’s column. Remember, he was torn between human names and nouns. He can have both by using your suggestion of descriptive …

Dear Hipster: As I understand it, one of the most powerful motivating forces in the hipster universe is “wouldn’t it be funny if…” Invoking this ironic catchphrase still seems to justify doing all kinds of …

Before we get ahead of ourselves, I’ll remind everyone that we posed a riddle to the general public a few weeks back. We got some inspired guesses, and a few snide remarks, but a handful …

Dear Hipster: Everyone has to pick one, so: are hipsters dog or cat people? — Dylan D. Short answer: hipsters are bird people. Long answer: we relate to preferred pets on a level deeper than …

Dear Hipster: For many years, faithful readers have come to you for help in identifying hipsters and their hipster behaviors. But nothing lasts forever, and even the coolest hipster may one day wake up, look …

Dear Hipster: Given that SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and Spotify make it relatively simple for musicians (myself included) to put their tracks, mixtapes, EPs, and albums out in front of an internet audience, it’s almost as if …

Dear Hipster: Here’s an obviously non-controversial premise for you: hipsters are very nostalgic, and they love old-fashioned stuff so much that they’re constantly imitating past trends in an effort to color modern life with the …

Dear Hipster: Riddle me this — if all the hipsters left town tomorrow, would there be no more hipsters, or would somebody step in to fill the “power vacuum,” so to speak, such as occurs …

Dear Hipster: Even if staying outside the mainstream and being countercultural is super important, it sure is exhausting keeping track of what’s hip and not hip, so that one knows where one stands in relation …

Dear Hipster: What is the meaning of life? Is it all just a bunch of frothy beverages and salted caramels, or is there more to it? Will the tie-dye revolution ever dismantle the oh-so-fashions of …

Dear Hipster: One thing that has always bothered me is, why do fictional hipsters always seem to have it so easy? You see some hipsters on TV and movies, and they somehow get away with …

Dear Hipster: Summer is here! And it’s not canceled this year! I’d say it’s time to celebrate, but do I even need to say it? I would imagine almost everybody is super stoked to have …

Dear Hipster: Immanuel Kant famously proposed that people should be treated as “ends in themselves,” not as a means to an end. As a corollary of that principle, people are supposed to help themselves and …

Dear Hipster: Around this time of year I always feel like the world’s attention is divided, at least a little bit, between hockey and basketball. Of course, by “the world” I mean “popular televised American …

Dear Hipster: As the proud owner of a sophisticated sweet tooth, I am always a little confused by people who have no opinion one way or the other on sweets and dessert. It has always …

Dear Hipster: What does it all mean? — Thad The answers are out there, Thad, but you have to follow the clues, and it takes special training in hipster numerology and phenomenology to uncover those …

Dear Hipster: Hipsters are known for having a generally snarky attitude towards most things, but they hardly own what Oscar Wilde called “the lowest form of wit.” Why is snark so easy? — Max That’s …

Dear Hipster: Although I would tend to agree that cool hipster stuff (music, fashion, food, or whatever) pushes boundaries in a good way, one thing I have noticed time and time again is that avant …

Dear Hipster: You’d have to be a dummy to ignore the profligacy of remakes, reboots, and retro-themed books, music, and movies that have cropped up with increasing frequency over the course of the past decade. …

Dear Hipster: I get how it’s cool and hipster to have obscure, preferably one-of-a-kind aesthetic sensibilities, but I don’t get why it’s important. This is kind of abstract, but how is there any value in …

Dear Hipster: What has had a greater effect on defining what it means to be a 21st-century American hipster: movies and TV, music, or something else entirely? — AJ That’s a bit like asking, ‘Who …

Dear Hipster: You want to know one thing you never hear about? Hipster mansions. If you picture the most hipster house you can imagine, you see a teeny tiny little cottage somewhere, or an itty …

Hipster: Why do I feel compelled to purchase discount, post-Easter candy when I would never, under normal circumstances, purchase a giant bag of Kit Kats and mini-Snickers for myself? Is there something about leftover holiday …

Dear Hipster: I have always wondered about the allure of weird, hipster businesses concepts that combine unlike elements under one roof. I’m thinking of things like a combination laundromat and bar, or a garage that …

The world is full of accidental poets. You can find them anywhere if you look, and searching for accidental poetry is a time-honored hipster tradition. Accidental poetry stands in stark contrast to the rarefied musings …

Dear Hipster: I have recently discovered that a friend of mine —perhaps really more of an “acquaintance” when you get right down to it — is an adamant moon-landing conspiracy theorist. I’m not talking about …

Dear Hipster: Is it good or bad if somebody does a good thing, but for a bad or evil reason? For example, if a rich man gives his fortune to charity, but he does it …

Dear Hipster: So, my news feed has been blowing me up all day with stories and tweets etc. about how Generation Z (mostly a bunch of teenagers and people in their very early twenties) has …

Dear Hipster: Maybe you can help me out with this thing I’ve been pondering lately. It’s a question of hipster commodities. Why is it possible to get a nearly infinite variety of artisan cheeses, but …

Dear Hipster: We can all agree that maintaining your own urban herb and vegetable garden is tres hipstère, particularly where you use your garden to grow unique foods for hosting elaborate dinner parties where each …

Dear Hipster: I was looking at some handmade furniture the other day from a self-described “artisan” who doesn’t have a website or a storefront, only an Instagram presence, and I was like, “Oh, that’s really …

Dear Hipster: After a long, dreadfully lonely 2020 in which I managed to contract, and recover from, a mild case of coronavirus despite remaining in near-total isolation, I’m super low-key dating again because, well, eff …

Dear Hipster: When the big tech oligarchs who now clearly control everything turn on each other in a violent struggle to become CEO of the World, who do you see coming out on top? Tim …

Dear Hipster: I’m depressed. Please cheer me up. — Kaye I’m going to assume you’re probably more displeased over the trillion trivial insults you might receive from life on any given day rather than actually …

Hipissimo Maestro: You hipsters have a penchant — pronounced in the original French way — for preserving and often restoring dying arts. I’m hoping reviving the art of polite, civil, mannerly conversation, even on the …

Dear Hipster: I always wondered what happened to contract bridge, and it always surprises me that I haven’t heard about a resurgence of bridge with hipsters. When I was growing up, it was almost a …

Dear Hipster: I grew up in the ’60s, when being hip was an ineffable, deliciously rare characteristic. Both my parents were Beats in their day, listening to Billie Holiday and yes, smoking the occasional joint. …

Dear Hipster: My roommate and I worked our way through a half dozen cans of Steel Reserve the other night while we watched the majority of a new Netflix documentary series about obscure competitions called …