A lot of people think Park Slope, Brooklyn, is a great place to live. In 2007, it was named one of the top 10 neighborhoods in the country, more than once, and its condos yield some of the highest prices in the borough, New York City's most populous. Probably unsurprisingly, Park Slope is also predominately white, educated, and affluent. Plenty of neighborhoods in America fit the same descriptionwhat up, Buffalo Grove!but most of these places are in the suburbs, and have thus been exposed time after time after time. Perhaps it's just as well, however, as studies indicate Park Slope, not Wisteria Lane, is steadily coming out the winner in the battle for upper-middle-class white angst.
One of the first people with publishing connections to identify this trend is New York Times columnist David Brooks. Back from four years abroad, in 2000 Brooks published Bobos In Paradise, an anthropology of Americans who find it "more prestigious to look like Franz Kafka than Paul Newman." As the type to demand a "vente almond frappuccino" be made with organic, north slope-facing cane sugar, what this individual lacks in irony (s)he makes up for in sanctimony. Thus the Bourgeois Bohemian, or Bobo. Though never as well-received as yuppie, Bobo survives as a cultural category, and the way demographics are headed, may see a second life yet.
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