Friday links! Logical next steps edition

This photo of one of several hipster traps to appear recently around New York was sent to me by Big Game, and it clearly represents a new epoch in the nebulous socio-aesthetic construction that is hipsterdom. First of all, I bet I could get that beer out of there without getting my hand caught. Second of all, the best part about irony is that you can even use it on irony. Once you do, your newly ironic approach to your previously sincere experience of irony seems like the only reasonable perspective. It’s the logical next step, even though it is prima facie absurd, and the paradox between these two understandings of the same relation can be resolved by noting that, oh yeah, the thing you did in the first place was absurd, too. This week’s link roundup is full of such progressions, in which logic demands more absurdity from absurdity. It’s the inductive narrative of history, and it’s happening all around us—even to Glenn Beck. When’s somebody going to make a trap with a Bible, an airplane bottle of scotch and a Ho-Ho in it?

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