Young families have been moving to the suburbs for as long as there have been young families and suburbs. That many of the young families moving to New York suburbs should be Brooklynites, and that many of them should fancy themselves "creative types" and that they, like their parents and grandparents before them, should believe themselves capable of bringing their superior sensibilities to the land of compromises and comfort should come as no surprise. See: Revolutionary Road.

And yet, the New York Times has seen fit to print yet another style section feature on the suburban exodus of Brooklynites called, what else, "Creating Hipsturbia." After all, "Williamsburg on the Hudson" ran way back in August 2011.

What seems to be entirely lost on these suburban pioneers (and The Times) is that despite their tattoos and their gluten-free baked goods and their farm-to-table restaurants, they are following in the exact same footsteps as their forebearers. The creative types who have long condescended to settle in the small towns of the Hudson River Valley have always carried their tastes with them, along with the notion that they may be in the suburbs, but they are not of the suburbs.

This is the tragedy of the suburbs: they are populated, on the whole, by people who hate to think of themselves of suburban, who cannot stomach the idea that they have abandoned the promises of the city for the comforts of the hinterland. The kinds of people who like to think they are above those comforts—the cars, the lawns, the bigger, cheaper houses—even as they partake of them. Frank and April Wheeler, for all their pretensions and talk of Paris, are not the exceptions, they are the archetypes.

The Times is so busy looking at the surface of things that they fail to see the substance. The style signifiers sprinkled so conspicuously throughout the article—the Fernet Branca cocktails with clever names, the haute donuts covered in maple bacon, the artist who wears his hair in a top bun and "bears tattoos with his sons' names, Denim and Bowie, on his forearms"—are meaningless. The Brooklyn "brand"—so easily recognizable that we all understand what "six-person-minimum whole-pig dinners" and bars "festooned with Edison bulbs" connote—is an aesthetic and lifestyle sensibility that has already proven itself infinitely adaptable to any number of geographic settings.

Indeed, the Brooklyn aesthetic is so ubiquitous and slavishly adhered to that it displays all the suburban hallmarks that we love to deride. The conformity, the dull sameness, the utter lack of imagination. In his excellent 2005 essay I hate Brooklyn Jonathan Van Meter quotes one of his friends on Williamsburg: "It’s not that I don’t like the culturati hipsters, but the last time I was in an environment where people only wanted to be with people exactly like themselves was in a fucking mall in Minnesota, which is why I left there twenty years ago."

As Inga Saffron writes in The New Republic, the real problem with gentrification is that it drives out economic, racial and generational diversity, leaving a bland monoculture in its wake. Brooklyn is filled with hundreds of independent businesses so identical to one another that they may as well be chains. Farm-to-table restaurants and are the new Applebees and felted wool antlers are the new Thomas Kinkades.

More to the point, these "hipster" newcomers want the same things that everyone moving to the suburbs has ever wanted: more space for less money, better schools, a slower pace of life. They have young children, they have not become the artists or dancers or musicians they had hoped to become, they have reached the age when they no longer believe that they will, and they do not find the sacrifices demanded by city life worthwhile anymore.

That these young families are being pushed from the city by affluence, rather than poverty, is something worth exploring. The growing impossibility of maintaining anything resembling a middle-class existence in an increasingly upper-class city is a real and pressing problem. But the fresh-faced suburbanites interviewed for the article tell an age-old tale.

Williamsburg roof parties thumping at 3 a.m. were not compatible with raising two young children. The gifted and talented program at the local public school was not up to snuff. Williamsburg no longer seemed central to the life they were living or wanted to lead. They were looking for a more peaceful environment, the country life not far from the city. The suburbs afforded more space to pursue the hobbies so central to the Brooklyn D.I.Y movement.

Brooklyn, with its brownstones and backyards and leafy streets, has long been a proto-suburb for Manhattanites. That those who embraced the lower-density and less frenetic streets of Brooklyn should be drawn to suburban life is not surprising.

"To abandon the idea of Brooklyn is to admit that a certain idea of Brooklyn has died, or that they are no longer part of it," the article claims. On the contrary, rather than stifling one's ability to lead a "Brooklyn life," the suburbs are an ideal place for a culture that glorifies domesticity and revels in homemaking, in baking and butchering and knitting and soapmaking and quilting and letterpressing. The Brooklyn ideal is not the urban careerist, but the rural crafter. The most hardcore Brooklynites are the ones who never really wanted to be in the city in the first place.

As one formerly-urban soap maker who now enjoys "pajama jams" in her basement music studio tells The Times: "We keep to ourselves a lot more, keep to our hobbies a lot more, which for creative types is great."

Honestly, what better way to enhance the insular qualities so particular to the Brooklyn brand, to nurture the inward-looking, self-reflective culture, than to shut out all the noise and messiness of urban life?

It's all come full circle, a development augured when Martha Stewart, the homemaking doyenne of the 'burbs, became the patron saint of the Brooklyn craft crowd. The return to the suburbs—where many of the Brooklyn hipsters came from in the first place—is not a really a reverse migration. It's a homecoming.

kvelsey@observer.com

William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, will publish Jenna Miscavige Hill’s “Beyond Belief: My Secret Life inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape” in January. As the title suggests, the memoir is about growing up in—and leaving—the religion and will include “strange and disturbing” details about the church and a “first hand” account of Scientology’s “upper ranks.”

Writing about Scientology is practically becoming its own industry. Maybe one that’s not as profitable as the religion itself, but an industry nonetheless.

The hated house feature

Remember when people once liked practical things on their houses? Porches and overhangs and aluminum awnings and such?

Well Greenpoint, for one, has had it with aluminum awnings, reports The New York Times.

Those humble providers of shelter are so mid-century, and not Eames chairs/ skinny ties/ birth of the cool kind of mid-century, but smoking around children and eating TV dinners kind of mid-century.

It's almost like they're deliberately trying to be unattractive, a la that golden girl of Greenpoint Lena Dunham, who films herself doing things like awkwardly hitching up a pair of flesh-colored panty-hose.

“You’re never going to go on Craigslist and find someone who’s looking for a vintage 1950s fiberglass or aluminum awning,” architect and Greenpoint-dweller Jonathan B. Held told The Times. “They are despised.”

Even the general manager of a scrapyard takes calls them an "eyesore." Ouch!

However, apparently some practical-minded people still want these functional coverings to block the rain and the snow and to keep their newspapers (we hope they don't read The Times) dry. In fact, in an indication of just how much attention they pay to such passing fancies, Brooklyn-based Aluminum Awnings informed us that they hadn't even heard about The Times article when we called their office.

Indeed, we found several other purveyors of awnings, including General Awnings and Home Depot, who are still  selling the product, focusing, we suppose, on the small segment of the population who are not part of the ever-fickle tastemakers. Why just last year The Times was singing the virtues of vinyl siding in nearby Williamsburg:

"To Mr. Canfield, replacing vinyl siding that is in good shape, as some homebuyers do as soon as they have the deed, is like carelessly restoring antiques that came over on the Mayflower. He views vinyl siding facades as the key to preserving Williamsburg’s working-class traditions, which arguably has become its own facade."

Trends... they are so hard to predict! What's next? Gutters? A resurgence of faux-wood paneling?

kvelsey@observer.com

Elizabeth Warren: Under Twitter attack (Getty)

Elizabeth Warren:why won't she just leave conservatives alone? Why does she insist on keeping her campaign running, despite the fact that she's revealed herself to be either part Native American or an opportunistic liar? (Follow-up question: Which of those two traits do Republicans find more disgusting?)

In an effort to squash the Massachusetts Senate candidate's campaign, racist conservatives have taken to their new best friend, Twitter, to express their outrage over something other than the fact that Rue from Hunger Games was so not black in the books. Today's trending hashtag? #ElizabethWarrenIndianNames. Hey, she started it!

Some of our "favorites" from the social networking hate-bubble, below.
It's funny, because these people claim to be outraged over Ms. Warren using her heritage as a political statement, because that's disrespectful to actual Native Americans. So obviously the answer is to make up "Injun" names that apply to the "Lie-awatha." Oh, down the rabbit hole...

A trendy youth. (image via sanjose.com)

Last week, The Brooklyn Paper made (largely unattributed) waves with a trend story on the "babyccino," which is what some Brooklyn baristas are willing to call "steamed milk" if it keeps the borough's powerful twee parent contingent happy. After being picked up by Daily Intel, the "espresso shots for tots" popped up in The Daily, the Post and the Daily News.

In an apparent attempt to replicate the baby buzz, this week the Paper brings us "tats for tots."  A new kids line from Tattly, the temporary tattoo company of  Swiss Miss designer Tina Roth Eisenberg, means the babes of Bedford Avenue don't need to wait for 18 to look like their mom(s) and/or dad(s). All they need are the motor skills to hold a wet rag to their appendages.

In addition to display copy, the inked-up infants story shares babyccino's feigned alarm. While the first story quoted a "skeptical" pediatrician, the second noted that Ms. Eisenberg "dispelled the notion that her faux anchors and hearts might turn tots into future Dennis Rodmans or Kat Von Ds."

Phew!

Although the second piece includes a politician's endorsement (Marty Markowitz gave Tattly a shout-out in his "State of the Borough" address), it lacks the parental testimonies required for full trend piece status.

Your move, other New York papers. We're too busy getting a jump start on "blunts for babies"  to do this one justice.

All it's cracked up to be.

On a charming August night, The Observer was sitting on our fire escape with two friends, having cigarettes, having beer. We had brought out an iPhone dock, a diminutive speaker machine that plays music right from a mobile device, at a decent, but not offensive-to-the-neighbors, volume.

Then, with a jerk of an arm, there came a crash. The iPhone dock, nudged at, spun down four stories and smashed unceremoniously on the Houston Street sidewalk. Still affixed to the dock’s protruding metal slab was our iPhone. A retrieval trip downstairs found a young woman holding the mess of technology. She handed it sympathetically back to us.

We examined the damage. Not good. It had been crushed to a pulp. The frame had cracked considerably, the SIM card sputtered out like a rancid animal tongue and the once-sleek corners were marred beyond help.

But I was hardly the first victim of a battered iPhone.

Let’s play a game. Do you have a cracked one? Have you been careless enough to go caseless, a state of the phone where a single mishandling can lead to a nasty slit across your screen? Look at your phone, turn off the backlight, and rotate it slightly to catch a good reflection—maybe you haven’t even noticed, but there’s quite possibly a spindly wisp of a line running horizontally from left to right.

For the last few months, more friends and acquaintances have revealed the imperfections on their phones. They might even reveal with with pride—there’s a sort of community emerging.

We have been privy to the following conversation, with little variation, rather frequently of late.

“Oh, yours is cracked, too,” said a friend to a young lady, over dinner at a small French restaurant on Orchard Street in July.

“Yeah, it is!” she replied in solidarity.

He was getting her number when the recognition hit. They both had gashes in their glass. They took the phones out to compare and the faults nearly matched up, like two touched-together palms with lifelines of the same size.

“What happened?” said the first friend

“I dropped it,” she replied.

“Look at that,” he said.

Never fear, this is not cause for mourning, not a moment to lament these blemishes to the vaunted work of the industrial-design gods in Cupertino. The thing is: cracked iPhones are cool now! The splinters displayed as a badge of honor here in New York. You have your demolished jeans, you have your beat-up apartment in deep Bed-Stuy. Now you can have your tough-looking mobile personal communication device.

(Can iPhones come pre-cracked, to save time? Sure. Why not.)

Adjusting to the new reality, we found ourself newly in possession of a blighted device, the dark face that once sprang to life with a single click blanketed in a spider web of broken glass, chunks of the sharp stuff falling out as we turned it over in our fingers.

But you know what? It looked pretty awesome.

“I’ve noticed that some iPhone users see cracks as street cred,” a writer told me. “Like, I was balling out with my phone so hard that I dropped the thing, cracked it, and I’m STILL using it.’ A cracked iPhone is clearly superior to any other type of phone that doesn’t have a crack in it.”

We had put out a notice on Twitter—how iPhone-appropriate!—asking those who’ve carried around a shattered phone in their pocket to come clean. Some replaced them out of shame, others sucked it up.

“[I’m] on my 4th iPhone,” one said. “Parents said the cracked one(s) made me look poor.”

“Psh I’m still on smartphone I think lucky #13,” tweeted another. “Maybe this one will last more than 5 months???”

“Oh man, mine was shattered and the butt of jokes for MONTHS but then it got stolen,” said one more. “Does that count?”

Yes, that counts.

Oftentimes it’s just laziness keeping New Yorkers from fixing their phones. Brian Phothimat, a tech fixer-upper who claims to be able to replace your screen in “5-35 minutes,” said with discernable dismay that he knows people who wait inexcusable amounts of time to get new screens.

“I have clients who sometimes wait 2 to 3 months because it’s not that important to them,” he said

(He then noted he was on the phone from Hawaii, on vacation. In the event of a dropped phone in the next week, well, his clients would be flat out of luck.)

“It gets really bad—when they try to slide it in they cut their hands,” he went on. “Your cell phone is your livelihood! It’s not good to look at. I cracked my iPhone three times and I had to get it fixed right away!”

Well, evidently many others feel differently. After talking about this for a while, we started getting tips, unprompted, from friends. There would be cracked iPhones at parties, cracked iPhones at the office, cracked iPhones on buses in and out of the city.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, our iPhone buzzed with a text from a close college friend who had just finished brunch in Brooklyn with four male acquaintances.

“Playing Taboo at a beer garden,” the text read. “One of them has a cracked iPhone.”

“Noted,” we typed back.

Another ping.

“Apparently there’s a background that is a picture of a crack.”

That is true, but cracked backgrounds are only the beginning. At this moment, just a few single clicks and you will be in possession of cracked iPhone wallpapers, cracked iPhone screen savers, cracked iPhone apps and cracked iPhone games.

Not all cracked iPhone apps are made equal, mind you. Being thrifty, we first picked up “Crack Me Up Lite”—it was free—which does little more than let you browse through none-to-convincing pictures of impact-heavy glass, and then blow them up full screen. Boring. So we ponied up a dollar for “Shattered Screen Joke,” which added one key element of a cracked iPhone app: the high-pitched exaggerated ka-pleesh! sound that attempts to intimate what it sounds like when an actual accident occurs. A nice touch, but nothing close to the real thing.

The full version of “Crack Me Up,” however, is pretty stellar. When you load one of the backgrounds, you can shake your phone to add more and more cracks, each shatter accompanied by a satisfying crunch. If you don’t have the courage to scuff your iPhone up on the ground, this would no doubt suffice.

But how could The Observer even test these apps out, when our phone lay dormant and unblinking after the four-story fall? The day after, we ventured to the Soho Apple store, where the air was thick with discontent. Every five minutes, another citizen approached the genius bar with a crack, or an iPhone that wouldn't turn on, or a model gashed badly on its bottom USB dock.

The estimate for fixing our phone was $150, and we declined.

Luckily, a friend had an old phone he was set to donate. We met in Williamsburg to complete the exchange. He handed it over at a busy intersection, and as we headed off toward brunch, the sun bounced off the screen and through the blinding rays we saw, across the top, a big visible crack. We thanked him and slipped the phone into our pocket.

nfreeman@observer.com

There are options: the trilby, the baseball cap, the cloche, the kepi, the newsboy, the porkpie, the pageboy, the bowler, the beret, the Stetson, the fedora, the Milan, the cycling cap, and the fake fur hat.

Such a wide variety of exotic millinery is enough to merit a tidy little trend piece in the paper of record. The New York Times visted such headwear hotspots as Everyman Espresso and the Stumptown at the Ace Hotel to find the ways in which workers abide by the hygiene code that calls for hair-restraining apparati. 

For some, the hat is an extension of the soul.

While a baseball cap would let Nicole Slaven, the owner of Dora, fulfill any legal requirements, she puts on a “mood altering” forest green cloche that she says makes her feel more “polite and refined.”

Adam Schleimer, of Joe, wears a dark blue kepi, a Civil War hat that suits his 19th-century beard; Trevor Dunaway, who works in a Van Leeuwen Artisanal Ice Cream coffee truck, covers his mohawk with a wool newsboy.

So many ways to assert your personal brand, so little time.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Piers Morgan Defends A Cell-Abusing Arianna

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

The Post brings us the flimsiest of flimsy trend stores with the obligatory two divorce lawyers and a marriage counselor who say that couples can't afford to make one household into two. “These days, the negative financial consequences for couples to get divorced can really outweigh the limitations on their freedom,” said Joseph Cilona, a Manhattan psychologist who has counseled all of two clients who called off their divorces for monetary reasons. “It’s a different landscape out there since the economy has tanked.”

We decided to wade into the age-old question of whether additional financial pressures or the difficulty of selling a home in the current market has led couples to hold off on splitting, only to discover it's a bit of a swamp. The number of divorces in New York State did, indeed, decline sharply in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available. Experts say that's surprising, since usually divorce rates spike due to the financial stress, and that it could be because this time around it's couples can't sell their homes.

But, in the end, of course, the heart wants what it wants. “There’s an old joke,” said divorce lawyer Randall M. Kessler. “Why is a divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth it. Now it better really be worth it.”

lkusisto@observer.com