I'm not all that surprised that the New York Times has decided that the hatred of my home neighborhood of Park Slope has reached the level of "trend" deserving of a Sunday style-section story. After all, New York City seems to be locked in a battle over its soul, and Park Slope is the most high-profile habitat of the sort of self-obsessed urban dweller that every New Yorker loves to demean and is terrified of becoming. And seriously, the number of strollers on Slope sidewalks on any given weekend can indeed be downright maddening.
What I do find surprising is that in that piece the Times used "Twittering" as a capitalized adjective with no explanation:
By the same token, when we talk about "people who hate Park Slope," we are talking in large part about a certain stratum of the chattering, Twittering class. "This whole thing sounds like white people being annoyed by and jealous of other white people, which I find kind of funny," said James Bernard, a union organizer and a member of the local Community Board 6.
I can't imagine that Twitter has reached the level of shared cultural trope. How many people do you think read that and thought "what the huh?"
