BroBos v. BoBos

In his entertaining essay “BroBos in Paradise,” a pun on David Brooks’s pop-culture treatise BoBos in Paradise, Leon Neyfakh explores what he calls a new variation on Brooks’s term “Bourgeois Bohemians,” or BoBos.

Neyfakh calls them Brooklyn Bourgeois Bohemians, or Brobos. “Young, comfortable and inclined toward creativity, they enjoy a utopian-seeming existence…. An existence only occasionally marred by the realization that this is not the hopped-up New York they came to conquer.” He talks to Matt Power and The New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe among others to dig up the motivations behind moving to or steering clear of the outerborough and gets a little at the heart of what it means to be a New Yorker.

Photo: Brian Branch Price

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Rozalia Jovanovic is a founding editor of Gigantic, a magazine of short prose and art. She is the Deputy Editor of Flavorpill and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Columbia University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming from Unsaid, The Believer, Everyday Genius, Guernica, elimae, and Esquire.com. She blogs at The Astonishing Egg and is The Rumpus New York Editor.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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