Yesterday, The New York Times published a profile of teenage Internet personality Bebe Zeva. "Who?" some of you are hopefully asking. Zeva, an 18-year-old from Las Vegas, is friends with Tao Lin and the Thought Catalog crew, and is the girl who models t-shirts on Hipster Runoff. And that's it. She is not a "journalist," as is claimed in this article's lede. I could maybe look past that little fib, but the absurdity doesn't end there.

It starts out at Lodge, the restaurant in Williamsburg, where Zeva and the Thought Catalog squad are assembled. Notes are mine.

"'I wore flared jeans and tight-fitting crewneck T-shirts from the likes of Hollister and Abercrombie up until my second semester of freshman year,' [ed. note: the horror!] Ms. Zeva wrote in an e-mail after the night at Lodge, 'when I made the conscious decision to pursue the hipster lifestyle.' It was around this time, Ms. Zeva recalled, that she went through a period of 'relentlessly' Googling the word 'hipster.' On the Web, she discovered the party photographer Mark, the Cobra Snake, and the blog Hipster Runoff, whose author goes by the name Carles. Both men have since become mentors of a sort."

Carles and the Cobra Snake should be no one's mentors, especially not young teenage girls.

After the meal, the diners were choosing between two parties to attend, one given by Ms. Alexander’s musician friends in Bushwick and another at the offices of Verso Books, in Dumbo, to which Mr. Lin had been invited. 'Which party will have the more relevant people?' Ms. Zeva asked. 'Verso publishes Slavoj Zizek,' Mr. Lin said. Ms. Zeva is an admirer of the Slovenian philosopher [ed. note: really?]. 'Will he be there?' she asked.
Welcome to a world where people at restaurants with their friends actually talk like Carles writes. Tao Lin and his wife Megan Boyle made a documentary about Zeva, the premiere of which was her reason for coming to New York. On the way into the premiere, Zeva ate chicken wings.

“Walking into the premiere eating wings is perfect for my personal brand,” she said.

And the personal brand thing? People say that out loud, too? Not trying to be unnecessarily mean to Ms. Zeva, who, after all, is still a teenager (here's the part where we all shudder collectively at the thought of what we were like at 18), but you kind of have to find it disheartening that a newspaper of record is now running pseudo-celebrity profiles of people whose main distinction is being friends with bloggers.