gladwell dot com / The Coolhunt: "One day last month, Baysie took me on a coolhunt to the Bronx and Harlem, lugging a big black canvas bag with twenty-four different shoes that Reebok is about to bring out, and as we drove down Fordham Road, she had her head out the window like a little kid, checking out what everyone on the street was wearing. We went to Dr. Jay's, which is the cool place to buy sneakers in the Bronx, and Baysie crouched down on the floor and started pulling the shoes out of her bag one by one, soliciting opinions from customers who gathered around and asking one question after another, in rapid sequence. One guy she listened closely to was maybe eighteen or nineteen, with a diamond stud in his ear and a thin beard. He was wearing a Polo baseball cap, a brown leather jacket, and the big, oversized leather boots that are everywhere uptown right now. Baysie would hand him a shoe and he would hold it, look at the top, and move it up and down and flip it over. The first one he didn't like: 'Oh-kay.' The second one he hated: he made a growling sound in his throat even before Baysie could give it to him, as if to say, 'Put it back in the bag-now!' But when she handed him a new DMX RXT-a low-cut run/walk shoe in white and blue and mesh with a translucent 'ice' sole, which retails for a hundred and ten dollars-he looked at it long and hard and shook his head in pure admiration and just said two words, dragging each of them out: 'No doubt.'"

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