One might think that a newspaper called the New York Times, which employs contributors from around the world, in war zones and dictatorships, would be less in awe of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a small patch of concrete just across the East River from its headquarters. And yet this week, the latest Brooklyn joke wasn't so much a joke as it was a 2,000-word New York Times essay about Williamsburg. Get it? Hipsters!

It's true, and soon the hipsters will be reading it on each others' Tumblrs or whatever: Polaroid is getting out of the film business, closing factories and hoping someone will be stupid enough to buy their technology even though they themselves stopped making cameras a year ago. Experts say the move is long overdue, but a dollars and cents calculation misses the awful human toll: literally dozens of young aspiring artists left unable to photograph their ridiculous friends using a retro analog tool that pales and mutes its subjects. The terrifying news has only just begun to trickle through the Polaroid fetishist community. In the meantime, here are some of the hardest hit.