Salad days / Happy hours
Today: Carrie Frye, writer and book editor at Black Cardigan Edit; and Anna Merlan, author of REPUBLIC OF LIES: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.
Issue No. 450
Women Laughing Again On The Internet
Carrie Frye
The Fabulous Fern Bar
Anna Merlan
HYDRANYM No. 26
The Editors
Women Laughing Again On the Internet
by Carrie Frye
Sometime last year the online archives of The Awl—the influential blog that ran from 2009-2018, and former home of many a Flaming Hydra contributor—went out, like a light switching off. Meanwhile, the archives of its sibling site, the beloved, brilliant, wonderfully askew The Hairpin, had suffered an even worse fate.
When thehairpin.com’s domain registration accidentally lapsed in 2023, it was snapped up by an internet entrepreneur who began operating the domain as an AI chum farm. The new owners served up historic posts, like the viral “Women Laughing Alone With Salad,” with fake bylines and gobs of random spam verbiage. It was a horrifying zombie afterlife for some of the best, and most fun, writing of those days.
For The Hairpin’s contributors, it also meant that you were going to find it hard, sometimes impossible, to get copies of your work to save. As part of last year’s fundraiser at Kickstarter, Flaming Hydra undertook to help both sites get back online. I used to work as The Awl’s managing editor and wanted to help. We were heartened early on by the help of Flaming Hydra reader and tech superfriend, Eli Dickinson. The aid of a programmer named Lowell Allen, aka my husband, was then enlisted; Lowell worked with Choire Sicha, The Awl’s co-founder, and former Awl programmer Dusty Matthews to get the lights back on. The Awl half of the project turned out to be fairly simple—with the brilliant result that you can now visit the site at its OG URL, and the majority of the links are, thankfully, still intact.
Keep us breathing fire!
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