Women Laughing Again On The Internet

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. 

The Hairpin, though, was trickier. The site’s no longer being used as an AI chum farm; there’s currently a placeholder page on it. Still, the domain’s owner hasn’t yet responded to requests to buy the URL back. So we took a different road, and for now, you can find the Hairpin’s archives over at thehairpinarchives.com, where they’ll be stewarded by the site’s founding editor, Edith Zimmerman. (Meanwhile, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved swaths of the site, too—often including their original and wonderful comments.)

We want to thank everyone who supported the Kickstarter last year, and everyone who’s bought copies of The Awl: The Book, for helping us preserve these golden moments in digital culture. And our sincerest thanks, too, to Lowell, to Dusty, and to Eli. It’s fantastic to have this glorious work back again.

I emailed Edith with some questions about the new archives.

What facet of the archives being back up seems most important to you? For me, it’s the writers being able to retrieve their pieces, but I’m curious what yours is.

I just love knowing that everyone’s pieces are googlable and retrievable again. What was that line in [so-and-so’s whatever piece about whatever]? OH YEAH! There’s so much there that was unconscionable to lose. 

I’ve been thinking about something you said last year, when we were tossing around the idea of a printed anthology for the site, about how for you The Hairpin existed as a particularly internet organism that would go dead as a book. Is that an accurate characterization of your thoughts? 

Yes—I love The Awl book, and it made the leap from internet to page really beautifully. I do feel like The Hairpin was very “internet-specific,” so I’m delighted to see it back alive on there/here. It's funny how “old” it looks, by 2025 standards, but it seems nestled in its own time and place. The comments were really intrinsic to the site, so I’m always sad those are gone, but there is an ephemerality to internet stuff, which is part of its appeal, for me. 

I know combing through the Awl archives there were so many pieces and eras and conversations I’d forgotten about. Are there one or two in the Hairpin archives that have leapt out to you?

For whatever reason, at this very moment, what comes to mind are Caity Weaver’s “Sometimes State Flags” and “Sometimes State Quarters,” which I’m now looking at for the first time in years, and Lisa Hanawalt’s “Fashion Week Animals in Hats.” Long live the internet. 

Relive the beautiful times in the comments