The Hairpin

» see thehairpin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the hairpin was the kind of women-internet writing that the awl crowd in manhattan made its case on. i was not in that audience. by 2010 i was a computer engineer in ankara on a ttnet adsl line reading donanimhaber threads and hacker news. a women-focused literary blog run out of a few rented brooklyn apartments was something i would have heard about years later if at all.

edith zimmerman launched the hairpin in september 2010 as the sister site to choire sicha and alex balk's the awl. the early stretch is the part people remember best. emma carmichael and jia tolentino came through editing. jolie kerr wrote ask a clean person about laundry stains and oven grime. lindsay king-miller wrote ask a queer chick. jane marie wrote how to be a girl with makeup tutorials shot on a phone. honestly, the voice was personal and weird in a way display-ad publishing did not really know how to monetize.

editing moved across a few hands across the decade. haley mlotek took over in 2014, sylvia killingsworth from 2016. the network around it kept growing and then kept thinning. the awl itself was already losing money by mid-decade as facebook and google split the digital ad market between them. the hairpin had no separate revenue base.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the hairpin was a counter-bet against the gawker-style traffic farm. it ran chronological posts, no algorithmic homepage, no chasing the trending topic. that was the entire model. for the readership that liked it, it was the corner of the women's internet that did not feel optimized.

in those days. it was where you went to read writers before they became names. tolentino went to the new yorker. kerr went to lifehacker and then her own books. carmichael ended up at deadspin and then the new york times magazine. back then. several of the people who edited the site ended up as the bench of women's longform journalism for the next decade.

~ the day it died ~

in early january 2018 the new ownership announced that the site would stop publishing at the end of the month. the awl followed a week later with its own ending notice. honestly, the math just did not work for an editorial site of that size by then. independent display advertising had been a slow decline for years and then it was not really a thing anymore.

~ the long tail ~

i wasnt close to this story, still. for a few years after the shutdown the archives stayed up as a memorial copy. in 2024 the domain was bought by a serbian dj who repurposed it for ai-generated seo content, which is its own kind of grave marker. the writers from the hairpin are mostly still writing somewhere else. the corner of the internet they came up in is just gone.

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