The Toast

» see the-toast.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Toast sat in the part of the english-language internet i can read about but cannot personally remember being inside of. It was a US literary feminist blog with a specific audience that did not extend across the atlantic in any visible way to a turkish computer engineer reading hacker news and donanimhaber. The site launched on january 7, 2013, was co-founded by Nicole Cliffe and the writer then publishing as Mallory Ortberg, and shut its publishing operation on july 1, 2016. The shutdown was a planned closure announced six weeks in advance, not a collapse.

The Toast was not part of any larger network. Cliffe and Ortberg had met while writing for The Hairpin, which sat inside the Awl Network, and the visual and tonal lineage of the Toast was close to The Hairpin's. The publisher of the Toast was Nicholas Pavich and the site was operated independently. A sister site called The Butter, edited by Roxane Gay, launched in october 2014 and closed in september 2015. The Toast itself ran for three and a half years and produced a defined house style that other sites tried to imitate without quite reaching.

The closing post on may 13, 2016 was direct about the reason. The display-ad market had moved away from independent literary publications, and the two founders were running careers that the site was no longer big enough to anchor. Ortberg took over the Dear Prudence advice column at Slate in 2016. The Toast archive stayed online and was eventually accessioned by the Library of Congress in january 2018.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

The Toast had a house format that read like a small literary magazine running on a wordpress install. Ortberg's "Texts From" series imagined sms threads between historical or fictional characters and was the recurring viral piece on the site. The "Children's Stories Made Horrific" series rewrote classic kids' books into stories that read like edgar allan poe drafts. A separate vein of art-history posts treated baroque paintings and medieval marginalia as comedy material with serious art-historical footing under the joke. Ortberg later described the imagined audience of the site as librarians, which was a useful way to set the upper bound of how much pop-culture explanation the posts needed to do.

The tone was the entire product. The Toast did not chase traffic and did not run lifestyle service pieces. Comment threads were a small named community rather than a drive-by audience, and the moderation was tight enough that the comments often read better than the posts on competing sites. That comment-thread culture is the part of the Toast that vanished cleanly with the shutdown and that nothing has reproduced on twitter or on substack.

~ how it actually ended ~

The shutdown post landed on may 13, 2016 and was signed by both founders. The economic argument was that display ads on a literary blog had stopped paying enough to fund the staff time the site required, and that they were not willing to switch to sponsored content or to a paywall. The personal argument was that Ortberg was leaving for Slate and that neither wanted to hand the site to a new editor.

The publishing schedule wound down through june 2016 and stopped on schedule on july 1. A few farewell posts went up after the date. The site stayed reachable as an archive without a successor product. The closure was, by web-publication standards, a graceful one.

~ what remains ~

The Toast left a specific tonal register that current literary-internet writers still cite. Ortberg's "Texts From" format has been copied into dozens of newsletters and twitter accounts since 2016, mostly without the underlying art-history footing that made the originals work. The Toast also left a small generation of writers who got their first byline there and then moved into magazines and books, which is the older publishing function that the post-2016 web has had a hard time reproducing.

For a turkish reader coming to the archive a decade later the site reads as a snapshot of a particular english-language literary-internet voice that does not translate cleanly into any other regional internet i can compare it to. There was no Toast-equivalent in the turkish-language web, and there is no Toast-equivalent in the english-language web now. The archive remains the only place to see what the format looked like at full strength.

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