In 2011, the small women's interest blog The Hairpin broke new ground in the field of visual journalism with the iconic post "Women laughing alone with salad."
It was just a collection of stock images of women eating salad, and yet it said more about the state of women and society than hundreds of thousands of words.
That blog post still exists, but instead of Edith Zimmerman's byline, it says it was written by "James Nolen" (who almost certainly does not exist) and has a bunch of AI-written text all about how "women laughing alone with salad" is an internet phenomenon and meme.
Across the site, other AI-generated articles and wonky things seem to appear, and there's a spooky deadness: Something bad happened here.
Wired got to the bottom of what happened: The domain for "thehairpin.com" was accidentally not renewed by its owners, and was bought by someone who snatches up recently expired domains to turn them into zombie sites that can grab ad revenue.
Kate Knibbs reports:
Vujo didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI emailed to the address listed on the site.
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The Hairpin, which was a companion site for The Awl, and a launching pad for writers like Jia Tolentino, Anne Helen Petersen, and Jazmine Hughes, shut down in 2018, but its website and archives were still up.
It's important to note that while the domain name seems to have been bought fair and square when the renewal lapsed, the new owner typically doesn't have rights to, or ownership of, any of the website's content.
Choire Sicha, a cofounder of the Awl Network, which published The Hairpin, told Business Insider that they have sent a letter to the domain's new owner.
It's not clear how Vujo was able to access The Hairpin's content. Sicha says they're still trying to figure it out.
"This entity or person did not purchase The Hairpin," he told Business Insider. "They obtained a domain name. That does not mean they're entitled to things previously published on that website."
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