Screenshot of The Hairpin.

Gawker Media's Emma Carmichael will take the reins at The Hairpin from founding editor Edith Zimmerman, who is stepping down after running the site since it launched in October 2010. The switch was announced in a post on The Awl this morning.

Ms. Carmichael left Gawker, where she was the managing editor, to become the managing editor of Deadspin in January. When she made the change, Gawker's Nick Denton said that she was "on a site lead track for us." Looks like Ms. Carmichael was on a site lead track, just at a different site--one founded by former Gawker editors.

"If Edith and all the rest of us had sat around in a circle on the floor of the office with blindfolds on (as we so often do) and secret-balloted names in a hat for who we all wanted to run The Hairpin now, it would have been like 100% pieces of paper that said 'Emma Carmichael' on them," The Awl editor Choire Sicha said in an email. "Kind of like on 'Survivor' when everyone hates one person and they unanimously vote them off the island, except in total reverse! She has to come live on our crazy made-up island now!"

"Emma is excellent, and I'm so happy she wanted to join!" Ms. Zimmerman told us. "And I have no idea what I'm going to do."

According to a conversation between the outgoing and incoming editors that was posted on The Hairpin this morning, Ms. Zimmerman will continue at the site during the transition before taking a break. But the founding editor is not leaving for good.

"I'll sometimes write for the site, but otherwise be doing ... whatever it is that I'm going to be doing," Ms. Zimmerman wrote on The Hairpin.

This change comes on the heels of last week's announcement that Nicole Cliffe, The Hairpin's book editor, was leaving to start a new site with The Hairpin contributor Mallory Ortberg that sounds not very dissimilar from The Awl network's sister site.

Marnell. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

At last night’s Housing Works panel on the legacy of the late Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, Vice columnist Cat Marnell stood out. Wearing a tight, translucent white dress and leather jacket, she snapped her gum, played with her hair and  alternately stared wide-eyed at the audience or down at her phone.

“I hate Gloria Steinem,” she announced at one point. “She’s boring and plain. My kind of feminism is that you want to be hot and awesome.”

Ms. Marnell was one of three panelists, along with Jezebel founding editor Moe Tkacik and Hairpin editor Edith Zimmerman, who gathered to discuss Gurley Brown and her efforts to help “mouseburgers” like herself have not only great sex, but all the money, recognition, authority and respect they deserved. At the panel, moderated by woman's magazine vet Alison Brower, Ms. Tkacik addressed her political leanings: “Before I was a Marxist, I was a slut.”

Ms. Zimmerman, seated between two voluble speakers, was more reserved, but she spoke with authority on the balancing act that comes with a career in gendered media, noting that while The Hairpin tried to escape the anti-feminist tropes of women’s magazines, its founders at The Awl network knew “There’s money to be made from advertising to females.”

Ms. Zimmerman, who wrote about the international Cosmo conference in Madrid for The New York Times, also noted how while, in the U.S., Cosmo “is sort of a punch line,” it has a stronger influence today in countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan where it’s still “the only source for female issues and relationship issues.”

Which is a well-taken point, but somehow this didn’t register quite as strongly on the Richter scale of provocation as the volley that followed between Ms. Tkacik and Ms. Marnell, with the former Jezebel blogger noting that women in the Middle East would not be liberated by Cosmopolitan, and the Vice blogger suggesting that at least the magazine would show them how to have "sex in a doghouse."

And while Ms. Zimmerman was ambivalent about the role that kowtowing to advertisers played in women’s media, Ms. Marnell saw a role for traditional beauty products, with a saucy twist: “I think that money’s awesome. That’s what drives things.” She had sabotaged a $250,000 deal with Proctor and Gamble for a piece on “lipstick that won’t come off on a dick.”

The spirit of Ms. Brown lives on in some form, it would seem, though Ms. Marnell is more interested in a male pioneer. “My publishing idol is Larry Flynt," she said only to be one-upped by Ms. Tkacik who jumped in with her own anecdote about the girly mag publisher.

"One time," she said, "Larry Flynt offered Gloria Steinem $1 million if she posed open pussy.”

She didn’t do it. For this generation, that makes her a mouseburger.

Update: This post has been updated from the original. Ms. Tkacik made the statement about Gloria Steinem and Larry Flynt. Not Ms. Marnell.

Rachel Fershleiser, Nick Douglas and Molly McArdle. (Photo credit:Jesse Chan-Norris)

We have reached a stage in the life of New York or the life of literature (or both) where a glance at the bio of most contemporary authors inevitably ends with the words “lives in Brooklyn.” Not surprisingly, a literary festival exists to celebrate the borough’s bibliophiles. The Brooklyn Book Festival, which will take place this Sunday, means that many writers won’t even have to get on the subway in order to read aloud and sit on panels in front of enthusiastic readers.

To kick off the literary festivities prior to the literary Festival, Tumblr, Electric Literature, The New Inquiry and the Los Angeles Review of Books threw a party. (Book people love parties.) Shindigger, being notionally bookish ourselves, followed the parade of tote bags until we reached the Williamsburg event space Public Assembly. After getting a temporary tattoo stamped on our inner wrist, we entered the darkened hall.

The drinks were cheap, the music loud and the lights dim as publishing professionals, indie writers, indie booksellers and indie magazine editors shouted above the DJ to discuss Important Contemporary Fiction and trade industry gossip.

“Anything by Lorrie Moore speaks to a certain kind of person,” novelist Jami Attenberg said when we asked her what books she recommends. “Junot Díaz is a fucking genius—can I say that?” We were unsure if she meant the sentiment or the swear.

“The funny thing about book parties is that you take a bunch of introverts, put them in a room and get them drunk,” said Jason Oberholtzer. Mr. Olberholtzer is a Tumblr success story—his Tumblr, I Love Charts, was turned into a book of the same name.

Tumblr stickers and pins (the sort middle-schoolers affix to their jean jackets) were strewn around the tables. Greenpoint bookstore Word sold books by authors who are speaking at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, and the paperbacks went first and fast.

“This is my event—$3 gin and juice, what’s not to like?” Edith Zimmerman, editor of The Hairpin, told us when we asked her plans for the festival. Has she read anything exciting recently? “I just read the internet. It’s terrible.” She sipped on her gin and juice, and we suppose she looked laid back.

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets author Kathleen Alcott looked more Madison Avenue than Bedford Avenue with her bright blond hair, pocketbook and well-cut pastel outfit. Although we thought she was too put-together to be at a party with $3 drink specials, as it turns out, Ms. Alcott does, in fact, live in Brooklyn.

“You must get this all the time, but what are you listening to  now?” we overheard someone ask New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.

“I have a Google Doc,” replied Mr. Frere-Jones. We weren’t sure whether he was offering to share the document or not.

“I’m excited about my own book—am I allowed to say that?” asked Cole Stryker, author of Hacking the Future. We assured him he was.

“As far as lit parties, this one has the dimmest lighting. Usually, they have bright lighting,” Mr. Stryker explained. “There are a lot of nervous people here wondering if there’s going to be dancing.”

As we walked away from Mr. Stryker, we heard a cluster of young men in plaid debating the lack of a lifestyle magazine “for teenage guys.”

If, as Mr. Stryker suggested, people were wondering whether there was going to be dancing, they didn’t have to wonder for long.

“People are already dancing. Jesus,” someone said, near the vicinity of the dance floor. It was only 8:30.

Sean Howe, who has a book coming out on the history of Marvel Comics, told us that he was going to speak on a panel with legendary Nation editor Victor Navasky. Was he nervous?

“The last time I was on a panel, I got tunnel vision,” replied Mr. Howe. Why put himself through that again? He shrugged.

Matthew Specktor, the senior fiction editor of the LA Review of Books, a host of the event, represented the West Coast. The drink specials were $3 Brooklyn lager and $3 gin and juice, and the Facebook invitation suggested that the drinks were standing in for a proxy battle between coasts.

Well, who was winning?

“Everyone here is involved in literature, so we are all winning or losing together,” he said, adding, “There is more than enough literary seriousness in LA to power a small nation.”

Although Mr. Spector told us that the East Coast/West Coast divide is false, he did roll his eyes when mentioning Southern Californians’ penchant for yoga and juice cleanses. Since we walked by three yoga studios and one sterile-looking new juice cleanse bar just on the walk from Bedford to the party, we assured him that New York wasn’t that different.

Mr. Spector nodded, we think a bit sadly (although that may have been reflected glow from the disco ball).

“Incandescent joy, unbridled happiness, metaphysical ecstasy,” gushed Rachel Rosenfelt, the editor-in-chief and founder of lit mag The New Inquiry, when asked about her night.

“There are a lot of blazers in play, and the dancing is hilarious,” said Amy Rose Spiegel, a Rookie Mag writer. She had very long false eyelashes, which we found impressive. “I’m having a bawl,” she added, requesting that we spell it to reflect her Jersey pronunciation.

People did seem to be having a good time. Nevertheless, when we heard one partygoer say, “She’s, like, doing something about smells and cultural associations,” we decided it was time to leave.

Molly Young.

What makes a Molly?

Molly Lambert.

They were three exemplars of the value of a well-constructed personal brand, and each is now more than merely Internet-famous. Ms. Young contributes regularly to New York after leaving a job at the Daily; Ms. Lambert works for Grantland, where she now sticks images of celebrities between her paragraphs on ESPN’s dime; Ms. McAleer launched a women’s-interest site, HelloGiggles, with the actress Zooey Deschanel, and is a writer for the new CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls.

 

Molly McAleer.

I Gchatted a friend who works in finance to tell her I’d been assigned to write a piece on “the Mollys.” She replied “write it in the p.o.v. of edith z.” The Hairpin blogger Edith Zimmerman may be the Molliest of Mollys. She wrote bizarre and fantastical fake letters from women’s magazines for The Awl and ghost stories on her personal blog. She brought that brand of flustered, wacky pixieishness first to The Hairpin, the women’s interest site she edits, then to a GQ cover profile of Chris Evans. The piece, which was controversial even among the magazine’s editors, was more revelatory of Ms. Zimmerman’s half-self-deprecating exultation of her L.A. exploits than of anything Captain America had to say, in the same way that Molly Young’s New York articles sneak in turns of phrase like “weenie-tuggers” and “girl crush," and Molly Lambert smuggles fan-fic footnotes about how Kate Moss is like “the cool best friend who knows all the good shows and parties to go to and brings you” onto Grantland. Another freelance writer, Marisa Meltzer, posted a photo of herself doing the “hand-heart” gesture on her Tumblr after publishing a piece on the phenomenon in the New York Times Styles section; she also posted a picture of her bedroom, suggesting that she considered submitting it to a blog of teenage bedrooms though she is “aged way the fuck out” now. Mollyish writing hinges on a cute mashup of ingratiating cuteness (hand-heart! Weenie-tuggers!) and hard ambition (the Times! New York!), starring a narrator in on the joke.

Such is the appeal of Mollyism—especially to straight, male dude-itors—that the literary eye-lash batting generally manages to survive the delicate transition from personal blog to print. (Whether Ms. McAleer’s voice will make the trickier leap to TV remains to be seen, but examples like that of Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Meltzer indicates that the blog voice can thrive in print.)

According to Wired editor Bill Wasik, the Mollys are doing what writers have always done. “It's pretty common and always been common that you start with voicier writing in less established organs,” said  “and you move to better- established organs that pay better and you bring the writing, but you show that you can report out and structure and bulletproof a magazine feature.”

But voicey is one thing. The Mollys have taken to a whole other level. The intimacies of Tumblr have vastly amplified the confessional mode. As Maud Newton noted in a recent essay in the Times Magazine (which briefly employed Ms. Zimmerman as a web columnist), there’s a frantically conversational tone on social media: “‘Oh, hi,’ people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.” Ms. Newton phrased this as a universal concern--perhaps we're all a little bit Molly.

Tumblr happens to be a nearly perfect platform for showcasing a writer’s wry take or sharp attitude while requiring minimal effort. “Sometimes, you see a blogger where they’ve only written two sentences, but they’re really witty,” said Jezebel editor Jessica Coen. “Tumblr’s really easy to read and you can go through 100 entries in ten minutes.”

The coquettish particularities of Tumblr as a platform—which encourages a sort of literary fan dance, in which a writer’s identity remains largely hidden even as she’s laying bare her interior monologue—invite a certain amount of projection from readers. Choire Sicha, proprietor of The Awl and a keen observer of the Molly phenomenon, noted over Gchat that “my problem is that digital presence is weirdly so obscuring? it's like, you look at someone's tumblr and you're like, what the fuck is your name? what's your email? where DO YOU WORK, HOW OLD ARE YOU?”

Near instant reader feedback also encourages a certain style of writing. “I remember the days of Tumblarity,” said Maura Johnston, music editor of the Village Voice, recalling an early feature of the platform that ranked users based on their readers’ devotion. “If I write something, I do hit the reload button to see if people have responded to it… it’s the blogger’s dilemma: you can work really hard on something that’s thought out and reasoned or you can post about ‘I fell in love today and this is why’—and that greeting card-ready stuff will triumph.”

“One of the things that’s been lost in this new, fast publishing age,” Ms. Johnston added, “is this grooming period for a lot of young writers thrown into the deep end after school. You see things like Thought Catalog”—the website full of glum young boys and girls curating confessions about themselves in a super-breezy tone—“and you don’t have people thinking about things. There are a lot of lazy constructions or lazy ideas.”

Which is not to say that there’s not considerable drive behind the cozy bed-head tics—just that the ambition is tempered by an appealingly easygoing quality. “Mollys just want to have fun,” Mr. Sicha pointed out. “That’s why they’re so endearing, even when they’re glum or emo or sincere… But they’re full of kicks.”

Mr. Wasik said that the kicks are hardly going to damage the writers’ credibility: “We're entering an era where it's not as if, if you want to write an essay for The New Yorker, they’re going to be freaked out by the fact that you have this Tumblr devoted to being funny or being silly. People get that writers have different sides to their personality.”

That presumes people can tell the Mollys apart. Ms. McAleer, the 2 Broke Girls writer, said: “It happens to me all the time—people say, ‘I read your stuff on Grantland every day.’” Molly is a memorable name, so people will assume that it’s all the same person.” She and Ms. Lambert, both of whom live in Los Angeles, are friends.

“We’ve all gotten emails for the other Mollys,” said Ms. Lambert. “It’ll go back and forth a few times before you realize it’s meant for someone else.”

Ms. Young, who lives in New York, stands apart, and declined an interview request. She told The Observer via email: “I just don't think that anyone gives a shit about me, even if I share a name with these cool people.” Super Mollyish thing to say.

And there’s always an up-and-comer. “No molly list now is complete with[out] molly oswaks,” Mr. Sicha told us via Gchat, of a writer whose work (“Mad Men’s Betty Draper Is A Real Bummer,” “The Melodrama of Miley Cyrus”) has been featured on Thought Catalog and in The Believer. “THERE’S A NEW MOLLY,” he told us. “MOVE OVER MOLLIES.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Molly McAleer

What makes a Molly?

Three well-known Internet writers--Molly Young, Molly Lambert, and Molly McAleer--share more than a name. The three have long attracted attention for their similar methods of self-promotion on the blogging platforms Tumblr and Twitter.

Along with the other Awl sister site Splitsider and new sponsorship deals with companies such as Ann Taylor, The Hairpin is helping make The Awl a profitable enterprise for the first time since its April 2009 launch. In a piece in The New York Times today, publisher David Cho told David Carr that the site will bring in $200,000 this year and could "realistically expect to be in the low millions in terms of annual revenue in the next 18 months."

Carr also tweeted, but did not include in the piece, the news that The Awl would soon be paying its writers — something that a lack of funds had made impossible before. 

The Hairpin will be run by Edith Zimmerman, late of New York magazine's Vulture blog, with help from Liz Colville, a writer for Pitchfork and former editor of Spinner, an AOL music site. 

The Awl may be finally breaking even, but the Times piece  — entitled "Against Odds, Web Site Finds Niche" — detailed the struggles the site has faced in its march toward profitability. When an anonymous donor sent Awl co-founder Choire Sicha a few hundred dollars, for example, it went toward food. 

"Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out," Sicha said. 

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234