{"id":201555,"date":"2026-08-27T17:56:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T01:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201555"},"modified":"2026-08-27T19:12:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T03:12:44","slug":"weht-to-moxie-aka-madison-slade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201555","title":{"rendered":"WEHT to Moxie aka Madison Slade?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a few years in the early 2000s, Los Angeles<\/a> had a blogging scene small enough that everybody in it knew everybody else. People met at parties in Silver Lake<\/a> and on the Westside<\/a>. Newspaper writers read the blogs and then drank with the bloggers. A link turned into an introduction, an introduction into a friendship, a blogroll into a social life. The cost of entry was a domain name and a willingness to publish under your own name, or under a name you invented.<\/p>\n

One of the women in that world called herself Moxie.<\/p>\n

Her site, moxie.nu, went up in October 2000. She wrote about dating, men, work, Los Angeles, politics, friendship and herself. By 2002 she was moving through the same rooms as Cathy Seipp<\/a> (1957-2007), Amy Alkon<\/a>, Tony Pierce<\/a>, Marc Weisblott<\/a>, Matt Welch<\/a> and the people orbiting the Los Angeles Press Club<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I went looking for her today and found that the trail stops in the summer of 2007. I suspect Marc knows what happened. <\/p>\n

Moxie had a second public name. In November 2002, The Jewish Journal<\/em><\/a> published \u201cThe Matchmakers\u201d<\/a> under the byline Madison Slade. The contributor note called the author \u201cMadison \u2018Moxie\u2019 Slade,\u201d described her as a Los Angeles freelance writer, and pointed readers to her website. Other bloggers of the period used the same construction, calling her Madison Slade, aka Moxie.<\/p>\n

That is her own byline, published by her, linked by her to her own blog. When I profiled her in 2003<\/a>, I noted that Moxie was not her real name, and Madison Slade may have been a professional name standing between her private identity and her Internet persona. There are a good number of women named Madison Slade alive today. I have no evidence connecting any of them to her.<\/p>\n

I met her through the Canadian writer Marc Weisblott, who visited Los Angeles in 2002. In May 2003, I interviewed Moxie over lunch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She told me she grew up on Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side<\/a>. Her father was a CEO. She graduated from Cornell<\/a> with a double major in biochemistry and marketing. She spent five years in high tech in San Francisco<\/a> and five more in Los Angeles, making six figures before the dot-com crash<\/a>. Then she lost the job.<\/p>\n

\u201cI needed a structured way to write every day,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

So in October 2000 she started moxie.nu. She had kept a diary as a girl. The blog turned a private habit into a public one. By 2003 she claimed an Alexa<\/a> ranking around 90,000, which sounds like nothing and at the time meant something. The traffic mattered less than what the traffic brought her. A party Brian Linse gave in July 2002 changed her life. She met Tony Pierce there, and Pierce introduced her to everyone else. A woman who had been sitting alone at a keyboard writing about her own week acquired a circle of friends who could be met for lunch.<\/p>\n

I asked how her life might have gone without the site.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d have an entirely different group of friends,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019d probably never write.\u201d<\/p>\n

The early Los Angeles blogosphere<\/a> was porous. The walls between amateurs and professionals had not gone up. Kevin Roderick\u2019s<\/a> LA Observed<\/em><\/a> linked bloggers next to news organizations. Blogging.la<\/em><\/a> gathered writers including Xeni Jardin<\/a> (b. 1970), Wil Wheaton<\/a> (b. 1972) and Moxie. People broke small stories, argued with each other in comments, and then met for drinks in Hollywood<\/a>. This was before Facebook<\/a> absorbed personal networking, before Twitter<\/a> turned everyone into a broadcaster, and before online writing became a job category called content. A blog was a thing a person decided to make.<\/p>\n

Cathy Seipp sat at the center of one cluster of it. Cathy and Amy Alkon kept alive the old tradition of Los Angeles writers meeting in person. Matt Welch has described being pulled into their monthly dinners, where bloggers, magazine writers, newspaper people and various media eccentrics mixed.<\/p>\n

Moxie became one of Cathy\u2019s friends. You can see it in the small stuff. In a 2006 LAist<\/em><\/a> interview with Cathy<\/a>, Cathy said the television critics tour had been more fun because Moxie and Emmanuelle Richard drove her there for much of it.<\/p>\n

Cathy Seipp died of lung cancer<\/a> on March 21, 2007.<\/p>\n

Amy Alkon\u2019s account of Cathy\u2019s final days<\/a> puts Moxie at Cedars-Sinai<\/a> near the end, sitting beside the bed, stroking Cathy\u2019s hair, asking Amy to read aloud a tribute Mark Steyn<\/a> (b. 1959) had written. Moxie was at the funeral two days later. I wrote about the funeral<\/a>, which pulled in a good part of the Los Angeles media world. On June 10 a smaller group gathered at the television writer Rob Long\u2019s<\/a> house for Cathy\u2019s closest writer friends. Moxie was there too, and I wrote about that gathering<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If Cathy\u2019s death drove Moxie off the Internet, it did not do so at once. That summer she pushed further in. She started an Internet radio<\/a> program called MoxVox on a service called NowLive, and Tony Pierce joined her on it. On August 15, 2007, LAist<\/em> invited readers to listen<\/a> to Tony and \u201cLA blogger Moxie\u201d going out live, with a call-in line and a chatroom. That sounds like nothing now. In 2007 she was building, without a name for it yet, the thing that became podcasting<\/a> and livestreaming<\/a> and the personality economy.<\/p>\n

On August 30, Ann Althouse<\/a> (b. 1951) appeared on MoxVox. Althouse\u2019s contemporaneous blog archive<\/a> records the appearance, and Moxie came into the comments afterward to defend the joke in her own masthead. So she was online, in public, arguing about a slogan, on the night of August 30, 2007.<\/p>\n

Then the record stops.<\/p>\n

There is no obituary. No scandal, no announced retirement, no falling-out with the circle, no illness. I searched 2008 through 2012 for combinations of Moxie, moxie.nu, MoxVox, Seipp, Alkon, Pierce, Roderick and the Press Club, and found recycled references to the old blog and no new appearances by her. Searching Madison Slade produces the same silence. In March 2008 OC Weekly<\/em><\/a> published \u201cA Year Without Cathy Seipp\u201d<\/a> and mentioned Cathy\u2019s pal Moxie in passing, which tells us she was still a familiar person to that crowd and does not tell us she was still writing. Later references are memory rather than contact.<\/p>\n

On the written blog, the last handle I have is a July 17, 2007 link from Brady Westwater<\/a> to a post at moxie.nu<\/a>. I searched for the ten post numbers that would have followed it and found none indexed. Search engines drop old pages, so this proves little, though it points the same direction as everything else. A site at caib.us<\/a> holds a chunk of the old moxie.nu database, mostly 2004 and 2005, including a post about moving four years of material to a new server and a piece about her cat Nika going with her to Cornell. That looks like a scraped or repurposed copy of her archive. The remaining route is the Internet Archive<\/a>, whose 2007 capture calendar for the domain.<\/p>\n

Going back to my 2003 interview, the ending looks less strange than it did.<\/p>\n

She was already counting the cost. Men she dated disliked becoming material. Some of them did not know about the site at all. She had started leaving her relationships out of it. \u201cI\u2019ve pulled back on the writing,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s limiting.\u201d She was spending less time on the blog and more time looking for work and seeing the friends the blog had produced. The site had built her a life, and the life could now compete with the site.<\/p>\n

Asked what she loved and hated about having a website, she said: \u201cI don\u2019t think I hate anything about it. I don\u2019t love it either. It just is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nobody talks that way now. A person with an audience is expected to preserve it, monetize it, migrate it across platforms and convert every scrap of attention into a permanent public self. Moxie came out of an earlier Internet, where people started blogs because they felt like writing and then stopped when they stopped feeling like it.<\/p>\n

The history of blogging suffers from survivorship bias<\/a>. We remember the ones who turned a blog into a career. Andrew Sullivan<\/a> (b. 1963). Glenn Reynolds<\/a> (b. 1960). Josh Marshall<\/a> (b. 1969). Matthew Yglesias<\/a> (b. 1981). They moved to Twitter<\/a> and Substack<\/a> and podcasts and books, and they left long searchable trails. That was the exception. Most bloggers vanished. Domains expired, links rotted<\/a>, Movable Type<\/a> installations went dark, Photobucket<\/a> ate the photographs, comment threads disappeared, and the indexes forgot the rest.<\/p>\n

From 2000 to 2007, Moxie documented her life in public, gathered readers, joined an emerging media scene, turned online contacts into friendships, and grew close enough to Cathy Seipp to sit with her at the end. Then, as the Internet was moving toward permanent identity, she went the other way.<\/p>\n

Madison Slade was also a pen name. Maybe she married. Maybe she went back into technology, or left Los Angeles, or decided there were better uses for an evening than telling strangers about her afternoon. She has had eighteen years of quiet and no obligation to explain them.<\/p>\n

What I can say is that the absence has no catastrophe in it. She stopped. She stopped early enough that Facebook<\/a>, LinkedIn<\/a>, Instagram<\/a> and the rest of the identity apparatus had not yet made stopping impossible, and so it worked. She was born into the first great wave of ordinary people putting their private lives on the public Internet, and she found the exit the rest of us have mislaid.<\/p>\n

She logged off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a few years in the early 2000s, Los Angeles had a blogging scene small enough that everybody in it knew everybody else. People met at parties in Silver Lake and on the Westside. Newspaper writers read the blogs and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201555"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201566,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201555\/revisions\/201566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}