Why should you cancel your New York Times subscription?
In this email, I'll show you how to get articles for free
A few weeks back there was an exodus from New York Times subscriptions. Can you guess why?
It wasn’t because it is easy to rig the book bestseller lists by purchasing 800 copies of your own book in a week and making it look like people want to read it.
It wasn’t because their journalism has less integrity than a buzzfeed blog about the world's cutest cakes, and in fact less integrity than the fluffy cakes themselves.
And it wasn’t because it was a waste of money (we’ll get back to that).
No. People were cancelling their paid NYT subscriptions because the NYT was using the controversy around JK Rowling to advertise their paid service. They were virtue signalling to an imaginary demographic of young people who are simultaneously frothing at the mouth with rage over JK Rowling, and in the market to purchase a subscription to a newspaper that doesn’t say anything interesting. Those people don’t exist.
Basically, the NYT were doing the “Hey fellow young people,” meme. I imagine because their primary audience died during Covid, or when their landlord whacked the heating down by half a degree, or, if they were living in New York themselves, they were beset by giant radioactive rats.
I can’t find the original advert now. It seems to have vanished. But here’s a response to it » https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/02/18/nyt-fire-chilling-advert-inviting-readers-imagine-harry-potter/
It was all very weird, as things often are these days. The ad was shown in the New York subways, and described one imaginary NYT reader as "a harmony of flavours" which is the same wispy feelgood sickly nonsense that pervades most poetry shelves now. It's a weird sales tactic... and it made me feel unwell in many ways. If I ever hear that kind of nonsense at a poetry reading, I go to the bar.
What is exceptionally interesting (and creepy) about the whole thing is this slant on “Imagining Harry Potter without its creator”. It seems the sort of young people the NYT is desperately groping toward like a disgraced politician are the sorts of young people who are into that postmodern erasure of history, but who can’t comprehend that other authors exist. This obsession with keeping JK’s books but abandoning JK is funny, as there are so many books out there.
But time must be rewritten, like some bad Dr Who plot. The author is dead (conceptually, though they may also be actually dead in some books) and the literature is plucked from its context, torn from its creator and reframed. It’s a very weird thing. And the NYT has swooped into this understandably very heated debate and decided to yell:
“HEY GUYS, BUY OUR SHIT PLEASE”
It is the same sort of vapid, empty virtue signalling that rises up within clothing companies whenever the rainbow month comes along. They will hunt down a demographic probably inspired by a CEO’s teenage child, then target the living hell out of them. They don’t care about the people they are selling to, of course, but pretending to care is profitable.
Which reminds me, my book has a gay soldier being groomed by his superior, a panromantic alien spider from the future, and an AI discovering love. It also has a lot of jokes about aliens probing humans. You can buy it today, if you can work out what the title is, because I’m not turning this into an advert. I refuse.
Oh no, I did it, didn’t I? I’m no better than the NYT. I’m sorry. Okay. Back to the point.
So, the whole point of this little article is to have a laugh about people cancelling paid NYT subscriptions, because you can read NYT articles FOR FREE.
It’s very, very simple.
Go to https://web.archive.org/
Copy the URL of the article you want to access into the search bar
Wait
If this doesn’t work, wait a day or so, it works on old versions of pages
That’s it. That’s how you can scrape most of the NYTs posts out of the waybackmachine for free.
Remember kids. If you are paying for articles that piss you off, you are the architect of your own rage. Steal them instead. And if you really hate a book, be it by someone you perceive to be on one side of a fight, or someone on the other, the best thing to do is to just not read the fucking thing.
There are more post apocalyptic stories, there are more magic school stories, and there will probably be more published by the time I send this article to you.
The area around your mind is a garden. Fill it with stuff that inspires you.
If you liked this post, I’ll be making more soon. Subscribing is free and keeps me motivated. Right now I have 18 active readers and about 50 people who aren’t subscribed, but keep reappearing. Maybe you could be one of those people!
I’ll eventually drop an entire short story collection here too.
Cheers.